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)
Related
I have made a very simple hypercasual game everything works fine but after some few minutes of gameplay, the fps goes from 60 to 50 even the phone gets heated up. Similar to this question. I tried profiling but just can't see anything off. Tried even removing some UI elements but still no luck. Tried various vsync settings. Also, I had used this to display the fps. Even without it, the lag can be seen. Even if I just open the game and do nothing then after 5 minutes the fps will become 50. If go back using the home button and re-enter the game then the fps becomes 60 again. Using unity 2018.2.6f1. Never experienced this behavior in my other Android games.
Basically it was a faulty custom vertex shader which was applied to a plane to change the background color which changed color over time. I had not used the mobile vertex color because I was not getting the desired output. But now I'll stick to the mobile one.
The two symptoms you observed are very much likely to be connected.
The phone might heat up, as you are using its full power, which in turn makes the throttling kick in, reducing the perform
I've had the EXACTLY same problem. I was trying to fix it for a very long time. You said something about faulty shaders you use. And this is the key to solve our problem.
I use a 2-color gradient as a BG, so I have to use a shader too. Due to the fact that I'm a total noob in the writing "shader-code", I have to find something in the Internet. And it was my biggest fail)
To fix the problem and remove this fps drop you should remove your gradient and shader attached to it from the scene. And try to find a more optimized shader for 2D-game (or you can always write your own one c:)
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 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.
I'm currently trying to implement a marble maze game for a WM 5.0 device and have been struggling with developing a working prototype. The prototype would need the user to control the ball using the directional keys and display realistic acceleration and friction.
I was wondering if anyone has experience with this and can give me some advice or point me in the right direction of what is essential and the best way to go around doing such a thing.
Thanks in advance.
Frank.
When reading your answer I didn't get the feeling you are looking for a game framework, but more: how can I easily model a ball with acceleration and friction.
For this you don't need a full fledged physics framework since it is relatively simple to do:
First create a timer which fires 30 times a second, and in the timer callback do the following:
Draw the maze background
Draw a ball at ballX, ballY (both floating point variables)
Add ballSpdX to ballX and add ballSpdY to ballY (the speed)
Now check the keys...
if the directional key is left, then subtract a small amount of ballSpdX
if the directional key is topleft, then subtract a small amount of ballSpdX and ballSpdY
etc
For collision do the following:
first move the ball in the horizontal direction. Then check the collisions with the walls. If a collision has been detected, then move the ball back to its previous positions and reverse the speed: ballSpdX = -ballSpdX
move the ball in the vertical direction. Then check the collisions with the walls. If a collision has been detected, then move the ball back to its previous positions and reverse the speed: ballSpdY = -ballSpdY
by handling the vertical and horizontal movement separately, the collision is much easier since you know which side the ball needs to bounce to.
last nu not least friction, friction is just doing this every frame: ballSpdX *= friction;
Where friction is something like 0.99. This makes sure the speed of the ball get's smaller every frame due to friction;
Hope this helped
I would recommend checking out XNA Studio 3, it has built in support for PC, Xbox 360 and mobile devices, and it's an official & free spin-off of Visual Studio from Microsoft.
http://creators.xna.com/en-US/
http://blogs.msdn.com/xna/
If you search around, people have written tutorials using physics (velocity on this one)
http://www.xnamachine.com/2007/12/fun-with-very-basic-physics.html
Try XFlib. It is in c++, but most cool things for the mobile have to be in c++, unfortunately. The site has some very cool free games. You can also see the source of most of the game too. Many have the physics you want.
Unfortunately, XNA doesn't support the windows mobile platform. However, as it seems that you're not having a problem with the technical issue of drawing on the WM device, but with the logic required to implement physics based movement, then it's not a bad idea to consider XNA to prototype the physics and movement code.
Check out some of the educational topics at creators.xna.com, and also "gamedev.net"
If you are at a loss, there's no mistake in trying a "lighter" tool for prototype. I would try Torque Game Builder - it spits out XNA, although maybe not meant for your platform.
At the Samples of the Windows Mobile SDK (check out the WM 6.0 SDK too), there are a couple of game applications. One of them is a simple puzzle game; not much, but it is a starting point.
The use of physics in game development is not specific for Windows Mobile. You can find a huge literature about this subject. This comes up in my mind now. If you are serious about game development, in any platform, you should do a little research first.
I dont know if this may help but i saw a Marble application for the Android platform on google code. Check it out here, it may throw some insight on the actual logic of the game.
The code is open sourced and written in java (using the android sdk) put nevertheless it may be useful. Also to better understand the code checkout the documentation for the SensorsManager, SensorEvent etc here
I wouldn't recommend using the same architecture as this application thou.