Ship 1 Interior

I initially intended to setup the environmental prefabs to be snappable. But when I tested it, I found out they already where. This made most of the level editing a breeze, so the task quickly became - Create the interior of the first ship. Which I also lit and baked. 

And so its done. The next part I'm working on is animating the doors. Of course that also means I need the internal code system started so I can have boolean events to trigger the door state changes. I will also have to animate the code changes.  

I figured it would also be good to share a few highlights, of things that I think are working well. The first one is that the environment was snappable, so placing the bulk of the environment was under an hour. Decoration tweaking and signs added a little more, but I could have spent a long time adding those. 

Then I followed the following scene structure. A root empty name Environment split into Labels, Lighting, Rooms and Interactives. 

Labels is a helper object. Inside are nothing but empties.  One child is named "Security", (top image, bottom room) and all the children are set to a label icon (light aqua). This allows the labels to show up in the editor, so I don't lose track of a rooms purpose. At any point, I can disable "Labels" and they disappear.

Each area is separated into its own room, and under each room is Background and Props. Background are the walls and floor. Props are tables, chairs and signs. This allows me to quickly add items directly to a room.  The room Parent, started at world zero, and after the room was established, I temporarily extracted the items from the room, and snapped the game object to its position where the room actually was.  Then I re-added the items. The benefit of this, is that if I ever want to move the room, its snapping as a parent will align with the rest of the snap positions.  

Interactives are non-static items and can cross rooms, in particular to note, Doors are a part of this. As some ships will be notably larger and there may be other key items in the future, such as an item that can be picked up and carried. 

As a final, you will notice there are no Camera or Light icons in the scene view. And that is because I turned them off.  I don't intend to turn them back on again either. All my lights go into Environment/Lighting. (with a light named for each room, sometimes more than one.)  And my cameras are first item(s) in the root. I know where in the hierarchy to find them, and can very quickly, and this way I don't have the icons covering things up.

What about you? What tricks or systems do you employ to manage a scene? What helps, and what tips sound good (any), but turned out to not work out well over time for you? Feel free to post a comment, or reach out at Game.Dev+Codavore@Live.com and perhaps we can do a video interview and showcase some of them.