I have a simple game in Unity and I have added some power ups. One of the power ups is a player
shield which instantiates on the player position and then follows him around. This shield is just a sphere with a transparency material. My problem is that when i instantiate shield it doesn't look like player was in the shield like in a bubble but it look like it is behind the shield. Can anyone help me out here?
Here Is the picture how it looks.
I want it to look like he is in a bubble. Can anyone help me out here?
Honestly, to me, it looks more like it is in front of the shield. Regardless, design-wise, there are four things that immediately come to mind:
Increase opacity of the bubble so that it clearly changes the color of the object inside of it
Give it an effect. Some sort of particle effect that sparkles or moves, therefore you will see it move across and behind the object within it
Ground it. have it hit the ground and result in a shadow. Shadows and a connection to the ground will provide a better perspective of where each item is
Give it a more reflective surface than the object inside it. Or change the dynamic so instead of the object reflecting light in the world, the shield does
This image conceptually shows a bit of what I referring to. Also, when it comes to design ideas, reddit is an awesome place to get opinions. r/Unity3d has a ton of helpful and friendly people that like to see people's ideas and are more than willing to comment on design. Rather than here, where it is much more programming oriented.
Hope this helps!
Recently I've been messing around with machine learning and I wanted to see if I could create AI for the game I'm currently making. The AI should be able to solve the puzzle for you.
The game currently works as followed. You have a few tiles in a grid, some of them are movable some of them aren't. You click on a tile you want to move, and you drag it into a direction. It'll then start moving the tiles and optionally also the player character itself. The end goal is to reach the end tile. Level example, Solving the level
Playing the game yourself:
Whenever you select a tile (you do this by clicking), you then hold the mouse button down, and drag onto the direction you want the tile to move towards. Once the tiles are done moving, the player object will move one step in the same direction. If the player is on top of a tile that you move, it'll move with the tile. And afterwards do another step in the same direction.
I was wondering if it's possible (and if so, how) for machine learning to define a position on the screen, (optionally) click and then define a movement direction?
Please keep in mind that I'm fairly new to machine learning!
To give some more clarification:
The grid is static for now, to keep it simple for the AI. But later one, the goal is to generate a level randomly, and see if it can solve it.
In theory, all the AI should have to do, is select a tile to move (A number between 0 and the width of the grid, and the same for the height). And define a movement direction. Either (0, 1), (0, -1), (1, 0) or (-1, 0).
Falling off the grid will results in a reset.
Reaching the end of the grid results in a win.
Moving in an invalid direction results in a reset.
Based off of your bullet points, I would honestly suggest just implementing the A* Pathfinding algorithm, with some modifications to emulate machine learning. The A* Pathfinding algorithm determines the best path on a grid from point a to point b, and using clever programming you could achieve the result you want with a reasonable amount of overhead.
Something along the lines of having a list of "do not touch" grid points(death traps, etc), which gets filled as the AI runs into them, so on the next iteration it knows not to take that path. This is a very basic abstraction of your idea, but would be highly obtainable.
Obviously we cannot write the code for you, luckily there are tons of resources on A* Pathfinding to help you get started!
Here is a simple tutorial
Here is an implementation that was used in Unity
Here is a code review on someones implementation
Assuming you actually want to use machine learning and not just a pathing system:
I will lay out some pseudo code that you can use for a basic scenario of the AI learning a static board. There are different ways you can write and implement this code, I have only suggested one way. But before we get to that lets first discuss this project overall and some suggestions for it.
Suggestions:
I would say that you will want to measure the game state on the board, and not the mouse movements. So basically the AI is measuring what moves can be made. The mouse movement part is just a way for the player to interact with the board so it is not needed by the AI. It will be simpler to just let the AI make the moves directly.
I don't think that unity is a good platform for this kind of experimentation. I think you would be better off programming this in a console program. So for example using a 2 dimensional array (board) in a visual studio c# console program, or in a C console program via CS50 IDE (comes with free sign up via edx.org for cs50 https://manual.cs50.net/ide). I have suggested these because I think Unity will just add unnecessary layers to a machine learning experiment.
My assumption is you want to learn machine learning, and not just how to make an ai solve a puzzle in your game. Because in the latter case better options would be a proper pathing system, or having the ai brute force several attempts at the puzzle before moving and select the solution with the fewest steps.
Pseudo Code:
Now onto some pseudo code for your machine learning program.
Assumptions:
A. You have a board with set dimensions that you can pass to the Ai at the start.
B. There are tiles on the board the AI cannot move into (obstacles).
C. The AI should learn to solve the problem, instead of having the answer at the beginning because of good code that we designed (like a decent pathing system).
D. We don't want the AI to brute force this by trying a billion different combinations before moving, because this suggests perfect understanding of its environment. If the ai has perfect understanding of its environment then yes, it should use brute force where reasonable.
Coding Logic:
Scenario 1: The AI plays on the same board every time with the same starting conditions.
I. You start by setting a discrete amount of time in which the AI makes a move. For example 1 move every 1 second.
II. Have a counter for the number of moves made to reach the end tile, and record the sequence of moves associated with this counter.
III. If the AI has no history with which to make a move it makes a move in a random direction.
IV. If the move is invalid then the counter increases and the move is recorded, but the AI stays on the same tile.
V. When the AI completes the puzzle the counter and sequence of moves is stored for later use.
VI. In subsequent play throughs the AI always starts by selecting the paths it has tried with smallest count.
VII. Once the AI begins moving it has a 1% chance per move to try something different. Here is an example. When the 1% is triggered the AI has a 50% to try one of the following:
a. 50% chance: It checks through all the sequences in its history to see if there is any section in the past sequences where the counter between its current tile and the finish tile is shorter than its current path. If there are multiple it selects the shortest. When the AI finishes the round it records the new total sequence taken.
b. 50% chance. The Ai makes a move in a random direction. If it made a move in a random direction. Subsequent moves again follow this logic of 50% chance check, and 50% chance move randomly again. When completed again record the sequence of moves.
VIII. You can seed this by making the AI run the puzzle a 10,000 times in a few seconds behind the scenes, and then when you observe it afterwards it should have selected a reasonable path.
If a computer can brute force a problem in reasonable time it should start with that. However bear in mind that machine learning in a computer program where the machine already knows all the variables is different from machine learning in the environment, where for example you have a robot that has to navigate an unknown environment. The above code should work in the latter case. You may also want to investigate the idea of the AI mapping out the entire terrain by trying to move to every tile and forming an understanding of the environment, then just brute forcing a solution once it understands the variables.
In a non static environment you will want to enhance the valuation system. This answer is already too long so I won't go into it.
Short answer to both questions: Yes,
You can create an ai that uses either gamestate (so it can read the objects/properties of your grid) or you could use raw-screen input combined with image processing, which is a hard thing to create, and expensive (computational) to run.
On the Unity forms there are several answers to the question "How to mimic mouse input" or alike. Take a look here:
https://answers.unity.com/questions/564664/how-i-can-move-mouse-cursor-without-mouse-but-with.html
If you are looking for the code for the AI, sadly, you are out of luck. There are lots of ai tutorials online to create a simple ai for such a game. I would advice not to dive head-first in the fancy stuff (like neural networks) and start simple. It would be the best, in my opinion, too start with creating an (class) structure for your ai, and start learning AI by practice. Start with an "AI" that just randomly returns something, then see what you can learn & manage online and make other versions.
For one of the first AI's, take a look into goal-driven AI's or state-machines. I think they should be able to give nice results, given your gifs.
I am working on a 2.5D side scroller/platformer project just kind of as a learning experience. I imported a robot model that came with premade animations. I have 2 questions regarding setting him up for movement and his animations. First, I set up movement for x and y, but do I only need to do x? Right now if I hit the UP arrow, the character appears to jump, but feel like that is probably bad form. Am I correct in assuming I should do just the x value for movement and create a separate method for jumping? My second question is with the animation controller. I set up all my states and set my transitions, but I'm not sure what to do from there. What do I do to actually set up the transitions, if anything, and also I could use some information on setting up the animations on the programming side. I have some very slight general knowledge of it, but not much and I'm having trouble finding good solid tutorials for these specific questions.
Thanks for the help!
Yes, I would recommend doing separate controllers and script files for side to side moving and jumping. That way if you ever need to change one of those behaviours you have a specialized place to do it. Also, perhaps you have an enemy that moves side to side but doesn't jump. Or perhaps something that jumps but doesn't move. You could just drag the correct behaviour onto the game object.
as for animations, the unity learn tutorials are pretty helpful getting you started on animations and very basic state transitions
I'm making a role playing game in C# using XNA. I already have a map and some stuff, but that's not interesting at the moment. My question is: How can I give the player the possibility to enter houses or rooms?
To create the worlds, I've used standard int-arrays where each number represents a different type of tile. That works all fine, but the house isn't enterable but a solid textured block of something.
BTW I've used a Vector3 to determine in which world the player's currently located and which one the program must load next.
Any suggestions how I can make the houses enterable?
One easy way to make houses enterable is to create a trigger object at the door of the house.
This object can be a simple Rect along with an id.
While the player moves around your map check for a collision between the player and the trigger.
When the player enters this trigger you can change the displayed map with a new one (the interior of the house) and move the player where the door should lead.
If you're using C# to make a game, you might want to consider switching to MonoGame (which is practically XNA's successor since XNA is dead) or Unity.
As mentioned previously, your best option in XNA is to create a Rectangle which will trigger on collision and change the game world.
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/