There are a lot of features in the Latios Framework. And if you are using Unity Transforms, it might be confusing knowing which features are good to use, and which are generally geared more towards QVVS users. That’s what this guide is for.
We’ll start with the most popular modules and features for Unity Transforms-based projects, and then discuss other features for the more adventurous. This order is largely based on conversations from the Latios Framework discord community.
If you are interested in the Latios Framework because you want a free skeletal animation solution, welcome! Some people use the Latios Framework solely for this purpose. You are in good company.
If you aren’t interested in Kinemation for skeletal animation, don’t write off Kinemation just yet. That’s just one of Kinemation’s many features.
Really, you should think of Kinemation as an upgraded Entities Graphics. It is just plain faster (both CPU and GPU), and offers many more features.
If you have a lot of entities, LOD Pack can make a huge impact on your polygon count. If you have a lot of textures, mipmap streaming works out of the box. And if you just want to create and modify a mesh at runtime, Unique Mesh makes that process so much easier.
Calligraphics does world-space text at scale really well. If you are worried about needing 1000 canvases or UI Toolkit panels, then Calligraphics is solution.
The most common use case for Calligraphics is for damage numbers. But there are other use cases where a bunch of independent world-space text labels are needed.
If you’ve ever explored Unity’s Galaxy Sample, you might be familiar with its technique of using a single VFX Graph to service many entities. LifeFX works in a similar way, but provides a better workflow for wiring up entities to the Visual Effects.
Explicit System Ordering is popular enough that it is this high in the list. Solo devs in particular really like just being able to see the order of their systems right in the code.
Myri is such an easy drop-in for audio when you need something simple. The only catch is that the listener needs to be an entity that gets baked, which means it cannot be the Main Camera Game Object.
For users with more-advanced audio needs, Myri is still a great tool for prototyping at the early stages of development, before switching over to FMOD Studio or Wwise.
This hashmap-in-a-DynamicBuffer solution was just a side-experiment. But
people really like it. It’s main claim to fame is that the value type in a
key-value pair supports Entity and BlobAssetReference serialization.
Unika comes in handy for problems where you really, really miss virtual interface calls. It is good for things like state machines and behavior trees. But you can also use it as a C# scripting solution for mods. And for small gameplay logic tasks, it is faster to work with Unika than to make a full ECS component and system once you have it set up.
Calci is the home of Rng, which is a deterministic random number generator that is simpler to set up than other solutions.
There are plenty more features compatible with Unity Transforms, but these are the ones that come up the most. If you use the framework, be sure to share which features you use, as doing so helps ensure those features and better maintained.
When using Unity Transforms, you will still come across TransformQvvs as part
of the API. This is just a struct, not unlike RigidTransform from the Unity
Mathematics package. Do whatever you want with the individual fields.