Assignment 5: Make a scene interactive with PlayMaker

Assignment 5: Make a scene interactive with PlayMaker


Larissa Urbiks

My aim of this assignment was to let my soldiers discover the island. Making my soldiers walk was more difficult than I thought and I spend in total more than six hours before they finally did what I wanted. My mistake was to add an FSM and states to the soldier and not to another object. After Professor Pacheco told me that, I created a cube and added the FSM and states to this object. The soldier is my Game Object now. I wanted to let him walk to the treasure box, and therefore I chose a cube near the chest as "Transform Position," but in this case, he walked through all trees. Since I wanted him to walk around the trees, I decided to stop off on our way to the treasure and placed a cube there, his “Stop 1”. So, my “Trigger Exit” was this cube and my “Finished” was the cube next to the treasure chest. It didn’t work out. I can't even tell why because so many things didn't work out. Therefore, I decided to set two different FSMs for the different trail sections and deleted the third stage. I created a new cube next to “Stop 1” and set a new FSM on it. My soldier walks now to “Stop 1”, stays there until the user follows him and when the user passes the cube next to the soldier, he continues walking.

In the end, it worked well, but I don’t like that I need to stay at my cubes until the soldier arrived at their destination. That’s why I had the idea to enlarge my box collider so the trigger won’t stop when I follow the soldier. As you can guess – it didn’t work out. My soldiers skipped the first stop and walked again through the trees to the treasure chest. I couldn’t find the reason for that and believe me; I tried to. There is also the curious fact that I set up the same speed for both actions but action number two (when the soldier walks from Stop 1 to the chest) happens much faster. I have the feeling that PlayMaker lives its own life.

But I discovered an exciting function while trying to make my soldier walk. As I said, I added the FSM and states to him first. If you don’t add a third state with the transition finished to it but the action “I tween move to” to the second stage you can control how the soldier walks. It is because the box collider is around the soldier and the trigger enters, and exit just work when you’re in the green frame. That has the effect that you think you control what he does. I think, this is not meant to be, but it’s quite cool.