Gaia Changes Scene Navigation

[Zaddo]

When I am in the scene view and press the up arrow key, the camera starts moving forward, then when I release the up arrow key, the camera continues to move, until I press the escape key. After a couple hours stuffing around deleting packages from my project, I found that this behaviour stopped after I deleted the procedural worlds folder.

 

Somehow Gaia or Gena is hijacking how the scene view navigation keys work. Is there a way to take back control without the extreme measure of deleting procedural worlds assets?

[Zaddo]

I worked out what was happening.  I have a control scene that has no terrain. I additively opened up one of the terrain scenes and started decorating it with Gaia.  The runtime components were also added to my control scene. When I just have the control scene open (now with the runtime components), this is when the navigation breaks.   There is something in the runtime components that is causing this behaviour. 

 

I deleted the runtime components and this stops the problem. But when I go back to edit a terrain scene with Gaia, the runtime components get added again to the control scene.  How do I stop Gaia adding the runtime components to the control scene. (Please don't tell me to close it when editing terrains, both need to be active for my workflow)

 

Note, this is another example of how Gaia goes too far with its invasiveness.  The user has no control over what Gaia assimilates. I am new to Gaia and it is becoming borderline if the problems caused by Gaia's uncontrollable invasiveness are worth the benefits of the world building tools.  In other posts you recommend running dual projects for users that just want the world building features of Gaia.  A gaia project for build the world, and the game project, exporting the world and importing it into the game project once built.  For anyone that builds the world iteratively, this adds enormous overhead.

 

You really should allow Gaia to be configured so it just does the world building, without ANY runtime presence. Not all your customers want to become a full citizen of the Gaia collective.

 

[Peter]

Hi @Zaddo, from past experience this issue is a bug / non-optimal behavior of the "Camera Easing" / "Camera Acceleration"  settings of the scene view:



These settings are supposed to ease out or accelerate the camera movement of the scene view, but there can be constellations where the easing leads to the camera continue to drift forever when you do not want to move anymore. This seems especially to happen if you have something a bit heavier in the scene, e.g. a full outdoor environment with trees, gameobjects, etc. in place. Could you please check whether the issue still occurs when you have those two switched off?

Regarding the creation of Gaia Runtime: The reason why objects like these are constantly recreated is that most of these objects are required for one of the features that you accessed that would create it - a clear cut example is: When creating water in the scene, a water object will be created under Gaia Runtime to display the water surface and host the scripts for detecting if the camera goes under water etc.
Originally we did create these objects only once initially and never re-created them. This lead to us getting a lot of support requests (sometimes up to multiple times a day!) where users would ask why a certain water feature would not work, why the water disappeared, and so on. 
When investigating those issues, we usually found that one or more of the water objects were missing, or scripts were removed, etc. for unknown reasons. When re-creating the water it was working again.
We then started to change our approach that if we initialize a system and find out that core components are missing or broken, we re-create them.
This has reduced these kind of requests to 0 since the water will automatically fix itself if there is an issue. This can however lead to irritation if a user decides to intentionally remove only parts of the water (e.g. the post-processing effects) which are then re-created soon after. (The correct "solution" in this case would be to switch underwater post processing off in the settings)

I cheated a little by taking water as my example which is a clear cut case, if you put everything Gaia does under the magnifying glass you might find cases where you can say "Is it really required that you create that object in this case, couldn't you just use some default setting instead?". But I hope it illustrates a bit that sometimes it is not so easy for us to differentiate whether an object is missing intentionally or if that is an issue that we need to fix by re-creating said object.

Beyond that I can only recommend joining the Gaia collective, you will never feel cold again, Food (sludge) is served twice daily and endorphins are administered upon successfully creating an Unity terrain. Great health benefits too, we got dental.

[Zaddo]

@Peter LOL, nice response 🙂  

 

Fair point on minimizing your work load. That is a good reason for automatically attaching the Runtime.

 

I will enjoy the offered sludge and endorphins 🙂  But I have managed to build my own little Unimatrix Zero with a few code changes to the runtime components that turn off some of the features I don't need.  

 

 

[Zaddo]

Hi,

 

I have done a bit more mucking around with the issue of the scene camera continuing to move after the navigation keys are released.

 

Summary of Environment:

- URP

- Unity 2021.3.15f1

- Windows 11, i9-12900K, 16cores, 24 logical, 32GB DDR5, GTX3060Ti

- Camera Easing and Camera Acceleration turned off

- I have 9 scenes open with a single terrain.  

- I have a 10th scene open with just the Gaia components. (Gaia Runtime, Gaia Tools, Session Manager, Synty Nature Biome) These were created with the Gaia manager 

 

The problem occurs after I spawn the Synty Biome. If I unload the scene with the Gaia components, the scene navigation returns to normal.  If I load the Gaia components scene and Spawn the Biome again, the problem returns.

 

Disabling the Gaia components, does not stop the problem. I need to unload the scene to clear the issue.

 

I created the same environment on a second computer, and the problem behavior was reproduced.  I used a fresh download of Gaia and the Synty Nature Pack, plugged into the same project.

 

Pressing the escape key, will stop the camera from moving.  But pressing the navigation keys again, will start the infinite movement.  System resources, including CPU are low.

 

I have only just started using Gaia and never had the issue before, I installed it. Unloading the scene with the Gaia components, clears the issue.  It seems like Gaia is the culprit. 

 

I am open to any other suggestions you have to trouble shoot this issue.