Figured it out!

Well... the last little bit of flight controls I wanted to figure out has been done.  I added a bit of a roll when using the left stick... just makes the rotation look nicer. I'm sure these will need tweaked quite a bit... but I'm not going to touch them again for a long long time.

A Few Cool Screenshots

I thought these were really cool. The game is a top down 2d style shooter that takes place inside a human body. But the idea is similar to our first level. I think these really show how you can have a really cool look and feel to being inside an organism.

 

 

I've been working on the controls a bit more. I think they are more responsive than they were.  I was also able to up the frame rate a ton, while still keeping the lights in the scene. And I made the controls more responsive even when the frame rate is around 30 fps.

Collisions are better, although I think I could tweak it more. And the camera now has a collision applied to it so it won't be able to clip out of the tubes. But there are some drawbacks to it I'll need to fix.

Unity also has a built in lightmap creator, so baking lightmaps is super easy, and can be done while still editing. I've also learned how to occlude stuff... so I think many of the basic things we will need for long tracks are almost in place.

Here is a really basic video, in it you will be able to see how the lightmapping has worked. This runs around 500 fps on my desktop.






By Tuesday I should have some basic guns on the ship to test out, and maybe something on the test track to blow up.

Unity Stuff

I thought I would toss up some Unity tutorials for anybody who wants to give it a go. The Unity 3d site has a number of tutorials, and some good documentation, but for getting started videos are always the best!
http://unity3d.com/support/documentation/video/

This site has a number of videos that will take you through the basics, it is based on Unity 2.6 though, and when he uses the "Island" demo you won't be able to follow along unless you download those assets from the Unity web page. But he covers pretty much everything to get comfortable with the interface, and to see how things basically function.
http://www.vtc.com/products/Introduction-to-Game-Development-Using-Unity-3D-Tutorials.htm

This one I found recently and covers a bit more about scripting and making things interactive. Just be aware that the first lessons start at the bottom of the page and get more complicated as you move up.
http://www.vtc.com/products/Introduction-to-Game-Development-Using-Unity-3D-Tutorials.htm

Me, Nate, and Nate discussed some things about scale and units to work in so I'll put those up here too.

Working units in Maya should be meters. The Maya default is centimeters, so you will need to make sure when before you model something you set the units in the settings to meters.

A human in the game world will be about 2 meters tall, and ships will need to fit into an 8x8x8 meter box. So keep in mind if a human is 2 meters tall then the cockpit needs to be proportionate to that size on the ship you model. If you have a ship design that doesn't fit within that box size, then we can all discuss it. The reason for choosing that size is because we are trying to figure out how tight we can make the tunnels, and how sharp the corners can be and such. Having a standard box size just helps us to know that everybody's ships will work within the level we are designing.

Ship

Here are the side views and front view.