A bit over two months later and we’re back, baby! First off, I had to move this Dev Log over to a personal Notion account, because it looks like my friend who set up our team account (which I’d been using for this Dev Log) cancelled our membership and didn’t tell me. Either way, I think something like this belongs on a personal account anyways. I was able to mostly copy/paste the existing blocks from the old blog directly, but the images all got resized and some special blocks broke. 30 minutes of tweaking later, I feel confident I have things ported.
I started up things again on the code side by upgrading my Unity to the latest 2022 release, and then moving archiving all my old metaball attempts. Like with the blog, this took some patience and a bit of reconfiguring. If you leave a space empty for long enough, things will get dusty!
I realized that the metaballs implementation I’m porting into my project now uses a single mesh filter to render all metaballs. This means I don’t need to worry about doing the mesh combining myself anymore. I’m hoping this fixes some of the physics glitches I’d experience from time to time with my previous implementation. Aside from the job system code, the size and position of the metaballs are updated individually in a simple loop. So why did porting this code feel so challenging today???
Truth is, it’s been way too long since I’ve worked on this project. I spent so long building a foundation, and then left before work was completed. Familiarizing myself with the code again is gonna take some time. My own code, nonetheless! I stared at my scene controller script and wasn’t quite sure how to mix in the new metaballs code. After some reflection, I think what I’ll need to do is create a metaball in each player’s constructor and then pass the player’s data back to the main controller script. Hopefully that won’t break the job system optimizations that these metaballs utilize. I’ll find out soon enough.
This project is once again my priority. I put a ton of effort into my day job these last few months, but now it’s time for me to return to making my own quality art. The good news is that I have an actual deadline to get this project ready by that’ll keep me motivated—August 1st. On that day, I’ll be setting up my energy balls in the Science Museum. Best of luck to myself. Woot woot!
Tags: unity gamedev metaballs programming vfx physics optimization