I was throwing some caves together yesterday, and some lighting reminded me that the actual scale of the world of seacrit is terribly off.  a 1x1x1 meter cube is about 1/2 the size of the smallest fish. This means all manner of systems are broken because the game was built at a massive scale. Lighting, shadow, in scene navigation, physics, ambient occlusion are all things built for a specific scale within the Unity Engine.

12 hours in and in that moment I decided to bite the bullet, I was going to break EVERY SINGLE DAMNED SYSTEM, EVERY PIECE OF ART, EVERY PARTICLE. Systems that play sounds, that detect vision range, movement speed, spawn ranges, if the player is close enough to buy something, if they're trying to talk to an NPC, how fast a dash pushes you, how fast you swim, how fast you accelerate, how quickly the fog tapers off, the much the flora sways. EVERY SINGLE THING in my game is now broken because I have decided to finally bite the bullet.

I'm not even sure this is going to be worth it, but now was the time to do it. It's a very stressful time, lots of other things are broken, but this project is going to be such a nicer environment to generate new things in if this goes well. I suspect I will have 2 or 3 more days of intense, stressful and painful revision as I tune a never ending slew of particles and movement values and forces and materials and scene objects to play well in the new scale.

I suspect for months I will be finding tiny things that are broken because of this.

But I hope by the end of the day I can post a new screenshot of the game with some point lights that actually friggin' work.  And if I ever decide to migrate to the high deffinition pipeline, I suspect these changes will be very important.

It's very frustrating and i'm not looking forward to tonight, but I am grateful to still be in decent health and pushing forward every day.

Hoping to at least get movement in a good place, may take today as an opportunity to revize the system a bit as everything is broken anyhow. Now's the time to do it.

IT'S RIP THE BAND AIDE OFF DAY!

Longest dev session I think I've ever had yesterday. Pushin' hard to try to get out of this damned cave.

Dev has been incredibly draining as of late, but i'm fast approaching a point where the game will be a joy to work on. I smell blood in the water, I think this project is really becoming something, the combat, the back end, everything is feeling like an actual game. Lots to tune, lots of content to generate, but that will come in time.

I've decided I'm going to double down, I'm going to revamp the movement code tonight, it's a mess, it's scattered, it's hard to work on. I hate when I have a cool idea and think. "Nope, can't do that, the code is crap and if I touch it something will break."

Bad code compounds on itself. Band aids covering band aides. I'm going to approaching this in a new way. I'm going to come up with the proper and perfect order of functions and logic out of the gate. I need to calculate acceleration push values, check again max speed for movement, and add both bonus speed and weave movement on top of these. It's actually surprisingly simple when I type it out in one sentence, but it's such a hodge podge after years of trying various things and goign through multiple coders that the script is overly complex and poorly named and strucutred. 

Going to gut the crappy bits, name things properly, structure things properly, make nice clean easily accessed functions that make sense and play nice with one another. Going to put all the most relevant variables in one place with the perfect names so that tuning and making new fish is easy and empowering . Will be moving various AI values off the AI script and onto movement. This all sounds so obvous in hindsight but it's easy to get locked into crappy setups.

Gonna be a long tedious night. But it will be worth it. Coffee's brewed, going to get a little exercise and get to work soon.

Edit: 12 hour day, know work is going well when that feels like a weak push. Spread thin but the movement revamp is starting to come together. Same with rescaling, SOON the project will be back on track!