I am making a app which draws continuous lines like a snake using Unity and SKSpriteKit (Obj-C) in Xcode (I’m making 2 versions of the same app in both):
http://i.stack.imgur.com/qA1zk.png
http://i.stack.imgur.com/484kj.png
http:// i.stack.imgur.com/QTEkC.png (Apologies for the image posts. I can't post an image/more than 2 links)
If you’ve ever heard of a game called Curve Fever, what I’m doing here is quite similar to it. I’m controlling the direction of the end of the line with the arrowkeys, whilst the end of the line automatically moves forward every frame creating an image like the one above.
However, from the 3 screenshots above, it is quite obvious that my program isn’t very efficient - every frame, I add a circle sprite to the SKScene in the place where my moving sprite is, which is why, after a while, there are over 1000 nodes on the screen, and the energy impact/memory/cpu is very high… Not ideal.
So now I’m looking for better ways of drawing the line on the screen without drawing thousands of nodes.
A while ago, a friend talked to me about how he made a similar app in GameMaker (which I have no knowledge of how to use). When I asked him how he rendered the line, he said he created something called a “surface”, and when anything moved on that surface, the old position of the sprite would still stay there - which would create lines if a circle moved across the surface.
He was rather vague about this, and I tried to do some research later, but with no success. I couldn’t find anything relevant about continuous lines, surfaces and GameMaker, Xcode or Unity.
If someone could come up with a solution like my friend was talking about, for Xcode/Unity - preferably both (or if someone could tell me what he was talking about for GameMaker), then I’d be grateful, as this would optimise my game and reduce the severe lags I get after around 30 seconds.
Also, I’d be grateful if anyone could suggest alternative solutions to this, too.
I'm using GameMaker but I have no knowledge of Xcode or Unity. I can't help you directly but I can explain GameMaker surfaces.
Surfaces in GM are objects where you can draw on instead of directly drawing on the screen. Later you can draw the surface to the screen. The main advantage of it is that you can store a surface and for example draw it again in another tick, while the screen is redrawn in every tick, or that you can change it over time.
Surfaces are basically just bitmaps where you draw on. That means it wouldn't be hard to do the same in any other environment. Most other libraries/APIs call it canvas.
In your example you would draw one circle to the bitmap in each tick and then draw the whole bitmap to the screen.
A related topic is destructible terrain as it is discussed here: https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/6721/implementing-a-2d-destructible-landscape-like-worms
Related
I am currently working on a 3d game in Unity, and I am working on the level design using ProBuilder. I basically created a huge cube which I "flipped normal", and a second one way smaller
which, as the other one, I flipped normal, but as soon as I crossed it while turning backward I could weirdly see through the small cube, which makes it feel unfinished. How could I fix this issue?
Normally in 3d games triangles can only be seen from one side. Usually this is not a problem because walls have some thickness. Since you clearly have paper thin walls made of only one layer of triangles this is exactly the result you should expect.
In short add the other side to your walls. The simples way is to duplicate the existing triangles and flipping them. Walls will still be paper thin of course. Later you should probably make them thicker.
I am building a game where everything behind the player is greyed out as if it lives in a memory. But I don't know how I can achieve this effect. Is this where shaders are being used for?
Now I can create a SKLightNode to create the lighting and make it dark around the edges. But I like to field of view for the character to be 120 degrees. Everything outside of that angle should be greyed out.
Of course in the future I like the view to be blocked by obstacles but that is outside of the scope of this question.
A desaturation shader for SpriteKit can be found at my blog post on that subject. Note that this works in terms of an input texture, so you may need to adapt things to work on top of a tiled background. Also note that there is a new iOS 9 API to support capture of the output of a whole node, which may be useful to you in implementing this.
I'm trying to do a little research for my next game that I'm planning to make and just wondering if anyone could give me a little direction.
I'd like to use sprites to show animation, characters walking and such so my question is this. What game engine handles sprites the best?
And how many sprites can be shown per second? Say i had a character walking and wanted it to look pretty fluid, might i be able to get 60fps? or is that way way to high?
Last question.. sorry! If a sprite has more colors and complexity, but is the same file size as something simpler would it take more processing power to display the complex one?
thanks!
James.
I would highly recommend cocos2d for sprite animations. It's very easy to pick up if you already know objective-c. And it's great for working with sprites. The animations are very fluid and when your testing your applications in an iOS simulator, it tells you the frames per second in the bottom left hand corner. The frames per second usually runs at about 60. And regarding the sprite file size, I believe if the file size is the same between two sprites then they require the same amount of processing power.
A good engine to use for it's simplicity is the Sparrow engine for sprites, sound and other things. There is no reason you can't get 60fps. As for your last question, it wouldn't make a difference.
I went through all my resources but I am not getting the scattering effect of an image smoothly. However, I am able to zoom it and I had scattered it but it is not as smooth as I want. I just want to click on a button and it should zoom and the other image should get scatter
I want the image to be scattered as the link given below is it possible in iPhone?
http://www.touchmagix.com/templates/diamond.htm
this is hell lot of graphics. If you intend to achieve this with iPhone sdk, start learning details about CALayer and then try to manipulate the movements of different objects. Which will require lot of coding logic.
My suggestion would be going for Cocos2D and try with the different classes and api's present there. In Cocos2D you can create an image which will act as an actual physical object and you can apply all laws of physics to it. Say if you create a ball, and you push it, the ball will go in the direction of the push and bounce back if it gets hit by any other physical object and you don't require to do any coding for this. Cocos2D takes care of all these things.
Try it.
I'd like to create a game that has levels such as this: http://img169.imageshack.us/img169/7294/picdq.png
The Player moves "flies" through the level and mustn't collide with the walls. How can I create such levels?
I found that piece of software: http://www.sapusmedia.com/levelsvg/
It's not that cheap, so I wonder whether there is another way to create such a level as shown in the picture above...?
You can do that pretty easy by reading the color value of pixels at specific places of the level. Take for instance that your level background is white and the walls are black. In order to perform collision detection, whether your character had hit the wall, you would do the following:
-take your character's position
-look at the color values of the pixels of your map that overlap with character's bounding box or sphere at that position
-if any of those contain black color you have yourself a collision :)
Now if your level is all colourful, you would want to build a black and white mask texture that would reflect the wall surfaces of your actual map. Then use the coloured map for drawing and the bw map for collision detection.
I'd spend a good solid couple weeks getting caught up on Objective-C, Xcode, Interface Builder, and Apple iOS documentation. There are many good tutorials out there and sample Xcode projects to download and run on the iPhone/iPad simulator.
If just starting out, some of those quick startup libraries can rob you of the intimate knowledge you'll need to create the intricacies and nuances you'll need when your application starts to reach outside the boundaries of the code sandbox. Not bad to use as learning tools or to speed up development time, but I'd advise against using them as a crutch until you strengthen your developer legs. Crawl. Walk. Run!