Hi again everyone!
Ages ago, I co-created ProBuilder, joined Unity … now, back on my own. Time to get building new toolsets.
The first is something I’ve wanted to tackle for ages, but was always told “can’t be done”. Turns out, it can!
Introducing … SceneBlocks
SceneBlocks neatly solves the problem of Unity scene conflicts, by saving out each object change to “blocks”. So instead of burning time/sanity on complex merges or over-using prefabs, your team can just be creative.
The studio creating Taival have super kindly been helping stress-test the solution, and even made a video showing how they use it:
And here is a separate demo video of my own:
Scene Blocks works in a very simple way:
- You build, save, and load scenes as usual. Nothing scary or messy or difficult.
- When you save a scene, Scene Blocks automatically copies it’s contents to “Blocks” in a separate folder (you can also make this manual, as Taival show)
- You and your team push/pull those block files, eg “House”, “Sunlight”, “SceneSettings”, instead of the entire scene file
- When you open a scene, it automatically checks the matching blocks folder, and rebuilds to match. This can be also set to manual, if you prefer.
Importantly, Scene Blocks does not change how your scene saves. It simply copies the data to clear, object-based blocks. So there’s no worry about losing data, references, etc, and your workflow doesn’t need to change drastically. This was really important when creating the system, for safety and simplicity.
So, I’d love to get some eyes on this and please let me know if you have questions, would like to try it out, etc. I’m also working on several other things, including of course a whole new level design toolset. Excited to be out here creating and solving fun problems again, thanks much for looking!