Nodevember 23 - Time (and the other updates)

Today I added "Time", but since the beginning, quite a few changes have landed.

First was adding the Hive : a simple haxagon texture was made in mixture, and a parallax offset mapping shader in shader graph. I wanted to make it emissive and add some movement so I added a transparent layer that had some vertex animation.

I really wanted to take advantage of the interactive nature of the web build, so in a later version I animated the emissive with a timeline triggered on "attack" which was conveniently tied to click or touch depending on the platform (input configuration was inherited by the microgame template). Generally, it has been pretty easy to use the input system on both desktop and mobile.

Then the Mask was made entirely in Mixture and the textures plugged in a material using the simple lit shader. The more complex lit shader didn't seem to work correctly on the web platform, although I could have done something wrong in the configuration of the project.

Like I would have done in substance, I built a heightmap using shape nodes (called polygon in Mixture), some blending, the scatter node (simpler equivalent to the tile sample in substance designer), a bit of blur, and a height to normal node. Most of the time here was spent on building the heightmap.

After that I switched to the First person controls. 

I used the touchscreen joystick sample from the input system package. Once again pretty easy to plug and play. I didn't want to use all the gameplay from the micrograme sample though, so I had to cut some calls to make the player work with a minimal amount of components. While doing that, the build would sometimes not work in the browser at all. On other platforms I never encountered this case where it would build without errors, and not even launch on the platform. I definitely got errors in play mode in the editor, and fixing them allowed me to make the build work again.

Now I'd like to add a condition to hide the joysticks on desktop but I focused on making the next prompt.

For "Time", I wanted something animated so I made it entirely in shadergraph using the sphere once again as a base.

I animated everything in the shader which was not a good thing. I regret not just exposing the variables and animating in a Timeline, as it would have allowed me to make a more fluid animation with more subtleties.

Along the way I have tweaked some general project settings to try making the build smaller, and the build times hopefully shorter. It's noteworthy that a full rebuild was sometimes taking up to 1 hour (on an AMD Ryzen 5 3600) but I think now that I optimize for short build times it's much shorter. At least when no code changes it's very short.

I'd like to use the addressables system in order to extend the "level" by just exporting the content a bit like postlaunch content. 

Let's see if there is time later to try this out :)