I’ve been working on the next type of grid: polar grids. The polar grid is based on polar coordinates, meaning instead of identifying a point’s position using X and Y coordinates we use a radius and an angle. The radius tells us how far from the origin the point is and the angle tells us the direction. This screenshot shows the new polar grid in Unity
Hello again
Here is a quick update: I have reached feature freeze for polar grids, meaning I’m done with all the features. Now I need some last polish and I must prepare new images for the Asset Store, then it’s all good to go. So, what took me so long? Well, designing and writing code is one thing, then you have to put it to use This often reveals weak points, some things might seems counter-intuitive, or some things are more complicated to use than others.
Hello everyone, I decided to do a status update so you know what’s going on and coming next.
As I mentioned last time the upcoming release will be a maintenance release with some much-needed cleanup. While I’m still waiting for approval I have been working on a new feature for rectangular grids that I had wanted to do for quite a while now, but couldn’t until the cleanup: I’m talking about shearing.
I have been working on the next type of grid: spheric grids. Think latitude and longitude like on Earth. Here is a GIF of a rendered grid rotating around its axis. Don’t worry about the framerate, that’s how the image was recorded to save space, the actual rotation is smooth as silk.
Progress has been better than expected and spheric grids are practically done. This is a good opportunity to take a look at the coordinate systems in spheric grids.
I have now finished the first major task towards version 2.0: extracting the renderers into their own class. Until now the task of rendering the grid was part of the grid class, this made the classes much larger and it was impossible to add one’s own rendering shapes without modifying the grids themselves.
Releasing a new major version is a good opportunity to say goodbye to older versions of your environment. Version 2.0 will require at least Unity version 5.0, which will free me from the restrictions of previous versions.
Rendering a grid is a three-step process: first we count how many lines we need to render and allocate the space needed, then we compute their end points and finally we send them to Unity to do its thing. In the earliest versions of Grid Framework these three steps had been done every frame. Since arrays in C# are heap objects this would send the garbage collector in overdrive for very large grids.