2 steps back and then 3 steps forward

Unity3d is a very powerful tool and offers many advantages but we've also stumbled on a drawback or two. Namely, that Occlusion Culling has to be sought out and specifically done before exporting your game. In our case, the frame rates were pretty abysmal because we lacked a really solid Occlusion Culling pass.

Occlusion Culling means the game becomes aware that it can take the liberty of erasing things that you can't really see due to obstructions in the name of efficiency. We noticed more than a few jumps in performance. This has been part of a recent focus on researching performance.

We also tried a new terrain object and tossed all the vegetation off to see if that yielded any performance gains. The answer was no. It also allowed us to bump into another issue. Unity3d's tree building tool is impressive but it has scaling issues. That will force our hand to scale up the models and the terrain.

Now, on to the good items.We've added more than a few of the critical buildings that are focal points to the field school experience. We also have added in flood gate logic and our first NPC (Non Playable Character). These latter proofs of concept will allow us to explore a more immersed and narrated experience. The possibility of playing as a villager imposed with the demands of life in El Cerrito is very appealing and that is our hope.

We modeled the School House. A lot of the photos we have to reference show the exterior well but the interior was very much still under construction. It seemed like a good idea to make this a central hub location to mimic its function in real life. Thus, we left the inside empty for now.

Detailed shot of the window frame. We went ahead and modeled out real windows since this is planned to be a high frequency area.

The inside of our school house. Empty as mentioned above.

The Utility Boxes, a few mounting tracks and a smaller window.

We left some of the features on the texture layer. You'll also notice

the dynamic shadows are pretty chunky. We're not very happy with that

and are looking into ways to make this more presentable.

This is our first NPC. We took advantage of this site's

promotional offer of free character generation and

downloads: MIXAMO

It will help to not have to build everyone from scratch

and gives us the option to have more characters in this

sim for better immersion.

They use Unity3d for the front end visualisation and you

pass variables to their back end that bakes up the correct

poly mesh, rigs and textures. Even for the fees they charge

it's quite a deal!

I understand that this is Joe C's House.

A few storage sheds next to Joe's house. They're done for the

most part and were fun to build. I know a makeshift car port

is missing from one and we'll have to add that in.

This group of houses was quite a challenge from a modeling

perspective. I was inclined at first to make one giant mesh

but figured out after a little work that modularity would be a

better approach. You can certainly see how the different additions

over the years stick out from this group of buildings.

Behind Joe C's house is where I'm told tent city usually is.

Our first attempt at game logic was pretty straight forward

and successful. A user will have the option to do a little bit of

irrigation management. One piece of this experience will involve

what's below: a hot area that will trigger the question - "would you

like to open the flood gates". One trick to this was that we had to

deactivate all the user's keyboard and mouse controls while pushing

up the options YES/NO.

When the user chooses YES a secondary camera looks directly at

the flood gate while the animation plays and the gate opens. On

the other side water rises!

After building it I really regret that we didn't build the church sooner.

There is a lot of personality to all the buildings in El Cerrito and

this one is no exception. We have enough photos of the inside that

we could (and just might) finish it out.

The learning curve has certainly been less of a factor on

this round. Maya and Unity3d as well as the production

concepts were a tall order for the first round.

Our next steps will involve correcting our performance issues,

scaling issues, more buildings, finish our prototype for

interacting with NPCs and then design an educational gaming

experience that a user can play to learn about many of the

dynamics about El Cerrito in a complementary way to our

Second Life build (parent project).