Friday, February 6, 2015

Using Unity Instantiate to create child objects

I'm building a tetris like board and was using Instantiate to create a group of tiles that were a move piece and when I moved the parent object, non of them moved.  It wasn't hard to fix, simply set the parent of the instantiated object.


            Transform ttmp = (Transform)Instantiate(goal_tile, goal_tile.position, goal_tile.rotation);
            tile.transform.position = new Vector2(
                (cellToCol(i) * tile_plain.rect.width) / tile_plain.pixelsPerUnit,
                (cellToRow(i) * tile_plain.rect.width) / tile_plain.pixelsPerUnit);
            ttmp.parent = transform;


Then in the update method, I can move the entire group of tiles like this



       Transform t2 = GetComponent();
       t2.position = new Vector3(t2.position.x + 0.005f, t2.position.y, t2.position.z);



In this case I'm getting the Transform associated with myself and adding a small amount to the x position. It doesn't do much because it just moves of the screen, but the game is getting closer bit by bit.

Thursday, January 29, 2015

Unity2D script to programatcally add a sprite

I'm create a grid of tiles. The tiles are sprites and I'm laying them out programmatically. Here is the code to generate one of the tiles.

public Sprite tile_plain; // assign this in unity by dragging a sprite to it void Start() { GameObject tile = new GameObject(); tile.AddComponent(); tile.GetComponent().sprite = tile_plain; tile.transform.position = new Vector2((i * tile_plain.rect.width)/tile_plain.pixelsPerUnit, 5f); }

Wednesday, January 28, 2015

Unity2D Screen size

Still messing with Unity 2D and wanted to make a note on now to find the screen size and the upper left coordinate. This will be something I need for every game.
using UnityEngine; using System.Collections; public class ScreenSize : MonoBehaviour { void Start() { float ScreenHeight = Camera.main.orthographicSize*2; float SceenWidth = Camera.main.aspect * camHalfHeight; // Set a new vector to the top left of the scene Vector3 topLeftPosition = new Vector3(-ScreenWidth/2, ScreenHeight/2, 0) + Camera.main.transform.position; } }

Tuesday, January 27, 2015

Unity 2D Units

I'm building a tile system to display a grid of sprits in my game. I'm old school and used to just using pixels so a 32 pixel wide sprite is 32 pixels wide. so when I do this to create a strip of sprites
(a public method variable)public Sprite tile_plain; int i; for (i=0;i<25;i++) { GameObject tile = new GameObject(); tile.AddComponent(); tile.GetComponent().sprite = tile_plain; tile.transform.position = new Vector2((i * tile_plain.rect.width), 5f);

Then only one sprite element shows up on the screen and the others, while they are there are off the screen. To do this, you have to divide by the pixels per unit identified in the sprite.
(a public method variable)public Sprite tile_plain; int i; for (i=0;i<25;i++) { GameObject tile = new GameObject(); tile.AddComponent(); tile.GetComponent().sprite = tile_plain; tile.transform.position = new Vector2((i * tile_plain.rect.width)/tile_plain.pixelsPerUnit, 5f);
This was a good Stackoverflow post (Unity 4.3 - understanding positions and screen resolution, how to properly set position of object?) on the topic.

Monday, January 26, 2015

Surface Pro 3 and Visual Studio network conflict

I've recently been using a surface pro 3 for my development.  I love it as it works great on planes and when I travel.  I had been having one issue with the network on sleep, it never returned and I had to continually reset it.  I also found that sleep had been replaced by hibernate and it took 20 seconds to come back to life every time I left it alone for a few minutes.  It turned out that Visual Studio 2013 installs Hyper-V.

This was a great explanation of the problem.
http://winsupersite.com/mobile-devices/surface-pro-3-tip-hyper-v-vs-connected-standby

I don't plan on using Hyper-V so I can turn it off. Basically I just ran a command prompt as administrator and used this command.
bcdedit /set hypervisorlaunchtype off

as this blog is mostly for my own note taking purposes, I'm going to return here if I need to run it again or I need to turn it back on

Here is how I'm going to turn it back on.
bcdedit /set hypervisorlaunchtype auto

Friday, January 23, 2015

Kids name printing

I now it's not software development, but my three toddlers are learning how to write and I found this really cool name tracing site.




Thursday, January 22, 2015

Board games for programmers

If you have a group of programmers, RoboRally is a really really fund game.  You create little five card instructuctions for your robot and send him off. Invariably, people put in bugs or run into other robots and cause hilarious effects.  I've played this many times with developer teams and everyone has fun.


Wednesday, January 21, 2015

Theory of fun

I've been revisiting this book on game design and really enjoying it. It will really help you understand what makes fun games fun.


 
Also, this book does a good job of talking about violence in video games and what it actually means. I don't know if it was in the book or not, but I remember reading this and coming up with a defense of violence in video games. Not that I condone violence, I like peaceful people, but the fact is that you can only complain about game violence if you've never played this children's classic.

.

Tuesday, January 20, 2015

How to configure a Unity project to use VisualStudio

I started a new 2D project to try and see if I could port an old game I did in Java called EmPathMe (http://www.woodsgoods.com/gaw, Good luck getting it to run).

When I went to launch a script in VisualStudio it complained there wasn't a .sln file so I had to figure it out again. I'm leaving myself this post so I don't have to figure it out again.

You select Assets/Import Package/Custom Package...
 
Then you navigate to the location where the VisualStudio Tools for Unity were installed (http://unityvs.com/). I installed them in the default location C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio Tools for Unity\2013. The debug only works well with VisualStudioPro and I have no idea how I'm going to pay for the pro version once my  That's one reason I'm setting this up so I can get the touch code working well before my trial license expires

 
Choose all the package assets.

 
Now you will have the Visual Studio Tools menu and you can generate the project files so you don't see the error about not having a .sln file when launching the Unity editor.


Monday, January 19, 2015

Unity 2D Tutorials

These tutorials on the new Unity 2D features have been very helpful.

http://unity3d.com/learn/tutorials/modules/beginner/2d/2d-overview

http://unity3d.com/learn/tutorials/modules/beginner/2d/2d-overview

Thursday, January 15, 2015

Bing rewards

I've recently switched to Bing as my search engine.  I tried it because they have a rewards program and after a few months I really don't see any difference.

Try Bing rewards, it makes search just a little more fun.

Bing rewards is running a 1,000,000 reward points give away. Sign up here.

Wednesday, January 14, 2015

Unity script referencing



I wanted my keyboard input script to retrieve a value from a grid generator script so it knew how far to move one of my game objects. It took me a while to figure it out even though it's simple so I figure it's best to leave myself a bread crumb so I don't have to search so much next time.

//this is how you get a reference and value out of another script
scriptholder = GameObject.Find("EmptyScriptHolder");
GridManager script = scriptholder.GetComponent<GridManager>();
print("Grid gap =" + script.stepsize);


This shows how to get a reference to the actual script, in this case it's my EmptyObject I use to hold scripts that are not associated with actual GameObjects.  I call it EmptyScriptHolder.  I then get the reference to the GridManager script.  This is the actual type name of the script.  Within that script is a method variable called stepsize.  Overall it's very simple to get a value out of another script once you know how to do it.

This site was very helpful even though it's documentation from a few versions back.
http://docs.unity3d.com/412/Documentation/ScriptReference/index.Accessing_Other_Game_Objects.html

Tuesday, January 13, 2015

Hexagon grids

I'm not building a game that uses a hexagond grid right now, but have done it before and thinking about what it takes and found this great hexagon algorithm resource.

http://www.redblobgames.com/grids/hexagons/

Thursday, November 27, 2014

Unity touch debugging

I mentioned this in an earlier post, but thought I would go into more detail. I think this is  a great solution for testing touch input with Unity.

http://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Input.GetTouch.html

I'm using Visual Studio Pro 2013 to do this and I don't see a way to do it with Mono.  The only other way I've found is to use an actual device and connect a debugger to the device. This way I've found allows me to simply run a Visual Studio project directly on my touch device/development environment and test my touch code.

The first thing is to Build the project using File/Build and Run

 

 Select Windows Store app and then click Build or Build and Run.

 
The default location is to use the winout directory in the current Unity project. This worked well for me so I just used the default.
 
 
This creates a .sln file in that winout directory with all the necessary Visual Studio project files. Simply double click on the .sln file to launch Visual Studio Pro 2013.
 
 
 
I tested the project and one really nice thing is that the .cs files associated with behaviors in my project are actually linked back to the same files in my Unity project. So after making changes, they are already in my Unity project and I don't have to copy them back.
 
 
 
One thing to note is that this is only for script debugging. If I want to make changes to my layout or the models I've laid out in my Scene I will have to close Visual Studio, return to Unity to make the changes, then rebuild the winout project to work on my scripts again.  It's a small thing and this is still a much easier way to debug touch input than anything I've had to do before.

 

 

 

Wednesday, November 26, 2014

Surface Pro3 Print Screen Button

I usually use SnagIt to great effect and it is a primary tool for me.  I haven't installed it on my Surface yet and I was trying to figure out how to do a screen capture without it.  There isn't a Print Screen button.  The trick is pretty easy though. Press Fn-Space bar to capture the screen and Fn-Alt-Space to capture the active window.

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/forum/surfpro-surfusingpro/print-screen/1aa98224-dacb-4770-863e-7e1fc77f9ac1

Tuesday, November 25, 2014

Blender UV Mapping

I have a love hate relationship with Blender.  Love that it's free and super powerful. Hate that I have to relearn how to do simple stuff every time I step away from it for a few months.  I will say that this time, the tenth that I've created a UV map on a mesh has been the easiest.

This site documentation really helped and even though I'm using 2.72b, and the documentation is for 2.6 it didn't seem to matter.

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Manual/Textures/Mapping/UV/Unwrapping

It might not seem like a lot, but this will be a good test model for the game mechanic I'm building.

 
This is the actual texture.

Friday, November 21, 2014

Surface Pro 3 and Unity for Windows Store

Recently received a Surface Pro 3 as a gift and really love it.  Was using a 5 year old Toshiba that was limping along even with the 128GB SSD. The SSD made it viable for quite a while, but it was really getting behind. Enjoying the new Surface. First loaded Unity and Visual Studio Express 2013.  It seems like I can finally develop on an airplane even if the seat in front of me is reclined and I'm next to a 300 pounded.  The laptop was just too bulky to use when someone was sitting next to me.

So far I spent a lot of time getting Unity and Visual Studio connected together using UnityVS. Not that I don't think Mono Develop isn't good enough, I do like that, but for some reason I'm drawn to Windows Store app development and need to use VS to build Unity apps for Windows Store.

It isn't well documented, but don't try to use Visual Studio Express with UnityVS.  It won't give you an error, but will only have a message that it can't find Visual Studio.   You have to install Visual Studio Pro to work with UnityVS.  I'm now running a 90 day trial and everything is working, but will have to write quick and decide if I want to upgrade my older version of Visual Studio Pro.  I spent a lot of time uninstalling and reinstalling UnityVS to get this to work. Many messages from Visual Studio that the project type wasn't recognized.  Once I installed Visual Studio Pro it still had the same message and I reinstalled UnityVS and everything worked well.

Another thing that led me in this direcetion was trying to figure out how to debug the touch screen interface in my Unity game. This seems like it will work well.  In Unity, you have to Build the solution for the Windows Store application which will create a new folder with a Visual Studio Windows Store project.  This has the C# scripts linked in it so you can debug and change those directly and debug your Windows Store application directly.  I could have done something similar and connected my Android tablet directly to Unity and ADB debugged on hardware, but this seems like a better way and I will be using that.

Tuesday, May 27, 2014

Datacap Documentation

I know this blog has been all about game development for many years, but my day job at IBM has been to create applications with Datacap so I'm going to add some Datacap posts.

It took a while to get used to Datacap and I highly recommend getting some training as the learning curve will go a lot faster.  Here are the best places to find Datacap documentation.

First, don't think this is clever.  Simply do a google search for Datacap Documentation.

The publication library is the first stop.
http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg27035774
Scroll down to the PDF documentation.  The best place to start for building Datacap applications is the Application Development using IBM Datacap Taskmaster.  I still spend a lot of time in that document.

The second place is the official infocenter documentation.
http://pic.dhe.ibm.com/infocenter/datacap/v8r1m0/index.jsp

The third place is the Proof Of Technology.  There is a lab book that goes with the Proof Of Technology the sales teams use.  This has great walk-throughs of the various tasks and can be very helpful to see how to do different tasks.

The fourth place is Developer Works.  There are great samples on many Datacap capabilities.
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/data/library/techarticle/dm-ind-datacap-taskmaster/


Friday, May 24, 2013

Unity Ray debugging



Oh, this is a cool one I just noticed that again shows me the developer of Unity knows what they were doing.

function Update () {

    var ray : Ray = camera.ScreenPointToRay (Vector3(200,200,0));
    Debug.DrawRay (ray.origin, ray.direction * 10, Color.yellow);
}


How many times have I struggled to see where a ray or vector is doing in my game and written a ton of debug code (yes I did this with XNA) to draw a line where a ray was.  Unity gives me this as a simple Debug call.    Thank you thank you thank you.

Thursday, May 23, 2013

Learning Unity


Yeah, just what I need is another technology to learn. After a few years of teaching XNA (before that Torque, before that Java, before that J2ME and somewhere in there a quick detour for Second Life/LSL)  it seems like the world is shifting around me again. I did some quick Android apps last year, but still wanted another layer above me to allow me to release on multiple platforms. Unity keeps coming up in conversation and after a few quick tutorials and calls with a good friend who already climbed the learning curve I seem to be picking it up quickly. I had to drop it again for a few months as I got busy, but found some time recently to dig in again. So far pure joy. I've found a tool that was programmed by someone who understands.

A couple of really small things have made me really appreciate the person who created Unity. Meaning it's really well designed.

This guy gets it.
http://docs.unity3d.com/Documentation/ScriptReference/Mathf.Deg2Rad.html
This guy was an intern (as was most of the DirectX/XNA code base in my opinion).
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.xna.framework.mathhelper.toradians.aspx

This will cause some arguments, but why create a function/method (XNA),

float deg = MathHelper.ToRadians((float) 1.0);

and I don't know for sure that C# does create a stack frame or not for this call, but why even chance it.  I know it's only a few extra instructions and one extra push onto the stack (if that's what it does), but if I run that a lot it's bound to do a little extra processing that I might not want to have on a slower/older device. I grew up with limited memory and CPU so I still know that every instruction is still a percentage of your maximum throughput. The less you use, the more you can do. For short, every single instruction still counts.

When this most definitely doesn't have any extra over head. (there might be an offset instruction for the Mathf. part, but not a (possibly) full stack frame creation).

float deg = 1.0 * Mathf.DegToRad;

This and a couple of other small things, like the ability to create/change a model in Blender (free) and have it automatically be updated in my game is a huge bonus. I love Blender and have struggled to use it with every game engine and with unity it's automatic. That's huge.  I can use 3ds max fairly well, but that expensive license every year for the simple stuff I build just isn't affordable.

Anyway, loving Unity after a few weeks of working with it.  Have a fun little game mechanic coming along.

Wednesday, September 5, 2012

Android - Full Screen

I was putting some finishing touches onto a new little ap for my 2 year old and needed to make it full screen. This is what I ended up using.  Edit the AndroidManifest.xml file and change the android:theme line to this.

        android:theme="@android:style/Theme.NoTitleBar.Fullscreen"

Tuesday, September 4, 2012

Learning Android - Audio Volume Control

I've been spending some time learning to program using Android.  It's been on my list for a long time and I'm going slow and building fun little things for my 2 year old. Nothing commercial, just something for him to enjoy.

The first app I built had an issue that the audio controls on the device wouldn't work unless a sound was actually playing.  Found a really simple work around.

Add this call to the onCreate method in the activity.

        setVolumeControlStream(AudioManager.STREAM_MUSIC);

Pretty simple little fix.

Wednesday, September 1, 2010

Second Life Game Tile Testing


I've been messing around with game tile systems again using second life. Looking at the rudiments of a table top game like checkers, chess or even something as complex as monopoly. Trying to figure out how to develop something that doesn't use physics, but uses a tile based movement system.

I started by building a blank table top and adding a piece to it. Right now, the piece simply moves from corner to corner when someone clicks on the table. Under the hood there is a lot more going on than you might first think.



This is the code in the init script in the table.

default
{
state_entry()
{

//list bb = llGetBoundingBox(llGetKey()); // get my bounding box
vector sz = llList2Vector(llGetPrimitiveParams([PRIM_SIZE]),0);
llMessageLinked(LINK_ALL_OTHERS,1,(string)sz,NULL_KEY);
}

touch_start(integer total_number)
{
//llSay(0, "Touched.");
llSay(1024,"move");
}
}

You might as why did I comment out llGetBoundingBox. The reason is it works great when the table is by itself, but once the piece is on the table, the piece's location is included in the bounding box. This makes the box larger than expected.

So, the script get's the actual prim size from the table top and passes it to all the other linked objects (in this case the "disc" using a linked message. The identifier of the message is the number "1" which in this case means "table size", and the size (vector) is passed as a string.


You can also see that when the table is touched, it says "move" on channel 1024 which you can guess that the "disc" is listening for. Why not use llMessageLinked for both communications? We'll I should, but the "move" message was added early on and I started using linked messages later and have to get back to change to use llMessageLinked.


This is the code for the disc

vector mysize;
vector mysizediv2;
vector tablesize;
vector min;
vector max;
integer posMinOrMax;

default
{
state_entry()
{
//list bb = llGetBoundingBox(llGetLinkKey(1)); // get the bounding box of the table
//max = llList2Vector(bb, 1); // max corner
//min = llList2Vector(bb, 0); // min corner
//min = >min.x,min.y,max.z<;

//llWhisper(0,(string)min+" "+(string)max);

posMinOrMax = 0;

llListen(1024,"",llGetLinkKey(1),"move");
}


listen( integer channel, string name, key id, string message )
{
if (channel==1024)
{
if (posMinOrMax==0)
{
llSetPos(max);
//llWhisper( 0, "max" );
}
else
{
llSetPos(min);
//llWhisper( 0, "min" );
}
posMinOrMax = 1 - posMinOrMax;

}
}

link_message(integer sender_num, integer num, string str, key id)
{
if (num==1)
{
mysize = llList2Vector(llGetPrimitiveParams([PRIM_SIZE]),0);
mysizediv2 = mysize / 2;
mysizediv2.z = 0.0;

tablesize = (vector) str;
llWhisper(0,"got size = "+(string)tablesize);
vector sz = tablesize / 2;
min = >-sz.x,-sz.y,sz.z*2< + mysizediv2;
max = >sz.x,sz.y,sz.z*2< - mysizediv2;

}
}
}

You can see that early on I calculated the min and max positions based on the bounding box which I have already said is wrong. On the listen channel when I hear "move" I toggle the position between the min and max. That should be pretty straight forward.


The interesting stuff is in the link_message function. I first get the size of the "disc" using the llGetPrimitiveParams call. All positioning is done from the center of the object, so if I use the absolute min and max sizes of the table then the disc will hang off the edge. I divide the size by two because that is how far I have to inset the position from the table's min and max.

I then convert the table size vector from the string that was passed on the link message back to a vector and calculate the min and max positions using the inset of half the disc size. The min adds half the disc size and the max subtracts. The other thing is that the table's origin is at the center, and positioning the disc has to take that into account. So the min is the table position (center) subtracting half the size of the table. The max is the table position (center) and adding half the table size.

Wednesday, August 25, 2010


I had a discussion with another developer about the moonphase virtual sculpture. They mentioned a technique that might improve bandwidth usage by using llSetTextureAnim instead of setting the offset of the texture directly. The idea being that llSetTextureAnim would be running on the actual client which doesn't require any bandwidth, while llOffsetTexture is run on the server and all the clients viewing that object need to receive a message that the object change.

So I did some testing with llSetTextureAnim and I couldn't get the same results. When you use ROTATE in llSetTextureAnim then you can't specify the texture offset, only which portion of the texture you want to use. It seems like it is used to have a tiled texture where each section of the tile can be used as an individual tile. In my case, I used a half transparent texture and am rotating that around the sphere. Using llSetTextureAnim I don't see a way to get the same effect. I'm a little slow most of the time so I may be missing something. Here is a screen shot of using
default
{ state_entry()
{
llSetTextureAnim(ANIM_ON | LOOP | SMOOTH | ROTATE,ALL_SIDES, 1,1, 0, TWO_PI, TWO_PI/360);
}
}



I also tried using a non-ROTATE texture animation which only cause the texture to turn on and off when the "tile" reached the non-transparent section.

I really like the idea of reducing bandwidth by having the texture changes run on each client, but don't see a way to get this to work for this sculpture. llSetTextureAnim is definitely a good tool for the tool belt and I'll have to consider some sort of sculpture using a tiled texture. That would mean that each client would see something different on their machine so there couldn't be a discussion about the "current" look of the sculpture between two people, but I'm not sure that's a real problem.

Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Sensor land detection

I recently moved lands and my new neighbor asked if I could turn of my sensor that greeted visitors. I guess it was going off when people were visiting their land.

I first detected the location of the Agent who tripped the sensor. Then get the land owner key at that location. It's hard to tell what that key is so I wrote code to print that out if the sensor detected me, then went into my neighbor's land. Then took that number and hard coded it into the welcome message. Now the sensor will only greet someone if they are on a different land than my neighbors.

sensor( integer number_detected )
{
integer i;
for( i = 0; i < detpos =" llDetectedPos(" k =" llGetLandOwnerAt(detpos);" k ="="" k = "+(string)k); // } //} if ( (llDetectedKey( i ) != llGetOwner()) && (k != ">