There are a few things I'm having trouble with, but in this thread, I have picked two that I'm running into problems with early in development.
First- Unity Nav Meshes. I baked a Nav Mesh using the Unity tools. I set player detection to Use Unity Nav Meshes, yet my player walks up the highest slopes and various terrain. Is there something simple that I should be doing to fix this?
Second- Action Lists, in general. Can I make an empty object and just assign an action list to it? I understand a hotspot has it's own list, as does a cut scene and a trigger. But what if I want to hide a UI element at a certain point, restrict player movement, or add an item to an inventory WITHOUT interacting. Action Lists strike me as needing player input of some kind to begin the process of executing a behavior. What if I simply want something to happen when a scene loads, or just occur in the background as a parallel process?
Comments
You don't want your NavMesh to cover areas the player shouldn't be able to move along. You should be able to configure the shape by tweaking the settings in the Navigation window, but this is more of a Unity issue than an AC one.
Alternatively, you could switch to Mesh Collider pathfinding, which would allow you to define the exact area as a custom mesh. Scripts are available via Google to export your Terrain as a mesh that can be opened in a modelling package e.g. Blender.
Action Lists
If you want to have a general sequence of Actions that can be called upon at any time, use either Cutscenes of ActionList Assets. If you want a Cutscene to run when a scene loads, you can assign it at the top of the Scene Manager.
Otherwise, any Cutscene or ActionList asset can be run by calling its Interact function. This can be done via a custom script, or by using the ActionList: Run Action. This Action can be placed in any other ActionList, which can also be part of a Trigger - which runs when the player or some other object passes through it.
ActionLists also have a When running property at the top, which can be set to Run In Background - essentially causing them to run as a background process, as you've described. If the last Action in an ActionList skips back to the first, the list will run indefinitely until it's stopped with the ActionList: Kill Action.
To run when the scene begins, you must have it run as part of the OnStart Cutscene in the Scene Manager. This is to allow you to differentiate what gets run when the scene begins via player-directed entry vs due to loading a save game.
If you want multiple Cutscenes to run at once, you can use the ActionList: Run in parallel Action to create as many branching paths as you like.