Sorry if what follows are a barrage of what might turn out to be stupid questions (in the sense that there's some incredibly immediate resource I should have seen and missed detailing exactly this)
I picked up PlayMaker yesterday morning, spent the day watching some videos from the company's incredibly well documented YouTube channel and started experimenting today. I only got Unity free a week ago so I'm as novice as they come at the moment.
As a testbed, I'm making a rudimentary railshooter in the vein of Starfox64. "Making" in this current sense meaning make the ship move along said rail, then work out how to do more advanced things like actually controlling the thing as it does. I'm away from the computer with the messy project on it but I don't have anything in there in presentable format anyway. So, here's a quick graph showing what I was thinking would work:
http://i.imgur.com/GZaxLN3.pngThe idea is that the player character is made up of a two-object construction consisting of a Tether and the Ship itself. The idea I had was that the Tether would follow a rail along the Z axis (which I kind of know how to do - I found iTween has a move action that makes a path out of waypoints that works swell for this sort of thing) while the player controls the ship's X, Y and local rotation variables. Extensively, it'd be nice for the player to be able to slow down and speed up the Tether's speed along the rail dynamically (i.e. break and boost) but I'm getting ahead of myself. Right now the issue I'm facing is making the ship actually stay within a certain distance of the Tether.
I managed an unsatisfactory solution by getting a vector variable, using that to control X and Y and having the ship's FSM GetDistance every frame and contrast this against a float switch. If the switch was triggered, an event notified another state to move the ship towards the rail a bit (1 or 2 units closer than the max distance the switch was checking for) and then send back to the main state. This works fine, except that hitting the limit set produces the effect that the ship is "bumping" against an invisible barrier. Some way to have the ship actually hit a constant maximum limit in a smooth fashion would be preferable. Is there a more appropriate action to cover this?
The other tethering issue I'm having is how to construct a good and proper third person camera for a more freeform, conventional third person flier (on the rail the camera would possibly just follow the Tether). I managed to get the camera to look with the ship in a pleasing manner by dropping a game object out in front of the ship and having the camera SmoothLookAt that, but I'm not sure what is the best way to keep the camera behind the ship but in a manner where it can "sway" or "lag" from side to side as the ship turns rather than occupying a rigid position in space local to the ship itself (which gets nauseating). Actually is there a tutorial out there I overlooked specifically about constructing third person flying vehicles in playMaker?
Thanks for the help fellas.
EDIT: This fellow has the sort of thing I'm trying to describe in that second point:
The term slipped me by earlier. It's called a "chase cam" that I was trying to construct, where the camera has a limited degree of rotation behind the ship it can swing to rather than being locked to an absolute point in space behind it.