How to set graphics for just part of the screen? - Unity - c#

I have a really peculiar question. I want to deteriorate the graphics in Unity of just a part of the screen. For example, if I'm playing a game with the screen split in two, one player can be playing with ultra graphics and the other, low ones. Is there a simple way of doing this, like setting the graphics quality on each camera? Thank you so much for your help!

I don't imagine and easy way to do that.
Graphics are the conglomerate of multiple things (at least for me); the number of polygons of an object, the size of the textures, etc.
So the only thing I know you can do, is to duplicate the scene (like if you are making and on-line game) and load this duplicate scene with different materials, models and textures on one player scene. Then synchronize the rest of the scene, so both players are looking the "same" scene.
Also you can "deform" the image, with shaders or camera filters, like a Blurr effect! But this won't really affect the "graphics".

I don't think that's currently possible. The game would have to render the same objects on 2 different ways, but that's just not possible in a good-performance scenario. You could very simple use prefabs with a lower quality on one of the screens or images with a lower resolution in the UI.
Do you really need this for your game? If u do some changes in the quality settings or change your game core mechanics, maybe the performance becomes good enough to skip this.

Related

how to create a responsive scene

I'm currently creating a 2D Android and iOS game using Unity3D engine. I'm testing the game on a nexus 5, and an iPhone 5s device. Everything until now is working fine and I am pretty happy with the result, but when I test that application on an iPad or a Samsung tablet all the objects in my game scene are not in the correct position anymore. Is this a common problem in Unity3D ?
I know I am missing something but I tried to do some research and what I found is only by changing the orthographic camera scale might fix this problem, but I found it as a big amount of code to write as my game have not only one scene but multiple scenes and every scene have it's own game objects.
Is there any other method to do, a good and simple work around for this problem?
It's all about setting the Anchors right.
If you're using the new UI System, make sure you anchor the objects where you want them to be, that's how you will achieve resolution independence.
For more information about anchoring, see this tutorial
Don't have separate scenes for separate devices. You can use the Screen object to check the height and width of your display. Then you can use this to set the orthographic size of your camera to something that makes everything visible as expected.
Update: I misunderstood your question, you say GameObject, i understand UI.
Please check this. I don't have this issue on my game. But when i try it with mac or windows machines, it is problematic. So maybe this can solve.
Other solution is more common which is you and Agumander say, change orthographic size of Camera.
This Is for UI
You can use Unity UI, and don't need to seperate. There are so many different resolution and density devices, you need to create so many scenes. So it is meanless separating scenes.
Unity UI has pixel based solutions which can be very helpfull for many density and resolution options. Forexample, It has VerticalLayoutGroup and HorizontalLayoutGroup for easy list like element visulation.
Most important thing is: Do you want to change UI for different screen size or resolutions? For example iPad has larger screen so user can be see more content. This change UX. Maybe you need to consider this.

Creating a sprite sheet from existing sprite sheets while game is running?

I've been making a 2D game with XNA that will have several unique enemies. I have no trouble drawing separate sprites to the screen, one over the other to make no two enemies alike, but I think it might be more efficient if instead of drawing a dozen sprites per enemy, I somehow merged those sprites into one sprite sheet.
If I have lots and lots of these enemies on the screen, will I improve performance by a worthy amount if I do merge? And is there a simple way for me to create new sprite sheets in this way, or is the answer quite fiddly?
It can be faster to draw one sprite instead of several. However, I would only recommend this, if you have performance problems. Drawing sprites is quite fast with the SpriteBatch. It has the nice feature to group draw calls of the same texture, which makes it pretty fast. If you create a separate texture for each enemy, you can loose this feature, which could result in a performance loss. Creating one large sprite sheet can be better, if the sheet does not get too large.
To create such a sheet, you have to create a texture / render target and render to it. Here is how to do it with XNA.

ideas to create a software where shows views of cubes?

I'm planning to draw these shapes in WPF. It's for an educational software.
What idea's do you have in how to implement these cubes and views?
I was planning at the beginning starting using canvas and draw, but I guess it will be become eternal. So I supposed if exists some library to help me drawing them?
The ability to draw 3D shapes (such as cubes) and render them from different angles is built right into WPF. From the look of your cubes, you're going to want an orthographic camera, rather than a perspective camera, because the lines composing your cubes are parallel.
You might also find the Petzold.Media3D library helpful, because it has objects like cubes built in (you don't have to write your own algorithms to build them).
Finally, you might this primer helpful in getting started with WPF 3D.
Once you have some idea of how to use 3D, it will just be a matter of putting cubes in your scene at the proper locations and positioning the cameras properly for viewing the cubes. You will probably want to keep reusing the same four camera positions: one for the "3D view", and one each for the top, side, and front views.
This should be a lot less work than trying to draw the cubes using 2D.

XNA 2D Shaders and SpriteSortMode

So I've been trying to wrap my head around shaders in 2D in XNA.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb313868(v=xnagamestudio.31).aspx
This link above stated that I needed to use SpriteSortMode.Immediate, which is a problem for me because I have developed a parallax system that relies on deferred rendering (SpriteSortMode.BackToFront).
Can someone explain to me the significance of SpriteSortMode in shaders, if Immediate is mandatory, anything I can do to maintain my current system, and anything else in general to help me understand this better?
In addition, my game runs off of multiple SpriteBatch.Begin()/End() calls (for drawing background, then the game, then the foreground and HUD and etc). I've noticed that the Bloom example does not work in that case, and I am guessing it has something to do with this.
In general, I've been having some trouble understanding these concepts. I know what a shader is and how it works, but I don't know how it interacts with XNA and what goes on there. I would really appreciate some enlightenment. :)
Thanks SO!
The sort mode will matter if you are attempting to do something non-trivial like render layered transparency or make use of a depth buffer. I'm going to assume you want to do something non-trivial since you want to use a pixel shader to accomplish it.
SpriteSortMode.Immediate will draw things in exactly the order of the draw calls. If you use another mode, SpriteBatch will group the draw calls to the video card by texture if it can. This is for performance reasons.
Keep in mind that every time you call SpriteBatch.Begin you are applying a new pixel shader and discarding the one previously set. (Even if the new one is just SpriteBatch's standard pixel shader that applies a Tint color.) Additionally, remember that by calling SpriteBatch.End you are telling the video card to execute all of the current SpriteBatch commands.
This means that you could potentially keep your existing sorting method, if your fancy pixel shaders are of limited scope. In other words, draw your background with one Effect and then your foreground and characters with another. Each Begin/End call to SpriteBatch can be treated separately.
If your goal is to apply one Effect (such as heat waves or bloom) to everything on the screen you have another option. You could choose to render all of your graphics onto a RenderTarget that you create instead of directly to the video card's backbuffer. If you do this, at the end of your rendering section you can call GraphicsDevice.SetRenderTarget(null) and paint your completed image to the backbuffer with a custom shader that applies to the entire scene.
I'm not one hundred percent sure on how much the sprite sorting mode effects shaders, i would think it would vary depending on what you were using the shader for.
as for bloom if you're using multiple begin and ends (which you really want to minimise if you can). you can create a render target the size of the screen, draw everything as you are now. then at the very end, take that render target back (using graphicsdevice.SetRenderTarget(null);) then draw your full screen render target (at 0,0 position) with the bloom shader, that way you will bloom the entire scene, regardless of the components of the scene using various sort modes.

Silverlight Collision Detection when controls are in different canvasses/layers

For our game we have to create collision detection.
The problem is that the collided objects are in different canvasses/layers, which makes collision detection by pointlocation inpossible.
Does anyone have an idea how to solve this?
It's hard to give a great answer without some more information, but if all your layers are the same size then you can just roll your own collision detection. All you need to know is the locations and sizes of two things to be collision detected. Then you just test to see if one rectangle intersects with the other rectangle.
There is also a function that might be useful to use called TranslatePoint. This translates from one UIElements coordinates to another. So if you had a ball bouncing around in a smaller area of the screen with it's own local coordinate system, you could get the ball's coordinates relative to the entire screen with this function.
Can I suggest you try using the Farseer physics engine just to save yourself some pain?
http://farseerphysics.codeplex.com/
It's very good and is in use in some WP7 games already.
http://www.farseergames.com/
There's also some Blend behaviors and helpers to make using it even easier:
http://physicshelper.codeplex.com/

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