The Brain-Bone's Connected To The...

These past couple of days I've been trying to get the physics based wires into my game - I've been collaborating with lecturers and found some help. I've had many suggestions and ideas of how it should be done. The code I found of the internet turned out to be A. broken and B. very computer intensive because it was constantly making 3D tubes with old outdated code. I have come to a solution and that is making a string of physics joints without any mesh or renderer, and using the position of the joints to simply draw a line connecting them all.

I thought I could remove all of the rendering code form the code I found on the internet and get it to work; I did to a certain extent, but after some research it seems to be it wouldn't take long to learn a bit more about physics joints and completely make the code I need for myself.

so that's probably what I will be doing for the next couple of days at least.


Additionally I have made the code I already had in the game much more efficient; some things were being done once or twice every frame, which could have been done once every time the player interacts; so that is fixed now too.

Tubes

I found a "physics rope" script and a renderer for it on the internet which I thought would be really useful for the sagging/swinging and displaying of the connecting wires (because I have no idea how to do something like that). Unfortunately I have no idea what all the parameters do, how I control it or how to get it to work properly. may need some help with that; so far I have a script which I edited so I could set the start and end position of it, a few lines which are drawn in pause mode, and a lot of strange activity.

Scaling

I just found some spare time so i played around with scaling the hubs, as they seemed to have a lot of size for no reason;

It's weird seeing it like this after so long, but I think it may help draw the player to the important bits.

I will probably work on adding different icons soon, after I've thought about what the icons are going to be.

Timeline Expansions

I almost forgot about this blog temporarily.
Anyway, after reaching my last milestone, I need to set a new one as I hadn't planned as far ahead as now.
my next timeline will be focused on making my game more user friendly and polished due tot he feedback I've got throughout testing; things to do include;

Visual Wires to indicate where the joins go to/from
Tutorial via popup text or (something similar)
Icons indicating the type of hub, and what they do.
Better indication of colours
Better controls for scrolling the level

There is a few other things I may do in this milestone if I have fine, but the date I plan to have the basic functionality of the above done by is 13th of march.

I may have to extend that deadline depending on how hard  find the coding tasks/how much time i have left from other projects.