It's been pretty quiet on here, mostly because there isn't a lot to report. I think now though, there's enough little stuff I can scrape together and make it into a full dish. This is a casserole post, or a maybe blog-loaf; all the bits put together mostly cohesively.
The biggest thing that's been done since the last post was finishing up the Bicycle model and optimizing that and the Unicycle model. I'm happy to report that the Unicycle went from just over 23000 vertices to about 800, and the Bicycle went from about 65000 down to 1100. They still need to be textured properly, but they should work tons better once I drop them into Unity. Also, I need to figure out how to make them show up as box-colliders instead of mesh-colliders, because I think that may have also been part of the last performance issue.
With 2 models done, I do need to see how well they work. The last thing I want to do is waste a ton of time knocking out 20+ more vehicles and finding out none of them work. At long last, I get to crack open the Unity book and start learning. The immediate plan is to follow and recreate all the tutorial lessons in the book, render a few basic surfaces, plan out a very rudimentary level, attach controls to both models, create movement animations for both models. and finally see how they look and how they work. After I get the models moving properly, then I can go back and worry about texture/shading them.
I hate to admit this, but I've sort of gotten ahead of myself in two ways. I'm starting to look up music software and everything I'll need for that. I already have a midi-keyboard, and I'm forcing myself NOT to buy the appropriate cable, because if I do I'll just be caught up in music and making even less progress. Regardless, my big decision is whether or not I want to use Reason. Reason is a brilliant and powerful piece of music-making software, and I have a legit copy from years back (about 4 versions prior to current). While it does work, and I'm not technically spending money on it now, it's pretty expensive and thus, goes against my idea of making a game on a zero-dollar budget. It's a tough call. Thankfully, by putting off answering it I can't use anything, so I can stay on track for the time being.
The other thing from down-the-line that's showing up early is another game idea. Every now and then I get a vague idea of something that would be cool or fun, but I write those off as passing thoughts. This one has been in my head a few days now fleshing itself out. I'm not going to go into too many details now, but it's a detective game; a nod to text/point-and-click adventure games. Find clues, solve a major case, many different endings, all the basic points. This idea is so far in the distant future though; I'm trying not to give it too much thought but my head keeps giving me story-line ideas for it.
Be that as it may, the priority now is to finally get a taste of Unity. Once I have moving vehicles, I'm going to expand the demo level a little bit and do a (very) small release for people to try out. No idea how I'm going to host it, but I should probably start thinking about a website somewhere for it. If anyone has recommendations on decent web-hosting, drop a line in the comments here.
