How might I go about, while using sprite shape, to randomly spawn different assets like rocks, bushes, grasses, etc., as I make the terrain?
My current method is to just create ~8 different prefabs with different assortments of assets (vegetation) on the terrain, then I just link those up while making the level. This is fine, but time consuming to make the prefabs. After the prefabs are made, it works alright, EXCEPT when I want to make interesting unique terrain—the problem with this is I need to go and individually add in all the assets on top of the sprite shape afterward.
How difficult would it be to randomly spawn different vegetation on top of the sprite shape as I extend its length and resize it?
Late to the party, but got any news on how to implement this? I’m trying to spawn the prefabs on top of the Sprite Shape but the Sprinkler just selects a random point of the spline.
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.
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: