A VERY Big Day

A few days ago, I realized that not only did the Unity Assets Store carry 3rd party products, but that Unity’s audio mixer probably (still a bit fuzzy) can load 3rd party audio plugins, and for sure, there are audio plugin type of things available in Unity. We are on the verge of releasing our new Dynamic EQ

So for the next beta build, I had Dave also run a Unity build.

Again, like so much on this journey, goolge really didn’t get me much in the way of info on how or even IF you could run plugins this way in Unity. As much as people tell you to google stuff, unity in google is a special sort of weird vacuum, where the very basics are hard to find, but much esoterica jumps right off the page at you. Eventually I was able to get our plugin to load and pass audio

But no GUI. And we need to get our values to scale properly and hopefully relabel in this 0–1 constraint (likely very doable). I have a few doors to knock on to get the GUI running, but again, the lack of even examples or confirmation that its even a possibility from google was a scary thing.

We shall see.

A good part of today was spent editing video and especially, audio for video! Finally, something I excel at. I pretty much flew through this, and if I say so myself, I am liking my cuts better than the instructions. Cinematography is getting a lot more fun…except:

WOW that timeline editor is bug city! You never knew if you did something wrong, or if it was time to restart unity. Often times you didn’t have to ask because Unity would just happily crash right to the desktop.

And where it isn’t buggy, it defies conventions. Big time. I watched our instructor struggle thru what should have been basics, but Unity’s timeline and especially keyframe system fought him constantly.

Again BASIC functions and info were hard to find on google, and what little I could was often developers or users pushing back against sensible basic implementation. I have no idea why.

As far as I could google, there is no play/stop mode, only play/pause. Eek!

But really, keyframes take the cake. I tried in vain to find a hotkey to drop keyframes. Especially a keyframe that adds both position AND rotation information to avoid yet another bug (feature?) that can really wreck your previous work. Really. Drop keyframe.

The pushback I saw in the forums against basic keyframe features you’d find in any video editor or DAW was stupifying. Users actively called me out for asking about it. Kind of crazypants, like watching audiophiles gush over 30,000$ speaker cables that are no better than 15cents per foot zipcode. Troo Beliebers? Also there is very little in the way of a sensible workflow to deal with editing keyframe properties that I could find.

And markers? If I told you, you wouldn’t believe me.

It does seem like it might be possible to script in some sensible functionality, and THAT might just be the ideal class project.