The first update of the new year is a bumper one. Noteworthy features:
This'll be more significant for those working in 3D, but the Timeline integration is now much more robust - and should make it much more feasible to rely on Timeline for your cutscenes. This update provides improvements to AC's Timeline integration in three key ways:
A new "AC MainCamera" track allows you to control which GameCamera that MainCamera is snapped to along a Timeline. Similar to the way the Cinemachine Brain track works, this also supports blending between clips and between the track itself - so you can transition smoothly to and from your regular gameplay camera.
A new "AC Speech" track allows you to trigger character dialogue, which can be voiced and translated via the Speech Manager as normal.
The Engine: Control Timeline Action now allows you to remap individual track bindings, without affecting all others at the same time.
To demonstrate these features, the 3D Demo has also been upgraded to rely on Timeline for its opening and closing cutscenes. It plays essentially the same (the jokes are still bad, I'm afraid), but the ActionLists controlling the cutscenes have been greatly simplified as a result. I've personally found it much easier to build and time cinematics using this tool, over using Actions to control everything. To check out the updated demo, download AC from the Asset Store in Unity 2018.3.
The Manual's new "Working with Timeline" chapter covers this all in more detail, but here's a brief video to show these features off as well:
The Multiple directions? and Do diagonals? options for Sprites Unity-based 2D characters have been merged into the new Facing directions popup field. This allows for a new option.. "Custom"! With this mode, you can hand-pick exactly which directions such a character can face: limiting to just e.g. up-right and down-left, if you so desire.
The "automatic" method of linking speech audio and lipsync files to dialogue lines has traditionally involved placing them in a Resources folder, which is quick to set up but not so great for memory efficiency. A new option allows you to place such files in a Unity asset bundle instead, which is more efficient and should improve startup times. A tutorial on getting up and running with this feature can be found here.
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Comments
And the full changelog..
Version 1.66.1:
Upgrade notes
Timeline
Cameras
Documents
Actions
Menus
Inventory
Characters
Navigation
Editor
Speech
Scripting
Cursor
Misc
'The deselection of inventory items when clicking on Unity UI elements is no longer automatic - the OnMenuElementClick custom event can be used to perform this manually'
is this related to having an inventory item selected and left-clicking anywhere that isn't another inventory item or a hotspot to deselect it?
Only so far as clicking on Unity UI components is concerned.
Awesome update, as always. One thing I've always liked about AC is how it continually keeps moving forwards while still maintining its tight focus
I'm particularly grateful for the change to the way character direction facing is now handled, as it answers a half-request I made a while back (even if the change wasn't actually implemented in response to that particular request)
I had some problems implementing the change for one of my projects which uses a Custom Animation Engine, because the new fields weren't appearing on the actor prefabs, but I surprised myself by working out that I needed to override CharSettingsGUI in the Custom Engine, and after that everything was fine...
‘Menus are hidden while saving, to prevent them from showing in the screenshot. I'll add the ability for individual menus to opt out of this, so that you can pick and choose which menus get hidden.’
Thank you for another great update! So finally it is time for me to switch from Unity 2017.4 to 2018.3 which I didn't want to do until there is a feature that I really need. But now as timeline gets integrated so well into AC I can do my cutscenes with AC and Unity. I used Slate for the cutscenes until now but am happy to get them done in Unity and AC directly. Slate gave me some headaches here and there.
The possibility to give inventory items to the player at runtime is a big time saver while testing scenes, by the way!
See the Hide in screenshots? Menu property.
A simple addition, but I thought it'd be useful
Thanks Chris! I'm less than a month away from release and I'm a bit doubtful if I should update, but seeing as I'm currently running the beta version I think making a back up and updating would be the best option!
Awesome!
Wow! Even if i'm on very older version, this is a great update on the beginning of the year. Thanks Chris
It shouldn't be - clicking on verbs deselects the inventory anyway. This is more for e.g. buttons.
Can you give a specific example?
If you bring up a menu while an item is selected, you can just use the Inventory: Deselect Action to de-select the item in the menu's ActionList when turn on field - but that's unrelated.
As the upgrade notes say, you can hook into the OnMenuElementClick event to deselect through script. How you use that event is up to you - you can have it deselect any time it's run, or just when e.g. a Button element is clicked on.
Wow, great update!
I'm very happy with fixing the custom speech tags bug, which I rely heavily on. It's a great tool for controling the cutscenes. Timeline seems like even better.
Moving speech files to AssetBundles is also pretty important.
This update makes so many valuable changes, it's worth to update even in the mid-project, I think.
Well, AdventureCreator is definitely moving in the right direction. So far the best tool for adventure type games, and getting better with each update.
"Added: Ability to tweak a Tint Map's color with a modifier".
This is a great addition. Would also be nice if you added an actionlist command to change the tint at runtime, even better if that had a gradual timer so you could do sunset/sunrise effects in 2D.
@ZcheK: Since the color is now exposed as a property, you can do all that using an Animator or Timeline.
Version 1.66.2:
Upgrade note
Changelog