Today’s my first day back at work after a pretty long vacation. My intention was to make this day as chill as I possibly could in order to smoothly reintegrate with the world of computers without stressing myself out. So far, so good.
After cleaning out my computer’s hard drive to free up some space, I opened up this project—or at least tried to. It wouldn’t open because of a package cache issue.
Deleting Library\PackageCache entirely fixed it. I updated the project’s Unity version to the newest 6.2 and also upgraded my packages to their latest versions. Clearly on an maintenance vibe, I began to consolidate and clean out files in the Assets directory. Eventually, I felt satisfied and ready to work.
I realized that I’ve accidentally been working on a separate git branch since September. Luckily, I managed to avoid merge conflict hell because both computers I’ve used have been on that branch. I squash-merged it into main but won’t delete it entirely until I confirm everything still works.
There’s still no settings menu section for particle VFX customization. I was reminded of that forgotten todo-list task because I wanted to try adjusting the initial particle velocity from the hands in order to begin analyzing the cause of that bug I said I would fix over 2 weeks ago. Interestingly enough, after analyzing my VFX graph, I realized that the node group labeled “Initial Velocity From Hand” is more accurately used to control the spread of the particles from the hand so they don’t all emit in a single-file line. I renamed it to “Spread Direction From Hand”.
Local x-axis velocity was unnecessarily being hard coded to 1.0f because the SDF attraction force is the actual driver of particle velocity. Therefore, I think an additional way I’ll smooth out the bug is by reducing SDF attractiveness while the particles initialize after the hand first opens. It’s time for me to wrap up for tonight though and continue my peaceful reintegration with the world.
When will I finally fix this bug? Tomorrow? Not gonna make that claim again. Expectations lead to suffering. All progress is good.
Tags: unity project-management optimization vfx file-management