Board to Bits

An indie game developer using Unity.

[boardtobits]

Nothing inexplicable about this. Nope not a thing.

[boardtobits]

Near-future city in progress for a VR project.

[boardtobits]

My wife will be rappelling down the Hilton Hartford this July to raise awareness about and advocate for policy changes to support victims of addiction and their families.

If you’ve ever considered supporting Board To Bits and the tutorials I create, I’d encourage you to make a donation to this great cause instead this month.

Or consider reblogging this message to help spread the word!

Thanks!!

[boardtobits]

My wife will be rappelling down the Hilton Hartford this July to raise awareness about and advocate for policy changes to support victims of addiction and their families.

If you’ve ever considered supporting Board To Bits and the tutorials I create, I’d encourage you to make a donation to this great cause instead this month.

Or consider reblogging this message to help spread the word!

Thanks!!

[boardtobits]

Handling some of the administrative details of game dev today. Working on saving and loading, along with versioning.

Working within System.IO today also got me thinking about the benefits of a making a single file for all saves vs. individual files for each. In theory, it would be a lot easier to just cache and manage a List<> of save files instead of having to parse through filenames and directories.

It does bring up new issues like when to actively save to the file and how to handle overwrites, etc.

Development!!!

[boardtobits]

More work on the track editor (Day 2). Guide cursor, adding and removing tracks and a better track selection mechanic.

[boardtobits]

Starting with the very basics of a track editor.

[boardtobits]

Progress marches on with the new project. Not so much a game as a simulator, but there’s some legs I’m excited about here. Test prop courtesy of the fine folks at @bitgem3d.

[boardtobits]

Early days on a new, VR-meets-creative-sharing-meets-Web-VR concept.

[boardtobits]

VR Project, Days 6-8

The past few days have been less about modeling new objects and more about converting everything existing into an A-Frame-friendly format. Blocking things out in Unity, I could just import my Blender files and things worked fine.

For A-Frame, however, I needed to make a few optimizations:

Making sure the poly counts on objects weren’t too high

Combining objects that use the same materials/textures

Exporting objects to OBJ files that A-Frame can read

There was a bit of a learning curve when A-Frame decided it didn’t like things like n-gons beyond 4 sides and vertex doubles that sometimes slip through the Blender Modifier process. But once all that got sorted out, it was pretty smooth sailing. A-Frame handles all the objects, textures and lighting admirably.

Today was all about getting the functionality working. The gray dots you see in the lower images (all running native in Chrome on iOS) are navigation points. Gaze at one for a bit and you get teleported. In addition, you can see an info pane in the peripheral that follows you around the scene. The copy is still FPO, otherwise I’d show them in full. But, I’m extremely pleased with how far the functionality has come in one day.

Three-ish days to go until I’m on the road to VRTO. Let’s see how much more I can get done!

[boardtobits]

VR Project, Day 5

Progress on two fronts today: about 90% done with modeling, which gave me some time to start working with A-Frame. Just the walls so far, but I’m really pleased with how the texturing/normal maps feel.

Hoping I’ll get the rest of the modeling done, but I also want to make sure I have the A-Frame functionality working because in ten days I’ll be at the VRTO World Conference in Toronto!

[boardtobits]

Morning reblog

[boardtobits]

VR Project, Day 5

Progress on two fronts today: about 90% done with modeling, which gave me some time to start working with A-Frame. Just the walls so far, but I’m really pleased with how the texturing/normal maps feel.

Hoping I’ll get the rest of the modeling done, but I also want to make sure I have the A-Frame functionality working because in ten days I’ll be at the VRTO World Conference in Toronto!

[boardtobits]

VR Project, Day 4

Progress continues with chandeliers and posters in the bar. At this point, I think it’s time to optimize all my meshes and start batching object with common materials to make it easy to load into A-frame.

[boardtobits]

VR Project, Day 2

Today was a big day for texturing, along with furniture-making. I also got the windows and front door started. Place already feels more alive, even with the big brown block of a bartop...

I still need to figure out how I’m going to handle the world outside the windows. If this were strictly for Unity I’d use a stencil mask to punch out to some kind of tableau outside, but I don’t think I can pull that off in A-Frame.

Decisions, decisions...

[boardtobits]

VR Project: Day 1

Technically day 2 if you count taking measurements of the real world space this is based on. Today was all about getting the structures in place–walls, brick facades (the peach stuff in the Unity image), the bar and the stairs in back (semi-visible on the far left of the Blender image).

Working with a real-world space has been a great way to learn about Blender techniques and the design of buildings and rooms. It’s also a godsend that BR defaults to 1 unit == 1 meter.

[boardtobits]

Reblog for the AM crowd.

[boardtobits]

VR Project: Day 1

Technically day 2 if you count taking measurements of the real world space this is based on. Today was all about getting the structures in place–walls, brick facades (the peach stuff in the Unity image), the bar and the stairs in back (semi-visible on the far left of the Blender image).

Working with a real-world space has been a great way to learn about Blender techniques and the design of buildings and rooms. It’s also a godsend that VR defaults to 1 unit == 1 meter.

[boardtobits]

Trying my hand at A-frame and WebVR. Got a rudimentary gaze-click working, along with some model importing, so it’s a start!