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.

New Camera!

It's been over four months since I last posted a picture I took with my camera (at least according to Flicker). This is because I loaned my camera to a gaggle of 8 year olds to make movies about the pros and cons of Jello (seriously), and they did something that knocked out my colors, forcing me into a world of greens reminiscent of the shallow waters of Lake Nokomis. I know this from experience, having swam there in the algae despite the very real threat of brain-eating amoebas. I biked over to Target to take advantage of a good deal on an Elph 100, only to find it was the only camera that was out of stock. The clerk graciously offered to find me an alternative store. I asked him if it was within bicycling distance. So I went home and upgraded to an Elph 300 (Cannon) on Amazon. Nice camera. Beautiful shots. And the movies are so much better than the last camera that it's a bit surreal. More storage space, but it was about time I had an excuse to go find a 1TB drive and a new desktop machine (the wireless card on the old one has died, and I figure it's easier to just buy a new machine and move over the content via the portable hard drive). BUT I DIGRESS! Yes, yes I do. I have a new Cannon Powershot Elph 300 HS. It will serve me well on vacation. To test it out, I took random photos for you to enjoy. First, Mean Mr. Mustard mimicking his boss by downing 12 Super Hot Buffalo Wild Wings in 6 minutes! That's right - it's a magical camera, you can see pictures of vegetarians eating meat. Or not. But it does take pictures of leaves. GLORIOUS LEAVES! Truth be told, they're kind of pretty with an HD point and click. And...wait for it...my front yard! That won't be the view for too long. That river birch is a thorn in my...eye. One third of it is dead. One third is over my house, though recently whittled way back. And one third threatens my neighbor's house and his innocent tree. I have worries that if I remove the 1/3 that's dead, the other two thirds will take out my garage, his tree, and perhaps his living room, depending on how far it manages to lean during hari kari. Two guys from work came by to take a look. Unbonded. They're pretty sure it's not an option given their limited insurance. I uploaded a video as well, but HD video is 129 Megs for 30 seconds of video! I wrote this whole post, and there are still 12 minutes of upload time remaining. I'm going to go do some shit on Facebook. Maybe make fun of Kevin. Then I'll be back so you don't miss this enormous video that shows you nothing but leaves rustling while I read Lev Grossman's "The Magician King".

New Camera

I bought a new Kodak Easyshare M380 that Ming was willing to pick up for me and that he brought over on New Year's. I haven't used it enough to figure out all the bells and whistles, although I did discover that taking video in subpar lighting doesn't work at all. Everything comes out grainy and the shorter videos I took on New Year's were an even bigger mess in a few cases. I suspect with some daylight it might be a different story. I'll have to run that test tomorrow. I'd hate to have to haul two cameras around with me in some cases. You'd think with 10.2 megapixels and the videos taking about 8x the space as my old camera for a similar length, they'd look like a million bucks. I'm unsure of the optics/digital issues that dictate otherwise.

But one thing I do like is the panoramic image capability. I took a picture of my back yard today. Excellent! Even the shadows seem to have knit together without issue.