Currently I'm working on a 2D game with destructible terrain in unity. It works great! Except for one thing.... collision generation... Since the terrain is destructible, I have to generate collisions on the go. I tried and it's awful performance. From 1000 fps from editing the terrain to 1 fps when I enable collisions generation. This is a huge issue and I know it's possible within unity because this guy :
https://forum.unity.com/threads/wip-nimbatus.221798/
created it with collisions as well. I tried contacting him but no response yet! Any of you guys have any ides on what I can do? Thanks!
I found a rather annoying but working solution to the issue. So basically what was wrong was I was setting points as vertices. The guy I messaged told me that at the time when he made his game, the 2D engine wasn't a thing in unity so he was forced to use regular 3D components. I didn't want to do this because it would possibly limit what I can do with 2D packages since I am not using the 2D engine. But in the end I decided that unless I could find a extremely fast edge finding algorithm that supported concave meshes WITH holes, I would need to just use the regular Unity3D MeshCollider component. I'm not sure why I was having an issue with the Polygon collider as I thought it would work the same as the MeshCollider but in 2D. I think the issue was I was setting the path of the Polygon Collider as each vertice. This is wrong because I think I would need to set the edge vertices only. (My mesh does not share vertices so I'm not sure how to find the edges) Of course I could re write it to share vertices but I think I will be find with the 3D components (For now at least)
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.
Is it possible to use Unity as a render engine? I have a game which is written in C# and I would very much want to rewrite it to use Unity because of it's portability and use of C#. The game itself is a 2D maze game (think Pac-man).
I read alot of tutorials for using Unity for 2D games but all of them used almost only menus and editors which embedded in Unity and used only small portion with C# or other programming language. If I'm going to go down this road it means I need to "rewrite" my whole game logic with Unity's editors/menus/managers etc...
I'm looking to use it like the XNA library for example. Is there any way to achieve that with Unity? If not, is there another game engine/library using C# which is cross-platform and canm be run under mobile devices?
I made Fangz (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6-5D6IkD5E) using Unity. If that doesn't prove that a complex 2d game can be made in Unity, I don't know what does :).
You can use Unity like XNA, but that would deny you from Unity's strengths. Once you get used to visualising your member variables in an editor in a custom way (via inspector editor scripts) it'll be hard to go back :).
Furthermore Unity now has native 2d support, which is as good is not better as 2d Toolkit, once of the most well designed 2d packages I've had the pleasure of working with.
Another advantage of Using Unity is that you'll be able to easily add animations to your 2d game. Just add an animation component, press record and move.
All in all I find myself thinking the other way around: how can anyone do a 2d game in anything other that Unity :).
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/
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.