Daily* Devlogs

So I've noticed that the serialized GUID system I'm using is struggling with equality in certain situations. So my plan is to actually alter my design tomorrow slightly to just use regular system.Guid. This will help reduce the chances that we might hit a wall later with this system and it'll reduce the variables by 50%. I don't think it'll take very long but it is the source of my cats being a little hokey. So tomorrow we'll update this and I'll try to write my update earlier so we can get more details! I'm just excited at how quickly I ironed out the issue.

Alright! First we've got good news, N number of cats is now working with the state machine. My individual cats all have their own behaviors and are walking around, eating, sleeping , etc, on their own time and personal needs. This is HUGE! I'm very happy with this and it will be a good stopping point for the night for me. A very, very large commit to be pushing. I've moved away from custom plugins for Guids and Dictionaries, I've just spun up my own solutions and they work without issues. This will also help reduce variables going forward in case anything breaks. Also for those of you playing the home game, I realize now my mistake on ID management for assets in th…

So off and on for a few weeks I've been toying with having a unique identifying value for each object in the scene. A big part of this is just being able to guarantee uniqueness and to keep the data that guarantees that information as small as possible. I tried a number of things, some involving pretty complicated editor scripting, and ultimately in the end I felt like the effort wasn't really paying off. I was making something that would not be fun to maintain and might be hiding secret evils in my future. I decided today that I would instead have a catalog (well Artifact) that tracks every item in the world. I specify item here, because we don't really car…

I'm almost finished with the first draft of the world item database. This will be our lookup table for all the items that are in the world for our kitties to path out to. We could find this data each time a cat is curious, updating it constantly, and generally just making a lot of garbage. Or we could track it through a table like this and have a fairly consistent memory footprint. I do have a bug with my component return feature. I'll need to look into that and see what I'm forgetting, it'll likely be obvious and silly but for now I'm not entirely sure. Otherwise I don't have much to add! I don't have any gifs for you at the moment but the cats are able to navigat…

I've now setup the logic on the Moosecats to work as follows. And I'm pleased to say that it looks like it scales for hundreds of kitties. So basically our little friends will notice they are, for instance, hungry. If they are, they will search out for food. If no food exists they will say "Tata!" and go on an adventure to find some themselves. In the example below we aren't yet de-spawning them and sending them on the adventure. But you'll recall I do have support for that from a month or two ago. So next I'll hook them into that system, updating their needs, so when they return they'll be happy and healthy and who knows...maybe they'll bring some presents or new fr…

Over the next few days I presume I won't be getting a lot done. We are preparing to see the eclipse and that means I'll be away from my standard hardware. However that doesn't mean we won't be able to do a little bit of theorycrafting as we lead into the next steps. For now I know what I need to do is get the hooks in for our Moosecats sending themselves on Adventures. We know that we can do it through UI (or direct function calls) but we haven't discussed is how to handle it happening automagically. Can the same adventure be running with multiple instances at the same time? I mean...do multiple people go on vacation to Hawaii at the same time? Probably. Also, a ra…

Alright, we've got our adventure system that currently rewards items. But what I need to do is have the rewards be actions rather than just raw items. In this case we can have the actions be something like "reward item", or "refill moosecat state", etc, etc. With that in place we'll be future proofed for all adventure outcomes. I also noticed that I've got some foundational code that is currently featuring manor only code. I'll just need to go back through that sometime and fix up those connections. Things like saving and loading should work in all of the game projects. But for now we can't stress about it too much, just need to make note of it and focus. Th…

Today was quite an experience. Truly something that I was never expecting to see. And I'm happy to report I did not blind myself. Also last night when I should have been sleeping I had a revelation about naming conventions for collections of data. We'll use DataBase to represent any collection of data that can be modified at runtime and Catalog for any collection of data that is read only. I'll adjust my classes when I get back home tomorrow to meet this. The nice thing is that will also mean that I can tell which is which much easier, right now they are kind of interchangeable and I think that's not good for my own mental capacity. Anywho, have a great night!

While I wouldn't say it is perfect, in fact I want to update it tomorrow. We now have a working component caching system that works for both the class name you are looking for, all interfaces that class implements, AND any parent classes it inherits from. In this way we can use it a lot like get component but it'll be much faster and not require searching each time. Now with this in mind, something I want to do is have it cache lazily. That is to say when you "return component" it will find the component, cache it in all the different ways we need, and then return the cached entry. That way we only store exactly what we need. This should be helpful seeing as there …

Working through the catalog system now. One of the first we need is for prebuilt kitties. These will be our friends like Moose and Bean. Because obviously they'll have a specific look. But other custom kitties will exist beyond this. I'll need to have the collection store both the cats themselves and some ID Artifacts for easily finding them in other work. This will require a bit of thought on my part, maybe I'll write something up tomorrow. For now you can find them via the unique IDs assigned to them, but that might not be entirely sufficient. I may also add in a getter lookup by string, or something else identifiable. If we do go the artifact route we can just inc…

Today you can join me in thinking out loud about solving Moosecats sending themselves on adventures. We presumably need 1 adventure for each kind of need that can't be satisfied in the map. For now this means that we will have a relaxation adventure, an adventure to relieve boredom, and an adventure to refill their tummy. Currently the adventure system assumes that you will have an "active" adventure, this is the one you've selected from the menu, and you will add your Moosecats to that active adventure. But in the case of automatic adventures we don't have one selected. So instead we need to select a specific adventure and send our Moosecat on it. These particu…

This weekend we'll be finishing up the adventure work I highlighted in the previous post. Then after that I've got a solid idea I think for items. We won't have "Collectible" Items and "Interactable" items etc, we'll just have "Items" and use interfaces to determine what cool functionality they provide. This will simplify the maintenance and really make it so we can add functionality at any time without needing to overhaul TONS of items, or create class after class. Obviously each item will have unique functionality (to some degree) but we won't be enforcing much at the base level. I forget the terminology but basically we'll code them through promised functionality …

Welp! I intended to do adventures first but it turned out we needed to do items! The good news is that I can use the same system for the adventures once I get to that tomorrow. There is no bad news. We can now create action lists to happen in response to something. Currently I only have one action list, but later we can have one for collecting, one for consuming, and so on. These action lists look something like the following: A keen eye might wonder how you can "collect" something and "consume" it (thus satisfying your need), but there is a reason this works for now. Players do not have needs that are satisfied, but they do have inventories. Moosecats hav…

So this has actually been a bit more of an update than I was expecting. But I think we can discuss the high level of it. I'll do a more in depth document soon for my own sanity as much as yours. First I suppose we should figure out what the problem statements are. The first is that we want our adventures to trigger a series of actions when they complete. What these actions will be are undefined but we'll just add them in the sequence we want them to happen. The second is that we want our Moosecats to be able to trigger an adventure on their own. This is to satisfy their needs and it needs to be infinitely scaling. Now that we've got our two problems, i…

Ok! Progress is moving along on adventures. I feel it'll probably take most of this week given how exhausted I am in general. Not with coding, this is always a treat, but just combining it into days with working out and a literal job. The adventures now track how many teams an unlocked adventure supports by default, and how many slots each team has by default. It generates each team slot, then populates their fields for adventurers, and saves all of that to the unlocked adventure data that we store to the drive. I believe with this change, tomorrow we should notice that we can add an adventure trivially and have any number of team slots running actively at the s…

We have now reached the point where none of the work is throwing errors. That's always lovely, this means that we can now move into having our Moosecats add themselves to adventures. Today was a long workday so I didn't have as much time as I wanted but did manage to hit a good point with this work. It feels like by around Thursday or Friday we should have the setup complete for our Moosecats to go on adventures when they can't satisfy a need and then return a bit later. Can also experiment with them bringing back items and dropping them near the player, that could be very cute if it works reasonable well. As always, feeling good about progress!

Alright, we are partway through the cats adding their own adventures. I'm taking notes as I move along. Our main challenge is that Unity doesn't serialize dictionaries and they don't serialize Guids. I need both of these things. I'm currently just building these on awake. But I think what we could use are some simple container objects that we can add to behaviors. Scriptable objects that act a bit like a dictionary. In fact...thinking on this, Odin can serialize our SOs so we can literally do this. We'll have the adventure containers be the keys and the need satisfying adventures be the values. This is stupidly simple, I'm a little annoyed it didn't cross my min…

I believe we will need to clean up the Adventure system in the future but for now it is in a pretty good place. What we do for cats added by themselves is as follows. Has any cat run this kind of adventure yet? If no, add this kind of adventure to our unlocked collection. We do this so it can be saved and loaded. Next we ask if there is an empty team slot on the adventure. If yes, we add this cat to it and start it, huzzah. If no, we create a new slot and add it. Then we raise the send cat on adventure. This allows us to effectively cache slots for these adventures. Which does make me realize I should probably standardize this logic and add dedic…

Today was one part updating Unity because of a bug with the specific version I had, and another part UML documentation! It is nowhere near done but I'm writing up docs on the adventure system so that I can more easily integrate new features into them. As you can see we don't have a lot, but this is the beginnings of it. Adding commentary to every function and attribute so that I can better keep things in line. Cause I'll tell you, this brain of mine struggles sometimes. Especially when we haven't touched something in a bit. And in the case of Adventures we made it a bit ago and then came back to it with a needed overhaul. I should have all this finished tomorrow th…

I am pretty sure I skipped a day lol... Anyways, I've come to the conclusion that I need to change up my development schedule. I'm noticing that on the weekends I'm usually pretty burned out. Between work and working out, I just don't have much left in the tank. This actually isn't the fault of this project, I really enjoy working on it. But I need the energy to do so. We are still going to have daily updates. Perhaps I'll take some time on Weekends to update documentation. Or if I'm feeling energetic get some coding done. But I don't want to stress or strain myself and ultimately get little to nothing done. This all said, today while we did take a very long bik…

An interface is a promise between scripts. In theory these cannot actually implement functionality. I say should not because I've found a gap in C# where you can implement functionality in your interfaces. I actually think this is a bad idea. But it is also a really interesting one. Perhaps we will start a coding guide section and I'll put how I did it in there. I still suggest you don't do it, as you can't breakpoint, but the fact that it works is fascinating!

I know for some folks this is the most miserable part of coding. You hit a golden point in your work and realize certain systems are unsustainable. As you get better these become less common but I do think there is merit in trying things then iterating on them to get the perfect outcome for you. We are nearly done with the refactoring of cataloging and spawning. I'm very excited as these are pivotal systems for the future of the game. I'm on a phone at the moment because we watched Fallout late into the evening but tomorrow o don't have a workout. That gives me plenty of time to go over it in more detail and maybe include some visual aids!

Sneaking in real late tonight! Just finished the Fallout series (season 1) and it was incredible. Absolutely soul crushing at times, anxiety riddling at others, and all around just filled top to bottom with misery. I couldn't do that kind of show all the time but it made me feel things and all around I'm happy that it exists. What an exceptional example of truly talented people pulling off something incredible. As for my own work, the spawner is refactored! It is much more powerful than the prior version and now it isn't limited by a single type of item. Now *any* item can be spawned as long as I have the ID for it. They'll be spawned enabled or disabled as needed, p…

Alright, well, that IS less than ideal. I've moved our spawn request logic into a state action. Because it honestly makes more sense for it to live there than it would on a particular gameobject. The plan is pretty simple, anything, anywhere, can request items from the spawn system and then they can choose to position those spawned assets anywhere they need and do anything extra to them after the fact. Unfortunately I need to fix a few things tomorrow. The first is that the positional data is wack, clearly a few problems here: 1) They are all spawning in a thin line. 2) They are all spawning under the nav mesh (woops). Otherwise though, if you ignore thes…

Alrighty! Spawning is now gangbusters! I really like where it is. So I think the next thing we need to refactor is the needs system for the Moosecats. There is "something" about it that I'm not liking. It is too easy to get a mismatch with data. This might be from my old bugs that caused it but fundamentally I don't like the issue. So tonight I'm going to ruminate on a solution and hopefully tomorrow we can implement it!