Version Updates, and More!

So, it's been over two months since my last post, and a lot has happened in that time. I'll start off by saying that I've been taking some time to continue developing my programming and Unity skills by taking another course that specifically focuses on Unity. I've been taking it non-stop for the past five or so weeks, and I feel like I've come away from it knowing far much more than I could have hoped for. In fact, with the lessons I've learned from this course, I have come up with some new ideas for the project that I couldn't have done before!

But, in order for me to make these plans a reality, I also had to consider another aspect of the project - we were using a pretty outdated version of Unity. A lot of the stuff I learned couldn't be put into practice in the version we were using, so I suggested that we update to a much more recent version. After getting the OK from Joel, I began updating the project. Of course, as with any kind of update, sometimes things are going to break, and sometimes things are going to behave quite differently than they did before.

After updating I had to go through the entire project to fix various new problems that come with working with a new version of Unity. I sought out newly-created bugs that popped up (as a result of depreciated/obsolete practices, for instance). Some project settings also had to be changed to keep unnecessary processes from working. I found that a Sprite Unpacker was trying to locate sprites in our 3D game, for instance, and it was taking quite some time to do so - really holding up the loading of the entire project in the process! Plus, the lightmapping I had done in our game previously was also considered outdated, and was therefore not working properly. And finally, my console was flooded with over 150 new warnings about some variables supposedly not ever being assigned, and therefore always having a value of null... even though these were variables I tended to assign in the Unity Inspector.

All in all, there was a lot to do. But as of today, all of these problems have been addressed, and now we can continue developing with a modern version of Unity. In future weeks, I'm going to try experimenting with some new tools and features that I hope will make the game a much more interesting and immersive experience.

Expect more updates as new changes arrive. Now that I've gotten through my Unity class, I hope I can add updates to this blog a little more frequently. Look forward to more news as the game continues to develop!