I haven’t posted here in a while. I took a break from the project to concentrate on preparing for a dream hiking trip to northern Sweden. Here are a few videos demonstrating where things stand. Here we are stress testing the new multi-threaded path finding, task following, and resource database. Keeping track of all the dynamic things on the ship in a way that can be very quickly searched is an interesting problem. The solution I came up with is…
My little rant generated some questions that it may be easier to clear up here than 140 characters at a time. Sometimes you want to execute some functionality when changing the value of a property. The key word there is “changing”. In order to know if the property changed you must compare the new value to the current value. It looks something like this: // some field in your class int value; void SetValue(int newValue) { if (value != newValue)…
I recently ran into an interesting Unity feature that I didn’t know about previously. I kept having an agent get stuck in the same place for no apparent reason. I’ve spent two days trying to track down the problem and finally ran across this in the least expected place – a function written almost on day 1 of this project, over a year and a half ago. I’m trying to set my x position to 32. Since I’m generating an event…
My current Unity project is a space exploration/base building game. Kind of Rimworld meets Starflight. Still in the very early stages (as most of my projects tend to be) and full of programmer art, but I’m happy with the results so far. Just finished a first pass at optimizing the lighting system which does the whole “light spills around corners” thing in real time. It’s kind of cool to see light smoothly expand out into a hallway as a door opens. I…
I’m not quite ready to start talking about my current game project, but one thing I can say is that it requires the ability to generate names procedurally. Of the several methods I’ve researched, Markov Chains seem to be the most promising. Among other things they can be used to generate random music, text, and individual words. We’ll be concentrating on individual words. A Markov Chain describes a state machine that can transition to the next state based only on…
On occasion when making a video game there is a need to display a texture that contains an image of a 3D game object. For example, to display in a toolbar, or chat message or something similar. These images could be created statically by your artist, but sometimes the image needs to change based on something happening in the game, or there is some other compelling reason where runtime creation is required. Render Textures are a straightforward method for creating…
Last time I talked about using timers for scheduling events by simply keeping track of a time limit and how much time elapsed. Another good use for timers is performing some action over time, such as modifying alpha to fade an object in or out, or sliding an object from one location to another. Let’s use the fading example. Fading is often done by animating transparency. The object starts out completely transparent, and gradually becomes less transparent until it’s fully…
It’s going on seven months since my last post, which is kind of pathetic. When finishing a large project, like the WP7 port of Guardian, my brain tends to shut down for awhile for recharging. That, on top of starting a new job back in November, lead to a much longer blogging hiatus than intended. So, how about something simple to get back into the swing of things. And since we’re talking about time… Very often in video games there…
Spruced up the menus quite a bit with some floaty asteroids instead of just the raw text. Looks much nicer I think. The todo list is pretty much empty now. Mostly some final balancing and play testing left to go, and some art work for the various icons and other app store images. If all goes well over the next couple of days it’ll be complete and ready to test when I hopefully get my hardware on Monday.
Here is my attempt at using XNA to duplicate some of the UI functionality on WP7. Well, not really duplicate so much as “create a passing resemblance to”. The menu is pretty boring. I’ve been trying to come up with a good idea to make it interesting, and think I finally have something that will be worth the effort. That’ll probably be the next movie. The first WP7 phones are supposed to be released in the U.S. on November 8th…