I wonder how many posts get to their third post. There must be a number of posts that's a kind of event horizon that's indicative of a long term commitment at some point right? It's kind of insane thinking that three weeks used to be a third of a quarter. Like that means I learned 1/3 of my biomechanics course at this point.
Anyway, back to this.
I worked mainly on making the skills activate this week. Initially I thought that it'd be super easy, barely an inconvenience as I just 'activated' a skill by instantiating a prefab that was a ball of light. I thought 'yeah great, done'.
But then I sat there thinking 'wait I want the light to ramp up and down when I turn it on and off so that it doesn't just pop into existence'. So I went back and wrote some coroutine scripts to make that work. So then when I 'activated' my skill it would fade slowly in then it would fade slowly out. Neat!
So I thought I was done with that. But then I tried activating the light skill when it was still active and I had TWO instantiated prefabs. This wasn't ideal. I had to put in a check in my Cast method in my LightSkill class to see if there was already a light active. If there was I needed to put in a way to 'rebrighten' the light if it was in the middle of fading out.
So that was like... about five times harder than I thought it would be at least. Since I'm doing all of this after wrok, just thinking how the code would work for this and then writing it took two and a half of my evenings... I ended up with this code.
Looking at this makes me kinda sad, since it legitimately took me about 5 solid hours to just reason my way here from 'wait, I can't just instantiate it'. But this is what the result of this looked like.
I also coloured the balls from last time.Since this was done it wasn't too hard to throw in a dark skill.
Which looks nice. I also made it so that the light and dark skills will destroy each other on instantiation if one is 'in the way'.I also made all the skills through and ISkill interface with a Cast() skill.
I actually just wrote a basic post on how to make these skills with reflection here if anyone was actually curious as to how to code with at least a small amount of architecture in mind.
I'll start on creating a lamp that I can turn on and off with these this week I think.