Unity - Level Design Tools

Intentions

It's been two years I've been learning programming alone and it was time to face some technical challenge, I thought creating some tools in Unity could be a good one.

I started a project inspired by Smugglers (My 2D game prototype) in 3D with the same mechanics.

Since I wanted to have traffic cars, I needed both a road network and basic AIs.

That's how I started coding the tools I'll describe below.

The tools

Road snapper

A simple tool that allows me to snap the road portions I created together, by dragging them beside.

Pretty simple to use, the current state of this tool allows me to build easily what I want really quickly.

However there are still a few issues to be fixed.

Road builder

A more complex tool that gives me the power to build my road network from a sole window.

The current development state of the tools allows me to build even more complex road networks.

These tools are still under development and still need a lot of love, for example, the rotation / position management of the roads being placed are hard coded.

I managed to find a way to generically do that.

Code samples

Here is how I handled the snapping system : each rotations was handled separately, every value was hard coded ...

This sample represent the snapping system for roads to connect to turns, only on one side.

This kind of code was present for 3 different road portion type (Road / Road Turn / Cross Roads) and handled the 3 road portions snapping. It represented more than 1000 lines of code ...

I found a way to ask the road to calculate the current position of their connectors (forward and backward one).

I use this value (a Vector3) and inject it into my snapping functions (below).

Now, I handle the snapping just by calling the functions SnapToRoadConnector()

- No more hard coded values

- No more particular cases

- Saving a lot of space and time

- Easy to debug / trace

There is still a lot to do, and to discover, but this thirst step gave me the will to carry on programming my own tools.

Alexandre CLIQUENNOIS

Technical Designer

Intentions

It's been two years I've been learning programming alone and it was time to face some technical challenge, I thought creating some tools in Unity could be a good one.

I started a project inspired by Smugglers (My 2D game prototype) in 3D with the same mechanics.

Since I wanted to have traffic cars, I needed both a road network and basic AIs.

That's how I started coding the tools I'll describe below.

The tools

Road snapper

A simple tool that allows me to snap the road portions I created together, by dragging them beside.

Pretty simple to use, the current state of this tool allows me to build easily what I want really quickly.

However there are still a few issues to be fixed.

Road builder

A more complex tool that gives me the power to build my road network from a sole window.

The current development state of the tools allows me to build even more complex road networks.

These tools are still under development and still need a lot of love, for example, the rotation / position management of the roads being placed are hard coded.

I managed to find a way to generically do that.

Code samples

Here is how I handled the snapping system : each rotations was handled separately, every value was hard coded ...

This sample represent the snapping system for roads to connect to turns, only on one side.

This kind of code was present for 3 different road portion type (Road / Road Turn / Cross Roads) and handled the 3 road portions snapping. It represented more than 1000 lines of code ...

I found a way to ask the road to calculate the current position of their connectors (forward and backward one).

I use this value (a Vector3) and inject it into my snapping functions (below).

Now, I handle the snapping just by calling the functions SnapToRoadConnector()

- No more hard coded values

- No more particular cases

- Saving a lot of space and time

- Easy to debug / trace

There is still a lot to do, and to discover, but this thirst step gave me the will to carry on programming my own tools.

Intentions

It's been two years I've been learning programming alone and it was time to face some technical challenge, I thought creating some tools in Unity could be a good one.

​

I started a project inspired by Smugglers (My 2D game prototype) in 3D with the same mechanics.

​

Since I wanted to have traffic cars, I needed both a road network and basic AIs.

​

That's how I started coding the tools I'll describe below.

The tools

Road snapper

A simple tool that allows me to snap the road portions I created together, by dragging them beside.

Pretty simple to use, the current state of this tool allows me to build easily what I want really quickly.

​

However there are still a few issues to be fixed.

Road builder

A more complex tool that gives me the power to build my road network from a sole window.

The current development state of the tools allows me to build even more complex road networks.

These tools are still under development and still need a lot of love, for example, the rotation / position management of the roads being placed are hard coded.

​

I managed to find a way to generically do that.

Code samples

Here is how I handled the snapping system : each rotations was handled separately, every value was hard coded ...

This sample represent the snapping system for roads to connect to turns, only on one side.

​

This kind of code was present for 3 different road portion type (Road / Road Turn / Cross Roads) and handled the 3 road portions snapping. It represented more than 1000 lines of code ...

I found a way to ask the road to calculate the current position of their connectors (forward and backward one).

​

I use this value (a Vector3) and inject it into my snapping functions (below).

Now, I handle the snapping just by calling the functions SnapToRoadConnector()

- No more hard coded values

- No more particular cases

- Saving a lot of space and time

- Easy to debug / trace

There is still a lot to do, and to discover, but this thirst step gave me the will to carry on programming my own tools.