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Baking Unity NavMesh with Box Colliders

January 10, 2014 by Devin Reimer

Up until recently in Dyscourse we had been using a pathfinding solution called “A* Pathfinding Project”. While it was a pretty impressive tool we weren’t happy with performance and some of it’s complexity. So I decided to give Unity’s built-in NavMesh a try.

Unity’s NavMesh worked pretty good, but it had one big issue, it didn’t support baking Box Colliders into a navigation mesh. It only supported MeshRenderers and Terrain. In Dyscourse we have a 3D world but everything is flat 2D planes, so this simply wouldn’t work.

Not deterred, I ended up figuring out a work around and created an editor script to do all the heavy lifting. This script automatically bakes Box Colliders into the navigation mesh with the press of a button.

Download NavigationHelper.cs (right-click save as).

To Use:

Simply put this script into an ‘Editor’ folder and add a new Tag into your project called: “TempNavMeshItemDestroyable”.
Run by going to Windows->Navigation Helper and then click ‘Build NavMesh!’. Everything happens automatically.

As an additional option in the script you can edit the COLLIDER_LAYER variable and set it to a layer you want to filter Box Colliders to.

Posted in Dyscourse, Unity3D | Tagged , | 4 Comments

Unite 2012 Amsterdam Presentation

October 29, 2012 by Devin Reimer

This past August I attended my third Unite (Unity Conference) in Amsterdam. This year I got the opportunity to give a presentation with Alex Schwartz. Our presentation was titled, “Continuously Bootstrapping an Indie Studio by Remaining Agile with Unity”.

We got a lot of positive feedback and people really like it. Unity did a wonderful job recorded the session and have put it up on their site.

Watch presentation : http://unity3d.com/unite/#6952894

I would like to thank Unity for putting on the event and all the people that attended. Unite was once again a fantastic experience.

Posted in Unity3D | Tagged | 2 Comments

Jack Lumber Launch – Now Available on iOS

August 16, 2012 by Devin Reimer

The day has finally come – Jack Lumber is now available on iOS. http://bit.ly/TreesSuck

Use the supernatural powers of Jack Lumber to massacre the forest and make Granny proud in this time-warping, line-drawing, log-slicing, pun-filled lumberjacking mashup.
http://jacklumbergame.com/

Jack Lumber is a collaboration between AlmostLogical Software and Owlchemy Labs. We have teamed up with SEGA as the debut partner in the SEGA Alliance.

Check out our awesome launch trailer made by the one and only Kert Gartner.

Go buy it today! http://bit.ly/TreesSuck

 

Posted in Jack Lumber | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

PlayModePersist Version 2.0 – Unity Asset Store

May 22, 2012 by Devin Reimer

PlayModePersist Version 2.0 is now available for download in the Unity Asset Store – http://u3d.as/content/almost-logical-software/play-mode-persist/1tS.

PlayModePersist is a Unity Editor Extension that allows you to persist changes you’ve made in the Unity Editor while in Play mode.

Thanks to some great feedback from users, PlayModePersist has been reworked to be both easier and faster to use. The biggest change is now PlayModePersist is window-based (no more needing to constantly open a dropdown in the Transform). This allows you to persist GameObject components faster than ever. This change has also allowed us to support Multi-Object Editing (new to Unity 3.5). You can now select multiple GameObject and then select groups of components to persist. Want to persist 30 Transforms on 30 different GameObject, you can now do that with one-click.

To see PlayModePersist in action check out the new video tutorial: http://youtu.be/NCkD7XgN4so

To learn more about why PlayModePersist is so helpful you can read my original blog post:  http://blog.almostlogical.com/2011/01/11/playmodepersist-unity-asset-store/

If you already own PlayModePersist this update is free, simply download the update. If you haven’t yet picked up a copy, what are you waiting for? Get it today: http://u3d.as/content/almost-logical-software/play-mode-persist/1tS

Posted in Unity3D | Tagged , | 24 Comments

Office Zombie Simulator in Flash via Unity

December 23, 2011 by Devin Reimer

With the Unity 3.5 developer preview being made available to the public yesterday, I set out to try the new Unity to Flash exporter. I’ve been looking forward to this feature since it was announced almost a year ago. The first project I decided to work on was Office Zombie Simulator, a small game Calin and I build back in February.

The major stumbling block with porting this project to Flash was that it uses iTween. As a lot of people have discovered iTween does not work with the Unity Flash exporter. Yesterday, I spent the day hacking iTween and got it to work with the Flash exporter. Get the modified version of iTween here.

With iTween working, I spent part of the day fixing up a few issues and now Office Zombie Simulator works in Flash. While it’s a little rough around the edges it is simply amazing that I’ve brought something of this complexity from Unity into Flash in just a couple of days.

Without further ado, here is the Flash version of Office Zombie Simulator.

I want to do a huge shout-out to the Unity team, what they have accomplished is incredible. I look forward to what the future brings.

Posted in Games, Unity3D | Tagged | 7 Comments

Unity to Flash Exporter with iTween

December 22, 2011 by Devin Reimer

If you didn’t already know Unity 3.5 Developer Preview is now available to the public.
http://unity3d.com/unity/preview/

To me the most exciting thing in the developer preview is the Unity to Flash exporter. The ability to easily create and distribute 3D content on the web without needing the user to have a different plugin.

So the first thing I did was start to port over some older projects. As this is an early build there are a lot of limitations, so moving an existing complex project over isn’t an easy task. One of the major stumbling blocks I had (and from the sounds of things a lot of people are having) is that iTween simply doesn’t work.

iTween is great framework for doing tweening in Unity. So I decided that with my deep knowledge of Unity, iTween and AS3 I would attempt to ‘fix’ the iTween libary to work with the Flash exporter.

Turns out iTween uses a lot of unsupported features and that coupled with the exporter being very new, turned this into a very challenging problem.
45+ hacks and a lot of knowledge later, I won.

Without further ado here is Flash export ready version of iTween: iTween.cs

Here is a quick demo proving it works: SimpleCrateDemo

This version of iTween is a little rough around the edges, but it works in my initial tests.

Known Issues

-ColorTo & ColorFrom are unsupported as they cause an infinite loop (reason unknown)
-FadeTo & FadeFrom are unsupported as they cause an infinite loop (reason unknown)
-Flash player throws a silent error on Destroy of iTween component (should not effect anything but will show up in Flash debug)

There are probably more issues so let me if you come across any.

I do know that a new version of iTween is being worked on and the Flash exporter is in an early state so this is a temporary version to hold everyone over.

PS: This took me an entire day, so if someone uses this to win the Unity ‘Flash in a Flash’ contest you official owe me a drink. :)

Posted in Unity3D | Tagged , | 45 Comments