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A.5 Maintainer Manual
This document presents all of the aspects for maintaining, updating, and expanding Hydrospace.
The game takes place inside of a single Unity scene. Transitioning between scenes does not play
nicely with the zSpace system. This is currently being worked on at the time of this writing and
may no longer be an issue. Inside the main scene, there are several prefabs that must exist in the
scene in order for the game to function properly. They are ‘DisplayPlane’, ‘Earth’, ‘Earth Flight
Center’, ‘effectsFactory’, ‘LevelLoader’, ‘menuHandler’, ‘MothershipEarthCenter’,
‘MothershipPlayerCenter’, ‘myStylus’, ‘Output’, ‘Player Flight Center’, ‘stylusGrabThings’, a
main camera (though it is not a prefab), and finally ‘ZSCore’.
In order for zSpace’s stereo 3D to function inside Unity, the ‘ZSCore’ prefab must be in the
scene. ‘ZSCore’ also provides a means to retrieve data from the stylus as well which is used from
within other scripts. The ‘ZSCore’ also configures the various stereo 3D and world settings. One
value we changed was the ‘worldScale’ which we increased from 1 to 10. With a world scale of
1, one Unity unit translated into one meter. Initially, the default scale was used, but this led to
problems with the physics engine. In order to provide the player with close interactions with
objects, everything was shrunk down and as a result, objects sometimes did not collide with each
other and behaved strangely. To remedy this, the world scale was increased to 10 where 1 Unity
unit was 10 centimeters. This let all the objects have their scale increased by 10 which resulted in
much better physics performance. So as a basic rule of thumb, keep in mind the 1:10 centimeter
scale for the scene.
The ‘myStylus’ prefab was created by us in order to simplify retrieving stylus data. It also
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