30 JUL 2022:
Before leaving for my business trip I was able to finish 2 more bombers. You can see the new damage animations on my latest Instagram post.
It would have been easy to duplicate the damage states for all 4 bombers using Blender's mirror on x/y axis option, but instead I made it so that each bomber has unique damage states.
As promised last week, here are my two cents on all the recent events surrounding the Unity game engine:
Unity is torn between 2 choices -- do they please the shareholders or do they please the users? At the end of the day, companies exist to make money, and this is especially true of Unity which exists on the stock market as Unity Software Inc. It's not mentioned as much as the Ironsource merger, but I was disappointed to hear that Unity scrapped further development of the Gigaya game demo. In a bit of irony, before I even knew what Gigaya was, I had thought to myself, "Wouldn't it be cool if a game engine had a comprehensive game project that showed off all the possibilities?" Needless to say, it's sad to hear of such a project get scrapped.
There appear to be some nods to pleasing the users, like their acquisition of Weta Digital, but it also feels like they're trying too hard to compete with Unreal Engine's Metahuman.
A common refrain I hear on Youtube videos is that Unity needs to fix what they have instead of adding features to it -- much like how Musk teases ideas of new projects when he hasn't even shipped a Cybertruck yet.
As I'm sure you're all aware by this point, Scrapship is being programmed in QB64 -- no game engine here! But I am considering switching to a game engine for future projects. All this Unity news is certainly food for thought. But ultimately I have to agree with some of the more level-headed Youtubers when it comes to game engines -- game engines are just tools, and the best one is the one you are willing and able to work with.
And speaking of game engines . . .
Since I won't have any Scrapship development updates next week, stay tuned for my adventures in making a basic game engine in QB64!
QUOTE OF THE WEEK:
"Even if you are on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there." -- Will Rogers
Thanks for reading and have a great rest of your week!