TaleSpire Dev Log 489

Heya folks,

For the past week, I've been working on tooling for our particle system. I wasn't blogging about it as (as you'll likely see) it doesn't make for exciting reading. However, this means things are radio silent, and that's no fun either. So prepare yourselves for a run of only marginally interesting dev-logs :P

I was working down at Ree's with the idea that he'd start using the particle system Alex and I have been making. It would be rough, but we'd get to shape the foundation we have into a tool that our artists actually need. All I needed to do was sort out the undo/redo system. 

I've written undo/redo before, and I wanted to take a very simple approach. All I needed was event/s to tell me that undo/redo was called.

Alas, that is not available. Instead, you have to use Unity's undo/redo system, which is built around their "scriptable-objects". I wrote this system's code to be very separate and simple, and suddenly it felt like I was fighting against what Unity wanted. I took a day to explore a deeper rewrite, in case it led to something better. However, I feel I was heading towards similar problems in a different form, so I abandoned that and went back to the previous branch.

As I had to refactor more than I had intended, I decided to say "screw it" to the original plan for the week and start work on the coder experience instead, which needed deep refactoring too.

The particle system has two primary kinds of user. Folks who intend to only use the nodes we provide to build things, and then more technical artists who will want to define their own nodes and HLSL code generation. The former had been our focus, and we have been steadily improving that tooling. The latter is tricky and fun as the experience you are tuning for is the experience of writing the code.

So I set to work. With Ree on hand, I was able to get a feel for terminology and approach that would fit, and did my best to make things flexible and hard to mess up. I'll probably natter about this more another day as it's getting late here.

The long and the short of it is that after four days of work pushing all these fixes and concerns through the tooling and compiler, I was able to compile the project again. And of course, lots of things are broken.

Totally expected. I don't expect to write that much code without mistakes, and so now I'm chasing those down.

Progress here is quick and will be my focus this week.

I hope to reach the goal from last week by mid-next week. That goal being that Ree can start experimenting, and we can push this forward based on real user feedback.

After that, my goal is deep in TaleSpire's architecture, so don't expect screenshots for a while!

Ok folks, it's nice to be nattering again.

See you all again soon.