In my Unity game players are able to chop down trees using for example an axe. The tree then gets removed from the terrain and replaced by a falling tree prefab. This works fine in small scale. I am looking for a more effective way to do this though, because:
The entire terrain needs to be reloaded if a tree is cut down. If the terrain is very large and complex this means that the entire game freezes for a few seconds whenever a tree is cut down.
It works very poorly in multiplayer. In order for the terrain to stay in sync, all players terrain needs to be reloaded each time a tree is cut down. This means everyone's game freezes every few minutes.
I have thought about "chunking" the terrain but the entire terrain is already built and I don't know of a way to break it up into parts after it has been made.
Any ideas will be appreciated! I'm about an intermediate level programmer so I don't need anyone to write the code for me here, I just need an idea or suggestion as to the best way to do this?
Related
Ok here is what Im trying to achieve - when user's feet collide with grass mesh, the mesh is secured to the ground at the base but the tops move away, then bounce back when foot is no longer there:
This example, and everything I've found however, are using billboarding/2d as grass. I want 3d, like these:
https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/3d/vegetation/plants/grass-toon-76674
Where some sort of collision is occurring, or Ive tried experimenting with unity's trees. Trying to find the most CPU/GPU effective (for Oculus app or mobile) way to do this.
Is this possible - to have interactive, 3d not 2d grass?
The only thing I can think of is to model each blade of grass as several bars connected by universal joints (I'm not sure what kind they would be in unity, but that is the mechanisms term).
Each joint could have a torque proportional to its angle, so the more you bend it, the harder it tries to flick back. Then its just a matter of adding forces to the blade structures as you bump into them.
This is more of a engineering solution than a programming one, and would require a little bit of math, so its probably not ideal. but it should work.
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 have been thinking about this for a while. I know we can write to our own textures with setpixels, but i also know this is a really slow method that would start dropping framerates below 30 just being there. (Due to the sync with the videocard that happens after.)
So either i am using the wrong method, or doing it wrong. But i cannot find a proper way to write my own vram to a texture or directly to a camera.
Long story short, if i were to build like an emulator inside unity, and i wanted this emulator to run on either camera pixel by pixel or just on a texture inside unity. How would i get this going without slowing my framerate to a crawl on most devices?
Are shaders an option? If so, please point me in a direction since i never made those on my own just yet.
I'm creating a program that simulates that of the Breakout Game using C#.
I've been learning various techniques on how to create the bricks, paddle and ball for the game but cannot work out on how to add them all into one picture box in Visual Studio.
The main issue I'm facing is that in order to move the ball for example, I have to clear the 'canvas' by using the following section of code:
paper.Clear(Color.White); This basically clears the picture box to the colour white in order for the new coordinate (of the ball for example) to be dawn within the picture box and this is where my issue begins.
Each of the components within the Breakout game (that I have practised) all use the paper.Clear(Color.White); code. This means that if for example I want to move the paddle, display the bricks and bounce the ball simultaneously, the program just decides to do one function at a time. If I remove paper.Clear(Color.White); from one of my assets then the program just won't function in the way I want it to.
Is there a way for all these components to run simultaneously within the game without missing any of them out completely?
At its simplest you need to change your approach to have the 'layouting' or 'painting' be centrally controlled, presumably on a timer or similar, and do a single 'clear' operation and then redraw all your components. In other words, do not have each component clear the canvas, they should just be concerned with their own rendering.
The above is the simplest approach. Beyond that you could take an approach of only redrawing what has changed from one frame to another. This can make for much more optimized performance, especially if your game canvas is large or has many components. However it requires a completely different, and in some ways more complex design. You would need to determine the rectangle / rectangles that have had 'movement' or other modifications to them from the prior frame, clear only those rectangles and ask those components that are wholly or partially in those rectangles to re-draw themselves.
This question is going to sound odd because I really don't understand how this could be possible but here goes. I have some collision code for a 2D game of mine which works perfectly fine on Windows, Xbox, WP7, WP8. But for some odd reason the exact same code does not work when I run my game as a Windows 8 Metro App. What's even weirder is, the code works when I run the same project on my Surface but when I run it on my PC the bullets just go straight through the enemy. I don't think posting the code would be of any use since the code is identical where ever I use it and KNOW for a fact it works. If anyone knows how this is even possible please let me know. If you want me to post the code then let me know.
I'll explain a bit of what the code is doing:
Loops through all the player's bullets
Loops through all the enemies
If rectangle collision takes place
If per pixel collision takes place
Kill enemy, remove bullet etc.
The game runs fine as an XNA game on my PC which is the same PC I use to test it as a metro app.
This might be a computer speed problem. Does your game-loop work on a static timer, or do you throw updates/draws as fast as you can? It's possible the bullets aren't colliding because on one update they're in front of the enemy, and on the next they're behind. Try 'widening' the enemies or bullets as a debug - that may fix it. If this is the case, you may have to do some bullet updating within the update to make sure it hits all the locations in-between. and doesn't teleport through the enemies.
If you are using pixel values to test for collision, you may be trying to use DIP (device independent pixels) pixels thinking they are screen location pixels (something new with Metro, in fact, it's the default).
Set your app to run in simulation mode and set the sim's screen resolution to: 1366x768. Does it suddenly work correctly? if so, then it's a DIP issue.
Start here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ff684173(v=vs.85).aspx
notice the formula halfway down the page: DIPs = pixels / (DPI/96.0)