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Closed 10 years ago.
I used to work with the Hammer editor of Valve for my Portal 2 mod, however if I just want to draw a basic concept or sketch for chambers while brainstorming, the editor has just too much features so I can not focus on what I really need and have to mess around with specific things I don't need. Therefore I am thinking about the development of a simple tool (in C# based on WPF/XAML) which is optimized for basic level geometry, only consisting of cubes/voxels, and a few gameplay entities. For the moment I am doing some research to approximate whether this is a good idea or whether this would be wasted time.
So far my requirements would be:
tiled view with a 3d window and different 2d perspectives known from different 3d editing tools (the 2d views could be made optional to simplify the usability)
camera movement in the 3d window
basic item handling including selection, movement and rotation
Although I have specific details about the file formats I don't want to mess with that in the early stages where I just want to get the editor working. Anything related to (de)serialization is not part of this question.
My questions:
Are there any similiar projects I might have a look into or even reuse?
Which resources (tutorials, books, articles, ...) would you recommend for the development of such an editor?
What you just described could be done perfectly using an existing 3D modeller tool, such as Blender. Using Blender specifically for this use case, you could setup a Workspace with exactly the views you wish, and you can completely hide all the unwanted options/windows such as texturing/animation/lighting.
You could also set up a template project to give a basic startup project so you could jump instantly into just sketching and throwing geometry around.
Plus it's free, and has excellent export support for many standard types.
I do understand it may sound appealing to write your own editor (been there, done that), and it would definitely be an interesting learning experience, if you just want a tool NOW, I'd recommend using Blender and not reinvent the wheel.
Blender 3D
Related
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Closed 9 years ago.
I'm starting a 2D platformer in Unity. I want to write it in C#, but most of the tutorials I'm finding are in JavaScript. Is there any good tutorial you can direct me to?
If not, what is a good place to start? I'm new to Unity so I'd like to start by making a ground for the character to walk on in the first level and then a simple character model (no specific design so I don't have to model an actual character at this point) that I can add a script to. How can I go about these simple ideas?
The differences between C# and Javascript when using Unity3D are not as dramatic as you might think. The Unity3D documentation has a page describing the most important differences (apart from syntax of course):
http://docs.unity3d.com/Documentation/ScriptReference/index.Writing_Scripts_in_Csharp_26_Boo.html
Also, the official unity documentation allows you to switch between JavaScript, C# and Boo.
If you want to get started with Unity3D, additionally to the official documentation there are a lot of sites around (just google it), one site that i found quite helpful was unity3dstudent.com, going through at least the Essential and Beginner modules as well as the Challenges should help to get a basic understanding of how things work.
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Closed 10 years ago.
I want to build a nice looking UI with Silverlight, something that keep moving in a delicate manner (like this intro)
I know of course this is possible through the Animation features of Silverlight, but they seem to me a bit too exhausting. I'm looking for some ready-to-use UI animation.
As I recall, jquery offers quite a few UI menus (etc.) that are really easy to use.
I've searched quite a bit for effects library, or tutorials, but I couldn't find anything helpful.
Is my only option is writing Storyboard and build my animations from scratch?
Is that considered OK or I'm just reinventing the wheel here for no reason?
Does it make jquery a better choice for fancy UI web applications? (I've never used it , just read about it)
Storyboards and animations aren't that bad to learn. They are daunting at first (because they can be verbose), but if you just take some time to understand them, they are fairly straight forward. You can try some third party control suites like Telerik which have some animation/transition functions but I'd suggest diving in and understanding how they work.
The best way to try to learn the animations is to think of what you want to do first (something simple) and then just research/figure it out. Googles great for this! Do somethign easy at first of course.
View the sample Silverlight animation browser at microsoft to get started... Sample Animations
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Closed 10 years ago.
The goal of my personal experiment is to create a 3D engine in C#.
I have read a little about XNA and SlimDX. I'm not sure about XNA, because it's basically a complete engine already and so there won't be much for me to do. SlimDX looks closer to my assumptions, but I would appreciate any other recommendations.
I have some experience using OpenGL and writing a simple engine for Android games, and for the PC using jogl.
I am interested in hearing about something similar to the level of abstraction available through Java / OpenGL, but this time with DirectX.
You can download the old DirectX SDK from here which will give you C# wrappers for Direct3D.
However... if you did want to give XNA a shot, this is probably one of the best tutorials out there to get started with (and by started I mean enough to implement your own game, but it will take a lot of work).
http://www.riemers.net/
You can get the current version of the XNA SDK here
As a DirectX c# wrapper, there's also http://sharpdx.org/
Couple of Pros/Cons between Xna/SlimDX
Xna is simple to learn, and you will already have some built in functions to load models, draw text, some built in render state presets, Math classes/structures. On the other hand it's feature set is fairly limited compared to new graphics card capabilities. You will have something up and running quite fast, but on the other hand, you might end up a bit limited for advanced features (tessellation/compute/append buffers/readonly depth to name a few). You will still have quite some work to do of course.
SlimDX/SharpDX are fairly minimal (they mostly wrap around DirectX functions), so If you want to use DirectX11 (if you want to use 9 go for xna :) , you will have a bit of work to do in order to have something running in the first place, but you will have full DX power and complete flexibility over how you want to organize your engine. You will need to have your own model importer, font renderer (DirectWrite), state manager. Most common math part is already there (Matrix/Vectors) so you won't have to worry about this part.
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Closed 9 years ago.
I need physics engine to simulate game world on server. I googled for .Net physics engines and they all were released in 2006-2009. So is there any good physics engine that I can use?
What I need from engine is box, spheres collisions..
Update: sorry forgot to mention i need 3d engine
Update: In case someone will need managed physics engine look at Jitter, it's pure managed and from the developer of JigLibX
I've used the very good Newton Game Dynamics via P/Invoke.
http://newtondynamics.com/forum/newton.php
There's also the well-regarded Bullet Physics engine, but I've never used it directly. It looks quite good, though.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/bullet/
You weren't clear if you needed a purely managed code engine, but note these are not.
2d Engine:
I had a look at this a little while ago: http://farseerphysics.codeplex.com/
-- Edit: for some reason I'm unable to delete this comment myself, or even reply to comments, so I leave this edit in here. This answer was posted before the clarification of the requirement for 3D. If a mod wants to delete this, feel free.
free or commercial ?
free: jitter, jiglibX, henge3D, bulletX
commercial: bepu physics, matali physics, digitalrune physics
I worked on one a few years back for a uni project
video
soureforge
codeexamples
MIT License
Written natively in C#
It has some limitations as you would guess for a uni project
eg only use convex hulls
Features
collision detection (uses bounding volume hierarchy)
elastic collisions
custom collision handling
also supports some particle physics and spatial queries (k-nearest neighbor).
its open source so if you wanted to add your own features to it you could
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Closed 10 years ago.
I'm starting my 2nd class in C# programming through Kaplan online school. I have some limited interaction with the professor and the class online, but nothing like in an actual school. I'm about to go through "Modern Software Development Using C#.NET" by Richard Wiener. It seems the book as a extremely heavy focus on UML (which I don't even really know what that is right now!)
You experinced Csharpers.... any tips to keep in mind as I go through this to keep in perspective how the modern software engineer works outside the classroom?
Any perspectives to share as I start understanding UML and intermediate C# programming?
Some companies will use UML everywhere. Some use it nowhere. I'm not a big fan myself - I prefer ad-hoc diagrams and plenty of other communication (notes on the diagram, actual talking etc).
The good thing about an ad-hoc approach is that you can leave it as vague as you like or make it really detailed. The bad thing about it is you can't generate any code from it - but I've never really liked generating code from UML. (Others swear by it, mind.)
You certainly don't need to know UML to learn C#.
UML would come very close to the end of the list of things that gave me insight into the complex world of programming. I find it very distracting when trying to design something, and too time consuming for real system descriptions. I have always thought it is important and tried to start my project with UML diagram, but it wasn't ever worth it.
The bigger the projects you are working in the more you need a language to speak with, known by all members of the project team - a common language like UML! But you need not to start learning C# with UML.