playMaker

Author Topic: 2D Platformers on Mobile  (Read 2381 times)

marcos

  • 1.2 Beta
  • Full Member
  • *
  • Posts: 199
2D Platformers on Mobile
« on: May 17, 2012, 10:10:16 AM »
Hey,

I wanted to set myself a mini-project for the afternoon, so I spent a bit of time just fiddling around with the CharacterMotor and PlatformInputController actions and scripts and managed to get a controller that felt pretty nice when playing on computer. I'm just wondering if anyone has managed to find a way to easily transfer these settings to an iOS control scheme?

I could get the left and right movement working easily enough with Jean's JoystickBridge action, though it felt a bit different. However, I couldn't find a way to get playMaker to tell my courageous capsule to jump around, as it seems jump is handled by Unity's native input manager.

It would be nice if there was a way we could seamlessly port such a controller to iOS, then again maybe there is and I'm just tired! So I guess what I'm asking is, is there?

Mark

jeanfabre

  • Administrator
  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 15500
  • Official Playmaker Support
Re: 2D Platformers on Mobile
« Reply #1 on: May 28, 2012, 01:49:34 PM »
Hi,

 Unfortunatly, There is no easy way out of this, touch screen management and api was done in such a way that it's something totally different and incompatible with the current input system of Unity... This is a real shame, and actually I think a big mistake, maybe they are planning on making a better input manager but I doubt it very much... I guess every "serious" project are rolling there own input system. Even I on my first project has to create my own input manager to work on top of all this mess...

 The problems boils down to the fact that existing controllers relies on the fact that the developer is using the scripting environment, and for this everything is just working fine, but because playmaker is a visual development environment, it makes it then very difficult for using existing controllers.

The solutions are to either

1: build your controller in playmaker. This is fine, but do require that extra effort ( when you know that a controller is sitting here with everything you need...)

2: build a bridge to make that controller accessible from playmaker environment, that is either create actions, or proxies ( more on this if you need examples, just shout, and I'll give more details)

3: Have you studied the various samples, videos and screencast on the topic. Surely, you will find enough materials to build your own controller all in PlayMaker

Bye,

 Jean