Progress: Day Twenty-Three - Event handling, A modular component-interaction system, Procedural bone transformations on an animated mesh, and all at 120 BPM.

Nearing that oh-so-festive time of the year, and the accompanying professional panic that ensues when people feel the fine-grained sediment of their life slowly ticking away -
That's my romantic way of saying that I have been busy with rent-paying projects these past weeks >.<


But let's not dwell - what have we been doing?


Let's start with a picture, something relatively (relatively) pretty to maintain your interest:

That happy camper is a procedurally-modified version of the low-poly biped that featured a few weeks ago. We'll say he's some sort of.... alien ape of husky head.

As you can see, regardless of the manipulation of his body parts, he observes the original bone animations applied to the biped.

The process is as follows:

1. Starting with a standard animated biped (using Bones, exported as FBX)
2. For each body part we wish to modify:
1. Apply rotation (x,y,z) to the body part
2. Apply scale (x,y,z) to the body part
3. Apply offset (x,y,z) to the body part
3. And presto! play that bad-boy and you can (more or less) make any number of good-looking entities from a standard animated biped.

There were a few technical issues with this that you may need to understand:

• Applying animated Bone transforms in Unity 
• Transforms will appear to function until you play an animation on your model - this will reset your transforms (as that is what an animation is)
• In order to consistently apply your transforms during animation, you must reapply the transformations during your LateUpdate() call.
• Enjoy!
• As to how this will perform on a mobile device (iPhone) I have absolutely no idea - stay posted as I purchase Unity Pro and run the profiler over this bad-boy!

You know what?

I might leave that post right here, so you get a succinct little package, and I'll repost with the details of my (now refined) message and event handling system, explain my cryptic 120BPM comment, and get into the real meat of it - gameplay!