Time for me to get some instruction in the programming of WordPress. Currently I can’t see what I am typing when I am creating a new post and I have to either create in Word check spelling etc. and copy to the new post box or create in the ‘Quick Draft’ window as I am now. Time to swoop on over to Lynda.com and find a course. Wish me luck!
Having problems
Not sure what the problem is but when I try to add a post all text I type is blank unless highlighted and I have no formatting controls. Wonder what I did wrong….
Making some changes – Hang tight
I am in the process of making some changes to the site. Change is good.
Udemy – Education site
I’m going to start blogging about the Udemy education web site and in doing so I will be creating a new addition to this site devoted exclusively to education. Now to figure out how, one or two days should do it.
Internet Education Sites
I received an offer for 30 days free for Lynda.com. If you have not heard of it this site is filled with informational videos, tutorials etc. on a very large number of topics. I elected to try it out and added training videos for Unity3D, Adobe After Effects, Blender, Visual Studio and C# programming along with others I can’t think of right now. The thirty days has come and gone and I’ll tell you, the quality of the tutorials and exercise files is quite good and I signed up for a monthly membership. I want to at least get through the play lists I have set up and then make up my mind on how much longer I will continue the monthly membership. I have quite a few to go but I have completed the following all of which were very good.
Up and Running with C#
C# Essential Training
Foundation of Programming Fundamentals
Visual Studio 2012 Essential Training
Visual Studio 2013 for Windows Store Developers
Windows 10 New Features
Rigging a Human Character in Blender
I also signed up for Udemy.com which is much the same as Lynda.com. The membership to this site is free and you pay for the content you want as you go and have unlimited access to the material. Now the content on their website is quite expensive with most of the ones I am interested in running around 99.00 USD each. I have seen them as low as 29.00USD and has high as 199.00USD but what attracted me to the site was a statement I read that said most of the courses are less expensive if you purchase them through the app rather than the website. This I found was exactly correct as the courses I wanted ran about 99.00USD and the app had them for sale for 9.99USD so I signed up.
Another site I frequent is CGCookie.com. This site has monthly, quarterly and annual membership plans for their content as well as a free membership allowing access to many free learning opportunities released throughout the year. I have been a paying member for the last few years and even though the rates go up once in a while the price is well worth the content, both video and course file downloads.
I highly recommend all of these quality learning sites.
I never regret signing up and paying for any opportunity to learn something new or expand on any knowledge I currently have.
Looking for those darn bugs
Here is a clip of a small problem I had last week. It seems that when I killed my opponent my health immediately went to zero and I died as well. Here you can see I manually change the health of the opponent, he/she dies and poof so do I. Funny looking but not so funny when I could not find the bug.
Bug hunting is now over. I spent most of the day at work looking for this illusive critter and only after I went home, moved scripts around and segregated most of the code I finally found the problem. As it turned out, if I had taken the time to investigate at work like I had time at home I would not have had to do all the changes I did (but the code is nicer for it). All that had to be done was add the following to the condition of an if statement “&& !enemyController.dead”.
Below is the problem I experienced.
Visual Studio
I have spend most all of my free time getting back into programming in a big way and enjoying it more than I ever did in high school. It does amaze me how concepts I learned more than 30 years ago seem to come back in bunches now. This weekend I had created some methods in some very different ways than my instructors were doing, knowing inside that my way would work very well but had hit a road block with my code. I walked away for an hour or so and my brain went into overdrive in the background while I was thinking of others things. Thinking I had not been in Blender for a while and needed to get back with some modeling. As soon as I sat down to continue where I had left off I had the solution at my finger tips and it worked wonderfully. Now it is time to start documenting all of these coding snippets on YouTube or some other type of note taking application. Maybe I’ll start using OneNote on my Surface which should sync with all of my devices.
Never Happy
I am recreating the RPG, Diablo style game I have been working on. I decided last week and this weekend that the way I have been creating my scripts or rather the way I have been organizing my scripts was not the best was and that I could do a much better job of organization than I have been. For the most part it has everything to do with not placing as many methods within a single script which in the end, so far seems to be limiting the use of the GetComponent and GameObject.Find. The way I had things organized the use of these methods I felt was over the top. As it stands now, for the most part they are called once in the awake method to initialize the references and rarely again. I’m hoping this will help keep my code from hindering the frame rates. We will see.
On the Unity update front, it seems all is well now and I am not being asked to log in every dang time I start the program, good things on that front. 🙂
Unity Update (Part 2)
I found on the community web site others were having problems, not quite the same but similar and tried their solutions with no success. Deciding to go back to version 5.1.0 I started downloading, paused with the intention of resuming at work. After getting to work all started up just fine. I changed my status to ‘working offline’ and downloaded 5.1.0 to my USB drive just in case I can’t work from home again. I shut down Unity, turned off the network connection and I was again able to open Unity with no problem. I will then try the network side again and see how that goes, Something tells me what has been happening has been a fluke and I will not be able to reproduce. I surly hope this is the case.
Looks like everything is working good now. 🙂
Good new info I learned today. If you make a variable public in C# you can have access to it from other scripts but is also visible on the inspector. I do not like this as the inspector gets to be too cluttered with information I don’t necessarily need to see all the time. I only want to have variables visible in the inspector if I need them to be. My revelation came when I realized you can have a pubic variable (accessible from other scripts) and invisible to the inspector by making them ‘public static’ variables. Best of both worlds, fantastic!
Unity update
Unity came out with a new update and I installed as all my projects currently are just test projects and would not be hurt by an upgrade that may be broken. This update did not seem to be broken when I installed but after shutting down at work and reopening the program at home I was welcomed to a new screen that was checking my licensing and would not continue. What is this since I use the personal edition. I had to uninstall and am now in the process of reinstalling. We will see it that fixes the problem.