TL;DR: Can someone please help with pathfinding with no obstacles, fixed and known starting points, and edges based on transparency of the pixel grid of a .png file.
I'm trying to make a simple app for my students to teach them the correct stroke order and direction of the Chinese strokes.
So far I have achieved this by layering "start" and "end" game objects with CircleCollider2D components on top of the PolygonCollider2D generated by the sprite to check if they started the stroke, stayed within the stroke, and exited it correctly.
It does the job, yes, but it doesn't animate the fill in process like you'd expect from such an app, not to mention that I need to manually add "start" and "end" points myself.
Ideally I could just provide the stroke sprite, tell it which way I want the stroke to go (left to right, right to left etc.) and let the program create the ends based on the first/last 10% of the pixels, and of course animate it to fill in once completed correctly.
But baby steps!
First, I'd be grateful if someone could please tell me how to even get the pixel grid to begin with so I can perhaps attempt an A* approach.
Thank you!
This is the same case for validating AI racers if they are in racing in the correct way. You will have to indicate some sort of waypoint system that has is ordered by the way of strokes you want.
Imagine you're teaching them to write the number 2. You will have to create an array of nodes starting from the upper left most of the number until you get to the other end. You can validate the strokes if their fingers pass through the correct order or not.
No need for a complicated A* algorithm.
However, this won't do if you want to automate everything. This will require you to do some sort of image processing, editor tool, and loads of validations. I wouldn't suggest the automated one though.
Related
I am improving a video game of mine where I currently have the problem that NPCs can shoot through walls. In order to fix this issue, I have decided to completely re-do my work regarding ground combat.
I use a tight grid for finding paths from any point A to B. I store my grid as an image-like structure and use Jump Point Search for the pathfinding itself. My goal is to find a location that is as far away from the enemy as possible (limited by the firearms's range) that also has a direct line of sight to the enemy.
In my latest approach, I determined all nodes in my grid that are within weapon range and that are connected to the enemy's location (colored in green in the image below). The final missing part is filtering these points so that only the points with a valid line of sight remain.
I can also detect the border lines (colored in blue) very fast. I could check for every node, if a line from this node to the enemy would intersect any border line. If that is not the case, I have clear line of sight. However, I assume this to be neither fast nor the optimal solution.
Do you have any ideas or suggestions? I am glad for any hint!
I visualized the grid in the following image to give you an idea of what I am talking about. If a character would stand in the lower right green area, he could not shoot the enemy in the upper left area because of missing line of sight.
I am currently in High School, and I am in an APCSP (AP Computer Science Principles) class, which in my case is learning in Scratch programming. I am confused and have practically no idea what I'm doing. Scratch is very confusing and I feel like it's pointless to learn.
My question is this: Can anyone help me on how to make a Maze Generator on Scratch, as this is my project and it's giving me struggles.
Thank you.
It's actually possible to build with scratch but depends on what you are looking for. I assume you want to generate a simple maze like in old fashioned 8-bit games like boulder dash.
First decide on the size of your maze: for example 5 x 5 blocks.
If you want to create a maze, imagine drawing it on a grid on paper. Blocks are either "empty" or filled in. Our maze can be represented by numbers. The empty blocks are represented by a 0 and the filled blocks with a 1.
You could visualize that matrix like this if all blocks are empty:
0,0,0,0,0,
0,0,0,0,0,
0,0,0,0,0,
0,0,0,0,0,
0,0,0,0,0
Adding a border wall while keeping the inside empty would look like:
1,1,1,1,1,
1,0,0,0,1,
1,0,0,0,1,
1,0,0,0,1,
1,1,1,1,1
Using a "list" variable to store this information would fit best within the possibilities of MIT Scratch.
In this case, you need to understand that each block in our maze is represented by a position in above matrix. You could draw numbers on a piece of paper in the shape and size of your grid / matrix as a reference to remember the position of each block if that makes it easier.
We also need to look at how our maze will relate to the Stage size. The width and height in pixels of a default scratch project is 480x360.
A 5 x 5 maze is divided in blocks of 480 / 5 = 96 width and 360 / 5 = 72 height. In other words, a block needs to be 96x72 pixels, based on a full screen maze.
Next step, is creating a sprite representing the visualization of the blocks of the maze. I would keep the first "costume" of our block sprite empty, and create a fully filled block to represent the walls of the maze.
After that, we need to programmatically create our maze. I made an example you can explore of random drawing of the blocks of a maze:
https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/278731659/
(You can change the rows & columns value to see it scale up, but remember the limit to the amount of clones the block sprite can have is 300)
This is just to get you started and by no means a complete solution. I just hope this helps you think in the right direction.
You can make this more advanced, by adding a function to explore and correct our randomly drawn grid to generate a walkable path from position x to position y. A rule you can program is for example: Every empty position in the grid should have at least two other empty positions in the spaces above, below, left and right of it.
There are many different ways to do this; whether this is with sprites and stamp or 2D lists and pen. Either way, the main component is the algorithm. This wikipedia page gives details on how maze generation works and few different algorithms. There is also a video series by The Coding Train here where he creates a maze generator with the 2D list method from above (this method is a bit harder on scratch, however). Either way, the best thing to do is to look at examples others have made, figure out how they work, and try to recreate them or make them better. Here's a good place to get started.
Scratch IS truly pointless! A simple maze generator would have you use the pen to draw predefined shapes (Such as a long hallway or intersection). You should also make (invisible) squares to separate everything and have the program draw in the squares.
I will put a link later that leads to a sample project that has the code.
Check out this video by griffpatch
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22Dpi5e9uz8
This was one of my projects, and the instructor provided this video for everyone to follow and expand from.
I'm trying to make a simplified version of crazy taxi . For the first step i need to make an infinite ground . I'VE searched online but couldn't find any examples .
Can i find any example of how to do this ?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhTPxrJICVg&list=PLLH3mUGkfFCXQcNBz_FZDpqJfQlupTznd
N3K makes an infinite runner in Subway Surfers style, meaning ground coming from the back and going towards the camera.
The above link is to his tutorial series.
This is a very broad question I try to give a very simplified answer to get you going.
To create endless road you need some sort of procedural function that generates corners for your track. If you do not need to backtrack you can cook something up yourself like (in X distance turn X degrees to the right). If you do need to backtrack you need something like perlin/simplex noise that always generates the same value based on 1 or more other values. You could use total distance to get the curve in the road.
You simply keep generating the world on the fly and unload pieces of the world you don't need any more. If the player can alter the world like destroying street furniture or leaving skitmarks you need to implement a chunk system. When you backtrack and generate a cerain part of the world with your procedural function you can have permanent changes the player made in that specific part by saving and loading to the chunk. Much like Minecraft does it actually.
I would like to track (if that is the right word for this) the movement of a point on an object and return the co-ordinates for the point in each frame to arrays for plotting. How would you go about doing this?
The point on the video is a certain color and so my first effort was to eliminate all other colors and change the part I wish to follow to black and everything else to white. Doing this left me with some areas in the background which are the same color but I wish to ignore them and just focus on the moving point. I do not know where to even begin with this or if I've even been trying to do the right thing so far?
Any help would be greatly appreciated! :)
Try searching for terms like 'tracking', 'morphological', 'computer vision', 'matlab'
Here's a project that I found that will probably get you started.
http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/28757-tracking-red-color-objects-using-matlab
if your object of interests is of a certain specific color. You can always apply a color-filter. To give you a bit of a background, i was trying to track not a point on an object, but a moving object in one of the videos i have. (it was a ping-pong video and my goal was to track the ping-pong ball). My algorithm was simple and fast (as i did not want any of my filters to induce heavy computations at one single frame). The basic idea was to apply a color filter. Similar to other shape filters, if your target is of high similarity to the filter, the response will be distinctive enough for you to notice. In other words, if you minus two objects that are extremely similar, you will get 0, otherwise, it will be far greater than 0.
I am tearing my hair out trying to figure out what seems to be a very easy problem. I know a lot of this stuff has been talked about tangentially, so apologies if this treads on well-covered ground, but I can't find anything specific to my solution (believe me, I've looked).
Basically I want to drag an object/sprite along a pre-defined, curved path (not just move it, but DRAG IT). Think of the iPhone's "Slide to unlock" thing, but instead of just dragging the slider left-to-right, make the path an arc or a wavy line.
My basic thinking was:
define a bezier path, set the object at the start point.
if the object is touched, check for hit detection on the bezier path in touchesMoved (or some similar function). if touches stay on the path, advance the sprite along the path until the path ends (in which case, task is finished) or the user's finger goes off the path (in which case, the object should go back to the beginning).
None of this is trivial (at least, that's how it seems). For example:
Doing hit detection on a Bezier path is a royal pain since you actually need to do it on the stroked portion, not the fill portion. And even then, I can't seem to find a way to do it on a path of any width -- only on the 1-point-wide path of the Bezier.
Moving an object partially along a path doesn't even seem possible: all of the animation methods move the sprite along the ENTIRE path. Also, doing this requires you to find the point on the path closest to the user's touch, which, if you've ever looked this up involves astoundingly complicated math.
I've thought of using rigid bodies to occupy all of the space EXCEPT the path, so the object can only move in the path. However, this requires the definition of curved rigid bodies some of which must be concave. Dead end.
Am I making this too hard? It doesn't seem that complicated. I don't need a whole solution, just a new way to think about this and kick in the right direction. Any help would be really appreciated.
How about this?
Consider the X Axis of your bezier
path.
Each time the user taps or interacts with the screen just look at the x portion of the touch
Map that X Coordinate with your path and move the object to the right position.
Yes, you are making this too hard.
Take the simplification suggested above (or along a circle, line, etc) if it works for, or if you really want to do it against a bézier curve, consider the following:
Look at the definition of the bézier curve
What you're looking for is to define a new object position P' from a current position P and a change in touch position D.
If you rephrase the original P(x,y) in terms of t (bézier curves are parametric), then the problem becomes finding how much t offset to add based on D.
Something involving the differential of the bezier fn at P might be a good way to do that. Ie, how much t would have been added had the curve just been a straight line coming from point P along the curve.
EDIT:
Transition between segments:
If each segment has t in [0,1), then you can detect t >= 1 and move on to the next segment, setting P to the end of the previous segment, and evaluating the movement again in relation to that point. There might have to be some heuristics involved if you have a lot of small points, etc.