Beta is almost done! I have been bestowed with another technical piece of wisdom about Unity3D. The revelation came while trying to fix a bug and realizing that the best prevention to the problem would exploit the cause of a bug I described in a previous post.

The current problem had to do with the scaling of enemy characters being skewed because they were children of a scalable object. Essentially, the best prevention for this bug is to NEVER put enemy characters as children of anything with the exception of empty game objects that act as containers. I wanted to avoid using GameObject.Find() for triggering enemies with my trigger volumes so I had been relying on this.FindComponentsInChildren, but after a few scene saves the characters began to warp according to their rotation.

The previous bug led to the discovery that even empty objects with children can participate in collisions if their children have components capable of collision. So the best way to prevent my current problem is to make an empty game object the parent for both the enemies and the trigger volume. The collision for the trigger volume would be applied to the parenting empty game object, but the enemies would be at no risk of being magically rescaled while I am not looking at them.

In summary, I have made one step towards a best practice for anyone that uses a similar workflow to create trigger volumes in Unity3D. First create an empty game object for each trigger volume at the origin and name these containers for the specific encounters. Place any custom trigger scripts on these containers. Then create cubes or other shapes for your trigger volumes and make them children of the appropriately named container. Enemies can be placed in the scene in an idling state and be changed to their attacking state using the script on the container when the encounter is triggered. This is easy and cheaply accomplished by calling this.FindComponentsInChildren() and using a for loop to iterate through the array that is returned to activate each one in sequence.

Space Marine is easy to pick up and play, leading to an engaging gameplay experience that gradually increases to an insanely high level of difficulty. I played on medium difficulty without much previous experience of action titles that combined tactics and timing challenges.The combat system is taught in manageable chunks and forces the player to progress past the basic mechanics in the early levels, allowing them to focus on each new element of combat one at a time. The level design creates a wide variety of encounter types while reusing the same combat elements. Sometimes the payoff is delayed further than most action games would dare - fore example, you get grenades and then immediately want to destroy the Ork drop ship, but they are invincible until you fight one in an extremely rewarding encounter more than 30 minutes later (one of my two favourite parts of the game is killing the first drop ship). Ultimately, this payoff is more rewarding because the player feels the limits of their character's abilities reduce dramatically throughout their progression through the game.

Pietro just discovered a very unusual fact about Unity3D relating to colliders. This has too many consequences to cover fully here, so I will leave it to you to consider them.

Any collider that is attached to a child of a parent object is inextricably part of the collider for the parent object.

This means you can have a collision with an empty object that children with colliders. It also can lead to erroneous assumptions about how damage is applied by melee weapons - which is what happened in our case.

The basic idea here is that to transfer a site, you are probably going to have to talk to lots of customer service people and wait for a few deadlines. Make it easier on yourself by updating the name and contact information through your domain handing service as soon as you own the site!