A little new tool, that will help you to gain more control over the way the player can interact with virtual scenes in Unity 3d.
Zone Controller is a collection of Unity scripts which allows game developers to control the dynamics of their scenes like never before.
The main concept is based on creation regions of your scene (Zones) which contain configuration information about how all of the other effects in the Scene should behave when the player is in that Zone. Zone Controller makes the entire process of creating these Zones extremely easy and does not require the user to write a single line of code.
At runtime there is a Master Zone Controller in the scene which monitors all of the individual Zones you setup and when a Zone is triggered by a player entering it, the Master Controller will smoothly and gradually transition the values from the current state into the values you specified in the inspector.
I worked hard on getting this right from the beginning and had 4 semi public beta releases of the product before releasing it. Zone Controller has 3 main methods of discovering information about the GameObject/Components you choose.
Zone Controller will work with fields,properties and methods that are:
Public, Private, Static or Instance
Zone Controller presently supports the following types:
Int, Float, Bool, Color, Vector2, Vector3, Vector4, AudioClip, String, Enumerations, Texture and Texture2D
So for example, if you are using a Post Processing image effect like a Color Correction script, Zone Controller can allow you to change the properties of that component at runtime and give you different color grading settings for indoor or outdoor regions of your Scene.
Zone Controller is intended to be use as many times per scene as you like. Presently only 1 active Zone at a time is supported, so you can have as many of them as you like. I have an update in the works to support nested Zones, where the Master Controller will average settings of multiple layers of Zones within other Zones. I did extensive testing with Zone Controller in my development and found virtually not impact on the runtime, as you only modify the items you select. The Editor itself has a small bit of overhead when discovering new components as it has to do deep introspection on Game Objects you select.
So, Zone Controller comes in two versions, Free and Pro.
Obviously as an asset developer I would like to make enough money to fund my research time, so it’s advantageous of me to make the Pro version more compelling than the Free. That being said the Free version is not crippled in any way. It offers all of the core functionality of the Pro version but with limitations. Mainly the Free version is limited in:
Without overestimating the usefulness of Zone Controller, I can say that since Zone Controller can allow you to control ANY other Unity component, the uses are limitless. There are applications for Zone Controller in almost any game and scenario. However most of my users have found the most benefit from Zone Controller in:
In addition to controlling properties of components, Zone Controller also allows you to fire off events to scripts when you trigger zones, so Zone Controller has been used to track game events such as cut scenes when a user reaches a certain part of the map.
So yeah, the uses for Zone Controller are really only limited to the imagination of the game developer. And again, this is all done without writing a single line of code.
As it was mentioned earlier you can get two versions, Free and Pro. You can also check out documentation.