Mad Level Manager - Level chooser and manager

Hi Guys,

Was wondering if you could help with an error I am getting. I am using the free layout and I keep getting the following error:

Level Title is of wrong type. Won't look at it.
UnityEngine.Debug:LogWarning(Object)
MadLevelManager.MadLevelAbstractLayout:LookAtLevel(String) (at Assets/Mad Level Manager/Scripts/Base/Layouts/MadLevelAbstractLayout.cs:246)
MadLevelManager.MadLevelAbstractLayout:LookAtLastPlayedLevel() (at Assets/Mad Level Manager/Scripts/Base/Layouts/MadLevelAbstractLayout.cs:277)
MadLevelManager.MadLevelAbstractLayout:Start() (at Assets/Mad Level Manager/Scripts/Base/Layouts/MadLevelAbstractLayout.cs:354)

I have 3 scenes before my level select scene, they are all marked as "other" as is the level select scene itself.

Any ideas what is causing this?

Thanks for the help

 

Hello Muralidaran,

Don't worry about it. I think it will be better to make it a info than a warning, because this is only a notice that last level is not a playable level, does not have an icon, so level layout script cannot look at its icon.

Cheers!
Piotr

 

is it possible to find out through Mad Level Manager how many levels are unlocked in total?

I can't find it in the documentation. But I'm sure the information is stored in some variable.
In the 'Mad Level Grid Layout Script' there's the value "Look at Level: Last Unlocked". How can I access that 'Last Unlocked' information?

 

Hello san.daniele,
Yes, you can use a query! Just write something like this.

Code (CSharp):

1. int unlocked = new MadLevelQuery().CountUnlocked();

Here's the method that is returning the last unlocked level name.

Please write if you have any more questions! I will write back tomorrow.

Cheers!
Piotr

 

Hi Piort,
Actually it is making a problem because on my level select scene I have the layout script set to "Look at Level: Last Unlocked" and it's not doing it. It keeps looking at some random position on the screen.
Might be that bug, might not. Has anyone else had this problem?

Thanks

 

After updating to the new version I get this error message:

Assets/Standard Assets/Mad Level Manager/Scripts/Mad2D/MadPanel.cs(123,13): error CS0103: The name `MadTrial' does not exist in the current context

I managed to get it to work by removing the OnGUI section in question. It just felt that I shouldn't tamper with those files

p.s. i'm using the paid version, not the trial

 

Are you able to send me to support@madpixelmachine.com a screenshot from your layout inspector and a video how this is behaving? This may be a bug.

 

Please try to remove and import Mad Level Manager again. I've checked the latest version in the clean environment and it should be fine.

 

hello, i want to ask about extension scene.
i want to have before (loading) and after (result), can it do both?
i have no problem with loading screen. but what should i do for the scene to go to result scene first before go to level select again?

 

Hello Keitaro,
Of course you can have both
Are you using an extension for a loading screen? If you do, please modify it and add the "Load After Level" scene:
http://madlevelmanager.madpixelmachine.com/doc/latest/advanced/extension_editor.html

Cheers!
Piotr

 

EDIT :
hmmm after i re-read your post, yeah i know the add load after level for extension.
but how to have access to After-Extension??

i'm using playmaker trigger action in-game to access the "Go-To-After-Level-Extension" Scene (which is i seems don't find the action). what is the name of the action to do this?
i really can't find the action or how to do this after my game scene is clear...

 

Hello Keitaro,

Please use Can Continue to check if there's next scene in the extension. For the "before" scene this will be the playable scene and for the playable scene this will be the "after" scene. Don't worry about the details, and if Can Continue will return true, just execute "Continue". In other case you most probably want to go to the level select screen or the next level.

There should be an example scene using playmayer and extensions somewhere. I will check that later. If not, I can send you one by tomorrow

Cheers!
Piotr

 

ohhh so just execute continue?
okay i got it right now.
looks like the error i encountered yesterday is because i just played the scene and pass the Level Select scene. so Before extension is not appear, and After extension got error

it's fine now, thanks for your help
anyway, this asset is really the best for level manegement

 

Good to hear that it is working
Thank you for your words! I'm continuously working to make it even better and easier to use. It's not a simple task, but as long as I am receiving feedback from you and other people I know what could be done better

P.S. 2.3.0 (maybe I will call it 2.5.0 or 3.0.0) will receive groups and advanced unlocking conditions. For instance you will be able to create levels that will be unlocked only if you will gain certain amount of stars. I am thinking about breaking the backwards compatibility a little, but only in the area of functions that was not commonly used and maintaining them are slowing things down.

Cheers!
Piotr

 

What's the status with Unity 5 compatibility ?

One of the thing which fails at the moment is the font rendering and many other things when it comes to customizing the graphics but I don't know if it's U5 or me doing wrong implementation.
Could you clarify the status, please ?

Regarding uGUI, I saw the video with The Energy Bar ToolKit. I was wondering if you'll be trying to get a closer integration in a next release for MLM as well ?

 

Hello IOZO,
Thank you for writing!

I haven't tested MLM with Unity 5, but one of my clients upgraded his project with MLM inside and he haven't reported to me any issues. Looks like I have to look at it by myself (I have beta access). How this font rendering issue looks like at the moment?

About uGUI, two weeks ago I've created branch called uGUI in Mad Level Manager repository. I want to introduce it in 3.0.0, but I will take me some time and I want to release 2.3.0 and 2.5.0 before that. There are many plans but it all takes its time

Do you want to be signed in to Mad Level Manager 3.0.0 beta?

Cheers!
Piotr

 

With my settings U5 B11 / MLM 2.2.3a The fonts do not render anymore in game view or scene view.
It used to work well with U4.6Beta but stopped working when I imported the project to U5.

I tried to remove completely MLM and re-import a fresh version in my project with no differences.
If I try to recreate the font is still not rendered.
I tried to open the demo scenes which comes with MLM and the font are still not rendered.
Besides that I see many other minor issues when I change the default icons with my own graphics but it's hard to give you details before I see the basic behavior working and I can iterate from there.

Please tell me if you get the same results.

Great news, I'm rendering fonts in uGUI with TextMeshPro. It works pretty well.
I'd like to use that for font rendering in MLM also. Do you see that possible instead of your current font system ?

Yes of course, I'd be more than happy to test MLM 3 Beta.
I also use Energy Bar Toolkit. At the moment it works pretty well but I'd be also happy to test a beta version if it works with uGUI

 

To be more precise. The font are rendered everywhere but on the Level prefabs.
I can see the background sprite but not the level number, the lock or the stars. Just the blue box.
In the scene view I can see and manipulate the item frames for the lock, the stars or the text but I can't see the item rendered neither. It just appears as a white frame on the blue sprite much like a camera setting issue.

 

Hmm I cannot think of any possibility that is causing that issue. I will check it and fix it for sure Thank you for the details!

Please send me your invoice no. of both purchases to support@madpixelmachine.com. I will add you to the list and send you the latest beta version of Energy Bar Toolkit.

Cheers!
Piotr

 

Hi there,
I am trying to create profile from string, which i have just saved as string. Here is detailed error message:
1. get profile from MadLevelProfile.SaveProfileToString()
2. try to create profile from string, MadLevelProfile.LoadProfileFromString(profileString);

Something went wrong when reading profile string. Please copy this message and send it to support@madpixelmachine.com
PROFILE_STRING:
3 Level 1 @locked@ b:False star_3 b:True star_1 b:True @completed@ b:True star_2 b:True 3 Level 2 @locked@ b:False star_3 b:False @completed@ b:True star_1 b:False star_2 b:False 3 Level 3 @locked@ b:False star_2 b:False star_3 b:False @completed@ b:True star_1 b:False 3 Level 4 @locked@ b:False star_3 b:False star_2 b:False @completed@ b:False star_1 b:False 3 Level 5 @locked@ b:True star_3 b:False star_2 b:False star_1 b:False @completed@ b:False 3 Level 6 @locked@ b:True @completed@ b:False star_1 b:False star_3 b:False star_2 b:False 3 Level Select @locked@ b:True 3 First Level @locked@ b:False 3 Second Level @locked@ b:True 3 Third Level @locked@ b:True 3 Fourth Level @locked@ b:True 3 Fifth Level @locked@ b:True 3 __profile__
END_OF_PROFILE_STRING
UnityEngine.Debug:LogError(Object)
MadLevelManager.MadLevelProfile:LoadProfileFromString(String) (at Assets/Standard Assets/Scripts/Base/MadLevelProfile.cs:100)
Please suggest any solution.
Note: i am using unity editor

 

Done, I'm looking forward to testing the packages and see if it helps with the issues I have.

 

Hello umar_farooq,
Can you send me the raw text of the output log or editor.log file? For pasting the raw you can use http://pastebin.com/ for instance.

Cheers!
Piotr

 

Thanks for quick reply.
I have shared Editor.log on dropbox.(sorry pastbin.com is blocked here)
https://www.dropbox.com/s/6o05jq5wlp2te4k/Editor.log?dl=0

 

Thanks!
OK now I see what is wrong.
Apparently you're using facebook to store your game save data. If I recall correctly, we've talked about this some time ago.

Looks like the way you transfer your string data between your Unity game and facebook modifies the string data. Look at the level names in your string. You have a Level 3 but, I'm intentionally replacing all spaces in level names with %20 like web browsers do. For example, this is how my first profile line looks like:

So the Level%203 is decoded as "Level 3". What method are you using to send the data to facebook? If you're using the GET method, this is only natural that this kind of data will be modified. Try switching to POST.

If I am wrong, please let me know. If I am right, also please let me know

Edit: I've just checked my spam box, and I see your message from yesterday. This does not happens to often, but it seems that I have to change my provider.

 

Thanks for reply,
We have not discussed this thing, may be you have discussed with some one else.
I am sending data to my own server not facebook server and i have checked my database records and respons strings too... space is not being replaced with %20 at all. Even, i have tried to create profile by printing string locally and but i am getting same exception.
Regards,

 

I'm sorry, my mistake
Can you show me the code you're using to read the profile string from MadLevelProfile?

 

Yeah sure,
I am using following method to read profile;
MadLevelManager.MadLevelProfile.SaveProfileToString();
Then, i am trying following method to create Profile from string.
var jsonResponse = JSON.Parse(request.text);
MadLevelManager.MadLevelProfile.LoadProfileFromString(jsonResponse["profile"].Value);

please, point out if i am doing something wrong or something else needed.

 

You're doing it right. You have to verify the exact moment when %20 are converted back to spaces. Please try using Debug.Log() after every step you're doing something with your profile data. I'm guessing that there something may be wrong when you're trying to send it to your server, so the server receives the modified string.

 

Spaces are not being replaced with %20, i am using Debug.Log already.
You can see sample response and string at following URL:
https://transcendentintl.com/android/hidden/penguin/getuser.php?id=4986387633500

Also, please inbox me your skype id, so we discuss quickly or you can access code.

 

A note for the watchers.

The issue was most probably the JSON builder class. The workaround is to encode the profile string to base64 before sending it any further, and decoding it back on read: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11743160/how-do-i-encode-and-decode-a-base64-string

 

FYI : The star and lock icon are correctly rendered if I disable the visible state of the icon.
For the text, I think it is really not rendered at all.

BTW, have you got my invoice number by mail ?

 

Thanks! I will try to fix that today

Nope :-( The SPAM folder is also "empty". Please try sending it to me as a PM here with your e-mail address.

Cheers!
Piotr

 

Hey IOZO,
I've installed Unity 5 and I have two news. The good one and the bad one.

The bad one: It's not working.
The good one: I've imported MLM into Unity 5.

OK, end of jokes

This issue seems to be a regression from Unity 4.2. The issue was that somebody in Unity team decided that submeshes draw order is not important, and this happened. Now the issue have raised again. There's no workaround on this one currently. I'm filling up the bug report now.

Thank you for noticing this!

 

Thanks for that. At least you can reproduce the issue and see what's wrong.
Let's hope the issue will be fixed in a next U5 Beta iteration. BTW I tried with B9, the more stable - tested version as well as B12 (provided with minimal tests) with no differences.

Can the uGUI integration you're working on help with this ? I believe the approach is different and that might be a good path to go for me. I like the idea of sharing the 2D/3D stuff of uGUI with your level management system. You should have received the details BTW.

Besides the font issue do you see other possible blocker for the main features of MLM in U5 ?

I currently may have another problem with my level config synchronization but I'm not very sure. If you could just confirm what you find out of your tests.


Best regards

 

I believe so. uGUI is now the priority for Unity and currently it's quite hard to find any bugs in it. Still I would need some time before MLM will be integrated with uGUI.

This is the only one and it's not only font-related. All sprites are just going crazy with their depths.

What issues do you have?

 

I'm ready to test if you have any Beta for this

Yep, I realized that as well. I'm now trying to use all the good stuff of MLM, i.e API, resource management, load/save, level story ... but no graphics/nor text. What I'm doing is simply disable the graphics or just use it as a guideline and render my icons, stars, .. with a different system. I hope I can make that work until you get a better solution.

I'm using groups of levels. My game is made with 5 paths to explore, each one stored as a group of levels. The root level simply allows you to choose one of the 5 paths. When you select any level from any group but the root, MLM is supposed to load a unique 'game" level with parameters to customize its behavior.

This used to work in 4.x and stopped working in 5.0B. Instead of loading the 'game' level it reloads the current level branch. No error message is displayed and the game level works fine when started directly.
I thought it could be a sync issue but I'm not sure.

If not what else could prevent my 'game' level to load ?

 

Not yet. I've added you to my mail list. Ignore all messages about MLM 2.5.0 and wait for 3.0.0 beta

I will test that scenario today and I will let you know. This may be another bug.

 

I was unable to reproduce that issue. Please try printing MadLevel.currentLevelName on the each level and group and check if printed level name proper for the loaded level name. Maybe you're using somewhere Application.LevelLoad() instead of MadLevel.LoadLevelByName()? Please read this:

http://madlevelmanager.madpixelmachine.com/doc/latest/basics/the_rules.html

 

That was my mistake. I made one test level with Application.LevelLoad...

many thanks.

 

Hello Mad Level Manager and Energy Bar Toolkit users! Today I’d like to share with you my plans about the future of these two tools. I'm posting about these two tools at once, because these two tools have a common codebase and I didn't want to break this into two.

I believe it’s a matter of weeks when the final release of Unity 4.6 will see the daylight. At the moment of writing this there’s a first release candidate version available for anyone who wants to. Unity 4.6 will introduce a new GUI system called uGUI and to be honest I am a little disappointed, because this is how GUI system in Unity should look like in the first place, and by the time being many developers have created their own GUI systems which are completely incompatible with each other. I am one of these developers.

Energy Bar Toolkit and Mad Level Manager are using Mad2D drawing library (this is my own creation) which is quite good, but’s it’s based on some assumptions that will be broken with Unity 5.0 (I will talk about this in a moment). Anyway, uGUI is great, uGUI is flexible, uGUI is extensible, and I am still under big impression how well-written it is. Now I’ve decided to migrate Mad Level Manager and Energy Bar Toolkit to uGUI. Just by the accident uGUI version of Energy Bar Toolkit and Mad Level Manager will be marked the same as the 3.0.0 version.

Currently I am on the last stage of moving Energy Bar Toolkit bars to uGUI (not including testing). Let’s say it’s finished in about 75% and I have only one more renderer to migrate. I can tell right now that the easiness and performance of Energy Bar Toolkit uGUI implementation has never been better! I cannot wait to release it, but as a well-known Unity Asset Store publisher I have to maintain a high quality of my products, so it may take me about 1 month from now to get things done. After the release of 3.0.0 I will focus on adding new renderers and extending the current ones by more advanced configurations and effects.

The state of Mad Level Manager is slightly different. For about 3 months I am working on level grouping feature. Along with groups I will introduce a new feature called advanced unlocking conditions. These conditions will allow MLM users to strictly define how and when groups and level icons can be unlocked without any additional programming. Here are some examples:

• Group will unlock if total number of collected stars >= 60
• Level will unlock if 10 levels in this the current group has been completed
• Group will unlock if all levels of previous group has been completed
• Level will unlock if total number of collected stars in current group >= 30
• Level will be unlocked if total game score is above 20000
• Level will be unlocked if previous level score is above 1000

What’s more, icons are able to display these conditions (label like 25/30 stars), just like in games you already know!

If you have some programming experience, you can do even more! You can write a delegate function for the unlocked, and its result will define when exactly level should be unlocked. This will be a way to create levels and groups that can be unlocked only if the player will download the DLC. These changes will be introduced in Mad Level Manager 2.5.0.

There’s one more thing that will complicate all this a little and I’m talking about the release of Unity 5.0.Unity developers have decided to break compatibility on some aspects, and one of them is how meshes with different materials are rendered. In Unity 4 submeshes were rendered at the index order, but in Unity 5 rendering is done in a way that reduces the number of context switches. This is really good news for mobile devices and not very good news for Mad2D rendering system, because it is basing on the rendering order. There’s a workaround this, but will require from users to switch toatlases instead of using separate textures. Also fonts are not supporting atlases currently, so this workaround will require me to do some patches to Mad Level Manager code.

I want to post these kind of thoughts more often from now on. Please let me know about your thoughts and have fun using Energy Bar Toolkit and Mad Level Manager!

tl;dr Mad Level Manager and Energy Bar Toolkit will switch to uGUI. Unity 5.0 will break Mad Level Manager rendering system, I am working on a workaround.

Cheers!
Piotr

 

Great summary. Using uGUI as a default renderer for both packages will solve many headaches.

I'm testing ETK 3.0 beta with uGUI on U5. It's already working great. I can't wait for the MLM version with uGUI.
Integrating uGUI Fonts is also a critical issue.

That's nice. Could we do the same for the renderer. I was wondering if I could easily use such a mechanism to replace or extend the default renderer ?

 

Hello IOZO,

What kind of replacement or extension do you want to achieve?

 

As an example, in my project I use TextMeshPro for font rendering. I'd like to hook on any text renderer and use the TMP renderer instead. I assume I could hook somewhere when any text should be renderered like level number or the label of the new upcoming version (i.e 25/30 stars).

Will it be possible ?

 

Regarding MLM roadmap, do you anticipate the creation of any achievement system.
I don't know how much the new advanced unlocking conditions could help but a true achievement editor would be a nice to have feature for MLM and a great feature if level or group could be unlocked based on achievements.

The star system, although very useful, is too restrictive for that and I would like to store in a specific editor a list of details and triggers to set when certain condition succeed throughout the game.
Achievement could also depend on other achievements.

 

Hello IOZO

The main issue behind using many different assets in 2D environment was non-unified method of rendering things. In Unity before 4.6 if you want to paint something that should be a GUI and shouldn't use OnGUI() functions then you needed to create a 2D mesh. Mesh needs a texture, texture should be assigned to a material. Having multiple materials caused many draw calls, so assets authors introduced their own implementation of atlases. Atlases were reducing number of draw calls down to 1 but the downside of this approach is that you couldn't 100% freely combine multiple assets of this kind. For instance please see EBT and NGUI integration limitations.

If TextMeshPro will switch to uGUI then there will be a real possibility of combining it with Mad Level Manager and Energy Bar Toolkit. It would need a small change in code to support TMP interface, but it would be much, much easier to integrate it than before!

I'm not planing of implementing an achievement system directly in Mad Level Manager, because this feature just not fits into level management core features. Stars (and other level properties) are a core feature, because you can build anything based on it. For instance I could create an add-on with achievement system that will use MadLevelProfile API to store these achievements and will extend unlocking conditions for levels to include achievements, but that's not in my plans right now.

Cheers!
Piotr

 

That's why I'm pushing everybody to switch to uGUI
I have a beta version version of TMP with uGUI which already works great. Maybe you could give it a try ?

An extension would be nice.
Do you support plugins or add-on ?
Does your new advanced unlocking system and Profile API allow some flexibility to build such an extension from our side ?

 

Please remind me, do you want to use TMP with EBT or MLM?

I wouldn't call it a support for plugins, but the API is giving you a freedom of build things upon. Oh i see some mistakes in the docs. Get/SetProfile* is profile-scoped, not global-scoped as documentation states in some places. Your game can have multiple player profiles (or game saves) that won't collide with each other. You can use bool get/set functions to check/enable achievements.

 

Ideally both but MLM is my first need. I want to replace the bitmap fonts and the full font creation process with TMP. As you know uGUI support for MLM is highly awaited now that I've seen how easy it is with EBT but I understand you're releasing MLM 2.5 first and MLM 3.0 beta with uGUI support will come after.

OK, great

 

hi hoping for some help! how can i query the number of stars unlocked for the current loaded level?

 

Hello!

The simplest way will be by using a Query:

Code (CSharp):

1. int starsCollected = new MadLevelQuery()
2.     .ForLevel(MadLevel.currentLevelName) // only the current level
3.     .SelectProperty("star_1", "star_2", "star_3") // change if your star properties have different names
4.     .CountEnabled(); // enabled property mean a collected star

Please write if you have more questions

Edit: Please also look at this.

Cheers!
Piotr