I was bumping around youtube and the Unity site and ran across references to the Timeline feature and the free Cinemachine plugin.
Timeline
Timeline has an intro video here and allows recording of scripted motion with triggered playback. It seems to have originated as a way to play out cut-scenes, but looks like it would also be useful to provide background activity in a scene with objects and ‘extras’ moving about to provide additional color.
I probably won’t play with this too much this weekend as I’ve got some work items to get a few hours on and I want to look deeper into the areas that my VR board-game needs.
Cinemachine
Cinemachine is a free camera management plugin. This looks like a wonderful way to manage a dynamic camera following a moving object. You lock the camera to a transform and set its parameters to keep the following process fluid. The introductory video is here. This one is also likely a ‘later’ item as I’m not currently planning much in the way of free motion or background animations in the cluster project.
Transitions with Animation
Interesting video showing how to use animations to create no-code transitions.
Scriptable Objects and Game Architecture
Watching this video on scriptable objects and game architecture. It seems as if I could stand to know more about these and their place in unity game architecture. I’m actually interested in non-unity assemblies as bolt-ons for a unity game. These would allow ‘business logic’ to be provided externally and tested using nUnit or something similar while providing services to the game as a black-box-like component. As they’re C# they should be readily debuggable along with the built in C# code in game objects and such.
This is one of the big steps to take…I would like a better feel for how the unity system works best. Building flexible, scalable things is always more fun…
Event System Ideas
Here is a talk that details an event system where the event grouping is handled by the type of the event object. The listener subscribes to notification based on the type thrown and the core event system throws based on the type passed to the event firing method. Keeps things clean and moves type mismatch errors cleanly into compile time.
There may be downsides (and I need to look more closely at the current unity event system as this may be similar to what we have in the 2018.3.6f1 version…
I think I’m going to wind up watching many more of these sessions to get a better feel for what works well in unity-land at the architectural level and from a finer grained point of view.