Posts tagged ‘Game Programming’
Camera for a Fight Game
Fighting games have been around since the arcade gold era during the 70s, and there’s basically two types of cameras used in these games:
- When the fighters can’t rotate around each other and move only up/down left/right. Street Fighter is a classical example of this type of camera
- The fighters can move at any direction on the horizontal plane, including rotating around each other, and they can also move up/down. Tekken is the best example of this kind of camera
The Street Fighter camera is just a particular case of the Tekken camera, so this post will deal only with the latter.
Some useful scripts for an RPG like Camera
There are some “patterns”, or GUI standards, for games that are used a lot. For example, displaying a health bar right above or bellow the main character, the damage going up from the player’s head after he/she received an attack. and I’m asked many times during classes how to implement some of the “game standards” for the GUI, or HUD. Ragnarok online, or Torchlight, are good examples of these standards
Instead of just putting the content of this post to one or more questions in the UnityFaq, I’ve decided to write a post and explain a little further all the features requiered to implement these standards. I’ve made a simple scene to show these features in action (you need Unity Player to visuallize the scene). You can download the project here. I assume you know the basics of Unity3D, and the programming will be in C#. If you have any question about the same scripts in UnityScript, just send me an email.
Aiming at the Center of the Screen in Unity
I have an UnityFaq to help my students find quickly some of the things I’m asked all the time. But, some of the questions need a little more explanation than just the standard answer I put on the FAQ. I will start these new, more complete answers with this one, how to aim at the center of the Screen, using a first or third person shooter, all you need is the position on screen coordinates, or better, on the viewport, where you want to shoot at.
Steering
In the last half of the 20th century, science gave many examples of complex phenomena can arise from simple rules and simple equations. Chaos Theory and Multi Agent Systems were among the fields the were born when scientists realized this. For game development this is really important, because you have to give an imersive, fun and realistic (looking at least) expirience to the player, and this must be done at least 40 frames per second. One of the most important aspects of game simulation that leads to imersion is the movement of the characters throughout the game environment. That’s what Steering is for.
Wellcome to the Kinect
Não me lembro de ter comprado qualquer gadget ou bugiganga no dia do lançamento, mas quando a Microsoft deu a data de lançamento do Kinect , e sabendo que o pessoal que trabalha com Creative Coding iria dar um jeito de acessar o dispositivo facilmente, reservei o meu na pré-venda assim que foi anunciado aqui no Brasil. Sabia que seria hackeado rapidamente, mas não tão rápido. Menos de 24 horas depois do lançamento nos EUA e na Europa, já havia mais de um driver disponível. O driver opensource mais estável que surgiu foi feito por Hector Martins (aka marcan). Este video dele deu origem ao movimento OpenKinect. Menos de 1 dia depois, Theo Watson, um dos criadores e organizadores do openFrameworks, já tinha feito um addon inteiro para a biblioteca.