Respawning: Transition Fix

Getting Started

I am not looking forward to working on the game today! I'm feeling stressed and anxious about troubleshooting my player respawn issues. I gotta do it though, so I'm just pushing through. I'm going to approach this in a logical manner. First, I have to identify the specific steps that are occurring. Right now, everything seems to be working fine in relation to player death up to the point of actually respawning.

What's Wrong

After clicking the respawn button things go a bit haywire. The game state does transition from PLAYER_DEAD to WAIT_SCREEN. This is normal, but the wait screen is NOT shown properly. It seems to appear in the world space with the camera still centered on the player. This may actually be a bit easier than I expected. What I'm seeing is that the wait screen appears as a child of the root node in the scene instead of a child of the UI manager.

It looks like the source of that issue is that the wait screen is controlled by the game manager and not the UI manager. So the player has a camera attached, which is the active camera when the player dies. The game manager instantiates the wait screen (this is during the transition to a new game scene) anchored to a specific position in the world instead of anchored to the UI manager. I need to do some testing to figure out exactly what is causing the issue.

Testing

The solution seems simple enough. Keep the wait screen functionality in the game manager, but move the wait screen management into the UI manager. I remember when this was first built and I had issues with timing the wait screen properly. Looking back at the code in my transition, it's complicated. I'm thinking I need to feed the game manager script into Gemini to refactor the whole transition. The other issue is that I haven't actually tested this transition to another scene.

I tried to test it and it failed. Probably my own fault due to the way I tested it. I tried another method to force a scene change and everything worked just fine. Maybe, instead, I should focus on keeping things the way they are, but address the issue of transitioning to the same scene we're leaving. To test this, without the respawn functionality involved, I changed up the test scene change to just transition to the scene we're already in and it behaved the same way.

Fixes

With this information in hand, it was time to talk to Gemini. I opened a brand new, fresh chat instance with the AI and fed it my game manager script with a description of what's wrong. After talking to Gemini a little, I decided to just go off on my own to figure this out. My first approach was to just create a new scene to transition through. I really thought that would work, but it didn't. It seems that my transition takes too long, and the new scene is loaded and starts the next transition before the last one was finished.

Eventually, I figure out a very simple and easy fix. I added a new public variable to my game manager to let other scripts know if the game manager is currently in the process of transitioning to a new scene. Now, my respawn scene waits for that variable to change and then starts a new transition. After a bit of testing it proved to be the solution. 

I made a few other modifications (mostly surrounding the playerstats data updates) while I was at it. Now when the character menu opens it automatically refreshes the data shown. I also made a slight modification to the HUD prefab so that it will hopefully stay updated as well.

In Conclusion

The issue ended up not being a complicated fix, but getting there took some serious thought. I'm very happy with this outcome. It isn't perfect, but it's good enough for now. I know that I will eventually come back through and make every single part of this game better, but this is the final piece I needed to complete my player death. The only thing missing is the ability for the player to maintain their character through a respawn, but that is for another day.

What's Next

I'm really not sure exactly what to work on next. There's so much still to be done. I think the next step will be the player's name. Right now I just have a placeholder, and there's nothing built out to allow changing it. This will be a somewhat important piece of the puzzle. But that is for another day!