Mirrored Animation

October 23, 2018April 19, 2021 Tantzy GamesAnimation, Playables, WOTTLeave a comment

The character in WOTT is a humanoid, which provides a number of advantages. One is that animations don’t have to share the same rig as the final character. That gives me the flexibility to make changes to the rig without having to remake previous animations, and also provides the ability to create animations using a variety of software packages if needed.

Another big advantage is that humanoid animations can be mirrored in Unity with a single checkbox. This halves the animation workload for unilateral, or Left/Right exercises which is important because there will eventually be thousands of exercise animations in WOTT.

With so many animations, it’s important that the users only download the animations they need for the routines they use – there’s no point downloading or storing animations they don’t use. To accomplish this I needed a way to create animation graphs on the fly which can’t be done with Unity’s Mecanim animation system. The only way to do this with the necessary flexibility is to use AnimationPlayables. So I needed to create my own animation system.

I originally had a month scheduled to create the animation system in WOTT, after which I had a month scheduled to create the database and backend. After a month I didn’t get everything done that I had planned, but I was happy enough with where the animation system was.

The fundamental elements of WOTT’s animation system are the ability to create downloadable animations, and then plug them into an animation graph when needed. Completing the animation system was always a long term project, but for now I just needed those fundamentals working so I could create exercise animations while I worked on the backend. Then, in a month, once the backend was done I could continue working on the animation system.

There were just two problems with that plan. The first was finding the time to create animations while trying to get the backend working as quickly as possible – two competing goals that the backend usually won. The second problem kind of snuck up on me around the time I felt like the backend was getting close to being complete, 5 months after starting work on it.

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Most Accurate Timer in Unity

August 7, 2016April 19, 2021 Tantzy GamesCoroutine, InvokeRepeating, Timer, Unity, Update()1 Comment

In our current project, a large part of the functionality relies on a timer. When it boils down to it, the accuracy of the timer isn’t hugely important so long as it’s consistent, but I figured the most accurate method is likely to also be the most consistent.

There are three basic ways to implement a timer in Unity:

I’ve seen quite a bit of discussion about these different methods, but there appears to be some disagreement about what’s best and why. None of the discussions I’ve found have included the results of any tests to compare them or demonstrate accuracy or efficiency.

I’ve been avoiding Update() where practical – using Coroutines or Invoke instead if something doesn’t need to be checked or done for every frame of an object’s life. But with two other methods available, I didn’t know whether a Coroutine with WaitForSeconds or an Invoke is a better way to create a simple delay. It doesn’t really matter too much for one off events, but for repeating events, or if you have lots of them, delays can add up fairly quickly.

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Get the Right Component!

July 31, 2016April 19, 2021 Tantzy GamesGetComponent, UnityLeave a comment

I’ve been using Unity for a while, but I’ve only been coding (for realz) for about a year. I’m currently refactoring some of the code I wrote a year ago, and seeing lots of things I can do better.

One thing I’m seeing way too much of is this:

    public GameObject myButton;
    Image myButtonImage;

    void Start()
    {
        myButtonImage = myButton.GetComponent<Image>();
    }

public GameObject myButton;

Image myButtonImage;

void Start()

{

myButtonImage = myButton.GetComponent<Image>();

}

I’m assigning a GameObject in the inspector, and then getting the Image component in Start().

What’s wrong with this?

In many cases I don’t need the GameObject beyond the Start() method, so having it hanging around is pretty much pointless, and getting all those components at the start (or any other time) causes an unnecessary delay.

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Unity uGui Button Long Press

July 27, 2016July 31, 2016 Tantzy Gameslong press, uGUI, UI, Unity1 Comment

ButtonLongPress

I’ve been spending a fair bit of time with Unity’s UGUI for my latest project. Having wrestled with it for a while, in some ways I wish I’d stuck with NGUI, but I’ve learned a lot along the way so it’s not all bad.

In my UI I have some buttons which open sub menus, but I wanted to be able to rename the menu item as well. Since the target is mobile, right click is out. I thought a long press would be an intuitive way for users to change the name, so I had a quick look to see if anyone had already done this.

I came across this Unity forum post which has a script/component that works quite nicely.

The thing is, I’ve been avoiding including any Update() methods in my UI to keep it as speedy as possible, so I rewrote that long press script to avoid Update() and it’s turned out to be a fair bit quicker as well:

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Mirrored Animation

Most Accurate Timer in Unity

Get the Right Component!

Unity uGui Button Long Press