Whale this is awkward...

Due to some midterms conflicts, this was not an especially productive week on my end.  Work was done to make the path-drawing a lot less hacky, and there were a decent amount of improvements to make the path drawing experience much more pleasant.

One nice improvement is the ability to draw lines coming out of a tower in any direction, not just from a specified exit point.  That's why playtesting is great, because even though having a specified exit point "makes sense", it wasn't super intuitive to the players, so we adapted to make a better playthrough experience.

A lot of work was done debugging some of the slowdown issues, and honestly Dylan and I have yet to find the reasons why things weren't working, because the behavior of some objects was completely out of sync with the documentation's specified behavior.  In the end we cut our losses and moved to another approach which significantly reduced the slowdown in the game.

One big issue is still with paths being drawn too close to edges and the corners of ramps, research is actively being done into the best way to give bigger margins around edges.  This is mostly an issue with how to configure the third party software, and hopefully there's some obscure setting somewhere that will fix everything.  This is still a top priority.

The next priority is to handle drawing detours on paths, followed by units walking along blocked paths, followed by more work on how exactly to handle invalid paths (which is tricky since the team is still conflicted).

Fun fact: when Vectrosity 4 promises enormous speed updates and the Asset Store claims you don't need to migrate to a beta version of Unity to use it, don't trust it.  Way too much time was spent assuming the problem was on my end and debugging it before I noticed that the Asset store requirements disagreed with the README's requirements.  On the plus side, once Unity 4.6 is rolled out it should be trivial to switch to Vectrocity 4, which uses way less resources.

Accomplishments

• Debugging and optimizing slowdown with Dylan (2 hours)
• Making existing pathfinding way less hacky and covering some edge cases (2.5 hours)
• Letting units leave in any direction (2 hours)
• Path smoothing and assorted improvements (4 hours)
• Assorted art direction and design work (2.5 hours)

Not-so-much Accomplishments

• Porting over to Vectrocity 4, debugging, realizing the reason it didn't work was because Unity 4.6 is still beta, rolling back (1 hour)
• Researching other kinds of graph types for our pathfinding and seeing if they fixed our issues (1 hour)
• Trying to get paths to have wider margins around edges (1 hour)

Next Steps

• The next priority is to handle drawing detours on paths, followed by units walking along blocked paths, followed by more work on how exactly to handle invalid paths (which is tricky since the team is still conflicted).

Ryan Daugherty