Engine update & drawer drag to open/close mechanic

This week’s focus was on finding and fixing the crash related to a newer version of the Unity Engine. I started by updating to newer versions in smaller increments and tested each version for the crash. I quickly found the version in which the crash started to occur since it was only a couple versions after the version I worked on for the past months. Since the game only crashed when I had an object loaded from within a mod it was obvious that it had to be related to the package I used to build my modding system on. This system is called the Addressable system which essentially uses an address (name) to refer to any asset inside the mod. I reduced my mod system code to the absolute essentials and slowly enabled more of the old codebase until I found the problematic part. It turns out that in a newer Unity version the way I handled caching my models for faster access was causing the problem. This was a 2 minute fix once I knew and found the problematic part. Last weekend I was quite depressed looking ahead to this week since I was expecting it to be a much worse error, which in the worst case I couldn’t even fix myself and would take much longer to find the cause for. Fortunately it only took me until Tuesday to find and fix the issue. This allowed me to fully update the game and mod projects to the most recent version of Unity. There are usually at least a few things to take care of when updating to a newer version which was also the case here but nothing worth mentioning as it all in all went pretty smooth. After the update I decided to continue work on the drag to pull & push drawers, doors, windows etc. and had a working version fairly quickly I was happy with. Unfortunately I came across a couple issues with the system later so I had to rework the system internally. This new version is already working and should make it possible to reimplement spawning items inside drawers fairly easily. For the following week I plan to implement this item spawning along with adding the required items and furniture to populate the new house(s). Before I do that tho I will be posting my first steam update post and get the steam and itch page updated to represent the new photorealistic art style of the game. My goal is to do monthly steam update posts going forward that consists of all the things I worked on during that month. With the crash fixed the path to tech demo version 4 is clear and should hopefully be available to interested testers in the coming weeks.

Notable tasks this week:

• Found and fixed crash in new Unity versions

• Updated project(s) to latest Unity version

• Finished first implementation of drawer drag to pull/push mechanic

Wishlist on Steam

Join the Discord

That’s all I got this week. I hope you are all doing well.

Stay safe out there and I’ll see you next week.