Another break...Finally return to the flock

There's been a repeating trend in development over the last few months...things will start going well, then something will come up which stops production, or seriously slows it down, for a couple of weeks. Since my last blog update, this has basically been the case.

I intended to get back into production about a week ago, but decided to take some extra time away from the project in order to come back to it a little bit more refreshed, and hopefully with a clearer view of what I wanted to do.

Today I focused on finally getting some of the flocking mechanics into the game. The Unity community Wiki, Unify, has a very useful script called 'flocking'...which I've been basing my flocking mechanic on...
Not much time has been spent on getting this to work, I just wanted to get it into the game, with the correct models being used etc.

Currently the birds that are created for the flocks will follow the player, although it's a little bit too slow, I want it to almost be instant, however there is quite a significant delay in the response of the following...however it seems that the bigger the flock, the quicker they will follow...

In short, production has continued with some very important deadlines to hit. November 15th is the student IGF submission date, and December 12th(ish) is when a prototype needs to be complete in order to present a few days later. To finish, a few screenshots to highlight today's progress

Environment Progress

Over the last few days I've been busy packing up in preparation for moving house later this week, so I've had little time to dedicate to making progress with Starlings.... However...

Over the last few days I've made some good progress with some of the scripting. The flocking script is being improved, the birds are starting to look as though they belong to a flock, it's got to a point now where I'm trying to get seperate flocks to merge together, which is the whole backbone of Starlings' gameplay mechanics...

In some spare time that I've had over the last two nights, I started working on another part of the environment. It's not something which I had planned to do, but I was inspired by a picture I saw on the BBC website of the Ribblehead Viaduct... so I decided to see how it would look in the Starlings environment... turns out it looks alright.

The inclusion of the Viaduct opens up a whole new area to the environment, and the screenshot above should help give a good understanind of the scale, as it represents about 20% of the current environment...which in itself represents about 10% of what I ultimately want to create.

Creating a scene...

Some really good progress today in a relatively short space of time.

A few quick tweaks were made to the speed of flight, slowing it down slightly, at the moment it works, but when all the controls are in place, it'll need to be looked at again.

The big update todays comes in the form of adding additional cameras to the scene, and switching between the two. 

To create a cinematic experience, Starlings will have numerous cameras situated in the environment in carefully selected positions that will highlight the best features of the environment and allow the player to take in the full scale of their flock, highlighting their progress.

There will be two types of cinematic cameras placed within the environment. The first will be placed in the terrain, near to landmarks. These cameras will be the most common and transitions between the main camera and cinematic camera will be decide by the player. 

The second type of camera differs in two ways. The first is that they will offer a view of the action from either detailed indoor environments, or those that are not easily accessible to the player. The main difference is that transition between these cameras will be forced upon the player.

When a player enters an area where a unique camera is placed, once the camera is switched, control of the flock will be automated and follow a set path in order to create the most cinematic experience possible. At the moment I have drafted out details for 3 of these unique cameras positions.. more on that to come, and I'm hoping to get at least 2 into the demo.

By the end of the week I should have most of the camera transition code and flocking in place...