Lork

The beam's position and rotation was already handled by script, so de-parenting it was no trouble at all, and it solved the problem. Thanks!

Yeah, it works when the parent is scaled uniformly. I tried using lossyScale and it didn't seem to make a difference. The beam is always rotating of its own accord as it is meant to do vertical or horizontal sweeping motions, so maybe that just makes it impossible to get an accurate reading. My current solution to the problem is to just not scale any of the parents that use the beam non uniformly, but of course a better solution would be nice.

I'm working on a laser beam that uses a trigger collider to determine if it is hitting something or not. The collider is scaled to the length and size of the beam like so: beamCollider.size = new Vector3(size / scale.x, size / scale.y, Vector3.Distance(aimPoint, transform.position) / scale.z);This works perfectly in most cases, but the scaling becomes inaccurate to the size of the beam when the parent transform of the beam is scaled non uniformly (eg. has a scale of y = 1, x = 2, z = 3). I'm sure this is all down to some 3D math concept that I don't understand, so my questions are: What's going on here, and can I account for it in my scaling algorithm? And before you ask: No, I can't use a spherecast to determine collisions because for some unknown reason Unity's SphereCast is unable to detect compound colliders, making it useless for anything involving hitboxes.

Why are you using GetAxis for keyboard input? You'll get better results by using GetKey, or by setting up buttons in the input manager for it. Edit: If you have the keys bound to buttons in the input manager, you can edit the responsiveness on releasing the keys by changing the "Gravity" setting.

Never in my wildest dreams did I ever think I would be sad to hear the words "That wizard came from the moon!" spoken aloud, but alas, Destiny has made it so. I wonder if they're considering changing the voice acting based on the near universal negative feedback, or if Peter Dinklage's paycheck was too much for them to even consider it.

Another weird question: Is there an easy way to remove a model/texture from a .fbx animation? Using animations from the Unity Asset store, I often need to make small changes, such as adding events, making new clips, etc. I recently implemented source control on my project and I'd like to include copies of my edits (which are really just edits to the way they're imported) in that, but obviously with source control space is at a premium. Some assets make this easy by neatly splitting up every animation into its own ~250kb fbx file, pointing to a separate file with the model rather than including it with every animation. Other assets make it a pain by clumping all the animations and the model into a single, giant .fbx, requiring me to duplicate the whole thing and remove all the excess clips manually if I want make an edit, and still leaving behind a ~20mb .fbx for one animation because it includes a model that already exists in the original file. Is there any way I can do something about that?

Right now my characters have all of their weapons already in their hierarchy when they spawn. I'm trying to switch over to a system where their weapons are instantiated from a generic prefab so that they can inherit changes from the prefabs rather than having to be changed individually, can be easily swapped, and so on. However, the position and rotation of the weapons need to be set to specific values so they fit into the character's hand properly, and there seems to be some kind of difference between the way Instantiate() works vs simply dropping an object into a scene. I have a sword prefab that, if dropped onto the relevant transform in the editor shows up in the proper position, but if instantiated in script with the exact same values for position rotation, and parent, ends up floating off to the character's side. Does anybody know what's going on here or what I can do about it? Edit: Figured it out. I needed to be setting the local position and rotation, not the world ones. The editor doesn't really specify which one you're changing, but in scripts you need to be specific.

Grab the grass crest shield ASAP. It's good enough to block smaller enemies if you keep it upgraded, and while blocking most attacks from bosses is futile, there's no reason not to have it on your back giving you that extra bit of stamina recovery at all times.

So when I bought NGUI I was under the impression that it was WYSIWYG, but so far it seems more like "What You See Has Only The Most Tenuous Relationship With What You Get" (WYSHOTMTRWWYG). All I want to do right now is make some HUD elements that stay in the same position on the screen if you change the aspect ratio, but apparently that's an impossible dream. Supposedly this is done by using "anchors", but they don't seem to do that at all, and what little I could find on it in the documentation (which is extremely sparse in contrast to what was advertised) was no help at all. Does anybody know how to actually get this stuff to work the way it's supposed to?

There are no level restrictions on the forest hunter covenant. It's just a big, crazy free for all where you can and will be summoned at SL1 to fight a trio of SL120 giant dads, or your SL300 character might get sent in to crush some poor newbie.

The key thing you're missing is events. Instead of working with the individual components, you simply send an event to the gameobject, and any scripts attached to it will respond accordingly if you've given them the relevant receivers. That's essentially how OnMouseDown works, as well.

What if size of your goal changed depending on how far away you are from it? Focusing into a small, easily defensible point when you're near it and going wide open if you're at the opponent's goal. That way there would at least be a risk involved in going into your opponent's territory and a bonus for defending yours (which sounds like a subobtimal strategy right now).

It's an interesting idea and I've loved the concept of stat triangles ever since I was introduced to them by Uprising, but actually trying to move and shoot while changing my stats at the same time results in a "Rubbing your stomach while patting your head" effect that I just can't deal with. Maybe if changing your stats was a special move triggered by a button press with a cooldown rather than the game allowing/expecting the player to do it in real time it would be easier to handle. Of course, the problem could just be that I suck.

Does anybody know why adding an NGUI object to a scene would screw up the existing camera? I have a third person camera like so: But as soon as I add NGUI to the mix, the player character stops being drawn by the existing camera and shows up on a different layer and only from the view of the NGUI camera. The change is permanent and persists even if I delete the NGUI hierarchy (at which point the player character becomes invisible as the NGUI camera isn't there anymore). As far as I can tell, the only way to recover the ability to see the player character properly is to load the scene from before NGUI was added. Edit: Apparently it's happening to the player character because it's on the "Player" layer. I remain baffled as to why NGUI would prevent you from seeing things on the "Player" layer, or why it continues to happen afterwards.

That did the trick, thanks.

Does anybody know how to set the scale of your model when exporting from Blender? I'm trying to make a simple model for use in Unity, but when I import it into Unity it's microscopic. I tried changing the scale in the "scene" settings, but that doesn't seem to actually change the scale of the object, just the default scale setting for the object's transform in Unity. I want the object to be the proper size at a scale (from Unity's point of view) of 1, as making massive changes to the scale of an object in Unity has broken/undesirable results.

Warren Spector's Deus Ex Postmortem is an excellent read. It always surprises me that almost no-one seems to know about it given how highly regarded the game is among the PC gaming crowd. It's a pretty fascinating look at the almost manifesto-like philosophy that went into the game's design and how it changed when put up against reality.

Did you guys end up picking a server and making an IRC channel? I can't seem to find the server in the thread if you did pick one, but I'd love to get in on this whole talking about making games business.

While I'm reminded of this: Chris, if you read this thread, do you mind if I ask if that alarm app was successful in waking you up? If so, what's the name of the app? I could really use an alarm that yells at me if I don't get up, provided it actually works.

That's good to hear. I haven't played Minerva's Den yet because I got really burned out Bioshock after 2, but I'm sure it'll be a treat when I finally get around to it.

One thing that struck a chord with me was Jake's complaint about audiolog placement in Infinite. This is a huge problem that I've noticed, not just in Infinite, but in pretty much every game that tries to talk at you while you explore. It's seriously an epidemic. There's this narrative that people have built up around the audio log that they're this cool thing that you can listen to while you explore the world at your own pace, but the reality is that in pretty much every game to feature them, trying to move forward at anything resembling a normal pace will inevitably result in the game talking over itself or cutting itself off constantly. For some reason game designers seem to put no thought at all into the placement and timing of audio messages. You've got some serious nostalgia revisionism going on for the original Bioshock, though. That game suffered from this problem all the time and was actually the first game to get me to really notice it, leading to the development of my rule for dialogue in games: Whenever I get a message, I immediately halt all forward progress and only move around places I've already been, if at all, until the dialogue is finished. I never feel like I'm actually wasting time by doing this, because in pretty much every single case, I finish listening and take two steps forward, and sure enough, there's the trigger line for the message from Atlas that would've interrupted the log, or the splicer group that would've made it impossible to hear over their gunfire and combat barks. I wish I was exaggerating, but that's really how it is. A friend of mine jokingly theorized that this, along with the generally low standards for audio mixing in games, happens because nobody plays with the sound on when testing games. Having (limited) experience working as a tester for a large publisher myself, I think there might actually be some truth to that, sadly.

I'm of two minds about the racism. While it is kind of weird that the game doesn't really seem to have anything to say directly about the racism it depicts, I do think they are trying to say something with it. It's just that that something is about Comstock's character, which then loops its way back to being about American exceptionalism, a subject which happens to involve racism, by way of metaphor, in an ouroboros-like fashion. I think it's yet another aspect of the story that would've made a lot more sense if they had handled the thing in my spoiler better.

You can count me as another person who respectfully but strongly disagrees with your guys' assessment of Infinite. I think it might just come down to your extreme reverence and adoration of the original Bioshock, which I don't share and frankly find sort of baffling. Maybe it's just because I had somewhat measured expectations due to my coolness on the original, but I found Infinite to be surprisingly good, and both more enjoyable and more interesting than the first two. The relationship between Booker and Elizabeth was sometimes hit and miss, but on the whole I thought they were interesting characters who I felt a genuine connection with, something I found impossible to do with any of the characters in the original Bioshock, due to their one dimensional nature. When Infinite started jumping around (being as non spoilery as possible here), I didn't really mind so much because the principle characters seemed to remain outside of that, and they were the important part of the story, while the city was just a really nice looking backdrop. If I had to pick the biggest problem with Infinite's story other than the oft mentioned extreme head explosion extravaganza getting in the way, I'd say it was I was also surprised to hear Jake mention being concerned about what actually did and did not happen in a fictional universe (a phenomenon also known as "canon", but maybe that's just me projecting Chris' (and my own) distaste for that kind of thing on the entire crew.

Don't worry, those people were just blinded by nostalgia. The original Metroid is a terrible game in retrospect, and Metroid 2 is even worse. There are only a few NES games that still hold up today, but the ones that do are still worth playing.

The game keeps two rolling autosaves that can be overwritten by midlevel checkpoints, at which point it's already too late. And stopping to make a manual save every time you would quicksave just so that you can have a chance of losing "only" an hour of progress instead of all of it is not an acceptable solution in 2012.