I’m making a top down GTA-style action game. In my game, you can get into cars or walk around on foot. Here’s my dilemma:
I was able to make the camera follow the player, but when the player enters a car, the player disappears, and the camera is supposed to follow the car. I tried to accomplish this by adding a Camera as a child to the car object, and disabling the main camera as the car camera is enabled when the player enters the car. However, the car camera isn’t activating. The main camera disables just fine, but the car camera fails to activate, leaving no camera active in the scene. How do I fix this?
public class CarCamera : MonoBehaviour
{
public IsDriving isDriving;
public CarInputHandler carInputHandler;
public Camera mainCamera;
public Camera carCamera;
// Update is called once per frame
void Update()
{
if (isDriving.driving == true && carInputHandler.playerDriving == true) // if player is driving a car
{
mainCamera.enabled = false;
carCamera.enabled = true;
}
}
}
If you want to debug what you have above, consider using this approach:
You must find a way to get the information you need in order to reason about what the problem is.
Once you understand what the problem is, you may begin to reason about a solution to the problem.
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.
You can also supply a second argument to Debug.Log() and when you click the message, it will highlight the object in scene, such as Debug.Log("Problem!",this);
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 working in VR, it might be useful to make your on onscreen log output, or integrate one from the asset store, so you can see what is happening as you operate your software.
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:
When in doubt, print it out!™
Note: the print() function is an alias for Debug.Log() provided by the MonoBehaviour class.
Absolutely no idea what the issue is just from your code, so you’re going to have to debug like Kurt-Dekker said above. However, if you want a really simple script to control camera position, this is what I usually do:
using UnityEngine;
public class CameraController : MonoBehaviour
{
public Transform player; // Assign these three in the inspector.
public Transform car;
public Transform cam;
public bool isDriving = false;
public Vector3 offset = new Vector3(0f, 0f, -10f); // Optional offset from the target (following variable).
Transform following; // The current target (player or car).
void Update()
{
if (isDriving)
{
following = car;
}
else
{
following = player;
}
cam.position = following.position + offset;
}
}
I find that setting the camera position works much better than attaching it as a child. If the camera is a child, adjusting the parent’s rotation or scale will mess with the camera too, which can give very bad results.
You can always use Cinemachine, but I find it’s a bit much if you just want something simple.
The above script is just an example, you can make whatever adjustments you need. Adding the functionality to adjust the camera’s orthographic size while in the car might be nice for example.
Hello friends. I appreciate the help. Ultimately I was able to solve my problem by having the character GameObject change parents when a vehicle is entered (parenting the character to the vehicle) and changing it back when the character gets out. Thank you for your help and have a great day!
