For anyone who is keen to know about the next update: My estimate is early February. Massive improvements have been made and I'm just testing and fixing everything.
Monday 4th:
Hello 2021!
First up today is the Shop. Before last testing, I made it so that it would automatically generate the shop list with all the client sprites and everything. Now to actually make that work.
Positioning of the buttons is fine. Now need to test up until unlocking a Client so I can check all the buttons are being set up properly.
The first hurdle is the Incubator, since that is the new 'Printer', we'll be using that to complete the 'Print a Human' quest.
First was to add the Incubator at start and for this save file, tidying a bit of code while I'm at it. (Not sure we need to save 'UnlockedCategories' anymore, since I can do 'foreach unlocked building, if its type is not contained in 'UnlockedCategories', add it... something for later maybe). [Done]
Now to add the interface for the Incubator so that the player can Print a Human for some Squid. Done.
Of course now that I have a Human, I have to fix the mountain of bugs that appears when I try to do anything with them since all the changes. So, from Shop, to Incubator, to Humans now. My only goal today was to get the Shop working, so already it's a good one.
Getting lots of 'Argument out of range' where probably I'm missing a '-1' in a few random generations. Dealing with those first.
Dealt with a bunch of bugs on printing the Human. Now my big task tedious task is to set the 'empty checker' for each Outpoint on Buildings.
Ok, now there are no errors, but the Human isn't doing much. I will make it my goal tomorrow to get at least one Human acting properly and doing basic things.
Tuesday 5th:
Today is all about getting the Human back up and running in its basic form.
First problem is that the NavMeshSurfaceEditor is giving me errors and now showing me anything. I don't imagine this is my fault. First thing to try is to update everything.
Having a lot of trouble with this. A lot. However, I do have on my agenda to update the NavMesh and better understand it for Teleporters and such later. So, pretty much overhauling the entire system.
... Ok I think I got it working again [by updating and reconfiguring a couple things in the editor], only the problem now is with the Human's script. There are no error messages, and if the Human has a place to go to it will go there. I think it's failing for reasons other than the NavMesh now.
(Not quite done with the Nav Mesh). Ok it seems the NavMeshModifiers have reset, and are referencing a missing script. However, it looks like the geometry is modifying the navmesh as intended anyway. So, I'm just going to remove them all. Have to do it manually and I have to do fix each prefab individually. Double click Building prefeb in Project view, click where it says 'missing (mono script), remove component, ctrl-s, repeat. Also had to do it for the buildings in the main menu, but I could select multiple there.
I get one error when pressing play in Unity, 'SerializedObjectNotCreatableException' on my NavMeshSurfaceEditor. I think I'm going to commit coding sin and ignore this for now until I can get some other things working.
On being printed, the Human teleports and gets stuck in an idle animation and activity. Time to put on my detective cap and geek glasses to figure this out. I want Humans fully functional as they were before by the end of the week.
Got my work cut out for me this week. Made myself a list which I want to complete by tomorrow, starting with a couple fairly unrelated things.
Processor doesn't continue work when I load the game. I could add 'Working' to the buildingsave, but I wonder if I could be more elegant than that. I don't think 'if current source != null' is specific enough, may cause bugs. Maybe if progress is above 0 and currentsource != null? No, in the end I'll go with 'working' on the building save, because I can imagine some occasions where these may be the case but we are not 'working'.
Incubator 'fill' (the pink stuff) was appearing above the UI and flickering. I think that's because its y scale was 0. I was right. Added 0.01 and it works.
When I print a Human on the Incubator, it checks for space automatically through 'outcargo' script, but that is AFTER it has made the Human. Also, I suspect I may want to change the way Humans move through Processors on the Conveyor so that they don't stack on top of each other and so on. This is something that will come into focus as I get to the 'put lots of Humans on the butchery line' part of testing, as I want something that will work in all instances. It's where I expect the most bugs, but hopefully easy fixes. For now, I'll just check for space/port connection before allowing the player to use it.
... The current script for 'OutCargo' has an 'out bool Success', which determines whether there was space to move or eject the cargo. I think this is clunky now, and there should be a separate function for checking space. This could be very simple but I ought to do it with a fresh mind. First thing on the list for tomorrow. Broke down the task into smaller parts so it's easier to tackle.
Decided to do this while it was still in my head and I'll make that my goal for the rest of the evening.
Made my 'CheckForSpace' script. Now to remove those parts from 'OutCargo' without breaking anything. Done.
Now, I've made a bunch of errors that, as I fix, I'll find all the instances of 'OutCargo', and I can modify them to check before attempting to out. I should probably wrap 'CheckForSpace' and 'OutCargo' into a single function to save on a few dozen lines.
Brain is hurting a bit figuring out what exactly should happen when 'CheckForSpace' returns a fail. For a Station like 'Auto-Excreter'... It should be stop anything from happening until we get a 'TriggerPrevious'.
So, how do I communicate that? By telling it to start 'Working' again? Telling it to 'LoadSource' to trigger the whole process? Or add a new bool 'Blocked', which becomes true on a failed OutCargo and is released on 'TriggerPrevious', and if it's true on TriggerPrevious then we tell it to 'Do'. Need to play out each scenario in my head.
For the Station, this is never a problem, since Stations so far only ever refer to one outpoint. But for Processors, the outpoint is contextual to the machine and the thing it's making. To solve this, I'm making Processors remember the Outpoint concerning Humans and using that.
There are a few exceptions which will make this less simple. The first is the Birthing Station, which has 2 potential Outpoints it might want to send its Humans through. Even if I have them both come out the same one, that's still confusing to me how it will play out when blocked. I may even get around this by having the Baby born in the Mother's arms, as a 'HeldItem' type of thing... Putting a pin on it.
Ok that's actually the only exception. I think I am going to make the Baby her HeldItem.
Ok, that's enough for today!
Thursday 6th:
The single conveyor isn't appearing as an option for some reason. First task today is to figure that out and fix it.
Some random fixes.
Ok so the first problem I see when printing a Human is that they get stuck in 'Idling' and walking on the spot when they reach their random wandertarget. I want to fundamentally change this to simplify things a bit. I'm going to make a transform on the Human called 'wandertarget', so it's an object instead of co-ordinates, and that is what gets moved and targeted. Then I can use the same script to handle what happens when they reach their 'wander target' (stand still for a while before deciding next move).
Well that almost worked, except I'm an idiot because the Human will never reach their wander target if it's in their heirarchy and moving along with them. For now I'm just unparenting and then re-parenting the wandertarget. This will be dodgy for saving and loading, so I'm going to give a thought to that... Just made sure to unparent if, when we load the game, our Human's target is their wandertarget, plus a few other places using my 'targettype' (human/item/building/+wandertarget) string.
OK! Got the Human wandering around and idling.
They're also successfully targeting their nearest station to use it. But when they reach the Treadmill, they just keep running on the spot and 'Going to Waypoint'. So that's next.
Bare in mind that [since the changes I've made in the last couple months] if I get this working for one machine, it generally works for a ton of others (now without having to copy paste anything).
Working through the various problems here and trying to do it in an intelligent way.
Now having trouble getting them to claim ownership of a bed. Took a while but I got there in the end. Long time to figure out what the problem was.
Now, when they enter the bed, I get a couple errors, so that's next. Easy fix.
Thursday 7th:
Ok so Human is working and sleeping and all of that is going fine. Next bug is at the toilet, with them getting stuck on it after using. A few Stations will have this issue as the code has completely changed and I need to change some things in the editor and double check the code as I go.
Also just before getting on to the toilet, I need to get the animation going properly because at the moment its completely broken, so that's first thing today.
Kind of frustrated with the way stations work. Feel like it could be a lot better given how much bug fixing I'm having to do.
More fixes...
Got them eating, sleeping and working. Nice! Still need to clean up the animation a bit but it's working functionally. I have a list of little cosmetic and other fixes to get through before I can start working through the game until I find more bugs again.
As with a lot of people today, I am very distracted by everything going on. Not going to end up the most productive day.
Ok Animation is looking smooth now. Sound still all over the place.
Got a couple things off the list working.
Friday 8th:
Ok got myself a list of things to work through today and I want to finish that plus make some progress into the game. We'll see how it goes.
Fixed eyes coming in mismatching and sometimes the dead eyes.
Failing to Print a Human now tells you why you failed. This will be handy for new players.
Seems that grabbing an Item from a Container no longer prompts the Transports behind it to move again. (Actually it was more to do with it going directly from Container to Container). Fixed.
Sorted out the sound for the objects we're using so far. Using my new system it's very streamlined.
Final thing on the list was to sort out the chest and waist sizes because they were looking funky (changes since I got rid of genetics for this). I think the problem actually seems to be more to do with the deformation of the chest, possibly since an update or something. In this case, I'm just going to remove this feature for now and I can redo it later if needed with better finesse.
Need to make a Transport Panel but that can wait til next week. This would show the object in the transport on the Building Panel in real time, purely cosmetic.
The other thing is 'HeldBaby', but that's complicated and not needed for a while so putting it on the later list.
Now, to continue the game and see what bugs I run into first.
Some trouble with Humans going to Stations that are already occupied. Think I fixed it, we'll see if it happens again.
Humans were babbling as if mad due to an error in the code. Sounds about right.
Yep, still problems with overlapping on Stations. Think I fixed them now.
We're running at >200 fps with 4 Humans on screen. Main stopping point besides animation and rendering is the frequent 'garbage collector' which brings it down to about 160 briefly each second. I think that's my fault and I can get around that, but not with my current expertise. Need to cache things and write better code. For now, let's keep testing and fixing!
Going to be a lot of minor bugs as I fix small errors and sort things in the Editor. I'd say this is a good milestone to end the week on. Hopefully by the end of next week I'll be much further along with momentum. Hopefully I won't be despairing as much about the fate of mankind.
Got some more fixed with the Grinder, things that won't need fixing for future objects.
Realized how cruel it was to have pipes spill their contents on the floor in front of them. Made that only work for humans.
Ok I think that's good for the week. I achieved my goal of getting the basics up and running. I hope that next week, with momentum, I can at least touch the point where I have all currently existing objects functioning together in game. Then, once that is all polished, I can release an update and get to work on more cosmetics and more content. I will be very happy the day that I'm making content again, as opposed to fixing things I made at the beginning of the project!