Morning report

Had a good old wrestle yesterday. To have the gameplay space loop around, I keep track of the objects and if they get too far from the player, jump them to the other side (wrap-around). There's a bug with this though when there's already something jumped, notably ships. If a ship is jumped to the other side and then moves to the space a piece of scenery is jumped to, the scenery lands on the ship.

This becomes seriously problematic with wormhole placement. I can place a wormhole - a target portal for ships or objects to be placed to leave the level - safely by checking that there's a space for it where I place it using the same methods used for spawning ships, but there was no safety measure when it got covered up by a wrap-around scenery object, putting the wormhole in an unreachable place. Bad!

So much of yesterday was spent creating a solution, which threw up some curious behaviour in my test scene where I couldn't get ray casting to work properly. Even though I'd used it everywhere prior to this, it wasn't working and failed to detect other objects. In the end, after lots of investigating, I realised it was because I was using a helper value to reference the collisions layer that I hadn't initialised because I was just running the test scene and not the main game.

Just goes to show even after years and years of experience, development can keep throwing curve balls and really make you think. Great software developers would probably make great criminal detectives!