September 2012 – ray barrera

Visual Studio 2012 Surprises!

The Visual Studio 2012 product site is garbage. It’s hard to navigate, doesn’t give you meaningful information and doesn’t really boast about some of the coolest new features. I use VS2012 when I’m developing on Windows because it’s awesome. Most of my work is in Unity, so I have it set as the default editor, so when I open scripts in Unity, they open in VS2012 by default. A few days ago, I happened to double click an .fbx file on accident, and I was surprised to see the VS2012 loading screen popup. I figured it would open the FBX as a text file, and that would be that, but it was much more interesting than that.

More PlayMaker Tips

PLAYMAKER TIPS It’s easy to mistake PlayMaker for a visual scripting tool a la Kismet or uScript, but it is much, much more than that. In fact, I can see a visual scripting tool being used hand in hand with PlayMaker. PM is a tool to help you create state machines. It encourages you to develop games using a slightly different mentality–use states for everything! Of course, it’s not feasible to put all the weight on PM, but there are specific scenarios in which it shines. For example, handling input! Here are some quick tips to get the most out of PlayMaker:

PlayMaker and NavMesh

Either I’m blind, or PlayMaker doesn’t come with an Action for the Unity NavMesh feature. In either case, it’s only a few lines of code, which you can find below. The only thing you may want to change, depending on how you’re using the action, is whether or not to include the Finish() method in there. This will exit the state if you have the transition set up, and you may or may not want to do that. Here is the code: