Once I’d got this new website more or less up and running, I turned my attention to putting together a new build of the software. After all, that’s why we’re all here. It’ll only take a few days, I thought.
But first I decided the time had come to update to the new Unity version 6. Major version updates are always a nightmare – everything breaks, often completely inexplicably. For instance, out of the blue, my perfectly straightforward farm gates suddenly decided they wanted to open upwards. I eventually figured out why that was, but now I’ve no idea why they ever opened properly in the first place! I must have somehow worked around an existing mesh import problem, years ago, and now Unity has fixed it. Anyway, that’s just how it always is, and eventually everything seemed to be working again. If I don’t keep up to date, I get further and further behind with technology developments, so it has to be done. And U6 is a very big change, with a lot of useful new things in it, like GPU occlusion culling and suchlike.
Unfortunately, time seems to have flowed backwards ever since. To solve problem Z, I first had to solve problem Y, which just revealed that I hadn’t solved problem X, and so on. Eventually I got the project working with Unity 6, but all the developers who make the tools and add-ons I rely on had also been frantically updating their software to cope with the big shift in Unity, and so I had to update those, too.
Water shaders, for instance, are a bit of a specialty, so rather than write bad ones of my own, I’ve been using water that I’d bought some years ago. But for U6, the company that makes it decided they needed to retire their old shaders and create a new set from scratch. No problem. I understand. Frankly, it’s nice to know I’m not the only one. It usually costs a bit of money to upgrade, but other than that it’s just a matter of slotting in the new code and learning about the improvements they’ve made. Onward and upward.
Except it meant that my streams and waterfalls now looked worse than before and needed some tender loving care to adapt to the new shaders. They’re only a rough experiment right now anyway, but I don’t want them looking so bad that everyone thinks I have no idea what I’m doing, so I reshaped the landscape a bit and rebuilt the streams.
But this in turn made me realize I needed some better rocks, to cover up a few spots. So, rather than waste time making my own in Blender, I decided to buy some from a third-party developer. Unfortunately he’d used obsolete and weird custom shaders, so I had to re-texture them. That took a couple of days, but they really didn’t look very good, so I decided to abandon them and make my own rocks after all. Which of course meant updating to a new version of Blender, although by now I expected nothing less.
Okay, but I really wanted these rocks to use triplanar projection, so that they automatically align their textures with the geological strata in the terrain. And I needed them to accumulate snow in the winter, because otherwise they’d stand out against the snowy hills instead of blending in. No problem, I can just use the excellent TVE vegetation shaders (another third party asset). Except that TVE recently got a major rewrite too and it’s very complex, so there was a 188-page manual I needed to read first (this manual! is so liberally peppered! with exclamation! points! that now all my thoughts sound like they’re being spoken by an Italian mama).
Somehow this made me re-evaluate the garden walls, which I’d also triplanar shaded to keep the bricks aligned. These didn’t accumulate snow either, so I decided to switch them to use TVE. For some reason that I’ve forgotten now, triplanar didn’t work all that well any more, so I thought I’d go back to conventional planar UV projection. Easy-peasy, it’s just a simple shader property. Except this showed up some silly errors in my UVs and made some of the brickwork look badly distorted.
Alright, so that meant I needed to go back and remodel the wall sections. They’re pretty simple, but I needed to redo some of the meshes to solve some other problems that had been niggling at me, then remap and match their UVs, adjust the gate hinges, and arrange the new wall blocks in place around the house. By last night I was back in business again. New walls, with new textures that can accumulate snow, wetness, maybe even a bit of color variation, and everything was finally cool.
That is, until I realized just now that I’ve made all the arches and gates too narrow for our little tractor to fit through… ARGH!
So, I was going to write you a nice post today to discuss time and seasons in the game, as well as introduce you to Frampton Gurney’s weather engine, but frankly I’ve lost the will to live and it’ll have to wait. Creation was so much easier when all you had to do was separate the heavens from the earth and build four poles to hold up the sky. I bet God never had to worry about UV projection space and keeping all his versions current. That’ll be why it only took him a week to do a build, I expect.
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