Weekend Update 07/14/24 (Patreon)

This week I continued work on overhauling the night loading system to be more robust and modular.

Unfortunately this update is still not done and is proving to be a much more intense problem than I anticipated. The main issue is that the old script that existed in the game world was made that way because it was easy to "grab" other things that existed in the level so that getting a light to turn off was as simple as clicking and dragging it into the script.

The new system needed a new approach, initially this was going to be done by giving each light/camera/sexbot a unique ID to capture and disable/enable them. This approach is becoming very unwieldy to use behind the scenes as I'm trying to debug the scene because Unity doesn't really give a good way of mapping the ID's of these elements to their name, so in the inspector I have something like "Turn off Light #1" and I need to remember which light that is. The alternative I thought would be to have the light's names be the ID so "Turn off Light: ShowRoomLight", but the issue with that is that I can't ever rename the light.

The approach I'm working on now is a hybrid approach of having in level assets that are essentially a list of steps and are separate from the lights and cameras. This would be similar to having the instruction be "Run Protocol: TurnOffShowRoomLight" and having an object in game that can be found with that name as well as a hard coded instance reference inside that object to run the script. Either way I'll have something out Monday or Tuesday with the updated system.