After it’s release back in March, there has been a lot of progress and features added to BuildR so I thought it was time to release a new trailer for it.
BuildR Carcassonne Generator
Current progress on this example included in the BuildR asset. I’ve changed the colours so they are better suited to the style I’m aiming for. I’ve worked on getting the offsetting of buildings working correctly now. I also introduced frame geometry for wall section openings which made a lot of sense for these exposed timber designs.
BuildR Carcassonne Project – With Added Buildings!
We have buildings! The BuildR Carcassonne project has come alive and BuildR is now generating building mesh data for all the buildings. There is much to add and improve on, but I’m super happy with how it’s working. This example took less than 10 seconds to generate.
Better Vector3 Console Output
When you Debug.Log(myVector3); Unity will output it’s contents to the console with only a single decimal point. This might be fine 90% of the time however sometimes you want to see smaller vectors. The simplest method to get more decimals is making use of the Vector3 ToString override which allows you to specify a string formatting value so to get 5 decimal points, you would write Debug.Log(myVector3.toString(“F5”));
BuildR Gets Custom Models
BuildR 2.0 Released
BuildR 2 allows users to create buildings within Unity without the need of external modelling programs. It has a quick and simple workflow to create buildings with ease. You can edit and preview everything within the Unity editor. Generate full interiors, curve facades and have overhanging sections. After 4 years, I’ve taken all the great feedback and knowledge, rebuilt this asset from the ground up, to create something that is flexible and powerful.
BuildR 2.0 in the works
I’d like to officially announce that BuildR 2.x is in production!
I’m currently building a new version from the ground up. Over the years I’ve received some amazing feedback from you guys and while I’ve striven and successfully added a lot of your requests, there is a lot that can be added that was either just a lot of work or just impossible with the current BuildR code architecture.
BuildR started out as a way to generate simple buildings to fill your levels. I didn’t want to just create square buildings like some programs, I wanted complex shapes supported. Over the years – and it’s been over three already! – interiors, stairwells, custom windows, Substance textures, runtime generation, and many more things were added. But I’ve now reached the point where we need to start again, picking the best bits of BuildR 1.x and creating something that can support some of the things you’ve requested over the years.
Here is a list that I’m committed to doing. They may not all appear in 2.x but I currently have no reason to believe these won’t make the final build.
- Curved facades
- Interior generation including walls, doors
- Overhanging sections
- Overhanging roofs
- Deep support for custom geometry
- Strong support for procedural runtime generation
I’ve been on the store for over 5 years now and a Unity developer for much longer so there are many things I would like to implement for this. There will also be significantly tighter integration with the Unity editor, expect a lot more drag and dropping and simple ways to create buildings.
Price wise it’s probably going to be a $100 asset with an upgrade path from 1.x for about $10 though I’m still weighing all these options right now and this could change. ETA is maybe an early beta by the end of August for people who want to try it out and test it for me. Hit me up on my email with your BuildR invoice number if you’re interested.
Moving to Edinburgh
As of today we’ve moved to Edinburgh. We’ve said goodbye to London, our friends and family and we’re going to start a new life here in Scotland.
More, if not all of my work will be remote now which will be equally new and old to me after two years in Hong Kong where I didn’t contract but worked on mostly Asset Store products and looked after our daughter.
It’s a very exciting time and we’re looking forward to living in a house after years of living in flats!
Unity Tip: Don’t Always Use Update
The Update function in MonoBehaviour is where you’ll end up running a lot of you game code. However, it’s always worth asking yourself does the code need to be running every frame? Some parts you can get away with running a few times a second or event every few seconds. Every time you’re building something into Update, understand if this is where it must be.
Level of detail code is a very obvious one that you might only want to update every second or so. I’ll usually run InvokeRepeating for that.
Unity Tip: Choose a Project Before Opening Unity
If you’re switching between projects or planning to create a new one when starting Unity, it can take a while for it to warm up and allow you to do this. One way to open another project is to find a scene in that project and open Unity from that. Of course that’s not as quick as clicking on the Unity icon on your desktop (you do have a shortcut on your desktop right???) as you have to find a scene buried within the needed project.
If you press and hold Alt when you open Unity it will open the projects dialog instead of the last opened project. here you can select a different project or create a new one!
