Hello Everyone!
I’m still chugging away at this when I have time. I’m pretty busy with work these days but I’m still working on making this game. I keep thinking I should write in this blog more often so I am.
So far I’ve experimented with Terrain Composer 2 and it’s pretty sweet! I don’t think it’s quite ready to use yet though, for me at least. Partially because I am planning to have infinitely generated and procedural terrain and I don’t believe it has streaming built into it yet. I did create a terrain with it though and may play around some more with it and start with a static terrain for now. I also discovered that Unity has plans to rework their terrain system eventually so maybe the ability to have voxel terrain that players can edit in the game will be built right into Unity some day. I don’t particularly want to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for Voxel Farm or TerrainEngine and it seems all the other similar assets on the Unity Asset Store aren’t being actively worked on. It also seems like probably wouldn’t have as nice of performance. So it seems like having non-editable terrain will be the way to go at the start until I can either afford VF or TE or Unity adds a better terrain system.
I also decided to get an inventory asset. I was thinking about getting ORK Framework or RPG All In One but they were a little too expensive for me and I missed the 24 sale on RPG All In One. The one day I don’t look at the asset store, go figure. So I got Inventory Pro on sale during the madness sale. It doesn’t have networking support built into it but it sounds like the author has at least built it with networking in mind and so I am just beginning to integrate that in with Forge Networking so let’s see how that goes. It has a lot of really nice features and seems pretty intuitive so far. I don’t find it to be as horrible as some people in their reviews seem to indicate. All the code is there so you can copy it to your own classes and change it if you don’t like it. It’s way, way, way better than starting from scratch which might not always be the case. But so far I’ve been lucky and haven’t really purchased any completely horrible assets. One thing about Inventory Pro is that it doesn’t yet seem to work very well with Unity 5.4 so I had to downgrade back to 5.3. I think it’s probably for the best anyway for now since some of the other assets also seemed slightly buggy or gave warnings so I’ll just stick with 5.3 for now.
What I really like about Inventory Pro is that it includes a simple interface for adding new items, currencies, equipment, crafting recipes, language, and settings. It also supports integrating with UMA which I’m excited to learn more about because that’s another asset I’m planning to figure out and use. I like that for items you can add different stats and rarities too. The way everything integrates together is really great. The currency system is nice too how it allows you to convert from one currency to the other and all the little options to customize things, I don’t know if I could imagine anything better for that. I haven’t played around much with equipment or crafting but they seem pretty nice too. One thing is for sure, this is going to be an ongoing process of integrating into the game and adding new items and equipment and whatnot. I have it mostly integrated already but there are a couple little issues I’m still working out. I also want to integrate the chat from Forge Networking into the notice screen or visa versa.
The next feature I want to add is the ability to build buildings. I’m looking at uConstruct and think I might get it next time it goes on sale. I tried testing the free demo version out but it didn’t want to work properly for some strange reason. I might have been using Unity 5.4 at the time though so I might give that another shot some day and see how it goes. It seems to be possible to integrate it with Inventory Pro and Forge Networking so that’s pretty exciting. It isn’t all that expensive anyway so I don’t know if I can wait for a sale. Once I have uConstruct I’m not sure what else I would even have to get next. Maybe something to make the graphics look prettier, shaders, models, trees, I dunno, but I don’t really care so much about that stuff just yet. Especially prettier graphics since my computer probably could use an upgrade.
uConstruct – A runtime build system for Unity.
TerrainEngine – A framework for procedural terrains or objects.
ORK Framework – An RPG engine for Unity.
RPG All In One – Another RPG system for Unity.