Saturday, March 05, 2016

80/20

The 80/20 rule (Pareto Principle) applies to playing around in Unity3d as well.  80% of the work comes from 20% of what you're working on.  I decided to move on beyond the Space Shooter tutorial when I got to the part where I'd need the Apple or Android SDK (or Windows).  Not that I'm adverse to using them or can't, I've used all three, but I thought learning more basics rather than significantly more configuration work was preferable.  So I started the 2D adventure game tutorial series.

1.) I was immediately amused because I'd had an intern candidate telling me about his Game Conference challenges using Unity2d and he'd discussed a "cookbook" game with a demon hooking to a JSON data source.  The Scavengers setup sure seems like the base application his team likely modified for their competition.  Wish I had played around with it before the interview.  I don't think he was expecting an interviewer who'd touched Unity (recently).  I asked a number of questions related to prefabs and how they compared to a traditional OOP structure and whether coroutines were threading (they're not, and there are a few tutorial videos out there on the topic of yielding to the main thread versus spawning new threads in C#).

2.) Getting back to the Pareto Principle, during the first real lesson after the introduction, I did something that eliminated my main camera.  So when I went to watch my little adventurer bounce up and down like he was wanking to pass the time, I couldn't find him.  Or his two wanking monster buddies.  I had no problems putting the camera back, but the default settings weren't the same.  I eventually had to boot up a new project and check the defaults.  Unity was resetting the Transform.z to 0 instead of -10 and the depth to 0, instead of -1.  I updated the values and there they were.  Like looking for a needle in a haystack.  Here's a default Main Camera, should I ever need to get my mitts on it again.  It took quite a while of dicking around with settings and looking online before I gave up and did the new project.  Seriously - I'm still trying to make it work in my head - I assume because my characters were at 0 and my camera was at 0, that I was in some sort of Flatworld universe where I couldn't see them.


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