An Alternate Method To Recognize When Objects Are Between Your Player and Game Camera

It’s almost 2018, I plan to write a status report of my game development status soon. In short, I think I spent most of my dev time in 2017 on trees, and am still doing so even today. At least I learned a lot… still feels frustrating though.

For some time, I’ve ignored an issue where objects are in between my game camera and the focus object (in my case, the player). My past games had sparse environments, so this was never really a problem. But my current game will be a bit more diverse than that. When thinking about how to resolve this, I realized there is a simple solution that, while not perfect, gives acceptable results.

There’s more than one way to skin a tree…

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Editing 3D Meshes in Unity3D

While this isn’t related to my game projects on this site, I’ve had the opportunity for my full-time job to experiment in the Unity3D game engine the possibility of modifying meshes, specifically to skew a series of cubes as if they were swaying in the wind. I found the experience quite fascinating, and in this article I describe what I did, my thoughts on how it relates to Unity3D, and include links to my source code in GitHub and some fun animated GIF’s.

While not a standard feature, it IS possible to modify 3D meshes in Unity.

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“True King” Development – More Optimization

I don’t know why, but it’s hard to focus and make progress on my current project. It seems when I play around a bit with making the level, I end up moving backwards… this week, I did some testing regarding Unity3D’s “Terrain” system and looked again at my tree models.

Generally, using Unity3D's "Terrain" system yields comparable visual results...

Generally, using Unity3D’s “Terrain” system yields comparable visual results…

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“True King” Development – Optimizing 3D Cel Animation and Raycasting

The last blog post I made on development of my game “True King” mentioned how the frame rate was unplayable when there was more than one character on the screen. I said that was worth another blog post to explain how I fixed it. That was four months ago. I’m sorry it took so long, but here it the explanation of why my game was so inefficient, and how I got around it.

My new 2D character in 3D... may not represent final gameplay.

60 fps if one character on screen… < 1 fps if 3-4 characters…

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