Now that there’s 2021.2 Alpha, can you please give an ETA about when we’ll get Splines? Thank you!
Wow - Splines come up A LOT in this forum. Seriously, if Unity just dropped everything they were doing and spent ALL their energy on Splines (and whatever Editor improvements they are making to support them better), I swear this forum would go almost silent.
Of course, I’m being entirely tongue-in-cheek and I don’t mean any harm - I just find it surprising how often splines comes up in here.
Hey! We can’t make promises on timeline. However, very exciting, as of this week our team focus switched from Overlays, to Splines!
This is a good time to note, we’ll have some research surveys and moderated sessions coming up soon … keep an eye out for those, if you’d like to participate - thanks!
A.W.E.S.O.M.E.!!!
Now that I’ve seen this, I can’t wait
https://portal.productboard.com/dzcznunfgebtky7ipmhrc22z/c/495-spline-editor
Hi all! As promised, here’s the survey link - shouldn’t take more than 20 minutes or so, and your answers will help determine how we prioritize and design the Spline system!
Thanks very much!
Done. What wasn’t covered in that survey was the movement along the spline. Is it possible to
- move by percentage
- move by distance, ie meters
- move by gameobject bounds (considering rotation along spline)
Then some core functionality:
- snap to any object when you place a node, eg terrain
- i don’t want to move tangents, that’s tedious
- quickly add at begin/end or inbetween
- quickly delete without moving to every single node, ie adding deleting should be fast without much user interaction
- align objects along spline, eg fence
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4qBMhOla2Y
or houses
or vegetation
Then some extended functionality:
- physics along splines
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cG00PXEmrU8
- multiple splines via offset
Just me, or is this a HUGE question: “What do you expect a spline tool to be able to do?”
I just hope spline implementations is going to be minimal (but not super minimal ) and interface based.
All this extra features (spawning morphing etc.) can be build around it but should not be a part of it.
My 5 cents.
Yeah, same here. I’d have expected the spline tool to be just that. And everything else evolve around it. I don’t expect any of the things that were in the survey. Or what I showed above. Just position nodes, create splines, move along them, save them, re-use them. Nothing else.
Yes, this. I’m quite happy if they expose some Events and a programming API so we can do stuff at runtime - but that should be down to the dev.
I think that splines in the editors should be separated from runtime splines. Editors splines should just be editor tools.
Based on the questions in the survey (which seems to anticipate a lot of use cases!), a spline may not be bound to a Monobehaviour per se, but it may act as a front end/editor. So hopefully it’ll still be possible to create splines entirely through an API, without any game objects, at runtime or otherwise.
It’d be nice to have a choice to create a spline that can either be saved as an asset(allowing multiple reuses of the spline) or just be copy-pasted as an inspector value(which is quicker and doesn’t litter the project with assets).
Also would like to see support for importing splines from fbx or other formats so we can draw them in external programs.
I hope you guys provide an API that does not generate new arrays on each call like so many Unity APIs do, otherwise this will be just another feature we have to avoid.
With a little luck they’ll use their own new Pooling classes so that should reduce that problem a fair bit.
https://docs.unity3d.com/2021.1/Documentation/ScriptReference/Pool.IObjectPool_1.html
And thread safety would be really nice, going forward.
Wow! That generated a lot of replies - super! Thanks everyone who took the time to respond in the survey, we’re very happy to get all that info. And I’ll walk through here as well - gimme a bit to formulate good replies …
Alright, I think the first thing to address, is clarifying exactly what we are creating - and that is only a spline.
So, essentially:
- list of points forming a path, with tangents to set curves if needed
- tooling for manipulating these points
- utilities for accessing the spline data (runtime or editor)
Additionally, we’re making it easy (on both artists and developer side) to set custom data along the path.
So, for developers this means yes it ought to be a really, really clean and performant base solution. Ideally, existing Asset Store spline developers will also benefit from this! (and we’d love to chat with you … )
For artists, it means nice consistent tooling/workflow for splines, no matter what.