Arduino to Unity Project Part 9: Adding to the scene + jumping

Adding to the scene

I had now added two analog thumbsticks as input and could could use them to control a FPS Camera in Unity. However the very simple Unity scene I had created where making it difficult to se how well this worked. To be able to improve and adjust the details of the interaction I needed a better scene. I went to the Unity Asset Store: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/

This store is great, you can buy assets and directly from the store import them into you Unity project. Since this was a school project, I chose a scene which someone made available on the store for free:
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/6459.

As described in earlier post, adding a script to an object is as easy as dragging it on to it. So after opening the scene in Unity, all I had to do was drag my C# script on to the first person camera included in the scene and then I could start using it with my controller just as in my previous much simpler scene. Great!

However, this scene had terrain. The ground was not at the same level everywhere but the where hills and valleys. As long as I was moving to lower levels everything was fine. But when I tried to go up a hill, to a higher levelled terrain my character would fall through the terrain and of the whole plane to an endless fall. As I have mentioned before, I am a novice in Unity. I started investigating if I had to add some kind of physics component to my FPS Camera object. There is something called "Rigid Body" and something else called "Collider". I was a little bit confused by this because whatever I added, I still fell right through. I tested to control the FPS Camera with the mouse and keyboard again and I did not fall through terrain, so it had to have something to do with my script.

I compared the movement of the FPS Camera Object using the mouse & keyboard vs my controller to see how they differed and then understood something that might be very obvious to someone with more experience with Unity: The FPS Camera asset object that comes with Unity really consist of two sub objects called Graphics and Main Camera. When moving the mouse left to right that rotates the whole FPS Camera object. However when moving the mouse forward/backwards only the Main Camera sub-object is rotated. So to replicate that action with my controller I needed to access the camera sub-object. You can do this by the function GameObject.Find() and then use "/" to move down in the hierarchy of you game object. So in my case it was :
cam = GameObject.Find ("First Person Controller/Main Camera");

This worked!

Jumping

However, as I was investigating physics and terrain in Unity I found this checklist for people with problem with falling with terrain:
http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/147687/checklist-object-or-character-is-falling-through-t.html

It says that it is bad practice to use transform.Translate() in a script to move a character and it is better to use CharacterController.SimpleMove . It turns there are built-in functions to do what I was thinking up how to do in Unity(of course there are!) I ended up using CharactedController.Move instead and I could pretty much replicate the example script given on the Unity documentation page.

This example script also came with a jump button implementation. The CharacterController-class of Unity there is boolean .isGrounded to check if the character is on the ground or not. We check if the character is on the ground(you can't jump if you are not on the ground in this implementation) then we check if the button of the right analog stick is pressed. I think I mentioned this earlier, but the thumbsticks input sensors more than having the two analog potentiometers also have a digital button which switches between 0 and 1 when you press down on the analog stick. So if the character is on the ground and the button is pressed, we use the CharactedController.Move  to move the character along the y-axis resulting in a "jump". Then we move the character down again over time, which represents the end of the jump when gravity is returning the character to the ground.