More after hours digging into Unity (slowed down by some necessary after hours work related items…probably going to continue for the balance of the week as we wrap up a tight sprint 🙂 ).

Cross Platform VR and Flat Display

I am coming to the conclusion that I need to dig deeper into the prefabs provided with the various VR SDKs that matter to me (daydream, vive and cardboard). It appears that the different vendors implemented their own event systems that aren’t necessarily interoperable. If we want to build code that plugs into any of these systems, we’ll need to address this.

I’m not currently sure how best to deal with this. Trying to build wrappers sounds nice for compatibility but has potential limitations. Changing the prefabs in-place provides more leverage but means potentially having to make the changes repeatedly as new versions appear with other features that we want. This won’t be resolved without some digging into the code and experimentation.

Unity Editing Support

I was recently playing with some asset generation scripting. Malcolm had commented that it would be nice to have a way to quickly create a room of any desired size with appropriate wall textures and texture scaling. I whipped up a very quick and simple script to take a wall, floor and ceiling prefab and build a complete room out of the set.

This worked quite nicely (though many details to be added such as the texture management) but had no visibility in the editor. You added an invisible GameObject to the scene, set its parameters and then when you ran the game you got a magically created room.

I was looking at the editor side options last night and it appears to be relatively straightforward to make the script do its thing in the editor as well as at game run time.

I’m going to play with some of this soon to see what I can put together. Being able to build more complicated, programmatically generated items in the editor would be a great capability to have available. Prefabs are fine for simple things but I’d rather have the option of generating a family of possible items from a script. Editor side visibility is a key part of making something like this useful.

Having fun playing with this stuff as work projects at the moment are in stabilization and thus mostly running down defects and back-filling missed requirements rather than building new architecture and the code to support it.