Unity

That’s gonna be a short post, because all you need to know is over on Robert’s¹ blog:

Say you’re making a Unity game that takes place in a large landscape dotted with windmills, and some of these windmills have tunnels that lead underground. But in Unity, the terrain collider is generated from heightmap data: it’s essentially one giant bumpy plane. You can’t punch holes in it.

Since I happen to be ranked somewhat high when it comes to mentioning Unity 3D and XML, and some of the posts¹ happen to be outdated by now since I learned stuff². But most of all, I intend to learn even more.

That’s why I choose to release those two projects into the wild and publish them on github.

Animation curves in the new Unity 3 can not only be used for animation, but can be directly accessed by scripts.

By defining

AnimationCurve curve;

Exporting an animated armature with a mesh for Unity using Blender 2.5 can be a bit of a hassle. With the armature parented to the mesh, I could either export the mesh or the armature with the animations, but never both.

Having the armature separate from the mesh seemed to have worked – I have now everything set up in Unity, both mesh and armature with animation.

Though the animation looks slighty wobbly …

When preparing my game for Fantoche, I ran into problems several times, since upon building my game, the screen either remained black or parts of my game did not work, with the log showing a NullReferenceException.

In both times, it was related to me tagging objects in the Unity 3D editor. This is caused by the somewhat peculiar implementation of tagging in Unity which only allows one tag to be added to an object.

Just in case you are as stupid as I am and place the imported models in your Unity 3D scene and later realise that prefabs would have been rather fab: This is the solution: Drag your new prefab onto the old model in the hierarchy pane while having pressed alt – instant replacement. And once again, the day is saved.

Today when working on my Unity3D game for Fantoche, I noticed it again: a short little squeak at the start of a triggered sound clip.

This has happened before in my prototype, but I chalked it off to my inferior post production skills when doing the first sound clips. The new sound clips, however, were pristine, I was sure of it.

So the problem had to be somewhere else. Changing a suspect in my trigger script did not change a thing.

Since I want to make some basic statistics for my game at Fantoche, I needed some basic logging function of the player’s position.

Just a hint on how pictures generated by Processing could be integrated into Unity (at least in an exhibition – the technique requires an instance of Processing running, which won’t be available on an ordinary setup).

Since I want to dive into C# and code most of my game in that language, I was searching for a tool to make my life a bit easier – I just love stuff that writes for me …

Since C# is, once again, a rather Microsoft-centric thingy, there aren’t that many editors out there – except for MonoDevelop, which works like a charm on many systems.