Handy Tip, Procedural Level Generation to Static!

News & General Discussion
1

As an Indie solo game developer one of the potential ways to generate content is to procedurally build levels, only you lose all of the cool Occlusion, Navmesh (3.5+), Texture Baking features in unity.

Or at least that’s what I thought, until I tried a simple cut and paste experiment.

  1. Procedural generate level at runtime
  2. Pause Game
  3. Select All Level Items
  4. Edit → Save Selection → … 1 [ Ctrl + Alt + 1 ]
  5. Stop
  6. Create New Scene
  7. Edit → Load Selection → …1 [ Ctrl + Shift + 1 ]
  8. Save Scene

Now bake in your Occlusion / Navmesh / Lighting.

Posted as this was an ability of Unity I had not realised existed, and a problem I think most Indie developers will have.

2

You can also save the scene’s position at runtime, check out the saving docs for a script.

3

I sometimes generate data in BlitzMax (fast prototyping, coding fun) which i afterwards import into Unity.