I am working, or about to be working, on a project where I would like to move a monitor along a railed track, left to right and vice versa, and have the camera in Unity update its movement left or right to follow the track movement. I am attempting to do something like this Video Example but on a smaller scale, and have, at certain points along the track, triggers that will spawn different animations based on where on the track the monitor is, sort of like a timeline.
I guess my question is, does anyone have any thoughts or ideas on how this is accomplished? My initial thought is using a accelerometer to get movement data and use that with some scripting to control the camera, but I am not sure how big a factor the potential error may be with this approach. Another idea would be to use some sort of Laser Range Finder to get a constant distance strapped to the back of the monitor or the track, right now I am really just brainstorming.
On the unity side of things I will be fine, I am just wondering if there are other ways, or if people may have other ideas on how this is done, before I jump into spending money on trial and error modes. Thanks for any insight that anyone may be able to offer in advanced!
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For my university project I am making a program to help test children's motor skills. Its basic ball catching/throwing tests, but there are certain steps involved, eg, for an underarm throw the movement goes as follows:
dominant hand swings down and back reaching behind the leg
steps forward with the foot opposite the throwing hand
ball is tossed forward hitting the wall without a bounce
hand follows through after ball release to chest level
For these detections I am initially thinking of buffering a list of points before each 'step' of positions and then checking each one over for that step to be performed.
Is there any elegant way of doing this? Any mathematical way that isn't a neural network?
My proposed method feels a bit crude, so i'd love input from anyone else.
Thanks!
Ive got - 2 on this questions so obviously i shouldn't be asking such a ridiculous question on here. Its fine. Ill figure it out.
so I've been trying to see if I can make use of Wheel Colliders for the past several months now. As much as I've managed to figure out more and more things about how to set them up properly, there's some things I've been noticing that seem impossible to avoid:
Even if your friction sideways stiffness is lower, there's a chance that your car will continue to "spin" or "rotate" in the direction you were steering if you JUST hold down your input long enough to get the car beyond just rotating. I've noticed this will happen, whether for example the "SteerHelper" or "TractionControl" functions are doing their work or not. This will put a dent in ensuring smooth turn movement. Now, I don't know if maybe this is just due to realistic car physics (I mean, I can picture the car skidding in scenarios where they lost grip of the road for sure), but it just feels kinda glitchy. Sometimes, even when I'm not turning, the car will start to turn a little to the left or right and then gradually seem to "lean" that way in terms of applied torque to the rigidbody. I've seen many suggestions for trying to stop the rigidbody from doing this. Here is one way I'm trying to work against this:
rb.AddTorque(-rb.angularVelocity * 2);
However, it seems that the car will still "spin" more than intended. What would be ideal is to be able to MAYBE allow the car to turn a little extra after the left or right steer buttons were released (maybe more or less depending on the vehicle), and no more than that to ensure there is maximum control to give the engaged and maybe arcadey game play I've been going for for a long while.
It's been difficult to adapt an ideal friction curve value that would give the most ideal feel of a drift turn, especially a more arcadey one. I'm not trying to go for wide turns that slow you down, I'm trying to go for tight (yet controllable) turns that allow you to preserve most of your speed. I find that especially at higher values of stiffness, as I know many people have observed in other posts, that again, the car will turn back an extremely high amount sometimes (you drift left enough, a force is turning your vehicle way to the right). It's sad, because I've wanted to be able to say I've "mastered this beast" and used it for my purposes, but I don't know if that's really a good practical expectation for anyone. I even worked my own alternate friction curve values that would be used in the controller:
But I guess as some people say, you can't polish something that's broken? Moving to the third point...
I've read so many posts that show how to adjust a vehicle's center of mass, or to add more colliders in different spots to correct it, using scripting to add an offset to the center of mass, etc. So many tips that say, "lower the center of mass, you'll find it" and I give that a try. When the center of mass is too low, my car can get pretty shaky on the terrain (not that it hasn't in the past, but it's often been things I could correct, like the weird initialization of the attachedRigidBody of the wheel colliders themselves in the beginning, etc). High enough, and of course, (even when it's lower sometimes???) the car will just start spinning in the air on either multiple axes or specifically the forward z, when you drive off a ledge or bump into something with a high enough speed. It just seems inevitable.
I've been trying to give my benefits of a doubt. I like to think there's a correct way to use this thing, and that I'm just not familiar enough with Unity3D physics concepts. However, it just seems more and more that I'm investing too much time in a broken component - or, maybe I just never got the best grip of physics.
I was about ready to try just convex mesh colliders around my tires, and just abandon the idea of gripping physics altogether, but I'd love to hear suggestions to either address anything I've mentioned above, or just a more ideal package to move onto. I've glanced at packages like Vehicle Physics Pro, but I do want to be sure I'm getting something that makes sense.
Full disclosure: I'm in the middle of trying to make a game that feels incredibly similar to F-Zero, but with wheels.
Thanks in advance for any thoughts or suggestions you can provide.
(Maybe not an answer per se, but hopefully helpful.)
Note Unity also suggests to possibly give the car a constant downward force via script. It might be telling that such workarounds are officially given, one would think proper physics would, well, properly work without them.
There's some assets you might want to give a try generally:
One is the Unity Asset Store asset called Arcade Car Physics, and it's free. I've tried it and it works (but not sure if it works for your needs). It's using Unity's native Wheel Collider plus extra scripts.
Another is the Arcade Car Physics github project. It has nice plane stabilization and more, and works well. It's not using the native Wheel Collider.
Then there's this asset called Vehicle Physics. Instead of native Wheel Colliders, they've create a fully custom wheel system so that it would be more physically workable. The asset is not free, but they offer a free demo executable where you can drive around different vehicles, and that works quite well. (I haven't yet bought this asset myself.) As a downside, some reviews mention there's some complexity in setting this up (and I suppose future support for this custom Wheel Collider hinges on the company continuing to exist).
Good luck!
I am making a multiplayer top down 2D game with 3d elements. All my movement, healthbars and basic functionality is working flawlessly even while hosted and playing on a server, node.js socket.io. However In this game it is possible to move the camera like in Realm of the mad god.
in case you are in doubt here is a video: https://youtu.be/4tdcxl3aZ0c?t=31s
This of course means that the players can end up being upside down with regards to each other and I cannot find a solution that works in all regards to make sure the sprites of the other players are always facing the correct direction with regards to their movement.
I have made several solution to this problem which cover most scenarios but while play testing other things we always end up noticing that the sprites sometimes face the wrong directions. So I am wondering if anyone has an answer, the logic, the fixing this problem.
Things I have tried:
Adding a gameobject to the camera to which all sprites asses their change in distance and determine their facing direction based off that information. (this leads to the players sometimes flipping erratically when the camera is moved and they as well are moving as sometimes they may be moving slower and there although moving left the camera approaches from the right and that flips them)
Adding a gameobject to the world which allows all sprites to have a fixed point to which they can measure their change in distance and therefore also know what direction to face (this worked somewhat better as they always know what direction they have to face, however once the player is upside down everything is inverted)
Emitting to the other players wether I am upside down or not in order to try to reinvert the above solution in the case I am upside down. (I could not find a good way to do this, and it got me thinking that this must be a problem people have fixed before many times and perhaps someone know of a good solution that works.)
thank you all for your input.
I seem to have found a solution for this issue that works decently well. Keeping in mind that I do not want to have the server being involved in this and I would rather have each individual sprite know its direction rather that have something heavy trying to determine this logic I came up with the following solution. May not be the best but it works. Still very keen to hear other solutions.
On my main character I have a switch case, which changes depending on the players rotation in the world. I need this switch case anyway for fixing (http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/1348301/trying-to-change-the-cameratransparencysortaxis-to.html?childToView=1348316#answer-1348316) that issue.
As the cases change I simply place the gameobject that I want the sprites to compare their distance to at 1 of 4 positions. YPos, YNeg, XPos, XNeg. Meaning that the sprite now determines its facing direction based on a gameobject that is placed in accordance with the Players position. without having to place it on the camera.
I will update if during further play tests this gives me trouble but thus far it works in the all the cases I need it to.
Still very willing to hear other solutions to this problem.
Thank you.
how could I get "hold of" two points coming from the iPhone's camera (in live stream) like these people do it : http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~gk/youtube.html (they're using this technique to bypass the need for markers in AR..)
I'm not interested in AR, I'm only interested in coming up with a way to "hang on" to such points coming from the camera's live stream and not lose them regardless of whether I'm moving the camera closer to them or further away, to the left or right,..etc.
Is it just a matter of coming up with a code that scans the camera's input for something that is "standing out" (because of diferrence in color?high contrast, etc?)
Thank you for any helpful ideas or starting points!
Check out http://opencv.willowgarage.com/wiki/
OpenCV is an open source lib that can do lots of things around image recognition and tracking.
If you google for it, along with iOS as a keyword you should run into a few related projects that might help you further.
I'm currently developing an iPhone game where the player needs to tilt the device to do something. The game is somewhat of a memory game with the four corners of the screen being possible targets. The object of the game is to remember the order and then move the device to the right place.
My question is more about the design of the moving mechanic. The two options that I thought of were to get the values from the accelerometer directly and when the are greater than a specific value return whether that was the correct place to go (ie the right corner for the given instruction). My second idea is that each corner would have its own CGrect and the accelerometer would move an other CGrect and when the two intersect it would return whether the move was right or wrong.
In your opinion which one would be best? I think that the accelerometer data would be quicker but it might be affected by sudden movements while the other way might be slower but more accurate. Let me know what you think.
I think you should try both, test each of them on players, and see which works better. Drive game design decisions from user testing whenever possible.
My speculation is that you are going to need to damp or accumulate the accelerometer data somehow, since it is noisy; and if you are integrating that data into a moving average, then you should show where that moving average is with eg an onscreen sprite.
You probably don't even need to use the CGRect's intersection -- if you're just trying to determine whether <x0,y0> is within r units of <x1,y1> then you can do it via a simple Pythagorean distance. But the important thing is that if there is some internal state in the algorithm calculating what the accelerometer data has integrated to, then you need to show that state onscreen to feel responsive.