[Workflow] Updating / Refreshing Gena Spawns without removal and respawn

[designleviathan]

Hello,

I'm trying to get the hang of Gena but I'm finding the spawn system a bit cumbersome now that I'm fully using it in conjunction with Gaia.

Perhaps I'm not using it correctly so would like to get some advice on how to have to a 'nondestructive' workflow.

Based on my understanding - Gena is supposed to be the PW tool to accomplish this type of 'targeted world spawn' as opposed to Gaias procedural placement system.

It seems it's more of spawn brush tool based on my experience with the tool, documentation and youtube tutorials. Is there away to actualize this targeted spawn capabilities?

Here is my use case / user story:

I have a specific town variant / instance I am trying to spawn in a specific place along the beach - lets say "Beach Town" - there is only one of these towns and it's placement is specific to the story / world.

For this example lets say that Beach Town was initially 'Gena click placed' (aka spawned by clicking in Gena on the terrain) at x250 y5 z250.

[Time passes]

Now I get an update request from my team with changes to make to Beach Town on varying levels. I add in (hypothetically) another 'block' to the town (one more street and set of buildings and say a few NPC placements that weren't there before).

My Issue simplified (hopefully)

Once I place the Beach Town 'instance' & 'palette prototypes' in the world (leveraging Gena Decorator / unpacker etc) and then need to make updates - I am finding that the only way to update that 'Beach Town Instance' with new objects is to fully remove it from the scene hiearchy and then re-place the beach town instance in the world.

This is what i would term a destructive workflow and one that eats up times with having to remove and replace every time I have to add a house or any otherwise object / prefab.

Is there any way to 'set' a Gena Spawn up so it ALWAYS spawns at that point and I can make changes to the root prefabs and have them be 'added' in as they are in said prefab.

No disrespect intended as I value these tools but it feels like any spawned utility obtained from Gena is lost by having to remove/replace

Workflow Solution?

If there is a workflow solution to this to remove the destructive elements of the workflow please please let me know.

If not - I feel Gena's utility and UX would benefit incredibly from a 'Update Spawned Instances' button that would 'refresh' / update your spawned instances with any changes / new ingested prototypes made at the spawner manager level.

 

Thank you for reading - hoping the fix is a workflow one

 

 

[designleviathan]

So is there a workflow solution or am I outside of the capabilities of Gena with this current approach?

[Bryan]

Sorry for the late response. 
I actually think there might be a way to do this but I want to confirm. 

My theory is you might be able to do this with runtime spawning. 
Having a town at first is the easy part you would just spawn that in. Any additional stuff while the game is playing is what I am thinking that runtime spawning or calling GeNa Pro api while the game is playing you could call on the runtime spawning and spawn in these additional objects. 

I am checking with the team, to see if they think this is the way or if there would be a better way to handle this if possible! 

[designleviathan]

On 4/28/2022 at 5:58 PM, Bryan said:

Sorry for the late response. 
I actually think there might be a way to do this but I want to confirm. 

My theory is you might be able to do this with runtime spawning. 
Having a town at first is the easy part you would just spawn that in. Any additional stuff while the game is playing is what I am thinking that runtime spawning or calling GeNa Pro api while the game is playing you could call on the runtime spawning and spawn in these additional objects. 

I am checking with the team, to see if they think this is the way or if there would be a better way to handle this if possible! 

I appreciate the follow up truly.

On runtime spawning - not that it isn't a valid approach (as I can already think of a few ways to update things at unity-player runtime) but runtime spawning seems a bit... excessive to make world/environment/town updates. Now in saying that - again it's not without utility - leveraging that gives me ideas for other things.

After some trial and adding your above response - it seems that there isn't a way to 'update' Gena's placed instances (in editor) without removing / adding it - which is fine.

Please let me know what the team says when you can but for now we will adjust our workflow accordingly.