Question Flying through 3D space instead of walking?

I am coming back to C# coding, as I took 3 years of courses in high school. I made a script for the player's movement but instead of walking on the ground and moving the camera up, down, and sideways, it just makes my placeholder character fly in whatever direction the camera is facing.

Code (CSharp):

1. using System.Collections;
2. using System.Collections.Generic;
3. using UnityEngine;
4.  
5. public class playerMovement : MonoBehaviour
6. {
7.     public float movementSpeed;
8.     public float rotationSpeed;
9.     public float rotationX;
10.     public float rotationY;
11.     public float rotationZ;
12.  
13.     // Start is called before the first frame update
14.     void Start()
15.     {
16.        GameObject.FindWithTag("MainCamera").transform.rotation = Quaternion.Euler(rotationX, rotationY, rotationZ);
17.     }
18.  
19.     void Update()
20.     {
21.         rotationX -= Input.GetAxis("Mouse Y") * Time.deltaTime * rotationSpeed;
22.         rotationY += Input.GetAxis("Mouse X") * Time.deltaTime * rotationSpeed;
23.  
24.         if (rotationX < -90)
25.         {
26.             rotationX = -90;
27.         }
28.         else if (rotationX > 90)
29.         {
30.             rotationX = 90;
31.         }
32.         transform.rotation = Quaternion.Euler(rotationX, rotationY, rotationZ);
33.  
34.     }
35.     // Update every 0.2 seconds?
36.     void FixedUpdate()
37.     {
38.         if (Input.GetKey(KeyCode.LeftShift) && Input.GetKey("w")) //sprint
39.         {
40.             transform.position += transform.TransformDirection(Vector3.forward) * Time.deltaTime * movementSpeed * 2.5f;
41.         } else if(Input.GetKey("w") && !Input.GetKey(KeyCode.LeftShift)) //walk forwards
42.         {
43.             transform.position += transform.TransformDirection(Vector3.forward) * Time.deltaTime * movementSpeed;
44.         } else if(Input.GetKey("s")) //walk backwards
45.         {
46.             transform.position -= transform.TransformDirection(Vector3.forward) * Time.deltaTime * movementSpeed;
47.         }
48.         if(Input.GetKey("a") && !Input.GetKey("d")) //cancel left and right if both buttons pressed
49.         {
50.             transform.position += transform.TransformDirection(Vector3.left) * Time.deltaTime * movementSpeed;
51.         } else if (Input.GetKey("d") && !Input.GetKey("a"))
52.         {
53.             transform.position -= transform.TransformDirection(Vector3.left) * Time.deltaTime * movementSpeed;
54.         }
55.  
56.        
57.     }
58. }
59.  

 

Always get key inputs in Update. Use Time.DeltaTime to make sure the movement isn't framerate dependant.
For the movement, if you are new-ish to unity look for a guide for a first person or third person character controller and then follow that

 

Welcome back! Looks like you wrote a "go" script that has no awareness of ground or gravity or anything, unless I'm simply not seeing it above.

In order to set yourself up for the win, definitely try to avoid stuff like this:

If you have more than one or two dots (.) in a single statement, you're just being mean to yourself.

How to break down hairy lines of code:

http://plbm.com/?p=248

Break it up, practice social distancing in your code, one thing per line please.

"Programming is hard enough without making it harder for ourselves." - angrypenguin on Unity3D forums

"Combining a bunch of stuff into one line always feels satisfying, but it's always a PITA to debug." - StarManta on the Unity3D forums

Here is a super-basic starter prototype FPS based on Character Controller (BasicFPCC):

https://forum.unity.com/threads/a-basic-first-person-character-controller-for-prototyping.1169491/

Otherwise, you might wanna follow what @DevDunk says above and work through a few tutorials. You'll learn a lot if you do it properly. Here's how:

Tutorials and example code are great, but keep this in mind to maximize your success and minimize your frustration:

How to do tutorials properly, two (2) simple steps to success:

Step 1. Follow the tutorial and do every single step of the tutorial 100% precisely the way it is shown. Even the slightest deviation (even a single character!) generally ends in disaster. That's how software engineering works. Every step must be taken, every single letter must be spelled, capitalized, punctuated and spaced (or not spaced) properly, literally NOTHING can be omitted or skipped.

Fortunately this is the easiest part to get right: Be a robot. Don't make any mistakes.
BE PERFECT IN EVERYTHING YOU DO HERE!!

If you get any errors, learn how to read the error code and fix your error. Google is your friend here. Do NOT continue until you fix your error. Your error will probably be somewhere near the parenthesis numbers (line and character position) in the file. It is almost CERTAINLY your typo causing the error, so look again and fix it.

Step 2. Go back and work through every part of the tutorial again, and this time explain it to your doggie. See how I am doing that in my avatar picture? If you have no dog, explain it to your house plant. If you are unable to explain any part of it, STOP. DO NOT PROCEED. Now go learn how that part works. Read the documentation on the functions involved. Go back to the tutorial and try to figure out WHY they did that. This is the part that takes a LOT of time when you are new. It might take days or weeks to work through a single 5-minute tutorial. Stick with it. You will learn.

Step 2 is the part everybody seems to miss. Without Step 2 you are simply a code-typing monkey and outside of the specific tutorial you did, you will be completely lost. If you want to learn, you MUST do Step 2.

Of course, all this presupposes no errors in the tutorial. For certain tutorial makers (like Unity, Brackeys, Imphenzia, Sebastian Lague) this is usually the case. For some other less-well-known content creators, this is less true. Read the comments on the video: did anyone have issues like you did? If there's an error, you will NEVER be the first guy to find it.

Beyond that, Step 3, 4, 5 and 6 become easy because you already understand!

If your project's behavior is mysterious, here's how to blast past that problem:

You must find a way to get the information you need in order to reason about what the problem is.

Once you understand what the problem is, you may begin to reason about a solution to the problem.

What is often happening in these cases is one of the following:

- the code you think is executing is not actually executing at all
- the code is executing far EARLIER or LATER than you think
- the code is executing far LESS OFTEN than you think
- the code is executing far MORE OFTEN than you think
- the code is executing on another GameObject than you think it is
- you're getting an error or warning and you haven't noticed it in the console window

To help gain more insight into your problem, I recommend liberally sprinkling

Debug.Log()

statements through your code to display information in realtime.

Doing this should help you answer these types of questions:

- is this code even running? which parts are running? how often does it run? what order does it run in?
- what are the values of the variables involved? Are they initialized? Are the values reasonable?
- are you meeting ALL the requirements to receive callbacks such as triggers / colliders (review the documentation)

Knowing this information will help you reason about the behavior you are seeing.

You can also supply a second argument to Debug.Log() and when you click the message, it will highlight the object in scene, such as

Debug.Log("Problem!",this);

If your problem would benefit from in-scene or in-game visualization, Debug.DrawRay() or Debug.DrawLine() can help you visualize things like rays (used in raycasting) or distances.

You can also call Debug.Break() to pause the Editor when certain interesting pieces of code run, and then study the scene manually, looking for all the parts, where they are, what scripts are on them, etc.

You can also call GameObject.CreatePrimitive() to emplace debug-marker-ish objects in the scene at runtime.

You could also just display various important quantities in UI Text elements to watch them change as you play the game.

If you are running a mobile device you can also view the console output. Google for how on your particular mobile target, such as this answer or iOS: https://forum.unity.com/threads/how-to-capturing-device-logs-on-ios.529920/ or this answer for Android: https://forum.unity.com/threads/how-to-capturing-device-logs-on-android.528680/

Another useful approach is to temporarily strip out everything besides what is necessary to prove your issue. This can simplify and isolate compounding effects of other items in your scene or prefab.

Here's an example of putting in a laser-focused Debug.Log() and how that can save you a TON of time wallowing around speculating what might be going wrong:

https://forum.unity.com/threads/coroutine-missing-hint-and-error.1103197/#post-7100494

When in doubt, print it out!(tm)

Note: the

print()

function is an alias for Debug.Log() provided by the MonoBehaviour class.