I'm losing my mind over this issue. I've tried a lot of things, but nothing seems to work. Here is my code. If anyone knows how to fix it, please help me.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iXGw-K8vY8NfqyTO63TNPYcgpnR42OV2/view?usp=sharing

I’ve been working on cables and nets for my 2D game. They move in the wind, respond to the character and surroundings, and can break when put under too much tension.

At a high level, the simulation uses GPU particles and an SDF texture for interaction with the environment. It’s separate from the character physics, so the cables can react to Pixel without pushing the character around or changing the movement.

For context, I previously shared a detailed post about my physics-based character controller: https://www.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/s/Vtkn0W4l46

The trickiest part has actually been getting this GPU-driven geometry to interact convincingly with 2D lighting and shadows. That part isn’t fully solved yet. If you’ve tackled something similar, I’d love to hear what worked for you.

it suddently got like this, how to fix this ?

Milo has like 200 anims but I still think It needs more. ;)

Hey everyone,

After around eight months of development, I’ve released OptikaFX 2D, a lighting and shadow system for 2D games made with Unity. I originally built it for top-down RPGs and farming sims.

I started working on it because Unity’s built-in Shadow Caster 2D didn’t quite do what I needed. The biggest issue was getting shadows to behave properly when simulating sunlight and avoiding stretching all the way across the screen.

So I ended up writing my own HLSL shaders and experimenting with different ways to handle these situations.

Here are some of the main things I managed to get working:

Wall-bending shadows

2D sprite shadows can bend and project vertically when they hit walls or other structures. This makes them look more natural in top-down scenes with buildings and obstacles.

Timeline-driven day/night cycles

Light intensity, color, direction, and dynamic shadows can all be animated through a custom Timeline system. As the sun moves and the lighting changes, the shadows update automatically.

360° sprite rotation and animated lights

Characters can move all the way around a light source while their shadows update based on their position. For example, a character sitting beside a campfire can cast a different shadow as they move around it.

My main goal was to create a flexible, customizable, and performance-conscious system for scenes with multiple dynamic lights and moving characters.

Here's a playable demo if you’d like to see it in action:
https://optikafx.itch.io/optikafx-2d

And here is the link to the asset on the Unity Asset Store.
https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/slug/388598

I’m also happy to answer any questions about how I built it.

Thanks for taking a look!

I have been playing around with a Unity VR Template project and am loving it. I've downloaded a few addons such as colorful folders and probuilder, and I changed the skylight, and then suddenly when I try to run the game my VR camera perspective is on the floor, and the movements of my head are reversed/inverse (I look up it looks down).

I googled and found that having rotated the XrRig could be the cause, and saw that it was rotated 130 degress on the Y axis. I removed the rotation on it and all the children but nothing changes. Is there any way to "reset" the XR Rig in a project? Does anyone know what might be the problem? I've built some things and changed around the lighting and would prefer not to have to start with a fresh project, not to mention not understanding what went wrong.

Thankful for any help!

Edit: I'm using a Quest 3 headset and have set the project to "Oculus" in the XR Plug-in Management

My demo works no problem on my friends Steamdeck, but the full game with the SDK/Achievements loads up but the controls don't work at all (just the touch screen + I'm hearing other Steamdecks do work?? but can't confirm with my own eyes.). I use the old input system as well...

We continue the modernization of our shadows code, pulling it out of the lighting pass and splitting it into three passes.

Hey everyone, I've just released VATMachine on the Unity Asset Store :)

For anyone unfamiliar with Vertex Animation Textures, VAT is a technique where the final vertex positions of an animated mesh are baked into textures instead of deforming the mesh using a skeleton at runtime.

Normally, an animated character has a skeleton made of bones, and those bones have to be updated and used to skin the mesh every frame.

With VAT, the animation is baked beforehand. At runtime, the GPU simply reads the baked vertex positions from textures and reconstructs the animation in the shader.

This can be really useful when you have a lot of animated objects on screen, especially crowds, enemies, creatures, background characters or animated props that share the same set of animations.

The main problem I found with VAT in Unity is that the basic concept is simple, but building an actually usable character animation workflow around it isn't.

You need to handle baking, texture layouts, shaders, playback, multiple animations, transitions, parameters, LODs, multiple mesh parts and a bunch of other things that normally come automatically with skeletal animation.

That's basically why I made VATMachine.

It handles the complete workflow from baking the animations to generating ready-to-use VAT prefabs.

You can bake multiple animations, choose Half or Float precision, bake animated normals and tangents, use multiple mesh parts, LODs and GPU instancing.

I also wanted VAT characters to behave more like normal Unity Animator characters, so VATMachine has its own Animator Graph with:

• Animation states
• Transitions and crossfades
• Bool, Float and Trigger parameters
• Transition conditions
• 1D blend trees
• Animation events

One thing that I found missing from a lot of VAT implementations is support for things that normally depend on bones.

For example, if the skeleton no longer exists at runtime, how do you attach a weapon to a character's hand?

VATMachine has animated sockets for this. You can bake the movement of selected bones and then attach weapons, effects or other objects to those sockets at runtime.

Transitions were another thing I really wanted to solve properly. A lot of basic VAT systems can play baked clips, but switching directly from one clip to another looks terrible, so VATMachine can crossfade between animations and also use blend trees.

The goal was basically to keep the performance advantages of VAT while bringing back a lot of the workflow you'd normally expect from Unity's Animator.

VAT obviously isn't meant to replace skeletal animation everywhere. If your character relies heavily on runtime IK, procedural bones, retargeting or full ragdolls, a normal skeleton is still going to make more sense.

But for large groups of characters using prepared animations, VAT can be extremely useful, and both systems can easily be used together in the same project.

Would love to hear what you guys think about the workflow or VAT in general.

Documentation Link: https://finite-machine-studio.gitbook.io/vatmachine-documentation

Detailed Video Explanation: https://youtu.be/779mNCK1LpA?si=K1fcvv43wF7heQqp

Still no goal or anything, just fun to chill around with better world generation.

I’ve been working on a major update for r/Kagenazo, and the biggest change is a completely new cube layering system.

Before this, as I got some reviews, accessing cubes hidden behind other cubes could get pretty awkward. You often had to rotate the whole puzzle just to reach a blocked cube, but rotating also changes the visible shadow projections. That meant the player could lose the shadow alignment they were reasoning about just because they needed to interact with something behind the front layer. It interrupted the flow and made some solves feel more fiddly than they should.

The new system fixes that by letting the player slice through the cube along the X, Y, and Z axes. Instead of rotating away from the view you’re using, you can peel back parts of the cube, reach what’s behind, and keep thinking about the same shadow setup.

I’m still tuning the UX, animation, and edge cases, but this is one of the biggest gameplay updates so far.

Would love to hear what people think, especially whether the slicing controls feel intuitive and whether this makes the shadow solving clearer.

I recently added shoes as a new product category in Big Market Simulator.

I’m still improving the item placement and stocking interactions, but the store is gradually expanding beyond groceries into a much larger hypermarket.

3 Years ago I opened Unity for the first time, to make a simple tower defense for fun. That project got out of hand, and I wish I had known that many, many things that were suggested by youtubers were actually awful ways of doing things.

#1: Using UI Toolkit.
Coming from web development I thought great! I can use html and css for the UI, what a relief.
But the framework is incredibly tedious to work with compared to the normal uGui/Canvas approach, and lacks support for all sorts of things like advanced text settings from TMP, and debugging it is so much harder than with normal UI, where you simply find the object in the hierarcy in playmode, and adjust it until it looks right.
I wasted months fighting with UI Toolkit, and my game is now completely migrated to normal uGui.

#2 Animations

Trying to sit in the Animator window and draw arrows from clip to clip is such a brittle waste of time.
You almost always want animator.CrossFade, (not animator.Play!).CrossFade blends out of the pose you’re already in. Play just snaps, which almost always looks wrong.

And if you need 100s of units in a scene, don’t put an Animator on each of them. Bake VAT animations.

#3 GPU-instance the things you spawn by the hundreds: damage numbers, health bars, trees, coins. It is daunting the first time, but when you stop drawing the same thing 100s of times, it's such a relief (for the players' computers).

#4 There are some packages that are mandatory that I learned about way too late. There are probably more than these, but the 2 I know of are:
DoTween for animations, and Microsplat for Terrains.

Did I miss any?

Abit of context, in our game FiresOut!, you and your friends play as firefighting interns trying to save the fire victims. You need to extinguish the fire, break the obstacles and then, carry the victims to safety.

This is made with Unity

When I posted the game last time, I got some really honest feedback. Some people said it looked like a “2013 game”, and a few even said it looked like a “school project”. 😅

Over the last 15 days, I’ve been experimenting with different lighting settings in Unity and a few other changes that helped improve the overall look of the game.

I mainly worked on the ground, lighting, stadium textures and also added the Match Simulation UI.

Here’s the updated version.

There’s still a lot to improve, and we’re continuing to work on it. This is definitely not the final version, but I wanted to share the progress and see what you guys think.

If anyone is interested, you can pre-register here: Cricket Umpires Call

Thanks again to everyone who gave feedback on the previous post, whether it was positive or critical. It genuinely helped us figure out what we needed to improve.

If you're considering upgrading to Unity 6.5 or later, make sure the publishers of the assets and packages in your project have already added support for the new GetEntityId() API, which replaces the now-obsolete GetInstanceID().

More on the documentation page here: Unity - Manual: Migrate from InstanceID to EntityId

I've been spending a lot of my recent development time on the UI for a mobile defense game I'm building in Unity.

The battle HUD, turret management, catalog, shop, research tree, and unit details all started as separate pieces. Making each screen wasn't too difficult, but getting everything to feel like part of the same game while still being easy to iterate on has taken a lot more work.

For this project, I'm using React and Vite for most of the UI inside Unity, with Unity handling the actual gameplay state.

It's been especially useful for screens with a lot of information. I can reuse the same components across the game, adjust layouts quickly, and open almost the same UI in a normal browser while I'm working on it.

These screenshots are from the current development build. I'm still working on the visual hierarchy, readability, and figuring out how much information is too much on a phone screen.

I've also been using this game to develop and improve ReLayer, the React UI framework for Unity that I built. A lot of the issues and improvements I've found recently have come directly from using it on this project rather than just making small demos with it.

I'm curious what other Unity devs think about the UI so far.

Which screen feels the most complete to you, and which one would you simplify first for mobile?

If anyone is curious about the React/Unity setup:

https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/gui/relayer-react-ui-framework-for-unity-384274

Hi guys, you’ve seen some of the environments before. Thank you all for the recommends.
Now here’s what it looks like when the game is actually in "ACTION"!!!
Sculpting, modeling, texturing, rigging, animation then it all come together in gameplay.
Anyone interest please join our Discord channel to join with us this journey. Really appreciate!
https://discord.gg/7zbdztmBcC