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.
Related
Feel free to close this question if it is deemed too subjective. I realize that it might very well be, as it may focus heavily on best practices, which, if not an industry standard, may be subjective.
The Problem & Idea:
I'm using the tilemap system in unity (2D), and its been working great, but I have a few concerns regarding my particular usage. What I'd like to have is multiple "battle maps" that will get instantiated when the battle scene is switched to. My current idea is to just make each type of battle map a prefab (prefab on the grid, since the tilemaps are just layers), and then instantiate the grid when the scene loads in.
Is this best practice or is there any better way? Does having 10 maps vs 200 maps make a difference?
Other Things I've Considered:
Would it be a better idea to make one huge tilemap with all of the battle maps drawn a distance away from each other and just restrict the camera to moving only within the "current" battle map? The absolute max size I could see a map being is, let's say 30x20 tops, probably closer to half that though.
An earlier idea was to use small pixel map images to render the maps in. This was before I found out about Unity's tilemap system, which, admittedly, I'd rather use because it is so much simpler to visualize, and less work to develop.
The Scenario:
For simplicity's sake, let us assume the game has 2 scenes, the main menu, and a battle scene. Basically, the idea is to enter the battle scene and have a random battle map to be spawned out of what's available. The character(s) get placed, and any additionals also get placed, say, items, or what have you.
Is what I proposed above best practice? And should I consider any other other two systems I've also described? Or is there something I'm not thinking of that would be even better?
I don't believe that any of the above ways wouldn't work, I'm just curious if any of them is the best way to go about doing this.
Your consideration to have all of your battle maps drawn on a single tilemap and restricting the camera to only the region of the current map is an instant red-flag.
In my experience with unity, if I want to have a large level drawn on a grid I will have to break it up into chunks (each chunk is a separate tilemap) for performance reasons in the editor and in the game, so I would not recommend doing that.
If your goal is fast load times, then instancing a prefab as you suggested is not a terrible idea as long as the respective tilemap is fairly small (less than 10000 tiles), otherwise you would almost difinitely notice the map getting loaded in. If you are trying to load large tilemaps seemlessly, it may help to load the tilemap asynchronously before the actual switch occurs.
I would keep only the current map and next map loaded in the scene to ensure a seamless transition and optimal resource usage. Unity's tilemaps are not light.
How can I achieve a wind effect like this.(See link in comments).
Not the SKFieldNode, I'm looking to achieve the design.
How can I do it using PARTICLES?
I've tried playing with the SMOKE template in the PARTICLE EDITOR. I tried changing the different parameters/numbers in the editor yet couldn't achieve this effect.
I really need help, I've been trying to do this for weeks.
Thanks!
EDIT:
I'm looking to achieve 2 different effects in the video.
Adding 2 images to be more precise about what I'm looking for.
1) Straight/Wavy Wind - The straight/wavy wind(see in video in the place I drew because it has very low opacity)
2) Swirly/Hurricane Wind - The swirly/hurricane kind of wind that spins around in swirly motion.
I hope this edit will be the most helpful.
These are two different particle effects, which are best done with tens of thousands of very small particles, or even millions of them, in a post processing effects program like After Effects, using something like TrapCode's Particular, or similar. Then rendered out as low resolution image sequence animations, and composited where you need them, when you need them. You can get away with low resolution because they're wispy, additive and faint. This will be the most performant and common way to do this. Doing this with "real" particles on iOS will drain the battery and hog all the CPU and GPU to do the combination of physics and rendering required.
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
I have image named "platform.png" that represents one brick for platform of a IPhone game. I have a cartoon character that will jump on this platform.
A series of platform.png will form one complete platform. These series will be generated by swiping finger across Iphone screen. When character will jump on this platform it should go down like elastic and bounce back up. Can anyone tell me how to do this ?
Thanks in advance.
What yo want is Collision Detection. I don't think using Cocos2d will be a great idea to use in this case because you want to show elastic and bounce effects which should seem real. For this, what I suggest, is using Box2d which clearly help in showing the effects in a natural way. Here Collision Detection can be handled in a separate class known as ContactListener. You can study Box2d and ContactListener here. In ContactListener you can generate these effects and this class is very easy to handle. Two or three months back I used the same to create my game Pogo Jump and believe me I was very easy to work on Box2d.
Good luck..!!
heye ,
you have two options for this , either use box-2d/chipmunk or dont.
If you have prior experience with Physics then i would say box-2d/chipmunk would look more realistic.
I want to show water flowing from one container to another in iphone app.
Can some suggest me how to do it .. by open gl or by simply couple of images??
Plzz help me
You can probably make some decent-looking water flowing by particle effect. The particles flows down by gravity and is colored transparent blue, and a little bit "foggy with a splash". For more challenge, the particles should agglutinate together into a single bigger particle when they're near each other.
You may want to look at this tutorial if you want a truly realistic water effect and doesn't mind burning too much CPU. (I haven't really read it yet though)
Even if you know OpenGL that would be too much work, better create an animation with other software export it as a movie or images and show that in your program ;)
Have you had a look at this SO question? (it points to other questions)