How does one create the game "area" for a scroller game?
How does one then put various obstacles with collision detection along this scrolled environment.
I want to try out a project which will allow the user to scroll to a certain direction in order to progress through the game.
How does one map the objects within the environment and then move what I guess is the "camera", the view of the environment.
Thanks
The trick is that there is no "area". The only bits that exist are what's under the camera (the view you currently see) and a small surrounding area giving you time to prepare more world in the direction you are moving..
Your world coordinates need to be defined as do the starting coordinates for the view. You use tiles to create the view - at its simplest that is 9 tiles, one you are currently "on" and one in each direction. If you look at the keyboard numberpad you are "on" the 5. If you move a little to the top right you are displaying parts of tiles 8, 9, 5 & 6. At that point you would create new tiles in case you move further. As you leave tile 5 you would probably release tiles 4, 1 & 2. Nine tiles may not be the optimal number of course.
If doing this with UIViews (probably not the high-performance choice) you are probably going to define one big view that can handle all the tiles and tile them onto the view (add and remove subviews), setting the large view's frame to define your camera position. As you move you change the frame to move your camera, when you need to shuffle tiles you move both the tiles and the frame to recenter giving room to move further within the coordinates of your view.
Collision detection is pretty simple since you define your own dimensions (the thing representing "you" in this world) and objects in your view have dimensions you can check against. CGRectIntersectsRect might be the simplest function to use but if you have irregularly-sized views it will get more complicated.
This answer about implementing a cyclic UIScrollView is a similar idea but it only handles scrolling on one direction.
This is a pretty common topic and if you google you will find a lot of sample code and tutorials around.
From the game logic side:
All your objects (lets call them gameobjects) should have a coordinate (x and y position) in your game world. You will keep all your gameobjects in a list. Your player object will be a gameobject too. Usually your "camera" position will be relative to your player objects position. I.e. the player will always be in the center of the screen. To determine the current "screen" position of your objects you will just subtract the camera position from your objects "world" position. Collision is usually made with simple rectangular overlap checks. You give all your objects a width and a height attribute and do your collision checks using x, y, width and height.
From the display side:
If you want to display many objects (i.e. Player, Enemies, Obstacles and so on) the best way to implement something like this is to use an OpenGL View. In this view you can display all Objects as Textures that are mapped to Polygons. You can use a library such as cocos2d which already has all of the code to achieve this easily.
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I've a simple project with a few objects.
I tried to move "player" object (Marked in the picture) to top of other objects but still it is in backward!
How to bring it to forward?
We need some more information to give an accurate answer for your exact situation, such as the properties of the Sprite Renderer (assuming Player is a sprite) and the properties of your Canvas and UI elements (especially if it is a world space canvas), and any code you might be using to instantiate, render, or move the player.
In general though, for sprites, you can bring a sprite in front of other sprites by either changing the Z value of the transform (negative Z is closer to the camera), or better by changing the Order in Layer of the player sprite renderer, and make sure it is in a layer that is in front of the other sprites.
As for Canvas UI elements, the element at the bottom of the hierarchy will be rendered last, meaning it will show in front of everything. Think of a UI hierarchy like stacking papers on top of each other. The first piece of paper placed down will be at the bottom of the pile.
I want to make a terrain where the ending point is also the starting point. So, like on the earth you could just go on walking straight and you would reach the point where you started again after some time.
Thanks for your help!
Unity's Terrain system can only create square regions of terrain. So this can't be done as such.
However, you can approximate it, and I'll tell you how I've done it in my project to some success.
Figure out how much terrain you need to cover the "globe", we'll say it takes NxN chunks of terrain we'll call a "tile".
What you do next is you make 9 of those NxN tiles, and arrange them in a 3x3 grid. Put the camera in the center tile of the grid, and whenever the camera leaves that tile, determine where it is on the tile it is on, then change its position to the corresponding position on the center tile.
This will give you a "toroidal" world. I found this was the easiest solution to get the player to see things on the other "corner" of the world map, and then cross into it without graphical issues.
If you have other objects residing on the world, that presents some additional challenges. One thing you can start with is duplicating them 9x and start them at the same relative position of each tile. If they only interact with the player, that should be fine, just whenever the player interacts with 1, the other 8 do whatever that 1 does.
If the other residents of the globe have to interact with each other, you'll need a way to figure out how to make all 9 copies of everything behave consistently, but that's too broad of a question to address here.
First, I just want to introduce to you guys my problem, because it is really complex so you need this to understand it properly.
I am trying to do something with Scene Kit and Swift : I want to reproduce what we can see in the TV Show Doctor Who where the Doctor's spaceship is bigger on the inside, as you can see in this video.
Of course the Scene Kit Framework doesn't support those kind of unreal dimensions so we need to do some sort of hackery to do achieve that.
Now let's talk about my idea in plain english
In fact, what we want to do is to display two completely different dimensions at the same place ; so I was thinking to :
A first dimension for the inside of the spaceship.
A second dimension for the outside of the spaceship.
Now, let's say that you are outside of the ship, you would be in the outside dimension, and in this outside dimension, my goal would be to display a portion of the inside dimension at the level of the door to give this effect where the camera is outside but where we can clearly see that the inside is bigger :
We would use an equivalent principle from the inside.
Now let's talk about the game logic :
I think that a good way to represent these dimensions would be two use two scenes.
We will call outsideScene the scene for the outside, and insideScene the scene for the inside.
So if we take again the picture, this would give this at the scene level :
To make it look realistic, the view of the inside needs to follow the movements of the outside camera, that's why I think that all the properties of these two cameras will be identical :
On the left is the outsideScene and on the right, the insideScene. I represent the camera field of view in orange.
If the outsideScene camera moves right, the insideScene camera will do exactly the same thing, if the outsideScene camera rotates, the insideScene camera will rotate in the same way... you get the principle.
So, my question is the following : what can I use to mask a certain portion of a certain scene (in this case the yellow zone in the outsideView) with what the camera of another view (the insideView) "sees" ?
First, I thought that I could simply get an NSImage from the insideScene and then put it as the texture of a surface in the outsideScene, but the problem would be that Scene Kit would compute it's perspective, lighting etc... so It would just look like we was displaying something on a screen and that's not what I want.
there is no super easy way to achieve this in SceneKit.
If your "inside scene" is static and can be baked into a cube map texture you can use shader modifiers and a technique called interior mapping (you can easily find examples on the web).
If you need a live, interactive "inside scene" you can use the sane technique but will have to render your scene in a texture first (or renderer your inside scene and outer scene one after the other with stencils). This can be done by leveraging SCNTechnique (new in Yosemite and iOS 8). On older versions you will have to write some OpenGL code in SCNSceneRenderer delegate methods.
I don't know if it's 'difficult'. As we have to in iOS , a lot of times the simplest answer ..is the simplest answer.
Maybe consider this:
Map a texture onto a cylinder sector prescribed by the geometry of the Tardis cube shape. Make sure the cylinder radius is equal of the focal point of the camera. Make sure you track the camera to the focal point.
The texture will be distorted because it is a cylinder making onto a cube. The actors' nodes in the Tardis will react properly to the camera but there should be two groups of light sources...One set for the Tardis and one outside the Tardis.
I have a game world that's much bigger than the view port, the main character stays in the center of the view port at all times and the background layer is moved around to give the impression of the character moving. I want to make it so that the game world wraps, meaning if the the character keeps traveling either left or right they will eventually end up back at the starting position. There will be moving entities in the game world so the biggest problem I foresee is that if you go to the far right of the map you should be able to see any of the moving entities that are within the first small section of the far left of the map.
I've thought a bit about this and any solution I've come up with seems far too complicated. Like creating two identical game worlds side by side and moving them around accordingly. I live in hope that there is an elegant solution to this. Any expertise you can share would be greatly appreciated.
I'm using cocos2d on the iPhone just in case that makes any difference.
An example might be to have an x,y offset for your camera, and a multidimensional array of sprite objects.
As the player moves, the offset value changes, e.g., xMove = -1.4 and yMove = +2.6.
Then you would iterate and change the positions of all the tiles by that amount.
Next, you would identify the sprites that are too far away from the center of the screen (0,0) and re-position them to the opposite side, so they will always be visible.
This would all be done on the same scheduled 'tick' so no graphical artifacts occur.
I'm pretty surprised no one has made a wrappable tile map yet for cocos2d.
I can't give cocos2d specific advice, but I would say the most common way to do this is to create one game world, draw (parts of it) multiple times and make sure that your logic for things like collisions and AI checks for wrap-around where appropriate.
So if your player character is close to the corner of the world, you'd draw the world four times with different offsets. This needn't actually draw every single thing in the world four times any more than you would normally need to draw the entire world when only a small part of it is on-screen.
I'm trying to create a top down car game where the camera follows both the player and the player's rotation. I can get CCFollow to work easily, but I have had no success with CCCamera. I assume that I need the camera in order to make rotation follow the player (i.e. have the player facing up at all times) but I have had no luck on google.
Can anyone either provide a code snippet or a tutorial on how to create a rotation-following top down camera?
Cheers!
My suggestion: don't use the CCCamera.
Your game design requires the car to move over a track. In programming terms this is often much easier accomplished by keeping the car static, and instead moving the background underneath.
Assume your car is at the center of the screen. It's supposed to move from left to right. Instead of moving the car or the camera, move the background layer - just in reverse: move the background layer from right to left to make it seem like the car is moving from left to right.
The same is true for rotation. If you want the car to turn left, rotate the background in clockwise direction.
This is a lot easier and can be accomplished simply by changing the position and direction properties of the background layer. Note that you do not need to do this for each object in the background layer, it's sufficient to add all objects to the background layer in the appropriate positions and then just change the background layer properties. The layer's children will follow accordingly.