Lately, due to work and personal interest I have been experimenting with Unity. It is a very nice and simple 3D engine with a lot to offer in terms of features and capabilities. I am hoping that in the following months I will be able to use it in order to perform a re-write of Space Generals. While Space Generals (version 0) met its requirements as one of my Master’s case-studies, it is in a dire need of a bottom-up overhaul. This will probably mean having to make do without a Haskell back-end and a Google Web Toolkit-based front-end. If Unity allows me to call external executables I might re-use the Haskell back-end as is and simply use Unity instead of GWT for the front-end. More on this as I make more progress…
In the meantime I am back to studying vectors and matrices with the hope that this allows me to refresh my memory and to better understand the various functions provided by the Unity API. In the end, while the API does a fantastic job to simplify and abstract, I feel that a basic knowledge of the underlying mathematics is a good plus. (Now I wish that my brain had conveniently kept its knowledge of this subject from pure maths classes, but apparently mathematics topics are like languages for me, they become rusty if not used from time to time.) The next step after this would be to go through various tutorials in order gain some experience and insight on how to best design and implement Space Generals using Unity. Finally, it will be my turn to get my hands dirty and give it a good shot.
Once more I am hoping that this blog will be a way for me to share what I have learned and to keep a journal of the game’s process.