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[tamaster92]

Did you make these animations yourself? I'm curious about animating in general.

EDIT: Derp didn't read that last sentence, so you messed around with an animation instead. Been looking to get into animation, already started 3d modeling.

Indeed, I am no artist! Probably the thing I suck at most to be honest.

In other news I found out why some of the transitions weren't working - apparently UE4 has a bug currently where the first time a state animation is run it is set to 0.0 runtime then plays - so my rules regarding how long left of the animation broke thr first time playing it.

Easily fixed by add a inrange and excluding 0.0

Equipping and unequipping basics are now done Now to try and make it so each gun can set its own equip and holster animations...

 

[taku]

Are there any good podcasts about game dev?

You might want to check out Designer Notes.

 

[Jacksinthe]

Well I don't know what you thought when I wrote "fake gameobject cursor" but I talked about a real gameobject which is a fake cursor, not a fake gameobject.

Yes you understand it right even if I always show the cursor in a form or another and never hide it for the moment.

I totally understand what you say and thought about something like this too, and that's why I talked about the use of the lock to center function at first.

I thought you were talking about my example because your initial post:

I save the current position of my cursor, change a menu property (for example), play with my cursor, and when I quit this menu state and want to reset the cursor position to my saved position.

I talk about the function that lock the cursor at the center to make it with tricks.

made no mention of faking a cursor until i mentioned it.

So there's that.

 

[Jumplion]

Good lord moving UI elements in Unity can generate a lot of garbage... I will make this work damnit!

edit: Just checked it out in a build... it doesn't care. Performance is fine, I hate editor only issues :|

The whole idea though is that you click a body part (which will probably no longer be the case as they overlap too much), it zooms in and display items you can click to equip, then more stuff for mods etc. The idea was to be like an augmented relaity overview to fit in with the whole cybernetics thing.



Now when zoomed in, it follows the location it's viewing for that weird effect I don't know the name of (sherlock holmes film did it for a chase scene I think?), so everything around you moves except for what you see. Bit disorientating though so may not do that, but it also does this to the UI...



Motion blur is disabled etc, but it ghosts like crazy. Once it's all fuctional though, then it's time to make it pretty!





I remember spending about a month experimenting with how to hide walls or making characters/things visible behind objects, was never happy with the results! (I'm still not) Yours is looking good though

Loving that fanciness

 

[sbkodama]

I thought you were talking about my example because your initial post:
made no mention of faking a cursor until i mentioned it.
So there's that.

Sorry to not have been clear, my first comment was mostly about the inability to directly set the mouse cursor position so I didn't see the point to explicitly talk about my fake cursor. By reading, I kind of mentioned it by saying "my" and "the" cursor, which refer to my cursor ingame and the mouse cursor,

I only use my fake cursor to change my mouse cursor sprite because I had a problem with the display of the texture that I use to directly change the mouse cursor sprite, and nothing else is at work beside the change of sprite for my fake cursor until now.

 

[Jacksinthe]

Sorry to not have been clear, my first comment was mostly about the inability to directly set the mouse cursor position so I didn't see the point to explicitly talk about my fake cursor. By reading, I kind of mentioned it by saying "my" and "the" cursor, which refer to my cursor ingame and the mouse cursor,

I only use my fake cursor to change my mouse cursor sprite because I had a problem with the display of the texture that I use to directly change the mouse cursor sprite, and nothing else is at work beside the change of sprite for my fake cursor until now.

You should be able to change the cursor fine using Cursor.SetCursor unless you are on an older version of Unity or a texture setting is messed up which can happen. That's weird that swapping the texture doesn't work but not surprising. Unity has a few issues that should work, but wind up not working randomly for some people.

But if it doesn't work then you're handling it correctly with a workaround. Dirty, but I venture most of is have bits of "I do this because Unity breaks" in their comments ha!

 

[sbkodama]

You should be able to change the cursor fine using Cursor.SetCursor unless you are on an older version of Unity or a texture setting is messed up which can happen. That's weird that swapping the texture doesn't work but not surprising. Unity has a few issues that should work, but wind up not working randomly for some people.

But if it doesn't work then you're handling it correctly with a workaround. Dirty, but I venture most of is have bits of "I do this because Unity breaks" in their comments ha!

Last time I tested to directly set the cursor texture it displayed bugged rgb lines instead of it, and it was on one of the lastest version because I always upgrade.
Maybe a texture type issue I don't know, I use tga and haven't try others just I opted for the fake cursor. Thank you for your time anyway

 

[Jacksinthe]

Last time I tested to directly set the cursor texture it displayed bugged rgb lines instead of it, and it was on one of the lastest version because I always upgrade.
Maybe a texture type issue I don't know, I use tga and haven't try others just I opted for the fake cursor. Thank you for your time anyway

I won't update to the latest. Too many issues. I am on 5.2 until release which I've found to work reasonably well with most things.

I have a few issues with 5.3.x that aren't sorted. I use a lot of trailrenderers, with about 6 or more on screen they all disappear. They don't hide behind anything, even in a completely empty project and scene with nothing but, they still randomly disappear for no good reason. That's just small fry. 5.2 works well so I'm sticking with it.

 

[TheHollowNight]

You might want to check out Designer Notes.

And Tone Control, the predecessor before that!

 

[Vincent Alexander]

I think taking notes and organizing them based on your workflow is absolutely essential. In the past year I've referenced this material countless times, which keeps me from constantly digging through manuals or bugging co-workers.

Thank you for feedback. I went out and bought myself a notebook to keep at my side each night as I learn more.

 

[missile]

Watched Blade Runner again recently and have been listening to the soundtrack a lot which is making me want to make a Blade Runner-esque game. There doesn't seem to be very many games like that...other than Cyberpunk 2077 but who knows when that'll come out lol.

Call me in. I follow a similar interest for a game I have in mind using
Cyberpunk / Tech Noir elements.


On another note; All good on my end, still working hard on my CRT simulator
and stuff. I got some issues with some filters in trying to balance filter
roll-off vs. ringing vs. non-linear phase vs. computational load. It's damn
tricky when you need to peel out a frequency multiplexed signal from another
one on a tight bandwidth. Having steep filter roll-off curves makes it easier,
but the computational load rises in order of magnitudes. The problem will be
even more demanding if I think about the tuner aspect of my simulator. So I
better spend some good time into it, because I need to find some pretty good
and fast filter approximations in the end.

 

[LordRaptor]

Last time I tested to directly set the cursor texture it displayed bugged rgb lines instead of it, and it was on one of the lastest version because I always upgrade.
Maybe a texture type issue I don't know, I use tga and haven't try others just I opted for the fake cursor. Thank you for your time anyway

Setcursor has worked fine for me with a 32x32 transparent .PNG set to type cursor on import settings

Public void SetCustomCursor()
{
    Cursor.SetCursor(newCursor, cursorOffset, CursorMode.Auto);
}

newCursor was a texture2d from an array, cursorOffset was either Vector2.zero or 16,16 depending on the type of cursor I changed to (I have both 'pointer' and 'crosshair' type cursors) - I used this as part of my general UI scripts to have the cursor change when it was over the draggable and resizable hotspots for draggable and resizable panels

 

[Vanguard]

Loving that fanciness

Thanking you

Still needs tidying up as it's still very much wip, but it's now functional in the game (which broke a lot, but mostly fixed now). Quite happy.

As webm: https://i.imgur.com/rl1USZ2.webm

 

[Jumplion]

Thanking you

Still needs tidying up as it's still very much wip, but it's now functional in the game (which broke a lot, but mostly fixed now). Quite happy.

As webm: https://i.imgur.com/rl1USZ2.webm

I love UI and stuff that makes everything all woosh around. Vlambeer is to screen shake what "wooshiness" is to me.

Also, I am probably late to the party on this guy, but I found this person named Keijiro Takahashi that does amazing work that you can find here; https://github.com/keijiro

His shit is inspiring, yo. He's got all kinds of stuff from particle stuff to monochrome scripts to audio responding visuals. I got the mirror/kaleidoscope effect on my game from him (and I just found out he has a sprite outliner effect which made me squee in joy)

Speaking of my game, working on backgrounds and still trying to nail down a decent look;
http://gfycat.com/ThreadbareBlaringApe
I'm trying to dial back on the color now, at least using two complementary colors that fade with eachother.

 

[HandsomeCharles]

Still needs tidying up as it's still very much wip, but it's now functional in the game (which broke a lot, but mostly fixed now). Quite happy.

That camera's transition looks really nice, it's got a high quality feel to it!

On another note, I finally have something to show! The focus for this week is building up my rudimentary spawn/death/respawn system into something more akin to how it is actually going to work in-game. Tonight's work was hooking up the animation for the player's "spawn tube" (If anyone can suggest a better name, I'm all ears!)

Anyway, it's still not all that fancy (and I need to sort out some positioning issues + get some extra effects in there), but I'm pretty happy with the direction I'm heading in

Here's a gif for your troubles:

EDIT: Just realised the slight camera jitter when the gif loops makes it look as though the door is slamming shut, it isn't

 

[tamaster92]

I am REALLY enjoying this work at the moment, lots of problem solving and making core mechanics etc.

Today I got all of the following done (all very basic versions mind)

Most of the stuff was making the base version of future mechanics - ie the base gun blueprints will be used to make expanded child Bps for each type of gun, then childs of those for each specific gun.

Opinions on what color the ammo bar should be btw? Green worked for testing but I don't think it works well in an actual game. Colors are tough :/

 

[correojon]

I´m almost finished with the basic movement of the main character, it´s taken a lot of time and failures but finally I have some animations I´m proud of:
http://i.imgur.com/vdu5LFG.gif


I like a lot how bouncy the walking animation looks and the tails a lot of weight to the movement You can also see the camera in the video, I´ve made it so it only moves vertically when the player changes platforms. Horizontally it also has a deadzone to allow for small movements without moving the view around.

 

[Elitist1945]

Call me in. I follow a similar interest for a game I have in mind using
Cyberpunk / Tech Noir elements.

I have lots of ideas but can't do anything because I know shit all about programming. I really need to stop procrastinating and just try and learn it already.

 

[Jacksinthe]

Yo, please refrain from 22 and 67mb gifs. Either link or use GfyCat!!!

Thank you

 

[tamaster92]

Yo, please refrain from 22 and 67mb gifs. Either link or use GfyCat!!!

Thank you

My apologies!

I'm still trying to figure a way to make them smaller without destroying the quality if you happen to know any good ways which keep them as a gif for mobile use

 

[Cheezus]

Hey GAF, my Google fu isn't working and I need help!

I recently decided after about a year and a half of messing around in Game Maker to learn some Unity. My current project is a very straight forward Mario style Platformer with Mario style physics, but it seems as though there is no built in/easy way to look ahead and check for collisions before moving the player a la place_meeting in gamer maker. I want to do this so that I can step the player with a loop until it hits a collision.

I know about the whole rigid body 2d physics thing but I actually hate the way physics based Platformers feel so I'm wondering if there's a way to do old school Mario style physics in unity either using the built in physics engine or some alternative way. I want nothing to do with "forces" if I can help it.

I was going to try and move the object and then revert it's position if it hits a collision, then step it with a loop but I'm not sure if there's a way to detect a collision on demand inside the update method. Any help is appreciated!

 

[Jumplion]

Hey GAF, my Google fu isn't working and I need help!

I recently decided after about a year and a half of messing around in Game Maker to learn some Unity. My current project is a very straight forward Mario style Platformer with Mario style physics, but it seems as though there is no built in/easy way to look ahead and check for collisions before moving the player a la place_meeting in gamer maker. I want to do this so that I can step the player with a loop until it hits a collision.

I know about the whole rigid body 2d physics thing but I actually hate the way physics based Platformers feel so I'm wondering if there's a way to do old school Mario style physics in unity either using the built in physics engine or some alternative way. I want nothing to do with "forces" if I can help it.

I was going to try and move the object and then revert it's position if it hits a collision, then step it with a loop but I'm not sure if there's a way to detect a collision on demand inside the update method. Any help is appreciated!

Unity has built in colliders in 3D and 2D that you can move and use them as triggers so when they enter/stay/exit then they can do something, if I'm understanding your question correctly. Using basic colliders would be fine unless your objects are moving really fast around the screen, in which case Raycasting can help with that.

 

[Cheezus]

Unity has built in colliders in 3D and 2D that you can move and use them as triggers so when they enter/stay/exit then they can do something, if I'm understanding your question correctly. Using basic colliders would be fine unless your objects are moving really fast around the screen, in which case Raycasting can help with that.

I have a box collider plus a kinematic rigid body on my player and box colliders on the walls and floor of the scene but I wanted to know if you are able to move the player with a collider into another collider, trigger the collision, then move it back and step the player pixel by pixel until it triggers again all in the same update method. I read somewhere that this wasn't possible and that I have to do this some other way involving physics and that's what confused me.

 

[Jacksinthe]

My apologies!

I'm still trying to figure a way to make them smaller without destroying the quality if you happen to know any good ways which keep them as a gif for mobile use

GfyCat is preferred

Hey GAF, my Google fu isn't working and I need help!

I recently decided after about a year and a half of messing around in Game Maker to learn some Unity. My current project is a very straight forward Mario style Platformer with Mario style physics, but it seems as though there is no built in/easy way to look ahead and check for collisions before moving the player a la place_meeting in gamer maker. I want to do this so that I can step the player with a loop until it hits a collision.

I know about the whole rigid body 2d physics thing but I actually hate the way physics based Platformers feel so I'm wondering if there's a way to do old school Mario style physics in unity either using the built in physics engine or some alternative way. I want nothing to do with "forces" if I can help it.

I was going to try and move the object and then revert it's position if it hits a collision, then step it with a loop but I'm not sure if there's a way to detect a collision on demand inside the update method. Any help is appreciated!

You don't step pixel by pixel.

Use a box collider as inner bounds for raycasts

Use Transform.Translate(Vector3*Time.deltaTime) in Update() to move

So say a horizontal speed of 6 - that's 6 in game units per second.

Using raycasts you check ahead a short distance to see what you are colliding with.

Is it a wall?

Yes: at our current speed this frame will we move past the collider bounds of the wall during our next frame? (distance*time.deltatime vs speed*time.deltatime)

No: keep on keeping on.
Yes: move only the distance of the gap and stop moving along that axis in that direction.

I would say raycast and rolling your own physics is essential for pixel-perfect collision vs Box2D.

Also, Unity physics doesn't have to "feel" bad - most people only dive into component physics structure instead of global physics settings. You can make jumps non-floaty and non-physics-y with some tweaks. They can be sharp and accurate without issue.

Still, I prefer raycast for collision. When moving with translate, everything should be kinematic and ignore Unity's physics. If a Rigidbody is present on at least 1 object, collision can still be detected for triggers.

 

[Cheezus]

You don't step pixel by pixel.

Use a box collider as inner bounds for raycasts

Use Transform.Translate(Vector3*Time.deltaTime) in Update() to move

So say a horizontal speed of 6 - that's 6 in game units per second.

Using raycasts you check ahead a short distance to see what you are colliding with.

Is it a wall?

Yes: at our current speed this frame will we move past the collider bounds of the wall during our next frame? (distance*time.deltatime vs speed*time.deltatime)

No: keep on keeping on.
Yes: move only the distance of the gap and stop moving along that axis in that direction.

I would say raycast and rolling your own physics is essential for pixel-perfect collision vs Box2D.

Also, Unity physics doesn't have to "feel" bad - most people only dive into component physics structure instead of global physics settings. You can make jumps non-floaty and non-physics-y with some tweaks. They can be sharp and accurate without issue.

Still, I prefer raycast for collision. When moving with translate, everything should be kinematic and ignore Unity's physics. If a Rigidbody is present on at least 1 object, collision can still be detected for triggers.

Awesome! I will start reading into raycasts thanks for pointing me in that direction.

 

[mStudios]

We just made our game's Teaser #2:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rP1B24UocDY

The video quality is on purpose.

 

[DNAbro]

We just made our game's Teaser #2:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rP1B24UocDY

The video quality is on purpose.

Looks cool. I assume Zero Escape series was an inspiration?

 

[Jacksinthe]

Awesome! I will start reading into raycasts thanks for pointing me in that direction.

No problem. I'd say for the player character it is a very precise way to make sure collisions are perfect.

Some tricks so you don't waste resources on a ton of casts is to only cast in the direction you are traveling. So if I am moving right and jumping, I would be casting a few up and a few to the right. When your gravity takes over and you're traveling negative, atop casting up and look down.

I use 4 raycasts per side of our box. One from each corner and two at equal distances (33.3 and 66.6 percent). They don't have to be exact, but I just gather info from them.

For anything else like enemies, standard RigidBody is fine, IMO. You can control when and how they traverse the environment so it's easier to keep them from sucking. For these I would recommend interpolating the physics using the component dropdown of the RigidBody. You could alternatively set the fixed Delta to 0.01666666 or 0.01666667 but you will never sync perfect with framerate and some mild judder will occur. So better to just interpolate on enemies and on non-essentials leave it off. You can also turn interpolation on or off say when enemies become alerted, engaged with the player, are in focus on the screen, etc. Up to you how you want to handle performance hits.

Here's a SUPER old example of when I started work on our current project using raycasts. This is leaving vsync off - so you can see the framerate at the bottom left and it's fluctuation of over 200fps at times with no issues to collision: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPBiqGY41fU

 

[fengshuifever]

I got an update for one of the characters this morning but I still wasn't entirely happy.
A lot of the actual mesh is fine but the texture itself was still bugging me

Before

So I threw it into Photoshop's little 3D painter thing and went H.A.M on it.
Probably spent about 4 hours on this so far but it SO much closer to what I'm aiming for with all of the characters.

After

 

[missile]

I have lots of ideas but can't do anything because I know shit all about programming. I really need to stop procrastinating and just try and learn it already.

You are in art? And what ideas do you have?

My one circles around a WipEout-esque racing game in a Cyperpunk/Tech Noir
dystopian city where the cool kids met at the outpost using the finest
technology to program agreed tracks through the city they will blast through
... making their day out of a broken society.

 

[HelloMeow]

Screw making my own editor!

I can now export mods with the Unity editor. Scenes, prefabs, scripts, everything.

 

[correojon]

Yo, please refrain from 22 and 67mb gifs. Either link or use GfyCat!!!

Thank you

Sorry, I removed the image

Hey GAF, my Google fu isn't working and I need help!

I recently decided after about a year and a half of messing around in Game Maker to learn some Unity. My current project is a very straight forward Mario style Platformer with Mario style physics, but it seems as though there is no built in/easy way to look ahead and check for collisions before moving the player a la place_meeting in gamer maker. I want to do this so that I can step the player with a loop until it hits a collision.

I know about the whole rigid body 2d physics thing but I actually hate the way physics based Platformers feel so I'm wondering if there's a way to do old school Mario style physics in unity either using the built in physics engine or some alternative way. I want nothing to do with "forces" if I can help it.

I was going to try and move the object and then revert it's position if it hits a collision, then step it with a loop but I'm not sure if there's a way to detect a collision on demand inside the update method. Any help is appreciated!

I was doing the exact same thing (but in the end decided to do it in GM to save time). In the end I went with the method Absynthe says, it´s much better to just forget about all the physics stuff and just control everything yourself with a more "classic" approach using raycasts.

Also, I´ve been studying Mario physics & controls in detail so if you want I can share some information on how it really works, there are a lot of neat tricks to make movement feel better.

 

[Cute Dragon Here]

Hello, folks!

Been working on a little exercise on Unity 5.3.x lately, trying to make a 2D JRPG console-style game. At this point, I have two test levels, a player character with stats, and basic movement (and animations), and a location tip UI at the top of the screen (which right now is based simply on the scene name).

1. How would you do things if the game were to go into cutscene mode? (As in, how you'd start that mode, and how that mode then processes its own events)
Probably want to keep things clean code/scene-wise.

2. How would you manage items and magic/skills?

3. What would be a good way to set up a "system menu" UI for the game? (As in, the menu that shows Items/Magic/Options/Save/etc...) Last thing I want is probably having spaghetti UI code.

4. Would using external text resources be a good idea instead of writing in the text right in the scenes/prefabs? Was thinking that I'd need to do it anyway as soon as I implement dialogue.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks in advance! (Sometimes I think I'm overwhelming myself...)

 

[jahasaja]

Stupid question.

My second game is in my head right now. However, I am not sure about the art direction. My first game I used pixelart (snesish quality)

A huge timesink was animations. I think it took around 60%-70% of development time.

So my question is: What art-style should I use to to save some time on animations? Is motion capture a viable alternative?

 

[spazchicken]

I got an update for one of the characters this morning but I still wasn't entirely happy.
A lot of the actual mesh is fine but the texture itself was still bugging me


Before

So I threw it into Photoshop's little 3D painter thing and went H.A.M on it.
Probably spent about 4 hours on this so far but it SO much closer to what I'm aiming for with all of the characters.

After

Great looking character but the eyes make her look kinda crazy. We're seeing too much of the top of her iris'. I would slightly raise her iris up under the eye lid and then raise the bottom portion of her eye shape to match.

 

[fengshuifever]

Great looking character but the eyes make her look kinda crazy. We're seeing too much of the top of her iris'. I would slightly raise her iris up under the eye lid and then raise the bottom portion of her eye shape to match.

While it was kiiiinda the intention to have her eyes a bit otherworldly (her character isn't actually otherwordly) that's definitely on my "edits" list that I sent off.

The idea was for her before rigging to have her eyes wide as possible but we both (the character modeler) realised it was a baaaaaad idea.

Also, thanks!

 

[Vanguard]

I love UI and stuff that makes everything all woosh around. Vlambeer is to screen shake what "wooshiness" is to me.

Also, I am probably late to the party on this guy, but I found this person named Keijiro Takahashi that does amazing work that you can find here; https://github.com/keijiro

His shit is inspiring, yo. He's got all kinds of stuff from particle stuff to monochrome scripts to audio responding visuals. I got the mirror/kaleidoscope effect on my game from him (and I just found out he has a sprite outliner effect which made me squee in joy)

Speaking of my game, working on backgrounds and still trying to nail down a decent look;
http://gfycat.com/ThreadbareBlaringApe
I'm trying to dial back on the color now, at least using two complementary colors that fade with eachother.

Damn his stuff is amazing, I read the license and think I understand it, but it's ok to use in projects that you sell? There's some nice stuff in there I could really use!
The backgrounds nice, in terms of colour I don't know if this may help? https://color.adobe.com/

That camera's transition looks really nice, it's got a high quality feel to it!

On another note, I finally have something to show! The focus for this week is building up my rudimentary spawn/death/respawn system into something more akin to how it is actually going to work in-game. Tonight's work was hooking up the animation for the player's "spawn tube" (If anyone can suggest a better name, I'm all ears!)

Anyway, it's still not all that fancy (and I need to sort out some positioning issues + get some extra effects in there), but I'm pretty happy with the direction I'm heading in

Here's a gif for your troubles:
EDIT: Just realised the slight camera jitter when the gif loops makes it look as though the door is slamming shut, it isn't

This makes me happy, I still wonder if it's too overdone but I thought if I make it quick and smooth enough it'd be ok! So it's good to hear it getting positive feedback!
I'd say "Spawn Pod" as a name? Because it's more pod like than tube, but that's all I've got
And even if not on purpose, I liked that slamming effect haha. How sudden it seemed made it amusing to me, but that could just be me.

I am REALLY enjoying this work at the moment, lots of problem solving and making core mechanics etc.

Today I got all of the following done (all very basic versions mind)

Most of the stuff was making the base version of future mechanics - ie the base gun blueprints will be used to make expanded child Bps for each type of gun, then childs of those for each specific gun.

Opinions on what color the ammo bar should be btw? Green worked for testing but I don't think it works well in an actual game. Colors are tough :/

Looking good! I want to say yellow/gold/bronze/copper or something to match the look/colour of bullets, as cliche as that may be.

Hello, folks!

Been working on a little exercise on Unity 5.3.x lately, trying to make a 2D JRPG console-style game. At this point, I have two test levels, a player character with stats, and basic movement (and animations), and a location tip UI at the top of the screen (which right now is based simply on the scene name).

1. How would you do things if the game were to go into cutscene mode? (As in, how you'd start that mode, and how that mode then processes its own events)
Probably want to keep things clean code/scene-wise.

2. How would you manage items and magic/skills?

3. What would be a good way to set up a "system menu" UI for the game? (As in, the menu that shows Items/Magic/Options/Save/etc...) Last thing I want is probably having spaghetti UI code.

4. Would using external text resources be a good idea instead of writing in the text right in the scenes/prefabs? Was thinking that I'd need to do it anyway as soon as I implement dialogue.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks in advance! (Sometimes I think I'm overwhelming myself...)

I'll try and answer some of these as best I can,

2. If items are static and their values cannot change in game (think like the stat rolls on Diablo items), I would probably go for storing them as ScriptableObjects so Unity can serialize them, also giving them a unique ID. You'd then have some form of manager that knows what ID relates to what item etc in your resources. The idea behind this though is when it comes to game saving and loading, because it's a unity type and you may have references to other assets, it's very tricky to save outside of Unity. But with this you can just save the ID's and how many are in the inventory etc. So when they load, it sees they have 5 items of ID 32 for example, it requests the manager 5 items of ID 32, done. I hope this makes sense... I probably explained it poorly
This may not be the best way though mind, and there are other ways, but if you ever need to reference Unity assets with the object like an icon, then ScriptableObjects would be good for static objects imo. You would also obviously need to make an editor inside Unity to make your life easier when making new content due to the UID's etc.

3. I hate UI so much, and all my UI code is spaghetti or just bad in general. I am unfortunatly no help here when it comes to good ways :<

4. I would definitely say store it in a text file, which you can still reference from prefabs etc because Unity will treat it as a TextAsset type. But also if you ever need to translate the game, then you can source the files out without the translator needing Unity to change it too. In fact if you ever plan on translating to other languages, getting this in place asap will save a lot of headaches later on.

You are in art? And what ideas do you have?

My one circles around a WipEout-esque racing game in a Cyperpunk/Tech Noir
dystopian city where the cool kids met at the outpost using the finest
technology to program agreed tracks through the city they will blast through
... making their day out of a broken society.

I'd play that...

We just made our game's Teaser #2:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rP1B24UocDY

The video quality is on purpose.

Looks interesting, curiosity rising.

 

[Cute Dragon Here]

I'll try and answer some of these as best I can,

2. If items are static and their values cannot change in game (think like the stat rolls on Diablo items), I would probably go for storing them as ScriptableObjects so Unity can serialize them, also giving them a unique ID. You'd then have some form of manager that knows what ID relates to what item etc in your resources. The idea behind this though is when it comes to game saving and loading, because it's a unity type and you may have references to other assets, it's very tricky to save outside of Unity. But with this you can just save the ID's and how many are in the inventory etc. So when they load, it sees they have 5 items of ID 32 for example, it requests the manager 5 items of ID 32, done. I hope this makes sense... I probably explained it poorly
This may not be the best way though mind, and there are other ways, but if you ever need to reference Unity assets with the object like an icon, then ScriptableObjects would be good for static objects imo. You would also obviously need to make an editor inside Unity to make your life easier when making new content due to the UID's etc.

4. I would definitely say store it in a text file, which you can still reference from prefabs etc because Unity will treat it as a TextAsset type. But also if you ever need to translate the game, then you can source the files out without the translator needing Unity to change it too. In fact if you ever plan on translating to other languages, getting this in place asap will save a lot of headaches later on.

Sounds... really overwhelming! Just poked around the manual and stuff, and I think I might need a few pointers on getting started with ScriptableObjects. I'm still at a loss.

Thanks for the TextAsset help, though! I'm now working on implementing text assets. A bit stumped though on what exactly is the best way to store, say location names. Was thinking of something like, scene name followed by actual location name, and likely with a search-by-string function on the engine/scripting side. Am I on the right track?

 

[Vanguard]

Sounds... really overwhelming! Just poked around the manual and stuff, and I think I might need a few pointers on getting started with ScriptableObjects. I'm still at a loss.

Thanks for the TextAsset help, though! I'm now working on implementing text assets. A bit stumped though on what exactly is the best way to store, say location names. Was thinking of something like, scene name followed by actual location name, and likely with a search-by-string function on the engine/scripting side. Am I on the right track?

Yeah, it can get kind of complicated. But they're basically when you want to store data and references to other Unity assets (and serialized as an asset), but not attach them to GameObjects. But I could still be wrong, I've rarely used them haha, funnily enough Unity did a live training video for them yesterday! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gscwiS3xsU Not watched it yet mind, but hopefully it helps.

Sounds like you may want to store it as a .xml? Might be easier, that also counts as a TextAsset, a lot of file types are counted as TextAssets in fact: http://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/class-TextAsset.html
I love TextAsset, especially when I can .bytes it. But yeah the way you're describing it, xml may be the way to go for that I think? As you can just .text the contents of the file into an xml parser thingy.

 

[LordRaptor]

Awesome! I will start reading into raycasts thanks for pointing me in that direction.

Its been a loooooong time since I've looked at GM, but I seem to remember GM mostly uses raycasts for its 2D sprite based stuff, so any familiarity there should transfer across to unity pretty easily.
Probably the most helpful thing during implementation would be drawing some Unity Gizmos to be able to see your raycasts in game

Sorry, I removed the image

...
Also, I´ve been studying Mario physics & controls in detail.

I saw it before it was removed, you're using the Super Mario World style 'bounding box' camera, aren't you? I always liked that implementation

 

[Cute Dragon Here]

Yeah, it can get kind of complicated. But they're basically when you want to store data and references to other Unity assets (and serialized as an asset), but not attach them to GameObjects. But I could still be wrong, I've rarely used them haha, funnily enough Unity did a live training video for them yesterday! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gscwiS3xsU Not watched it yet mind, but hopefully it helps.

Sounds like you may want to store it as a .xml? Might be easier, that also counts as a TextAsset, a lot of file types are counted as TextAssets in fact: http://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/class-TextAsset.html
I love TextAsset, especially when I can .bytes it. But yeah the way you're describing it, xml may be the way to go for that I think? As you can just .text the contents of the file into an xml parser thingy.

Thanks, I'll catch the video sometime later.

How would an .xml work better? Not very familiar with these files.

 

[GroundCombo]

How would an .xml work better? Not very familiar with these files.

You can add xml attributes to a C# class and use XmlSerializer to automatically serialize class instances to/from a xml file with very little effort. We're using xml for saved games and ScriptableObjects for fixed level/powerup/etc. metadata, with custom inspectors for easy editing. Basically, xml is a good option if you need to access or modify the data outside Unity (external tools, modding and such).

 

[Pehesse]

Is the reference too on the nose? I don't care. (It can be even more glaringly obvious, the other characters just didn't feel like appearing in all my recording attempts).
Main point is: I'm done with the one vs. many segment backgrounds! DONE! ...until I decide to make more.

But yeah, pretty big milestone so I'm pretty elated! Next on the to-do list is...more writing. ...great. It's a promise: the next I game will have no text, no script, no words! None! Nothing! Freedom! (We'll see how that goes)

 

[HandsomeCharles]

This makes me happy, I still wonder if it's too overdone but I thought if I make it quick and smooth enough it'd be ok! So it's good to hear it getting positive feedback!
I'd say "Spawn Pod" as a name? Because it's more pod like than tube, but that's all I've got
And even if not on purpose, I liked that slamming effect haha. How sudden it seemed made it amusing to me, but that could just be me.

Nah it looks good, the only thing you'll need to watch out for is if during normal gameplay the player's "normal speed" menu interactions would have the camera swooshing back and forth rapidly (Such as going back and checking various things) as that could make the image quite "intense".

 

[Cute Dragon Here]

You can add xml attributes to a C# class and use XmlSerializer to automatically serialize class instances to/from a xml file with very little effort. We're using xml for saved games and ScriptableObjects for fixed level/powerup/etc. metadata, with custom inspectors for easy editing. Basically, xml is a good option if you need to access or modify the data outside Unity (external tools, modding and such).

Sounds interesting.

Though I guess my head's still kinda in clouds about all this XML stuff. I was thinking of plain text way too much...

Guess we probably should find a good starting point to implement XML stuff. Take the fact that I'd like to have easily modified text assets to be referenced in the actual game... well, how would you probably generate and access the text asset? Sorry for sounding confusing.

 

[GroundCombo]

Guess we probably should find a good starting point to implement XML stuff. Take the fact that I'd like to have easily modified text assets to be referenced in the actual game... well, how would you probably generate and access the text asset? Sorry for sounding confusing.

Text assets are just text files dropped into the asset folder; you can reference them from other objects like any other asset, or put them into Resources and load the contents when needed. But if you're thinking of something like a dialogue system, I'd definitely cook up a class containing all the relevant stuff (are any special effects needed, who is saying this, position on the screen, link to next line in the conversation, localization, ...) and put it into a ScriptableObject or read it from xml.

 

[Jumplion]

Damn his stuff is amazing, I read the license and think I understand it, but it's ok to use in projects that you sell? There's some nice stuff in there I could really use!
The backgrounds nice, in terms of colour I don't know if this may help? https://color.adobe.com/

Yeah, the code should be free of charge to use without restriction.

As for the color, I ended up expanding a HSB/HSV color script to get me the Complimentary, Analogous, Split Complimentary, etc... colors of an input color, so I have the background slerp towards it's complimentary while I set whatever else I want to the background's split complementary or something. It kind of looks a bit garish, but I think that's mainly because the colors are all set to maximum brightness.

 

[Cute Dragon Here]

Text assets are just text files dropped into the asset folder; you can reference them from other objects like any other asset, or put them into Resources and load the contents when needed. But if you're thinking of something like a dialogue system, I'd definitely cook up a class containing all the relevant stuff (are any special effects needed, who is saying this, position on the screen, link to next line in the conversation, localization, ...) and put it into a ScriptableObject or read it from xml.

Hmm, so I guess I already have a text file containing location names. Let's start with that for now - maybe we'll deal with the dialogue system later.

Assuming that we have on hand the current scene name (that won't change) and the text file containing the actual location names, I guess all I have to do is to make a script that can figure out the right line to display from the text file based on the loaded scene, no?

 

[SouSouRocket]

Stupid question.

My second game is in my head right now. However, I am not sure about the art direction. My first game I used pixelart (snesish quality)

A huge timesink was animations. I think it took around 60%-70% of development time.

So my question is: What art-style should I use to to save some time on animations? Is motion capture a viable alternative?

Motion capture is expensive depending on what you're using and it still requires you to sit and clean up the animations--if you're using a cheaper alternative you'll still end up wasting time just wrestling with the equipment and making sure it all works.

I would say 3D animation is probably your best bet but quite frankly animation is a long process no matter what you're doing.

 

[GroundCombo]

Assuming that we have on hand the current scene name (that won't change) and the text file containing the actual location names, I guess all I have to do is to make a script that can figure out the right line to display from the text file based on the loaded scene, no?

Sure, you can do that. You could also read all the lines at startup into a dictionary so that you can then just look up the correct text based on location (assuming you have several locations per scene).