Personal Challenge: Game in a Week

In my spare time this week, instead of building spaceships, playing games or even drinking beer... I will make a game for the Apple App Store using Unity3D.

Next Wednesday I shall announce my failure, or success.

Who will join me? :-)

RAGE!: Unity3D Bug? kills all progress...

Verdict:

Failure. The above bug sucked my will to code for at least two days, though Unity does appear to be behaving now.

What have I got to show for the weeks effort?

1. I know that terrain meshes run acceptably fast on the iPad in the 1500-2000 vertex range. Meshlab does an excellent job of reducing Unity Terrain meshes to usable vertex counts.

2. A reasonable approximation of a car engine, transmission and differential.

3. An objective / waypoint system for running a race around a terrain.

I will revisit this again later. Sad Face.

Server Retirement.

Such a Sad Thing.

simon@metaplay:~$ uptime
 12:49:18 up 923 days, 4 min,  1 user,  load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00

Engine Glow

Carrier #2

Inspired by something I saw in a wing commander poster today. Using a different toon shader altogether. I might stick with this one, it has cleaner edges.

Exploding Spacecraft...

What is the point of a nice spaceship model... If you can't blow it up? Not too much I hear you say. Well, now I can blow arbitrary spaceship models apart! w00T! :-)

Scout Ship #1

A Fleet is born...

I'm still working on the shaders. I added a toon lighting model which has definitely improved the lighting, but I'm not sure why my edges are so jaggy! Hmmm.

Another Spaceship.

Spacecraft Development.

My spaceship is progressing. I've also tweaked the renderer to make it more cartoon like in appearance. What do you think?

Non Photo-realistic Rendering.

I'm experimenting with flat shading and full screen pixel shaders. What do you think? Would you buy this game? :-)

Font Rendering Problems in Unity3D

Does your text look like this in Unity3D 3.0?


To fix, simply change the Character option in the import settings for the font to "dynamic". Problem Solved.

OSX Web/HTTP Sniffer Tool.

HTTP Scoop from Tuffcode. Great tool, invaluable if you have to work with HTTP.

Automagic GUI Scaling in Unity3D

Step 1. Tell you team that everything must fit within 1920x1080 or 1024x768 or whatever resolution you like!

Step 2. Surround all OnGUI method body code with methods BeginGUI and EndGUI from the below class.

Step 3. Scaling across all resolutions... problem solved!

using UnityEngine;
using System.Collections;
using System.Collections.Generic;

public class GUISizer {

    static float  WIDTH = 1024;
    static float HEIGHT = 768;

    static List<Matrix4x4> stack = new List<Matrix4x4> ();

    static public void BeginGUI() {
        stack.Add (GUI.matrix);
        Matrix4x4 m = new Matrix4x4 ();
        var w = (float)Screen.width;
        var h = (float)Screen.height;
        var aspect = w / h;
        var scale = 1f;
        var offset = Vector3.zero;
        if(aspect < (WIDTH/HEIGHT)) { //screen is taller
            scale = (Screen.width/WIDTH);
            offset.y += (Screen.height-(HEIGHT*scale))*0.5f;

        } else { // screen is wider
            scale = (Screen.height/HEIGHT);
            offset.x += (Screen.width-(WIDTH*scale))*0.5f;
        }
        m.SetTRS(offset,Quaternion.identity,Vector3.one*scale);
        GUI.matrix *= m;
    }

    static public void EndGUI() {
        GUI.matrix = stack[stack.Count - 1];
        stack.RemoveAt (stack.Count - 1);
    }
    
}