Wife-Aggro

I really resisted the blog post thing initially.

On one hand, I like the idea of creating something. I’m a crafter in an era where it’s somewhat hard to craft. At least in the old-world, “That’s a nice plow you’ve created there, DR,” sort of way. I think that I do create “stuff” as a primary occupation. I feed and house my family (and hobbies) as a software deployment tech. So, I sort of take software that others have created, and I develop ways (typically using SCCM), to deploy it 5000 times as seam-less-ly as possible to a bunch of quietly happy people. And a few very vocal folks who like to complain about it.

However, on the other hand, I think there’s needs to be a level of vanity in a good blog poster. You’d have to really think that what you type is important for others to commit the time on it on a regular basis. To the best of my knowledge there are a small handful of you folks that read these infrequent posts. And a butt ton of spam commentors hoping to reach you through this medium.

I’m obviously not going to let that happen. But it does sometimes strike me as odd that the biggest audiance that I believe I have for this journal of mine are people who I loathe.

I’m up through about video 217 over at the Burgszerg Unity tutorial series.

I don’t want to say that I’m completely lost, but I do feel like I missed a couple of things when comparing what I see on the videos with what I’m seeing in my own instance of Unity. Things like his fat model showing up, for example, when so far we’ve only talked about instancing the muscular model. The code makes sense to me, which is really the important part, though. Also, I can see from the list of videos that there’s a big project clean-up coming up, so I suspect some of those things will get addressed.

The temptation is there to do my own thing to keep my project looking like the one that I’m seeing in the videos. However, I did so much of that last year, that it drove me to purchase the same art assets that Petey is using, just to streamline things a bit. Now that I feel like I have all the right pieces, I sort of want to see where he goes with it rather then doing it a possibly different way and spending the rest of the project adjusting for the differances again.

It took me a fairly long time to revamp where I was at to make the assets that I had bought catch up with the ones that I was tweaking each video.

But I have to say, alot of understanding came out of that process.

Now when I think about what I want to do with Unity, I can see all the pieces working together. There are still some underneath the hood things that I’m a little fuzzy on, but waiting is.

-dr

Two spiff things are happening for me this week.

Spiff 1: Star Wars: The Old Republic early entry kicks off. I only pre-ordered a couple of days ago, so I’m not really sure how long it will be before I get to play, but it has been a few months, or more, since I played an enjoyable MMO.

So that’s a goodness that I’m looking forward to.

Typically, I like MMOs, but I hate MMO Guilds. I enjoy being IN an MMO guild, but I really can’t stand being part of organizing one. Been there, done that, and all I recall about it was that it was thankless and nearly impossible to keep everyone happy.

Spiff 2: I’m taking December 15th through Jan 15th off this year. Probably the longest vacation I’ve ever taken.

I intend to use it to catch up with the Hack and Slash tutorial that I’ve been working through at Bergzurg. Maybe even catch one or two of them over at 3d Buzz.

And I intend to get some prototyping done for my game. Basic functionality type stuff. That woman that tricked me into marrying her has started to produce some artwork for me, so I want to start putting it to use.

Oh, and I plan to hunt Sith.

-dr

I’ve overcome my inertia and have started back in on Unity.

Despite life throwing a ton of distractions (some, like my wife, might say priorities) at me. I know, however, that there’s a new Star Wars MMO coming up in about a week or two, and THAT’S going to hog up some PC time.

The Character Customization series of videos is pretty spiff. Like I always do, I had a period of adjustment to work through when we wrap up one series and then go to apply it to the next. Often it involves me peering at the screen trying to notice which objects are in in scene, and which scripts are attached to which objects. Some times that’s a pain, some times it’s not. Always it’s instructional.

I’ve probably picked up enough in the 175 or so videos that I’ve watched to at least begin prototyping the project that I have rolling around in my melon. But I want to catch up with the series first. I don’t plan to create a hack and slash game, but I do expect that I’ll pick up techniques (like I already have been) that will apply to what I want to work on. I have a very long vacation starting next week so I expect to catch up before mid January.

Unless the pull of the Dark Side is just too strong…

I still have an art assets hurdle to overcome. You would THINK that being married to someone who professes to enjoy creating textures and models with software like Illustrator or Maya would give me a contact from which to procure textures and 3d models for my project. Reality is proving both of us wrong, though. There are marital politics at play here. I am not eager to create situations where opinions or timelines might conflict and result in friction. In fact, I think I’d best wrap that portion of of this post up here. No doubt there is already a price to be paid.

-dr

I’m finishing up the “Changing Room” tutorials this week. More then likely I’ll finish quite a bit more of then that with the long weekend ahead of me, but I’m intentionally not looking ahead to avoid the temptation to skip around the videos.
The changing room miniseries was pretty informational. The applicability of being able to programically (sp?) change character mesh objects and parented models is pretty huge. At least for the project that I’m slowly putting together in my head. I’m constantly amazed by the diversity of people working through those tutorials. There are obviously people there with a lot of programming experience. Even a few who take more then a few opportunities to point out a “better way” that Petey could have done something. Then there are folks like me with some basic understanding of how Object Oriented Programming is supposed to work. In my case, VERY basic.
At least I think I try to answer as many questions in the Burgzerg forums as I ask.
I’m finding that enough of the Unity / C# environment makes sense to me that I can generally fix my own problems when I create them. Possibly not the best way to have done so, but at least a way. I’m even catching some of Petey’s before he does. Which is probably a lot less of me knowing what I’m doing then it is of him recording tutorials while taking cough medicine or watching his son out of the corner of his eye. However, those moments are at least gratifying in the sense that I’m obviously learning concepts that I didn’t know 170ish videos ago.
I’m not using the same models that Petey is. That in and of it’s self has lead to some really informative troubleshooting as I figure out how to to mock up what he’s showing me so that I can duplicate it in my scene. Converting the little construction worker that comes with the Standard Assets package into the little warrior that Petey purchased from Frogames has forced me to explore some aspects of Unity that I would have skipped over otherwise. How to turn 1 material into 3 visually unique ones for the sake of making a script work correctly, for example. Importing a free sword model that turns out to be the size of an aircraft carrier in my scene and figuring out how to get it to work as a correctly sized prefab as another example.
There is evidence that not all of Petey’s subscribers have taken self-generated learning opportunities as a positive experience, though. I don’t envy him at all.
-dr