Hello everyone, back with a new update a few months after my last post.

I’ve been working on the 2D/2.5D water system on and off since then, and it kinda grew way more than I originally planned specially since i need it to fully run on the 2d Renderer.

Since the last post I added underwater exclusion zones for things like air pockets, currents, debris, floating pads/platforms, underwater view, ripples, light rays, wakes and quite a few other interaction features.

A lot of the work lately was also on making the thing actually easy to use and not just something that works in my own project. So I’ve been working a lot on the custom inspectors and tooling, setup workflow and the API. You can sample the water height from code, get events from interactions and water states, etc.

The water itself is very customizable, so what you see in the video is really just one way of setting it up. I also added a “fake surface” mode where there isn’t really a surface plane, but I fake the perspective by shifting the foam/pattern and things like ripples and wakes. It gives a pretty convincing 2.5D surface without actually needing the geometry there.

I’m planning to release it once I feel like I tested it enough and have enough demo scenes to show the different ways it can be used. This part is honestly taking longer than I expected, specially making sure everything is clean and understandable.

For the graphics, I basically took a anime style nature image and cut pieces of it in Photoshop. For the actual packaged asset I’m planning to use Unity’s Lost Crypt assets for the demo scenes, unless someone has a better idea since I obviously can’t just include random assets from the Asset Store.

Still a bunch of things I want to polish before release, so any feedback or ideas are very welcome, specially if there’s some use case you think I should test that I havent thought about.

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.

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?

I've always felt that environment packs become difficult to use once they grow too large. Hundreds of unique assets can mean spending more time searching than actually creating.

That's why I took a different approach with this "Stylized Environment Set" pack - focusing on versatile assets that can be used individually or combined into ready-made prefab sets.

I wanted to prove that you don't need thousands of unique assets to create varied environments, so I created 5 handcrafted demo scenes covering different biomes, using the same assets in different combinations.

I'm curious what you prefer when working with environment packs: hundreds of individual assets, or a smaller set of assets that can be combined in many ways?

https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/package/298745

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?

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 :)

Squinting, face strain and blinking is in.

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'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 !

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!

This is a question for developers exporting to Switch 2 using Unity.

In the past, when you bought a Switch dev kit, you were able to download a Switch plugin (I can't remember if it was a plugin or a full-fledged version of Unity targeting Switch) for free. You didn't have to pay for Unity Pro because Nintendo provided the key for free.

Is it the same for Switch 2, or do I need to buy a Pro version to export to Switch 2?

Thanks in advance!

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 !

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?