Level complete!

I've just finished the level - you can navigate round the environment, and click on objects to retrieve information on them. You can also rotate the macehead to get different angles on it. Now all I have left to do in Unity is create a start screen and possibly add some audio, anything else I need to do within Unity is optional. I also still need to work on the website and the embedding process but the main task is done. I'm going to go and reward myself with some GUI tutorials. Hooray!

First Person Controller and terrain constraints

My terrain is essentially finished, I might add some trees and grass later on but at the moment it is the shape I want it to be, apart from one small problem: I can't currently prevent my first person controller from going into the lake and not being able to get out. I have used step offset and slope limit to prevent him from going up the hills, but unfortunately I'm not sure how this works in the opposite direction. I've tried smoothing out the terrain by raising the parts of the lake that I've lowered, and it may just end up being a tedious process of doing that, but I'm sure there is also a scripting method I can use so I have to find that out.

This is what you can see from the lake. But you can't really do anything!

Outdoor museum?

I rebuilt the terrain to look more like the natural landscape of Lough Gur. I roughly copied the shape of the lake. I placed mountains around it. These do not follow the topography of the real Lough Gur, as I would need access to digital maps to be able to do a really accurate depiction, so I decided it was best to approximate it and take artistic license with it. I imported my assets with textures, and the size of the assets compared to the terrain was not what I expected it to be. I tweaked things a little bit, and then placed the plinth and macehead next to the lake. I really like the way this looks, and I would actually really like to leave it like this and do away with the architecture. The idea here would be to dot several plinths around the landscape and have the user navigate to them, clicking on each item for information. It allows for an outdoor museum where you can look at the objects in the context of the environment rather than inside a building. I may still place the crannog somewhere as a museum object, but I think the idea of the openair museum is much more engaging, and I prefer the aesthetic sense of it.

Unity file embedded to web

I've had a certain amount of success in that I have managed to create the basics of my Unity application and embedded it to the homepage of my online museum. It has not been seamless; the textures still aren't there, and I have a basic rotation on the macehead but it is not working the way I want it to. This I will sort out soon. At the moment the main problem is the way the web player appears in the page; I was hoping for a small window like in the actual Unity file in game mode, but the window is elongated. I also haven't compiled it at my desired start point and will have to look at creating a GUI as well. That said, I'm very happy with the way things are going so far. This is still my trial file so hopefully I will have these problems ironed out before I get the real thing sorted out.

As you can see, this screen shot shows just how problematic the game window is, but I should be able to sort this out.

Inside the museum

I may not have the textures sorted out yet, but I have a macehead on a plinth inside the crannog-museum, which is progress. I'm not made about the scaling here - I modelled all the game assets to scale in 3ds max and it looks like I have a lot of extra space in the museum that I don't need. I think the scaling is actually correct though, I think it's just that I expected it to look a little bit different. I thought I might have time to model some extra objects, but because the macehead took so long, coupled with the fact that many other Lough Gur objects are of much more unusual shape, made me stick to just one. In a larger scale production I would definitely model more - I would have liked to have the shield done. I tried to get the texturing sorted as well, but to no avail as yet. I think the key is to obtain full functionality at the moment, and to worry about the rest later.

I do also have a first person controller in this scene, but I need to add colliders to the objects to prevent the FPC walking where it shouldn't be walking, and I also need to animate the macehead and add the webpage with all its information.

Progress with Unity and 3ds max

I have created most of my sample scene using Unity. If I have time I will go back and create one that matches more correctly the shape and topography of the Lough Gur area, but at the moment I just want to make sure everything works. I have imported the crannog, and the plinth is in there somewhere as well. The textures have not transferred. They transferred easily the last time I tried this so I will have to go troubleshooting. I might also make the terrain smaller as there is only a small playable part of the scene and it is a little swamped by all the scenery. I used an overcast skybox, because it's probably more realistic for the Limerick area.

Note: I think the issue with the textures is just a settings problem ie. I didn't check a box that I should have checked. Will sort this out later on, going to continue with the functionality of the scene for now.

 

 

 

 

 

PHP assignment - useful for the project

Yesterday I handed up  30% assignment for the Advanced Web Programming class that I think will be very beneficial to the project. The task was to create a database with full CRUD functionality in order to make a static website dynamic. Below is an example of the 'read' code and the resulting web page. 

It was quite a difficult project and not all of it works, but hopefully I will be able to iron out the problems to achieve full functionality within the project itself.