History of post ‘Camera Not Showing Anything in Unity 2D? Try This Simple Fix.’

Revision 1 · Jan 11, 2024 2:32 am UTC · View this (the most recent) version (v2)

Remove erroneous count

@@ -46,7 +46,7 @@ void LateUpdate()
Now it works like a charm.

## Takeaways
I’m a Unity noob, but these are the-two main things I learned from solving this problem:

1. It seems that, in Unity, 2D games are just flat pancakes inside a 3D world, and z coordinates still matter.
2. Therefore, even in a 2D game, transform components still have a z coordinate.

Original · Jan 11, 2024 12:06 am UTC · View this version (v1)

# Camera Not Showing Anything in Unity 2D? Try This Simple Fix.
While practicing my Unity game-development skills, I tried getting the camera to follow the player’s y coordinate in a 2D game. I followed [this tutorial](https://gamedevbeginner.com/how-to-follow-the-player-with-a-camera-in-unity-with-or-without-cinemachine/) to do so.

The task seemed simple enough: assign the player’s transform as a serialized field to the camera and use it to set the camera’s position.

```csharp
using System.Collections;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using UnityEngine;

public class Camera : MonoBehaviour
{
    [SerializeField] Transform target;

    void LateUpdate()
    {
        transform.position = new Vector2(
            transform.position.x,
            target.transform.position.y
        );
    }
}
```

In this script, `target` represents the player object’s transform component, assigned in the Unity editor by dragging the player game object into the corresponding field. The camera’s x coordinate is retained, and the player’s y coordinate is used to set the camera’s y coordinate. This way, the camera follows the player up and down but not left or right – but that’s an implementation detail.

However, once I ran the game, I suddenly couldn’t see any of the objects anymore.

The issue lies with my use of `Vector2`. I used it because I’m in a 2D game. Why would I use Vector3, right?

Well, I noticed in the Unity inspector that, even though it’s a 2D game, the camera’s transform still has a z coordinate for its position. By default, it was set to `-10` before I started the game, but the `Vector2` assignment in the code above implicitly set that to `0`. This caused the camera to be on the same plane as the objects in the game, thus looking ‘behind’ them. [This](https://discussions.unity.com/t/camera-not-displaying-any-gameobjects-in-scene/131060/2) helpful answer on the Unity discussion forum tipped me off.

To fix this issue, instead use a `Vector3` that retains the camera’s z coordinate:

```csharp
void LateUpdate()
{
    transform.position = new Vector3(
        transform.position.x,
        target.transform.position.y
        transform.position.z
    );
}
```

Now it works like a charm.

## Takeaways
I’m a Unity noob, but these are the two main things I learned from solving this problem:

1. It seems that, in Unity, 2D games are just flat pancakes inside a 3D world, and z coordinates still matter.
2. Therefore, even in a 2D game, transform components still have a z coordinate.
3. Assigning a 2D vector to a 3D field implicitly sets the z coordinate to `0`. It does *not* retain the original z coordinate.