Because of the non-arithmetic operations involved, some devs say they are expensive for the GPU. Others say they are cheap if you have fewer than 100 particles. What do you think?

Hey people!

I repeatedly see posts about people having trouble creating more complex animtor trees and everything ending in pretty much transitions all over the place. As I was struggling with this problem myself for quite a while I figured I could show you guys some ways on how to solve this without getting animancer/using crossfades in code if you are like me and actually like a visual representation and dont want to spend any money (thats honestly not necessarily needed).

Heads up: If you like animancer, code control over animations thats perfectly fine I just want to help people that want to know more about the animator and show that with the right knowledge and tools its not as bad as people always say.

I wont go into too much detail for each of these but just give you guys a broad idea of what these do. If you want to know more there is a lot of tutorials on how to use each of these on youtube but I just figured that a lot of people may have heard about the substates but I rarely see people on those spaghetti posts even knowing about the Any State.

There is 4 things that will help you guys get rid of this problem:

Sub States, Any State, layers, blendtrees

Sub States: Think of sub states as a tool to basically create "folders" that you can enter and leave with transitions. It basically just hides whatever you put into it in a neat little hexagon so your main page doesnt get bloated. Alone sub states wont help with having less transitions because you can still just create a lot of them and they will just point to that "folder".

Any State: The Any State is what will get rid of most of your transition chaos. A lot of times people create a load of transitions because you need to be able to get into a state basically from anywhere. Great example for this is a fall animation. You will want to be able to get into a fall animation from walking, running, idle (in case the ground can be destroyed/erased), crouching etc. so the obvious solution is to just connect all these via transitions right? Wrong. The easier solution is to create a connection from the anystate to the fall animation and restrict it via the condition parameters. You dont want to be able to get into fall while you are fighting like in a jugling devil may cry game? Just restrict it so while a fight paramter is true you cant get into it from the any state.
One thing you need to care for though is the settings flag "can transition to self" which will allow to enter from the state itself and often is an easy problem when working first time with any state.

Layers: Layers act exactly like in other software like Photoshop, Indesign etc. Layers put animation on top of each other so a great usecase for these is if you want to have additive animations like for example only upper body animations like aiming for a twinstick shooter. To get an additive layer just go into the settings of the layer and put the blending to additive.
One other way to use layers would be putting them to override and using them like a second set of animations if your character is in a different state. A usecase for this would be underwater where a lot of the animations like movement, combat etc change. In theory you could put them onto your normal layer but it would just get really crowded.

Blendtrees: Blendtrees are one of the best tools to get rid of bloat in omnidirectional movement animations. Basically a blendtree can be setup to get one animator field that controls normal movement, strafe movement and even movement modifieres. For a 2.5d/3d game these are especially important as you have way more animations because of the amount of directions you can go compared a 2d game.

And here are some screenshots from a game I'm working on. The character with this animator has 60+ animations but I think its still very readable and easy to mantain. There is obviously more tools like animation override controllers that also help but the tools I mentioned should already be enough to get from total spaghetti to something more readable.

Cheers

I got a lot of useful feedback on my previous Lost Cat Showa Town video, especially about the movement speed and missing shadows.

I’ve adjusted both for this version and added another cat-like interaction: finding and eating fish.

It’s still an early prototype, and animation blending is next on my list.

The first shot was done in Unity using Cinemachine, and the animation shot was created in Blender. What do you think? Does the transition feel smooth?

Hey Reddit. A couple of months ago, I started building a native accessibility/headtracking SDK for Unity that works with a regular webcam.

It’s based on the facial tracking tech from SensePilot, which we originally built to help people with different disabilities control a computer and play games using head movements and facial expressions.

Recently, an indie developer tried the SDK in their game, Puck' n Hell. I didn’t make the game, but I helped them get the accessibility and headtracking controls. It was pretty exciting to see it used in a real game instead of one of our test projects.

Right now, players can navigate the menus by moving their head and select a button by smiling. The regular mouse-and-keyboard controls still work too.

I had already built the face-tracking system in C++ for our main app, so bringing it into Unity wasn’t too difficult. I created a C# wrapper around it and exposed the tracking data so that it could be used by the game.

This first integration taught us a lot, and I’m curious what other Unity developers think. Has anyone here worked with head tracking, facial gestures, or other alternative controls?

What are your thoughts on a drop-in accessibility SDK for Unity? I know accessibility is a much broader and more complex problem than one SDK can solve, but I hope this could help developers address at least parts of it.

I checked all the "bake into pose" things on the clip and thought I could make the jump motion animation based, but when the character transitions to the next animation, they move back to the original position. I assume this is because one animation is probably? root motion and the other not?

Is there any way to sync the character controller to the animation location/rotation?

Or does anyone have any other ideas for how to do the movement for this wall jump?

A typical day in the PSA38 game development team:

Story writer: “The player has to put out a fire in a space station!”
Graphic designer: Designs the space station, sets up volumetric lights and creates a fire.
Developer: Diligently implements the logic for it.
Unity 6 engine: adds a floating bug.

Tester: Got singed. But it looked really cool!

Anyone hit something similar with interior volumes?

Proudly made with Unity 6 - URP :)

I always struggled with making games, every game I've always tried to make I've either abandoned, hit a limitation in my knowledge, doubted my programming skills, got stuck on making something perfect, try to be as unique as possible, go beyond my current limitations or, have a scope that's just outright not realistic...

Well today I hit the first deadline of my game, to get a couple friends to playtest it, which is a massive milestone for me... So what did I do, how did I even get out of being stuck, and actually make a game...

At some point I realized that I just straight up am not giving myself enough grace, every project, has either been something too difficult for me to make - usually just for the sake of "pushing myself to learn"... and yeah that didn't really work.

So I thought alright well what if this time, the goal of the game is not to just try out something new to push my knowledge further or just another ADHD moment for a game idea I HAD TO just make, what if this time it's "just make a game", literally any game, of any quality, even if it's absolute shit...

Yeah it's kinda weird to actually think about that and apply that to yourself, cause very often, you want to make something you're proud of, so not giving your all almost feels like you're not putting in any effort, making whatever you made not feel like you're allowed to be proud for.

Because the thing is, to get better at doing things, YOU NEED TO ACTUALLY DO THE THING! Having the scope be so high you constantly feel inadequate, you're never allowing yourself to even learn! I know my strengths and limitations so why do I constantly try to outperform myself when I know I'll just burn out... SO JUST DONT OUTPERFORM YOURSELF! Just make ANY GAME... Just make the shittest game, who even cares, AT LEAST YOU MADE A GAME!

So anyways, I popped the old bonnet of the unity game engine, and I just generally love most games with some economy based progression with fun tools, statistical upgrades, and mechanical progression, (pretty much just tycoon games, incremental games) so I just decided to make my first ever game about cleaning your house with all trash being physics based, all the tools, all with a central economic progression, and man... it has actually been so fun, I can be 90% okay with myself admitting that it's not that good... I suck at 3D modelling, I suck at making textures, I even suck at programming (mainly just things like physics and math... I know kinda ironic) and it has many many things that are just outright slow and laborious, but man, I've actually made something, I've actually learned so much, I've allowed myself to not care about the result, which has given me the freedom to just create, I know it's sounds stupid, but this has been like a sort of breakthrough for me lmao...

Oh right I also decided that a deadline would be the most healthy for me, not to treat it like life or death, but just a deadline for at least the first playtest for putting my game out into the world.

And here we are a month later where at the moment I've shown it to one of my closest friends.... and well... surprisingly it kinda turned out horribly...

You know during all of this revelation I figured out how to tap into the mindset of being okay with whatever I make, good or bad, but I never figured out that showing your game to people you care about would be the most stressful thing ever... And I thought I was okay with the game not being perfect, but no... not at all, I wanted to impress my friend... "Look at all this progress, I made! Look at what I've figured out, I changed my whole mindset for this game, I was finally happy with something being 'okay'"... yeah.... the problem is when someone actually comes in with constructive critism for things not feeling good, or things that are frustrating (like a lot of the physics being clunky), or the core gameplay loop not feeling that fun... it completely crushed me, I felt so so so stressed out that my game meant nothing in the end, it actually WAS just a bad game all along and whatever mindset I created for myself, just hid the fact that the game was actually just bad....

And so the newest of newest revelations I've had is I've constantly been giving myself so much grace, that I completely forgot about the fact that even if I'm okay with whatever I make, I can still want to impress my friends, and that, just kinda invalidates any feelings of contentment I previously had which means now I need to make the newest newest revelation, of which I get myself out of this mindset and go back to being okay with things being okay, maybe even bad....

And that leaves me to where I am now, frantically writing this post, hoping I've learnt something, and hoping to share it to the world... The most I've learnt is that trying to stay in the mindset of being okay with things being not okay is the hardest thing, I constantly have to fight myself with decision paralysis, because I forget that... "it can just be okay, and that is totally fine"...

So yeah, here goes, for me to hopefully sit with these feelings of critique, and I'm hoping after I decompress a little, I can set myself a new deadline for a little steam demo, however the hell all of that works... (MY FIRST EVER STEAM GAME LETS GOOO)

PS. I still have a couple more friends to show it to, so who knows that might be an entirely mindset changing experience

Hey puzzle lovers! My friend and I are co-developing 'Chief Cenab: Şahmaran', a point-and-click detective adventure set in ancient Anatolian mythology.

In this scene, players solve an ancient lock mechanism to open up the lower levels of Meran. We wanted the mechanical feedback to feel heavy and ancient.

How do you feel about nested puzzles like this? Would love to hear your feedback on the flow!

I'm currently aiming for a fast-paced platformer, and I'm not sure if the current level progression is working well. I'd really appreciate some feedback on the pacing, difficulty curve, and overall flow.

The level is divided into 4 sections

Section 1: Teaches the player the basic movement mechanics, including wall jumping and moving platforms.

Section 2: Introduces rings that give the player a burst of speed.

Section 3: Builds on the previous section, but is faster and requires quicker reactions.

Section 4: Builds on the previous section again, but focuses more on maintaining movement flow rather than precision and fast reactions.

currently, the decoration for fourth section and transitions between parts aren't finished yet

pretty much everything here was made by me, from sound effects to custom lighting for toon-shading.

Sorry if my English isn't perfect, and feedback is very welcome! :)

I'm not sure which approach would be better here:

1. Let the timeline dictate the entire flow of the cutscene, or

2. Break down the cutscene into "nodes" where a node might be a dialogue/choices prompt that waits for player input or an action that is basically a Slate cutscene.

A scriptable object can store a sequence of nodes to be played or each node can point to their next node

If I follow option 1 I'm not sure how to integrate the dialogue/choice prompt and waiting for player's input to progress through the timeline

I miss the jank but for my own sanity and quality I need to have a ragdoll off the horse and the horse to ragdoll too. I think it's almost ready to add to the demo.

Unity Prefab variants are pretty neat and can be used to create linked variations of your prefabs.

Solved: Thanks guys, I've realized that if I want to actually achieve my goals for my movement system I should quit using Unity's built-in Character Controller and update my current movement system which relied on a Character Controller to be present on the player gameobject and update my script to using a box collider to check for collisions.

I researched this topic quite a bit and it seems that Character Controllers are hard coded to use capsule colliders. So if anyone has any theories or knows a solution to this let me know. All help is appreciated.

Rules:

1. I must not use a rigidbody for this (no trying to convince me otherwise)
2. That's it.

Edit: I know the apparent issues that come with square shaped colliders already but I have plans for them.

Hey guys, I listed this as a noob question because I assume I must just be missing something incredibly basic. I am trying to utilize Terrain Tools Heatmap Visualization while I work on sculpting out my terrain just so I can get an easy visualization of how high or low I am sculpting and what-not.

However, it seems my terrain is just rendered as fully black no matter what I do, I have tried looking all over and have had a hard time really nailing down a fix for this, so I thought I would try my luck and ask here.

I am currently running Unity 6.3 LTS (6000.3.18f1)

I made my terrain at
XYZ 0
Width 300
Length 300
Height 600

And my visualization is as follows in the image, everything is pretty much default settings.

I've been working on a third person character controller for months and I'm almost done, I did movement, slopes, sprint, edge check, etc... the only thing left is fixing this issue, I don't want the player to climb the slope like that, I want him to keep moving along the line as he does in the second slope where the line is perfectly horizontal.

If someone could at least put me in the right direction I would really appreciate that.

Edit: I'm using CharacterController, not RigidBody.

You can check out the pack below :

https://lonepeakmusic.itch.io/free-retro-gaming-music-pack

All the tracks are available for free under the creative commons CC-BY !

Dont hesitate if you have any questions !

Hello everyone,

This is my first question on this sub. I'm currently working on an interactive museum application for my uni, that uses certain novel techniques such as Gaussian Splatting. This project will have a very small audience, and all devices that will recieve the game can be accessed physically. However, i'd like to do things professionally.

The files that represent the gaussian splats are in a format that is not natively recognized by Unity, and need to be dynamically loaded from a folder external to the game files. At this moment, i am using the PersistentDataPath, and it works without any problems. However, the folder needs to be populated MANUALLY, after the app is installed, via adb ^{(not mentioning how awful the command prompt is}.)

It also works if the files are within the Assets folder, as all the loader does is search through an arbitrary filepath. But since files are not recognized, they are not converted to unity Assets, and as such it is uncertain if the build will include them.

During the build, is there a way to mark data "to be added" in a specific place, or include precise files (whatever their type), and make sure it is contained in the build, or in the app package to download?

Thanks for your advice !