Two days to go until I submit this build to Rezzed Left Field. I think I could probably do some testing today and submit, but with two days I think I’ll spend all today tweaking stuff, tomorrow doing maybe a touch more + testing, then submit.

Planned Tasks

Rolling over some tasks from yesterday

  • Wormhole fx don’t show in tutorial
  • No wind buffeting sound in clouds
  • Lightning tweaks (received new developer email with a fix)
  • Player starting position is crap, we start rolling backwards toward the camera. Starting on a hill would be best.

This shouldn’t take too long, I might tackle these, then I have an email to write for Hyperfocal Design that might take a little bit, then I’ll have a playthrough of a build with mouse/kb + XBox controller and see where I’m at, if I’m going to ‘call it’, etc.

Realtime Notes:

Making notes/observations/new tasks as I go:

Wormhole fx fixed, 5 mins

Trying to tweak the sound for wind in clouds but nothing happening – not sure if my fault or plugin’s! Doubt I’d get a fix in time if it’s the plugin, though, so going to have to find some other way.
Now just trying to track down how and why the wind buffeting sound is being held so low while in clouds.
And still trying… really baffled why this sound effect doesn’t go to full volume in clouds anymore!!

The reason I’m still on this is because people often tell me that getting in clouds is one of their favorite things in EXO ONE, and I think the sound is a big part of the whole experience, so I really wanna make sure this is working!

30 mins

Wind Buffeting Volume

When in clouds, Group Master Volume goes to 1 (great!), but the Variation volume only reaches 0.5 (boo!).

An event in Master Audio tells this sounds “Group” to go to 1 volume over 1 second when in clouds, and 0 over 1 second when out. Yet the variation is 0.5… Shouldn’t the variation stay at 1 at all times? I don’t know!

Checked that the sound distance/fall off was correct, check!
Turned off ducking, no effect.

Finally got it, it was a Bus Control volume setting, I think I was possibly confusing this control with Group Control! Ugh!

Since I’ve just realised this I’m taking the opportunity to adjust some volume levels I wasn’t happy with.

1hr

General Volume Tweaks

While tweaking the inclouds stuff, noticed:

  • Holding shift to glide doesn’t transform us (visually?) if we have 0 charge, then enter clouds (which gives us charge). Needed to release then press again…
  • General sound and music volume sounds good now, but Narrator gets drowned out

Adding a new Mixer group for when narration plays, should be pretty easy… Umm, I take that back! I kinda need a bit of a system to handle this as all I’m doing now is transitioning between Mixer Snapshots based on if we’re in clouds or not, and this would have to work with that… And it might need a priority system, so if we change to a Narrating Snapshot then enter clouds, we don’t just change everything back… Or for now I could fudge in some stuff into my inClouds SnapShot transition code that checked if narration was happening, and if not, transition… Umumumummmm…

This has taken a couple hours so far messing with volume levels. It’s almost there, the big thing is just that narration is drowned out… Well, I’m just going to go for the hackiest option of lowering all volume levels except the Narrator, so my game will be kinda lower volume than usual… No wait! One more thing I’ll try quickly – in the NarrationOn/Off functions, I’ll try setting all Buses lower volume during narration, then back again afterward…

Ok, implemented that, not toooo hard, still can’t seem to hear any volume adjustment happening on certain sounds though, which is annoying. Unsure if it’s just MA not updating in realtime or I’m not understanding something… It’s good enough, though.

1hr.

Lightning, Round 2

According to the lightning plugin devs email he just missed a file, so trying again.

Whoops, errors, still no good! Moving on!

5 mins

Player Start Position

Since EXO ONE has a procedural terrain, this will probably change, but I’m not changing terrain for this build, so I can just move the player to the top of a nice fun hill and let players drop down.

That was pretty simple, 5 mins.

Glider Transform in Clouds

This isn’t happening, at least the visuals aren’t. It’s total rubbish to have to release your finger and press it again to glide in clouds/after getting hit by lightning… The only thing I changed recently was the execution order of the Player, PlayerControls and PlayerRend scripts, so that might be related.

Realised this was caused when I changed Glider Transformation from a button held to button pressed system. Works well when you have charge, but if you have zero, then gain charge, but you don’t release and Press the button, nothing happens. I need to use one of these kinda bools I think:

if(!doingThing) {doingThing = true}

… to stop it firing every frame I hold the glide button, which I kinda hate cos I feel like they’re so messy and require a million bools, but not sure how else I’d do it.

Lol, I even found duplicate if(glideButtonPressed) code, I am amazing!!

This is actually a bit of a bitch of a problem, as I can’t just do:

if (PlayerControls.instance.glideButtonHeldDown)//need this for auto transforming when at zero charge and we enter clouds
{
if (!glideButtonHeld)
{
glideButtonHeld = true;
TriggerEXOTransform(EXOONEShape.Glider);
}
}

… do I have to go in and set glideButtonHeld false when we reach 0 energy? My logic brain hurrrrts! I wonder how many programmers read this and laugh? luls (no one reads this :).

The bool name for this is definitely misleading as well, but again in the vein of get shit done, this will do. I just did what I said above, it is foul but it works.

Here’s an insight into my code (probably terrible):

30 mins

Just realised lightning seems even worse than it was, I can’t even see it. Perhaps this happened when I was trying to update it?

Lightning Round 3

I feel like this happens a lot somehow, I finish doing things, then they change magically and I need to re-do them!

Done! 15 mins.

Lunch Break

Got up a bit late so just 15 mins.

Pulling Up

Feel like I need to tweak the glider pull-up mechanics some more too. It feels good when we are moving toward the ground or parallel to the ground, but you get punished by trying to pull-up when already going up (in my attempt to stop ridiculous heights). It could also help if perhaps EXO ONE doesn’t move in the direction it’s facing (its velocity) but instead zeroes out Y. This way you couldn’t hold forward and endlessly fly upward. I might try this first as this might be an easier fix with a tweak to how I handle pulling up.

This is taking too long, I’m trying to actually model a glider with my rather simple physics code by hacking things together. It gets close but I don’t know if I’m going to manage anything decent in time. I’m going to give this another 15 minutes then admit defeat for now.

Thought I’d try and record a video in the Unity Editor but I have yet to own video recording software that doesn’t crash everything(!)

Calling this done for now even though it aint!

30 minutes

Build Testing

Going to play with mouse/kb then XBox controller, and make notes on anything that sticks out as super broken.

Notes in order of importance:

  • RestartLevel from ‘demo complete’ is broken with a black screen
  • Unpin terrain to avoid the ‘snow bug’ in terrain (Map Magic/RTP issue)
  • Tiny draw distance (not being set correctly?)
  • Pull up costs no energy vs jump, which does.
  • Music too low. Are we returning to max vol after narration?
  • Alien signal too loud in intro
  • Sphere not lit in tutorial
  • Hud arrow in intro shouldn’t be visible.
  • Can’t glide and pull up from ground?

Plz Restart, Level!

Blarrrgh! What happened to you, RestartLevel!? Time.timescale = 1 yet we seem paused, and having trouble getting the damn black fadeout image off. If we restart anywhere else we still break everything… RestartGame() also no longer working, help me jebus! watafak!

Here’s another example of something that was working and now isn’t. Maybe this is just common? I feel like I need a better methodology for figuring out the cause, and probably some way to code things that doesn’t make them so susceptible to breaking in the first place! Having a lot of trouble with this, 30 mins + in.

Notes:

  • Clicking restart level seems to properly unload and then load the scene we are in. New intro starts to play but nothing happens from here. Game manager needs resetting or something?
  • Looking at the LoadEXOScene code (it’s garbage) and have nfi what the problem is
  • shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit
  • trying to build incase build is different to editor… (hail mary) … Nope!
  • OK, Debug.Logs, EVERYWHERE. This has taken me hours now for something that was working before…
  • Looked back through my tasks from yesterday and can’t understand what changes might have done this.
  • We seem to be staying in our Orbit state during the intro, after restarting… And my debugs tell me the player in orbit isn’t moving.
  • Checked Time project settings and while I swear to gawwwd it said 1 before, it just read 0 (paused), which is hopefully where my entire problem is.
  • OMG it’s working again, wtf! I have no idea why the timescaling decided to stop working but I’ve fixed it. Now on to restart()ing
  • Restart works but the intro text stays if we Restart right away…fixing

So now we are back to square one after most of the day spent redoing what I thought I’d completed already, and the menu > restart or reset level still doesn’t work. I think I may just need to get the black overlay/fader image to go away and this might be done.

RestartLevel is now working, but not RestartGame();

So many hours, 4?

Double Manager Scenes on RestartGame()

It helps sometimes to look at the inspector, #unitytips. So first guess, I don’t actually unload the Manager scene, then load another…

Whoops: //SceneManager.UnloadScene(SceneManager.GetActiveScene()); //can’t unload an active scene!

Where was the warning/error on this? I didn’t see one!

Rewrote my previous terrible code with some less terrible stuff, works!

20 mins

Remaining tasks:

  • RestartGame from ‘demo complete’ is broken with a black screen
  • Unpin terrain to avoid the ‘snow bug’ in terrain (Map Magic/RTP issue) 5 mins
  • Tiny draw distance (not being set correctly?) 15 mins
  • Pull up costs no energy vs jump, which does.
  • Music too low. Are we returning to max vol after narration?
  • Alien signal too loud in intro
  • Sphere not lit in tutorial
  • Hud arrow in intro shouldn’t be visible.
  • Can’t glide and pull up from ground?

And after testing, let’s add a big obvious one – controller support for menus, yikes! I’m a professional … game … makering … guy! Cross fingers I can actually pull this one task off in one day!

Tomorrow will feature getting RestartLeve() working from the demo end, plus controller menu support.