First Person to Top-Down View

Unity Engine
,
1

Hello all,

I’m trying to make a store building game and wanted a top-down view to help with placing walls etc.

now I don’t really know how to implement this?

I have a script that goes from FP to TP and I just placed the cam at the top of my world but I can’t move my Camera.
So I want to be able to move my Top-Down Camera and for my player body to disappear.
I’m very early into Unity and C# with some prior knowledge in Java.

Thank you

using System.Collections;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using UnityEngine;

public class CameraChange : MonoBehaviour
{

    public GameObject ThirdCam;
    public GameObject FirstCam;
    public int CamMode;

    // Start is called before the first frame update
    void Start(){
      
    }

    // Update is called once per frame
    void Update(){
        if (Input.GetButtonDown("Camera")){
            if(CamMode == 1) {
                CamMode = 0;
            }else{
                CamMode += 1;
            }
            StartCoroutine(CamChange());
        }
      
    }
    IEnumerator CamChange(){
        yield return new WaitForSeconds(0.01f);
        if(CamMode == 0){
            ThirdCam.SetActive(true);
            FirstCam.SetActive(false);
        }  
        if(CamMode == 1){
            ThirdCam.SetActive(false);
            FirstCam.SetActive(true);
        }
    }
}
2

I’d recommend trying cinemachine. It supports virtual cameras and transitions between them.
Cinemachine3rdPersonFollow
CinemachineTopDown

1 Like
3

I’ll second CodeKiwi… Camera stuff is pretty tricky… you may wish to consider using Cinemachine from the Unity Package Manager.

If you insist on your own solution, here’s how to debug what you have:

You must find a way to get the information you need in order to reason about what the problem is.

What is often happening in these cases is one of the following:

  • the code you think is executing is not actually executing at all
  • the code is executing far EARLIER or LATER than you think
  • the code is executing far LESS OFTEN than you think
  • the code is executing far MORE OFTEN than you think
  • the code is executing on another GameObject than you think it is
  • you’re getting an error or warning and you haven’t noticed it in the console window

To help gain more insight into your problem, I recommend liberally sprinkling Debug.Log() statements through your code to display information in realtime.

Doing this should help you answer these types of questions:

  • is this code even running? which parts are running? how often does it run? what order does it run in?
  • what are the values of the variables involved? Are they initialized? Are the values reasonable?
  • are you meeting ALL the requirements to receive callbacks such as triggers / colliders (review the documentation)

Knowing this information will help you reason about the behavior you are seeing.

If your problem would benefit from in-scene or in-game visualization, Debug.DrawRay() or Debug.DrawLine() can help you visualize things like rays (used in raycasting) or distances.

You can also call Debug.Break() to pause the Editor when certain interesting pieces of code run, and then study the scene manually, looking for all the parts, where they are, what scripts are on them, etc.

You can also call GameObject.CreatePrimitive() to emplace debug-marker-ish objects in the scene at runtime.

You could also just display various important quantities in UI Text elements to watch them change as you play the game.

If you are running a mobile device you can also view the console output. Google for how on your particular mobile target, such as this answer or iOS: How To - Capturing Device Logs on iOS or this answer for Android: How To - Capturing Device Logs on Android

Another useful approach is to temporarily strip out everything besides what is necessary to prove your issue. This can simplify and isolate compounding effects of other items in your scene or prefab.

Here’s an example of putting in a laser-focused Debug.Log() and how that can save you a TON of time wallowing around speculating what might be going wrong: