#4edge

Ultimately, this train of thought is taking me off track. Once I have a basic product which is shipable, I can come back and add features like this, or indeed branch into different versions of the software depending on application. Ideal features like avoiding edge overlaps are similarly distracting, but will be more important to fix once the framework is in place.

I made the basic ‘target’ overlay for the interface. The idea is that the middle circles give a sense of scale: the central one represents the radius of one of the nodes in the network, the second is twice the radius. The outer circle which actually receives the input expands with the screen size; this could cause problems between platforms/resolutions, but those problems can be left until later in development.

It turns out that trying to do anything graphical without Photoshop is an absolute pain, even in 2D. To act as the markers of my edges, I wanted a handful of geometric shapes; to produce these I had to draw them in MS Paint (RIP) and then move across to PowerPoint to remove the backgrounds. But I’m not putting any money into this project until I absolutely have to, so since there is no free 2D shapes package that I could find in the asset store, this will have to do.

Wrapped around this structure is the influence of the GameControl script, which gets everything going in the first place. If only I had access to some network visualisation software to model this workflow...

I hope that eventually the implementation chosen will vary with the network (as edge density changes beyond certain thresholds, say), and having an interface will allow me to do this with minimal changes to the code and without losing earlier solutions to the problems I encounter.

So this fourth week has ended up lasting... four weeks. Not that anyone’s paying attention! I have occasionally found moments to work on this project in that time, though, and the outcome is that I’ve designed a system capable of storing the positional data of a network to a persistent file and then extracting it into the virtual meat space. Most of the aspects of this design are not yet coded to functionality, but I at least have a good enough understanding of how scripts in Unity interact to have come this far!

A template, just like the one for my button. Useless until I can work out how to extract what’s typed!

A quiet week on this blog (back home, driving theory test next week, hosting people for my birthday this weekend). Mid way into learning about data persistence, I realised that for this to be even minimally functional, I would want to be able to name save files from within the game. Which requires text input. Hence my exploration of a text-based adventure tutorial! All I need from it is player input but there might be some useful info about ‘scriptable objects’ too.