Back from holidays update

Richard here again. We are now back from the holidays and here is an update on what I have been working on just before the holidays and what I will implement into the game in the upcoming week.

Unfortunately I got sick right before christmas and just got back now so I have a lot to recoup. The good thing though is that the group has been working hard while I have been gone and managed to implement the core systems during the time I have been gone.

Update on mesh combiner

When I put up the first version of the mesh combiner that was ready for testing a few weeks ago we immediately noticed a few issues that had to be fixed asap for the tool to actually be usable. The most crucial thing I had missed was that merging did not take in child meshes, so that was fixed in a quick update. I also created an option for saving the new object directly as a prefab. I am also working on a new version that will have the ability to save down the meshes in .obj format. The tool will also be updated to give warnings if the user is trying to combine meshes that will cause a high vertex count.

Navigation

Now to the actual exciting news in this devlog. The game is starting to take shape and most of the core mechanics are about to be finished. We got a camera that takes photos and takes in information about what is in the photos, we got a quest system on the way and I am currently working on a navigation system for the submarine so the player can put the submarine in auto pilot (if they want to, they can still navigate the submarine manually). I have put off time on doing research before actually building something. I planned for one week of research and one week for implementation. Luckily I could start experimenting with code already on my second day of research. The reason we want a navigation system for the submarine is because we want the player to be able to enjoy and look at the environment while not having to care too much about bumping into objects. The submarine will however still be able to pilot manually if the player so wish.

The navigation system will use Unitys built in navmesh functionality with a few tweaks using Unitys navmesh API. With these tweaks we will get a get a very good, 3 dimensional navigation system that will work for our purposes.

The system is just about to be completed and is currently being tested in an isolated environment. Once testing is done I will spend the rest of the week helping our designers put the system into the game. The system will have to be going through a few tweaks when added to the game, but atleast for now we have something that is usable.

Here is an early example of how the navigation system works. The player can click on a map to set a coordinate and off we go.

And here you can see how the navigation system re-calculates its path when the submarine goes up / down.