Personal Goals

All the things i want to learn more about this semester.

What I want!

Well because it is still too early to know what we are going to be working on once the project starts it is very hard to decide what it is I want to learn more about. At the moment I hope I get to learn more on the following subjects:

Locomotion and Navigation: The different ways of Locomotion in a VR app and looking for original ways to navigate.

Shaders and Materials: How to make basic shaders and materials and create my own shader.

Asset optimization: The best way to optimize models and the procedure used in doing so.

Behavior trees (or better said decision making): An AI that uses a behavior tree instead of a state machine with a few behaviors like idle, wandering, chasing.

Game optimization in general: How can I increase performance in games (combining meshes, lods. etc.).

Personal goals first draft

So my learning goals for this semester will be:

1. As a Unity developer I want to create my own shaders, so that I can make a shader for the FRT environment and make it look more appealing.

2. As a Unity developer I want to be able to create behavior trees, so that I get a better understanding of AI and decision making.

3. During the project FRT I will learn how I can optimize game assets to increase performance during our VR experience.

After having a meeting with Lisette and Remco on my learning goals, they gave me a bit more insight and direction. One of the things that came from this meeting was that it might be a better idea to look into Machine Learning or neural networks instead of behavior trees. A reason for this was that they are being used less and less in games and that maybe i should look into the differences between each. Another to look into was learning how to create shaders and decide if I want to be able to write my own or use some kind of software like shader graph and what the benefits would be from either one.

In any case I want to start learning about shaders during the second sprint and maybe start looking into what shaders are exactly and how they are used before I start writing (either custom or shader graph) my own.

Since we have been sculpting models for our project we need to find a way to decrease the polycount of the assets. For sprint 3 i want to start looking into optimizing 3D models so keep out poly's low and our framerate high.

Because we have been doing so much on optimization, i think it might be good to look into optimizing our game. therefore I would like to change one of my learning goals

from :

"2: As a Unity developer I want to be able to create behavior trees, so that I get a better understanding of AI and decision making. "

to

"2: As a Unity developer I want to be able to increase optimization of our vr experience itself."

Looking back

Looking back now i was able to complete 2 of my learning goals.

First of all i wanted to learn more about how shaders work, how to use them and more importantly how i could create and use my own shader. I learned what a shaders exists of and the multiple ways to create shaders in Unity. I was also able to create a shader that we used to light up the environment when players use voice input.

With the second goal, I wanted to learn more about how we can optimize our game assets for our vr experience. I started off by looking into the different ways of optimizing existing models, retopoloy and existing tools that are currently used.

As for the final goal. I was able to do a little bit of research on optimizing our project. only this was only looking into the things that could be optimized and not really how I can optimize those aspects. Therefore I did not achieve that goal.