I am brand new to Unity, but I was wondering if there is a way to create terrain by somehow capturing a piece of Google Earth, and somehow exporting it to the engine's terrain editor? If there isn't a direct way of doing this, could someone suggest the best way to go about copying a portion of Google Earth (or something similar) to build a terrain?
Thanks to #Josh1billion the answer seems to be terrain.party, here is a youtube link that expands on it
For completion, a pricy tool that does most of the work for you:
Real World Terrain: https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/terrain/real-world-terrain-8752
It has good reviews.
If you are serious about it, keep in mind that AAA titles build worlds still manualy from reference pictures.
Hey dreamer (or) If you want to change industry:
Good base data from goverment (swiss only) costs between few 100k up to 2M, while free to students.
Heigh educated knowledge of AI, software engineering and some math required. Hudge manpower needed. Buildings are the biggest problem.
Related
Now I am learning game development with Unity Engine .. but the problem is .. I'm a programmer .. I have zero experience in art and how to create game assets .. I have these huge ideas and I really want to make games .. so I took a course to learn how to draw and design but it doesn't work for me .. there are a lot of assets and characters to buy .. but they are different from each other .. so I came up with this idea of buying the assets and change them into pixel form .. to make them similar .. so I can build a game with them ..
the question now .. Is there any way in Photoshop or any other programs to convert those assets to pixel art?
All this About 2D Game Assets .. and 2D Games
Welcome to Stack Overflow.
The simple answer is no. There is no mystical algorithm that can take a game asset - photo or 3d model and simply turn it into a bitmap sprite.
In the example below, there is a photo of a lady dressed as Chun Li on the left. The right shows a version of the same photo, reduced in size and color (true color down to 16 colours). Notice the sprite version is missing an eye. That's the kind of detail that will be lost by any automated process. The detail in the dress and hands is also lacking.
I've worked as a pixel artist for many years and I understand your frustration. That's why I've answered your question) Many coders simply can't work without any art assets - because it looks crude or at best just doesn't look right. The best thing to do is work on the functionality of your code. Put in place some place-holder sprites (Purchase them from stock sites or similar). When the code is at a suitable point, seek out a pixel artist who'll help you fulfill your vision. That way you've already got a working version of your game, yur bitmap artist will just improve it's look many times over. I hope this helps. Good luck.
Not really. I too am an indie game developer and suck at art. However now I have an Artist on my team. But when I didn't I did a few different things:
OpenGameArt.org
I love this place. People post art you can download and use. Lots of the work is also Free to use in commercial projects. Sometimes they even include the PSD file if you want to edit a little bit.
Simple games require simple art. A big part of the games I make are for mobile. In this I can make amazing games, and simple graphics. Like a colorful cube, or similar basic art.
People. I don't know if you're in school or are part of some community of sorts but often times there are many people who are good at these things but don't share it. Ask round and see if any one might wanna help on the side. Plus, more than one person means more that one brain.
Our university has had an agency create a very pretty printed map* for a special purpose.
In the early stages of the project, I suggested that they make the map in true proportions, and in vector format, so that a digital version might be more easily made in future. The future is looming, and it's looking like I'm going to have to come up with something!
I've begun toying with ways of doing this. One option is to make a suitable base layer and add the buildings as individual svg files - it sounds like a LOT of work.
I wondered if anyone had suggestions about how I should approach this. Is mapbox even the right tool?
* apparently, I don't have the 'reputation' required to embed an image!
There have been a number of impressive cartonish and artistically stylized maps made with Mapbox GL JS and Mapbox Studio Classic.
https://www.mapbox.com/blog/pencil-drawn-style/
http://dessine-moi-une-ville.makina-corpus.net/#15/43.5933/1.4514
http://a.tiles.mapbox.com/v3/aj.Sketchy2/page.html#6/33.962/-6.405
https://www.mapbox.com/gallery/#map-7
https://www.mapbox.com/gallery/#map-20
I've begun toying with ways of doing this. One option is to make a suitable base layer and add the buildings as individual svg files - it sounds like a LOT of work.
This sounds like the one good way to go about adding individual building illustrations. Other options include using one or many image sources.
Good luck! Can't wait to see what you make!
I am newbie in Xamarin; I know there must be ready components for what I need, already I searched but not yet found.
I need to create a dynamic graphic like this:
http://www.highcharts.com/demo/dynamic-update
I wore this in PhoneGap (html5 + JS), but now I'm moving to Xamarin forms and would like to know if any third component is what I need or I'll have to do everything from scratch.
Thank you.
I'm currently looking into graphing too and OxyPlots seems to be a pretty good line graph tool. I don't think it supports dynamic updating so you'd have to program it to update manually when new data points come available.
I've not gotten round to actually using this myself but I thought I'd post this here in case it works for you.
Edit: Here's a list of examples. Also you can add it to your project using nuget so it should be easy to set up.
I'm using Syncfusion controls for Xamarin.Forms and I'm satisfied with it. They also have a free license for individual developers and small businesses.
For dynamically updated Xamarin charts SciChart offers an extremely high performance solution. With the SciChart Xamarin Chart control you can draw up to a million points, zoom, pan and scroll big datasets interactively.
Check out performance demos here:
https://www.scichart.com/example/xamarin-chart-realtime-fifo-scrolling-chart-example/
https://www.scichart.com/example/xamarin-chart-performance-demo-example/
https://www.scichart.com/example/xamarin-chart-ecg-monitor-demo-example/
Disclosure: I am the tech lead on the SciChart Xamarin project
I have written a number of games now, but feel that I fall down on my main menus. I usually use photoshop to create 2d text and buttons. To me the end result is very amateurish compared to other games out there.
Can anyone give me some tips to improve my main menus? My last game was written in OPEN GL ES - is there any easy way to e.g make the buttons 3D?
Martin, you know what the true solution is? Hire a desginer which will cost you as little as a couple hundred bucks. Just go to getafreelancer.com (or whatever web site is current today) and post saying you want to pay $200 to have a nice fun game menu designed.
You'll get about 40 responses immediately and most of them will do some sort of sample for you, to see if you like the approach. Pay using PayPal, and wait a few days to get the files.
(The fact of whether or not it is 3D is irrelevant: you just want it to be "really good". Another way to look at it: if you are not an artist/designer in 3D, your own art/designs in 3D will look equally bad. I am a hopeless guitarist and if I try to play the organ, I am equally hopeless!)
A good designer will make it happen for you, and you'll never look back.
Hope it helps!
PS an important tip with designers: to get the best result give very simple instructions. No detail. For example, "I want a Christmas look" or "I want a sci-fi look". And just let your designer run. Do NOT try to tell a designer your ideas on design, or detail issues such as where things should be. Try for the "five word rule" - do not use more than five words telling a designer what you want! (eg, "I want a fun look" or "It's for small children".) Also, do not pay too much! Hope it helps!
I've written a couple apps that are currently published in the app store. However, I'd like to start writing games that use OpenGL ES. I know how to model objects in 3D Studio Max but what I don't know is how to get my models into an OpenGL ES application on the iPhone/iPad and then manipulate those objects to create gameplay.
Can anyone point me in the right direction to get started on this?
Just to clarify...I don't mind writing code; I'm not looking for a point and click solution.
I would imagine that I'd need to export my models into some sort of format. What is that format and how do I incorporate it into a game on the iPhone/iPad?
While more involved than you're looking for, Stephen Jayna has a great writeup on how he exported textured models from LightWave in COLLADA format for use in OpenGL ES on the iPhone.
Bill Dudney had put a little effort into making a Wave Front OBJ loader for the iPhone a while back, but I think that Jeff LaMarche's project to do the same might be the farthest along.
UPDATE (8/10/2011): Jonathan Wight recently posted his TouchOpenGL code, which includes an OBJ parser.
I've used this before with some luck. However, I would say there are no easy answers to this in my experience. They all required some coding/wiring up for me.
This is a nightmare process. My past approach to this was probably not the best. I worked on PC using 3DS Max to create an exporter using MaxScript. I dumped what I needed to a text file - in a format that I just invented for my own needs as an intermediate.
I then switched to Mac and wrote a command line tool that used NSFoundation to read this text file and convert it to a binary format that was optimized for my opengl renderer. This is okay for basic and static meshes. But I had hell exporting animated figures that used keyframed skelaton animations (the maths for that stuff is intense).
This did work, but I really think that I took the hardest approach.