I’m making a save/load system for my user generated scenes which involves saving and loading the scene terrain. The issue i’m facing is related to the terrain layers and alphamap. At first I just used a list of the diffuse textures contained in the terrain layers which i serialize using the newtonsoft serialize object along with the actual aplhamap of the terrainData. The result i get after deserializng the texture names, recreating the terrain layers and using the setalphamaps with the deserialized alphamap is a terrain that has the correct terrain layers but the first texture of the terrain layers in painted on the whole terrain rather than recreating the terrain textures before saving. After doing some research I also added the terrainLayer. tile size and tile offset on the serialized terrain layer but no luck. Next thing i found is trying binary serialization.
You’re going straight from terrain to serialization and back to terrain and noting a problem.
There’s more steps than that you can debug. Break it down.
Get the textures out of the terrain. Put them back.
Does it work? Don’t do ANYTHING else until it does.
And when it works, be antagonistic: make TWO wildly-different-looking terrains and write a script to pull out and swap their textures so you are confident that “it works” is not just a simple head-fake false positive.
Now when that works, serialize the textures and deserialize them.
If you are unsure if a texture is really “correct”, make a stupid-small texture like 2x2 pixels, Red, Green, Yellow Blue pixels, something you can Debug.Log() every single color value and stare and the output and say “These are absolutely the same. (or not).”
Do NOT retype code. Use copy/paste properly using code tags. - Do NOT post screenshots of code. - Do NOT post photographs of code.
Do NOT attach entire scripts to your post.
ONLY post the relevant code, and then refer to it in your discussion.
Time to start debugging!
By debugging you can find out exactly what your program is doing so you can fix it.
Here is how you can begin your exciting new debugging adventures:
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 names of the GameObjects or Components involved?
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.
Visit Google for how to see console output from builds. 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 for iOS: How To - Capturing Device Logs on iOS or this answer for Android: How To - Capturing Device Logs on Android
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.
If your problem is with OnCollision-type functions, print the name of what is passed in!
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:
