Status update / 3D modeler still wanted

Things have been going in fits and spurts the last couple months. The season of summer is usually quite busy for me, and this one was no exception. Buying a few games I was looking forward to for some time didn't help, either.

Anyway, the MoonKrieg update.  Things are still progressing, although I'd had to do a fair bit of rewriting. I mentioned before on the various problems with objects wrapping around the edges of the map, and while the hack I implemented works for the majority of use cases, there are a few special cases that are requiring more thought, and some redoing of previously written code.  I'm slowly slogging my way through these problems, although Unity's various... eccentricities aren't helping. Last night it crashed multiple times, and I lost some objects that had been saved for weeks. I had to take my frustration out by killing thousands of orcs.

I had hoped to have a playable demo by the end of the year, and I'd like to think I'm still on target for that.  However, that estimate was based around finding somebody to do the 3D modeling for me, which has not happened.  While I've had some people go "Sure, I'll help!" I've yet to see any actual models.  While I suppose I can still release a demo involving cubes of various colors shooting spheres at each other, I'm not sure that would constitute 'playable'.  First world problems, indeed.  Anyway, if you happen across this post and have some experience in 3D modeling and/or a love of Moonbase, shoot me a message and let me know.

I have a month before Guildwars 2 is released... I have a sinking feeling that will likely be a major time sink for me.  Must code faster.

Wrap around and its problems

The original Moonbase Commander had a gameplay feature where an object that left the map on one side would appear on the other side, still traveling in the same direction.  I wanted to recreate this in MoonKrieg, as I knew how important the mechanic was in MBC.

The problem is that Unity doesn't have any support for this mechanic, so I had to hack it in myself.  My solution works, but it has spawned some interesting problems.  Like bombs exploding on the bottom edge of the map dealing damage to a building on the top edge.

Last night I finally got the framework set up to deal with this problem, and got the anti-air missiles working with it.  So, that's good.

Unity-Free and Version control

Argh.  Had I known beforehand that the free version of Unity3d purposefully created its project metadata in a way that makes it incredibly difficult to version control, I might have ran away from it.  Well, actually, it's not the version control that is hard (Git will happily track binary data) but the sharing and merging with other changes.

This all means that I will have to be extremely careful should others want to help with the project- to the point that it might just be easier to have people email me the changes so I can directly add it.

Unity Pro, which can make all the project metadata text based, costs $1.5k.  Waaay out of my budget.

Oh well, I suppose I'm putting the cart before the horse a bit here... I don't yet have any people offering to help anyway, so this hasn't really affected me yet.  But it's annoying nonetheless.

Opening post

Got to the point where I decided I would be extremely upset if I happen to lose the progress I've made so far on MoonKrieg, which prompted me to host it offsite on GitHub, which in turn prompted me to set up a blog of sorts to track my progress and give people with questions a place to maybe find some answers.

There will of course be more updates coming soon.  I plan to actually finish this project someday, unlike most of my projects.