using scenes effectively

News & General Discussion
1

I’ve been working on my first unity game for quite a few months. The game levels are procedurally generated, which from what I understand, removes one of the primary uses for breaking the development into scenes. Basically, the current design only contains start menu scene and a game scene. There’s no story animation or anything like that.

There’s a nagging voice in my head telling me that there’s more to scenes than meets the eye. Anyone care to share how they leverage scene compartmentalization beyond levels and cut scenes? I can’t help thinking I’m missing the boat on this core feature.

2

We do it the same way you are. A single scene that loads everything. Scenes are great for prototyping and during development, but add unneeded complexity if are doing everything procedurally/dynamically.

1 Like
3

Thanks for the feedback, zombiegorilla. Good to know it’s a common strategy.

4

Ugh if you want to have each floor have different assets or whatev then you wouldnt need to load them all at the start.

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5

Scenes are stages, you can restart them whenever you want.

Does your game frequently reload everything from an initial state?

If not, you probably don’t need lots of scenes.

6

Scenes have a place where they belong, and a place where they don’t belong(in a large amount I mean). Assuming you are using Unity “traditionally” using the editor as the actual level editor, you would want one scene per level. Or a scene per “region” or something similar. This makes perfect sense, as in these types of games you would only want one level loaded at a time generally. But for a game like yours(OP, and zombiegorilla) you only want one scene for the actual game. If a game is creating things procedurally or dynamically, you are probably defining the “parameters” for that in some object and then running code to do it, so there is no point in having separate scenes if all you are changing are some variables to get different levels.

7

Hey, thanks everyone.

@Aiursrage2k , that’s a really good point. The models are all pretty lightweight and heavily recycled throughout levels, but they do swap in new UV/normalmaps for each new level. The entire game should weigh < 200 mb. I imagine the unity 5 web export will use scenes to download just-in-time (I don’t have the beta, so this is speculation). I haven’t figured out what distribution I’m targeting, too early, but this is good info. It would be easier from a dev perspective to load everything up front, but if I end up targeting the browser, I’ll investigate more.