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Pile of Kittens: Day 10

http://stttutter.com/pileofkittens-contest/flash/PileOfKittens.html

Submitted!  Unity’s preview Flash support proved uniquely challenging in quite a few different ways at the last second, so I only have four levels and a special new “100 kittens” level now, unfortunately.  As far as I can tell everything ended up looking remarkably polished despite the number of surprises on the way there; I’ll have to see if that holds up to another day of scrutiny.

It’s very impressive to be able to create this kind of thing in Flash, but here are the things that went wrong with me for the Unity 3.5 Developer Preview and Flash:

• 2D Audio didn’t work and I had to scramble to reimport all of my sounds as 3D and update my audio sources accordingly.
• My AI-controlled CharacterControllers would jitter and wreck the game with NaN coordinates after a couple minutes, only in Flash.  I switched all of my enemies over to Rigidbodies tonight.  Debugging this took a good few hours.
• I couldn’t key bind to shift or ctrl!  I wanted do use both of these keys for mine, but now I’m stuck using WASD + Q and E, which conflicts on some keyboards.
• Putting code in FixedUpdate() caused terribad performance in Flash.  Moving the same code to Update(), which actually gets called more often since it’s not the “Fixed” physics update, somehow improved performance.  I eventually throttled those calls to further improve performance, which ended up being pretty important.
• Performance in general is much worse in the Flash build, but still putters along on most machines after optimizations.  I’m a bit worried this means that rendering is more CPU-bound in the Flash version of Unity than the standalone.  I imagine they’re already working on fixing that, though.
• I couldn’t remove Rigidbodies and Colliders from objects at runtime in Flash.  This meant that I couldn’t disable my kittens as colliders ever, which leads to some kind of weird but awesome jump boosts if you pick up a kitten just right while jumping.   It seemed like the collider and the rigidbody had a slightly more explicit ownership/binding to each other than in other implementations, given this rather rad debug log that came out of Flash:

Can’t remove SphereCollider because Mono’s disabled (MonoBehaviour), Mono’s disabled (MonoBehaviour), Mono’s disabled (MonoBehaviour), Mono’s disabled (MonoBehaviour), Mono’s disabled (MonoBehaviour), Mono’s disabled (MonoBehaviour) depends on it

I’ve once again chosen to use music by Connor Humphreys, “Artist of the Fortnight”.  This time it was from some of his earlier CC-released work.  I think it works very well.

It’s time for sleep.  Parts of me are starting to break down.  My teeth hurt.

Pile of Kittens: Day 7

Added big kittens!  Added hills.  Made and animated two models for my baddies, coded the movement and attacking for one of them.  Worked out a hack to fix the physics of my flash builds being different than my desktop builds: I avoid adding force and instead set velocity whenever possible; I also check if I’m a flash build at run time and increase the velocity accordingly to make up for further discrepancies.

Hopefully I’ll fix the root cause of these issues before the competition ends, but until then I’ll at least be testing/level designing with somewhat consistent physics now instead of being rudely surprised at how crap Mister Overalls is at throwing things in the Flash build :).

I was really hoping to power through and finish all of my enemy logic today; I didn’t.  That leaves tomorrow for wrapping up enemies entirely, Wednesday for finishing my levels and UI, and Thursday night for sound and submission.  That sounds like a hell of a Wednesday.

I start work again tomorrow.  It’s been a great vacation.  I’ve been spending a good few hours a day goofing off with family and friends as well as working on this; hopefully going to work won’t actually kill my competition schedule as much as one would think.

Pile of Kittens: Day 6

While still slower than I’d like on machines with slower CPUs, I’ve vastly improved the flash version’s performance. 50 cats is pushing it on my laptop, but it technically runs.  Now the main loss is anti-aliasing.  This polygonal style definitely takes a hit without those smooth lines.  I’ve decided to be consistent regardless and have made some polygon-based grass, terrain and clouds to fill out the scene.

You can check out a test flash version here!

I also fixed a few bugs today, my favorite of which was an animation goof where the main character’s eyes disappeared if you started running at the wrong time.

Pile of Kittens: Day 5

I was feeling pretty decent about the work I got done today.  I got the recursive “grounding” of the kitten pile working, fixed the rest of my animation bugs, added vaguely cute squish effects for the kittens when they hit things and get stepped on, and I prettied up the process of picking up and throwing kittens with appropriate animations/kitten moving.

Unfortunately, I went to test the performance of my project in Flash and it was about a tenth of what I experience with standard builds.  I’ll have to test things on a Windows machine before I can decide how depressed I’ll be, but enough other things are broken that I’ve got quite a bit of extra work in the pipe.

Pile of Kittens: Day 4

I’ve got the kitten herding/calling effect working well enough to do some stupid things. The next thing on my list is to implement the “kitten ground detection network” so I can’t fly away into the sky on my pile of hoverkittens.