welcome to part one of the AtavismX Instance Plugin tutorial series. In this video series, we're going to learn how to turn any Unity scene into a playable area in your MMORPG. And then we will learn how to set up our NavMesh for navigation, and lastly set up our minimap for our players when they are in that scene. Let's get started. In this part one of the series, we're going to start by converting a scene into an AtavismX playable area. Start by opening up your Atavism Unity project and then loading the scene you wish to add towards your game world. You can import a scene into your project, or you can create one from scratch. For this tutorial, we'll quickly throw together a gray box testing area for our game where we can test out abilities, monsters, and other aspects of our MMORPG as we create them. I recommend you have a scene like this regardless of the MMORPG you are building to make the process of implementing and testing new features much easier. To make a gray box scene, we'll just

create a new folder in our assets by right-clicking assets, and then create, and then folder, and we'll name the folder underscore scenes. Next, we'll go to file in the top left and press new scene. Then right-click the untitled scene and click save as. And then we'll save it to the scene folder we just created. And we are going to name the scene test area with a capital T and a capital A. Keep in mind the name of the scene as activism is going to use this scene name for a lot of its features later on. And it is case sensitive. In our scene, we're going to create a simple plane. So hit the plus icon in the top left, 3D object, and then plane. Set the X and Z scales to 10 so it's nice and big. I'm going to also create a material in the scenes folder now, and I'll name it test floor. Set it to green, and then just drag it onto the plane. You can add a bit more detail to the scene for testing. Activism comes with a

few tree prefabs. So type tree into the search bar, open up the Dynamic Tree folder, click prefabs, and then we can drag some of these out onto the scene. And lastly, we'll just make a wall, just a big old 3D cube, and stretch it out, and that should be enough for a little testing scene. Let's organize the hierarchy by creating an empty game object and name it environment. And then we will drag all of our stuff into that empty game object and save the scene. All right, now we're ready to implement this into Activism. In order for Activism to utilize this scene, we'll need a few things, but they're extremely easy to get as we will find them all within the blank Activism scene. So type blank Activism scene into the search bar and then drag it into your hierarchy, which will open it below our test area scene. We want to copy everything from the blank Activism scene into our test area scene, but because it has a main camera, we'll start by deleting the main camera from our test scene and then highlight all the objects in

the blank activism scene and drag them into the test area scene. Now, we can unload the blank activism scene, but do not save the changes so that it will be available to copy-paste from again if we create more scenes in the future. We can then remove that scene from the hierarchy by right-clicking it. With this done, the only thing we're missing is a starting spot for our characters who come into the scene. The easiest way to do this is to just create a cube, set it to the 0 0 0 position, and then set the y scale to 2 to simulate a player's height. Then move it up above the plane so that's where our player will basically start when they log in the first time. Then we can disable the mesh renderer on that cube and the box collider, and then rename it as the start. Now our scene is just about ready. We need to save it and then go to file, build settings, and then press the add open scenes button, and it should add our test area scene to the build settings.

once that's done, it's time to open up the Active Editor. Go to the server tab on the left side and select instances. Then hit the plus icon in the bottom right to create a new instance. For the instance name, it is case sensitive and it needs to match our CNAME test area, so make sure you capitalize the T and the A and you don't put a space just as the name of our scene is in the Unity project. For instance type, we'll select World. Different instance types have different allowances and different parameters. For the water height parameter, this will select the Y-axis position of where water or swimming starts in your instance. This is really useful for coastal regions or something similar. For now, we will set this to -100 as we don't actually have water for our testing area. The population limit will restrict the amount of players inside the instance. We want this to be a big old open world test area, so we will make it unlimited. To set it to unlimited, just type in -1. Below that is the markers parameters.

these indicate various respawn, spawn, and entry points within the instance that can be used in other ways. We won't be using the marker in this tutorial, but the editor does require something in the fields, so we're just going to fill it all with ones. And lastly, below that, we see weather profiles and seasons. This is where you would fill out what sort of weather profiles that region would use. So you could set rain, you could set summer, night, day, all of that in those parameters. For now, we're going to leave those blank as we haven't set those up, and we will be covering more of that in the weather profile plugin tutorial. Once we've filled this amount out though, that's basically all the instance needs. We can hit the save button, and the instance will be saved. Now all we need to do is set it as the starting location of our classes so that they will appear here once they spawn into the world for the first time. On the left side of the editor, click the character panel and then select the

player templates plugin, and then double-click the first one, which represents human warriors. Once it's open, change the instance parameter at the start to test area, and copy the same position data from our start object in our scene using the same x, y, and z coordinates. And then do the same for the respawn instance area, which will make the character just respawn exactly where they started from if they die or get stuck. Then we can hit update, and that's it. Now all we need to do is restart the server. We can do that from the editor by clicking on the green circles in the top right and pressing the start restart button. If you are using the cloud server, but if you are using other methods of hosting your server, such as the windows manager, be sure to restart your server using the appropriate method. Once the server has restarted, we can open up the login scene in our unity project once more. I'll do that by typing login in the search bar, and then dragging it into the hierarchy. Once it's loaded, we can unload the test.

area scene. And then we can hit play. Log into your admin account now. At the character select, any already existing characters will stay where they are. But if we create a new human warrior really quick, and then we enter the world with him, he should be sent to our new scene as his first starting area. You'll notice as we're loading into our scene that we're being shown a default loading screen. So once we've confirmed our scene is working correctly, I'll quickly go over how to customize your loading screens. You can see now we've logged into our new starting area. Everything seems to be working, though it's not exactly pretty. Let's go back and change our loading screen to add a little bit of extra personalization. Everything to do with loading screens is client-side, so we'll be working from our Unity project. In the Unity project, type Scene Loader Manager into the file browser search bar with no spaces to find a Scene Loader asset and click on it. In the Unity Inspector, you should see a list of the default scenes with activism, and you can look at them by dropping

them down from the arrow to get an idea of what we'll need to do to customize our loading screen. Firstly, if you want to change the tips that are displayed during loading screens, you can add, remove, or edit the tips at the bottom of this prefab. These will be randomly chosen when a scene is loading. I will remove the default tips here and add a few for fun. Now, these tips will show up if the tips are enabled on the layout of the loading screen, but it is possible to remove them completely by deleting them all here or modifying the loading screen layout, which we'll go over in a moment. For the actual loading screen, we're going to create a new one in the scene manager list. And for our scene name, this will need to match the name of the scene in our Unity project. So we will name it Test Area, and remember this is case sensitive. The display name is what the players will see on the loading screen. We can fill that in as we like with spaces. Additionally, the description will be

smaller text shown underneath the name that can be used to give a bit more information to your players. On the scene, for example, some lore or some type of monsters that are in that area. Or maybe let them know if it's a pvp area or not. For skip type, this decides how the loading screen behaves when it's done loading. Instant complete will transition into the game once it's done loading. But you can add variations like requiring the player to press a button or press any key to continue. You can also switch the loading type to create fake loading time and modify how long you want the fake loading time to take place if your game requires that. For the image on the loading screen in the background, we can put those in the backgrounds array under references. You can enter multiple backgrounds so that one is chosen randomly or just have a single background image for your scene. I'm going to make a background really quick just to show you how you might go about adding one or making one by yourself. I will just open up paint. I'm going to

doodle a little smiley face here with a sword. We're gonna make the sword red. That looks pretty good. So then we will save this image to my Unity project asset folder in the scenes folder that we just created. Those are located wherever you saved your Unity project. Alternatively, you can just save this image to your desktop and then drag it into your Unity project. Even though I'm just putting this in my underscore scenes folder, you'll probably want to be a bit more organized when you do this for your real game. Once the image is in the project, though, we can click on it and in the inspector, change the texture type at the top of the inspector to sprite for 2D and UI, and then click apply at the bottom. Then go back to the scene loader manager prefab and set the background's array size to 1. We'll delete element 0 and then go to where we put our new sprite background and drag and drop it into the element 0. That ought to do everything we want in terms of customization for our loading.

screen, but there's a bit more customization you can do if you'd like to rearrange the default layout of the loading screen altogether. If you type in canvas loader into the search bar, you'll find the canvas loader prefab. Open that up, switch to the 2D view, and press F in your Unity project scene, and you'll see the basic layout of your loading screen. Everything is labeled here, so if you want to rearrange the layout or hide certain things, you can do that by basic Unity UI editing and moving the things around in this prefab, then saving your changes. I'm going to leave it all as the basic default because if you couldn't tell by my loading screen drawing, I lack artistic talent. But let's back out of the canvas loader prefab and back to our login scene. Save the Unity project, and then let's test the game again using our character we just created, and you'll see once we've logged in this time, our new and improved loading screen should be there in all of its glory and

we finished with the basics of setting up our first new scene. Once in, we can run around and search and do all the activism stuff that we want to do. However, there are still two major things missing from the scene. Firstly, is the navmesh navigation, meaning the server doesn't know where mobs should and should move in this instance. Secondly, the mini-map will appear as black, or it'll be using the minimap from the main world, as we haven't told it what this area looks like for the mini-map section of our activism scene. So, we will be working on that in the next two videos, but that's it for this video. Join me in part two where we'll go over creating a nav mesh for the scene and putting it on our server so that our NPCs behave correctly, and then part three where we will go over the steps on creating our mini-map for this area as well. If you had any trouble setting up your own game world instance up to this point, though, be sure to join

the activism discord where you'll find helpful support from the activism staff and community. Don't forget to subscribe to the activism YouTube channel and hit the notification bell to be alerted when new videos on activism are released. Have a great day and happy developing.

Atavism Online - Instances (part 1)

Atavism Online - Instances (part 1)