Hello! its certainly been a while, and I seem to have fallen behind again. This article will be about my experience with gizmos and handles in Unity.
Playing with tools was surprisingly fun to do. It felt fast and easy compared to some other stuff in unity. I mentioned gizmos breifly in my last post but I'll explain specifically what I did with them here. The main thing that I used gizmos for was mapping out the paths for my pathfinding system. The gizmos show where nodes are, how they're connected and they used to show what the pathfinding algorithm was doing. I used handles quite a bit more and they control adding new points, moving them around, deleating points, removing connections, adding connections, and adding points in between existing connected points. This has made creating pathfinding systems much easier than before where you had to individually set up connections, transforms of objects, and tell the point list where all your new points were.
Overall playing with unity's tooling system has been an icredibly enjoyable experience and I feel that if I were to become efficient at using it I could do some really cool demonstrations and make some cool debugging tools. One other thing I've used since the last update is scriptable objects. For items I originally used prefabs for items with different prefabs for each form of the item (held, dropped/pickupable, or the metadata item which was used to make inventory icons and passed around for a few other purposes.) I've since replaced that whole system with a scriptable object. All the scriptable object needs is a game object/mesh and it can generate all the other types of items or continue to use game objects if a more complicated item needs that.
Next up is training my coworker in unity basics so he can make levels and story for the project.
I also have some other, brand new, things to to start working on like the cooking minigame, engeneering 'puzzles' and the core of the game as a whole.
Until next time! (maybe I'll actually start posting weekly)