toryjleo / microscope-simulation

Microscope Simulation

The project is themed around the idea of looking through a microscope at white blood cells attacking viruses.

This project was made in Unity 2017.3.1f1

To Run

• Download this project as a zip onto a windows system.
• Go into the PreCompiledBuild folder and double click on the Unity executable named "Microscope Simulation".

Playing the Simulation

• Use "WASD" to move the player controllable white cell .
• Press escape button to quit.
• The simulation loops, respawning the viruses.

Purpose of Project

In the Winter/Spring of 2018, I took an interest in teaching myself graphics programming in C++ using the GLEW and GLFW libraries for OpenGL. In the process of learning graphics programming, I started to create and use simple shaders and by the end of the first series of OpenGl tutorials, I still felt a bit sketchy using shaders. So I started a small project that would require a more in-depth understanding of shaders (specifically fragment shaders).

Why Use Unity?

• The Unity Engine allows changes to HLSL shaders to take affect during runtime, which speeds up the iterating and debugging process.
• Although I had only worked with shaders in GLSL previously, there were enough similarities between GLSL and HLSL to make the process of learning HLSL not too hard.

Assets

Virus image pulled from: https://www.stuffyoushouldknow.com/podcasts/virus-talk-with-josh-and-chuck.htm

Music composed by Garrett Young