Creating a grid system in a 3D world

[Kurt-Dekker]

Sounds like you’re on the right track at least initially with raycasting to find the tile height at each center.

If you combine that with a 2D (laid down flat) cell / tile editor you can define walkable areas pretty simply.

Annoyingly this site is down, which is one I learned a lot from:

http://wiki.unity3d.com/index.php/2D_Tilemap_Starter_Kit

Here’s a SUPER-cheesy-easy way to get started without the hassle of writing an editor:

• make a little piece of geometry (like a tiny colored sphere or cube) and place instances of it into the scene to indicate walkability.
• For each walkable cell:
  —> Duplicate your marker sphere to place into each walkable cell
  —> Drag it laterally with the collide-against-ground modifiers (CMD-SHIFT on Mac) to track the ground
  —> optionally snap-place it (I wouldn’t bother initially, you can write a script later)

Once you have the walkability defined for a small test scene (like 10x10 cells!), read in all those markers (either name them specially, put a tag on them, put a marker script on them, child them all under a special GameObject, whatever you like) and use their integer cell positions to mark off your cell as walkable.

After that you can start writing editors to “paint” big areas, or rectangles, or whatever.

It’s unfortunately a bit daunting to get started, but once you get started you can just keep iterating on improving your editor making it do more stuff. When you make a real editor, just import all the above work into it.

I highly recommend using source control and saving and committing your work REGULARLY!!!

Personally I use git because it is free and there are tons of tutorials out there to help you set it up.

As far as configuring Unity to play nice with git, keep this in mind:

Prefab links keep getting dumped on Git pull

There really isn’t any fix because git works perfectly with Unity when configured properly. Best practices involve saving your work and closing Unity before using git. But if you understand how Unity does and does not flush changes to disk (or at least ALWAYS do a save-project), you can get away with leaving Unity open. The only thing linking EVERYTHING together in Unity is the GUID assigned to a script or asset. Name is irrelevant. Only the GUID connects it. This GUID is in the meta file. I…

Here’s how I use git in one of my games, Jetpack Kurt:

2 steps backwards

Yeah, what Praetor said is it… Debug.Log is your friend, and also since this is animation related, you can open up the Animator window when you expect the animations to go, and actually visually see where the state machine is, see which state it thinks it is in. You can combine this with Debug.Log() output at the locations where you set the animations to be what you think they should be, and that should lead you to some intel. I highly recommend setting up git source control. It really plays ni…

Using fine-grained source control as you work to refine your engineering:

When to make a separate object or class/script? Help me think like a programmer! (Example in text.)

This is a reasonable initial approach. The problem is you have listed the parts, but you haven’t really listed how they interact, and even if you did, it’s still sorta up to you how to organize it. Only YOU will know how to organize it, and the only way you can tell is to do the work. I recommend this: first, develop ALWAYS with source control (such as git), and every time you get even the slightest thing working, commit those changes with good commit messages. Then move to the next thing, c…

Share/Sharing source code between projects:

Your techniques to share code between projects?

I have found that bundling your own code into DLLs only serves to slow down your workflow. I base this on several years of experience dealing with other teams well-intentioned packaging mishaps. With games, it is almost always useful to reach into library code, make a temporary tweak to isolate a problem, and then revert it. With DLLs this is impossible, making workflow harder and more brittle. I prefer to share source code at the C# level. That way I can reach into libraries trivially and inje…

Setting up the right .gitignore file:

Removing IL2CPP_cache from Project

Not sure what you are "auto generating" with... I usually start from one of my other projects, or a gitignore example online, and reason about all the parts inside it, and start from there. Like any other configuration change, after you make it, pay attention for a while to make sure it is what you want. You can always clone the repo somewhere else to verify that the correct files are being tracked. Doing so to a brand-new computer is the acid test to make sure you can still bui…

Generally setting Unity up (includes above .gitignore concepts):

How to Git with Unity