zikrostag

Tried working with terrains and textures, so far am not happy with the grid like pattern that all the textures seem to create. Trashed that idea in favor of a plain with a single large texture. Added sound and worked with custom textures and sub emitters in particles, got some awesome effects, LOVE the particle systems.

The most challenging thing to figure out so far was scripting. It took me days to figure out how to access other objects and/or scripts. I just didn't understand that you had to create references to other objects using the GUI before you can access those objects in the script.

Once I understood that concept I re-arranged all of my objects and scripts that control movement/activation. I now have a functional application that launches rockets, plays sounds, countdowns, resets, flys up, tracks with camera etc. My 3 year old loves this thing, and is constantly interrupting development to play with it.

Next on the agenda:

1. Adding different/moving cameras, and the logic of when/how to switch to them.
2. Adding additional structure to the surroundings, right now I just have a few primitives making up the launch pad and tower. This will likely lead to learning Blender.

Spent about 3 hrs last night learning the tool through a set of youtube videos that got me into the editor, moving around and adding objects. www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuFom_…. I found this tutorial to be reasonably good, the guy forgets basic stuff like moving around in the scene though, you can tell he's so used to it that it's second nature to him.

I learned that I'll need Blender to do modeling so downloaded and installed that program as well. I also downloaded an asset pack from the store - NASA rockets. I plan to make a simple rocket launch application that my 3 year old can play with.

The tutorials have just been working with boxes so far, this gives you no sense of scale, direction or anything else really. After downloading the assets I replaced some of my boxes with a SaturnV rocket. And I have to say just doing this gave a whole other sense of scale and understanding of what the "world" is. It moved me from abstract concepts to understanding, and got me exited. Once I saw that rocket sitting there all I wanted to do was make it move, I ended up jumping back to the Unity provided tutorial videos on scripting. By 1am I had a realistic rocket launch acceleration tied to my SaturnV with the camera tracking it's launch, all tied to the "up" arrow key.

Let me say, it's awesome to see something in motion when you hit a key. I'm excited for tomorrow and have a better understanding of what I need to create.

World, sky, clouds.
Camera angles.
Buildings, launch pad.
More rockets.
Smoke, fire.
Sounds.
Explosions.

Not sure what I'll cover first. I'll likely get a sky and world together to see some more big progress, but the real fun is in the effects like smoke and fire, I can't wait.

I am 100% new to mobile development and 3d development. I'm going to log my process of discovery as I attempt to learn mobile development from scratch.

Did quite a bit of research on 3D engines for the mobile platforms and decided on Unity.

I started the Unity download while I watched a few tutorials on the site about the unity work space, how scripts work in unity, and how the object store works.

After download I was prompted to create an account before the application would start. Once I got my email verified I was into the application. First screen to create an new project is library inclusion. I have an understanding of what this means, but no idea what libraries I'll need. So, off to do more research. So far, about 3hrs invested including research and install.