totally off course, but what the hey; perfect example of why i’ll probably never finish the game. maybe i needed a break from the regiment, a slight deviation from the plan. maybe i needed to remember what the joy of creating felt like. it has been straight up code and editor work since i got back to it this year, so working on aesthetics was a nice change for the day. at first i wasn’t making any progress and even started to have a brief panic around midday, but i told myself that learning is okay and after watching a video or two began experimenting. i think the video that actually helped me was by Respect Studios. there is surprisingly little information that i could find about reflections and the new scriptable render pipeline. in the end, i added lots of properties for adjusting the intensity of the various texture channels and the fresnel effect. to be honest, it still leaves something to be desired, but overall the effect is much closer to the visual quality i had before upgrading from the built-in rendering. it feels like less of a sacrifice is being made. honestly, with displacement and proceedural generstion, the shader graph may end up saving me quite a bit of time. i should look into generating the terrain for the levels directly in Unity as opposed to Houdini. this newfound progress sort of makes me want to redo my health pickup again and repurpose my current iteration in another color. maybe i should make a rule at least one day a week should be zpent creating assets of some kind. i seem to recall a similar rule i made about building an online presence. maybe that should only be once a month, if only to keep my duplicate backlogged entry count down. oh well, progress is progress, i guess.