{"author_name":"mtthwcmpbll","cat":"LD #25","comments":[],"epoch":1355599500,"likes":0,"metadata":{"p_key":"48983","p_author":"mtthwcmpbll","p_authorkey":"3178","p_urlkey":"84659","p_title":"Progress on the Environment","p_cat":"LD #25","p_event":"LD25","p_time":"1355599500","p_likes":"0","p_comments":"0","p_status":"UPD5","us_key":"3178","us_name":"mtthwcmpbll","us_username":"mtthwcmpbll","event_start":"1355443200","event_key":"14","event_name":"LD25"},"text":"<p>Spent the afternoon playing with Blender modeling the environment I sketched out in my last post. It&#8217;s pretty primitive and probably took me way too long, but that&#8217;s fine &#8211; this is what I wanted to spend my time doing this jam, getting more practice at the 3D side of things. \u00a0Some things I&#8217;ve realized I have\u00a0<em>no<\/em> idea how to do correctly:<\/p>\n <ul>\n <li><span style=\"line-height: 14px\">Choosing a scale for the game to work at and making sure both Unity and Blender agree. \u00a0If there&#8217;s a strategy to this, I&#8217;d love some pointers. \u00a0In general, I modeled what I wanted in Blender, imported it into Unity, then compared it to a 1&#215;1 cube as a reference for a character&#8217;s size and adjusted the environment model&#8217;s scale to match. \u00a0Still, a lot of fiddling and magic numbers and I have no idea where this is going to bite me down the road.<\/span><\/li>\n <li>Related to the first point, until I get the game itself up and running, I&#8217;ll have no idea if the distances between houses and other objects are realistic and playable. \u00a0I&#8217;m terrified of finding that everything is too far apart and I need to modify the whole environment to fix it. \u00a0I&#8217;ll need to look at how to break the environment up into pieces to place more modularly from withint Unity down the road.<\/li>\n <li>Optimizing the model, making sure there aren&#8217;t any hidden faces, making sure all my normals are good, etc. \u00a0I&#8217;m sure there are a bunch of tools in Blender to help out with this but I don&#8217;t have the time to look into them right now so I&#8217;m plowing ahead with my crappy first-run models.<\/li>\n <li>Lighting in Unity has always seemed like a black art to me. \u00a0With one directional light, realtime shadows and\u00a0light-mapping\u00a0both seem to have weird spots that are brighter than they should be. \u00a0Shadow&#8217;s usually look jaggy and hard no matter what knobs I play with. \u00a0More magic numbers to fiddle with and I don&#8217;t have time during the jam, but I&#8217;ll come back and take a look at this after other stuff is finished.<\/li>\n <\/ul>\n <p>Here&#8217;s the greyboxed environment pulled into Unity. \u00a0Next up, the character model.<\/p>\n <p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/2012\/12\/15\/progress-on-the-environment\/greyboxed_environment\/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-203869\"><img class=\"alignnone size-large wp-image-203869\" alt=\"greyboxed_environment\" src=\"http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/12\/greyboxed_environment-550x442.png\" width=\"550\" height=\"442\" srcset=\"http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/12\/greyboxed_environment-300x241.png 300w, http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/12\/greyboxed_environment-550x442.png 550w, http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/12\/greyboxed_environment.png 806w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 550px) 100vw, 550px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n \n <p>Tags: <a href=\"http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/tag\/gamejams\/\" rel=\"tag\">gamejams<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/tag\/ld25\/\" rel=\"tag\">ld25<\/a><\/p>","time":"December 15th, 2012 2:25 pm","title":"Progress on the Environment"}