Why is it moving locally instead of globally?

[enricogp]

Sorry if if local vs global coordinates were extensevely explained before in this forum, but I still have doubst about it.
I’m very noob at Unity, however usually I don’t come with problems with local vs global positions. Recently I saw a tutorial and, from my understanding, it was explaining that “Vector3.up” is a global position, which supossedly means it will always points towards the global definition of “up”, while a local position (example: transform.up) will change depending on where the object is facing.
The problem is that right now I’m tryind to do a “snake-like” kind of game, but when I use “Transform.Translate(vector3.up)” it actually moves the snake always to where it is pointing to (it’s a 2d game) depending of where it is facing, which is what I would expect of a local position system. If I use “transform.up”, however, the snake always goes the same way no matter where it is facing (and it goes down instead of up), which in my understanding is supossed to be the behaviour of using local coordinates. What am I understanding wrong?

Note: the player starts rotated by -90 degrees in the z axis, not sure if/how this affects rotations

[unity_ek98vnTRplGj8Q]

You are correct in your understanding of local vs global coordinates. If you look at the Unity Manual for Transform.Translate, however, you will see that it takes an optional second parameter that corresponds to the “space” in which you want to move. If you do not supply this parameter, it defaults to Space.Self. In other words, it will take any vector you give it and transform it into local space. So if you give it Vector3.Up, it will be transformed into transform.up. To fix this, you could tell it to move in world coordinates (or in other words, to not transform any vector you give it) by doing something like transform.Translate(Vector3.up, Space.World);. Or you could take the more direct approach and modify the position directly like transform.position += Vector3.up;