FS Swimming Review. Fantacode Studios put out a Swimming…

Fantacode Studios put out a Swimming System for Unity. And so, of course, I picked it up.

Easily add swimming to your game with the FS Swimming System! Players can move across the surface, dive underwater, and jump or dive into water from heights.

And, well, as expected from Fantacode Studios, it works quite nicely out of the box.

Hmm… I’m not entirely certain what else to add. It adds easy swimming, including the AI being able to swim along the surface (Unity not having an easy free way to do 3D AI navigation).

Adding Underwater Noise Filters

Someone on the Discord suggested that the sound effects for moving underwater were nearly identical to those above the water. They are different, but Fantacode Studios used some free effects and they are pretty similar. But hey… if you’re underwater, things probably should sound a bit different, right? Well, let’s show how you can do that with an Audio Filter on your Audio Listener. First step, we’ll add an Audio Distortion Filter and an Audio Echo Filter to our camera. Honestly… I’m not an audio guy, so there’s probably a better way to do this, but I just want to show that there is a difference. We’ll start with the two filters off.

Next, we’ll hook into the events when going underwater and leaving underwater to turn on and off the filters.

Lastly, we’ll add an audio-source, which in this case will play a song from Danse Macabre by Dark Fantasy Studio. And, the result?

The filters aren’t quite as strong as I might like, but you can hear the difference between above water and underwater. In retrospect, I probably should have set the underwater sound effects to not be affected by the filter, since they sound kind of weird… but that’s a problem for another day.