Hey everyone,
In continuing my experiments with hand-tracking, I realized that the blaster tool and palette management needed improvements and fixes. I'm currently traveling, so I'm writing this from my laptop! Fortunately, I already recorded the video I wanted to include in this update. :)
Blasting and Hand-Tracking
I recently made a hand-tracking tool that shoots projectiles from my fingers!
While I extend my fingers toward the board, the tool begins blasting shapes from the tips, and the blast intensity increases when I squeeze my thumb closer to my palm. It was a lot of fun to work on this experimental tool, and by making it, I became aware of several problems with the blaster tool and palettes.
Blaster Improvements
When I started playing with using the blaster with hand tracking, I scaled up the shapes so they were more visible when recording with MixCast. What I noticed was that the shapes got bigger, but the way they collided with the environment didn’t look correct. What I realized was that I was incorrectly scaling the projectiles’ colliders.
One of the challenges with working with Unity DOTS is that working with components is not as straightforward compared to Unity's traditional game object approach.
When an object resource is converted into an entity, the collider is added as a component and does not change even if the entity’s Scale component is changed. This is different from game objects, where scaling a game object’s transform will also scale its collider!
To scale a collider, instead of changing a “scale” parameter on the component, the entire collider needs to be rebuilt. Depending on the shape (e.g. sphere) of the projectile, a different generation method is used. For non-generic shapes, like the twenty-sided polyhedron, a convex hull needs to be used to generate the collider shape.
In short, I spent a lot of time optimizing and fixing blaster projectile shapes so their colliders scaled correctly.
Palette Reworks
Another issue I noticed when experimenting with hand-tracking was that my palettes were not saving. I realized that the palettes were not being properly serialized and thus not being saved. Big yikes.
In addition to fixing the serialization problem, I decided to save custom palettes to file so that sharing palettes with your friends is simple and easy. You can also still copy palettes and import them from the clipboard if that’s easier for you though.
Enjoy!
-Bradley