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!
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I built an apk using the HelloAR scene (which is provided with ARcore package). The app is only detecting Horizontal surface like table and creates it's own semi-transparent plane over it. When I moved my phone around a bottle, the app again, only created a horizontal plane cutting through the bottle. I expected ARCore to create planes along the bottle as I move my phone around, like polygons in a mesh.
Another scenario is, I placed 2 books on the floor, and each of them have different thickness. But the HelloAR app creates only one semi-transparent horizontal surface over the thicker book, instead of creating two surfaces (one for each book).
What is going wrong here? How can I fix it and make the HelloAR app work more precisely? Please help.
Software: Unity v2018.2,
ARcore v1.11.0
ARCore generates an approximate point cloud using a soft movement of the device to identify the featured points, this points are detected by contrast in the different shapes, if you use your application in test mode in unity you can see how the points are placed in your empty scene.
Once the program has enough points at the "same height" (I don't know the exact precision), it generates the plane that you can see, but it won't detect planes separated by a difference of 5cm or even more distance.
If you want to know the approximate accuracy of the app, test it with unity and make a script to capture the generated points that have been used to generate the planes, then check the Y difference to see which is the tolerance distance.
Okay so Vuforia is currently one of the leading SDKs for augmented reality providing a wide area of detection options (Images, Ground, Point, 3D objects, ...)
So regarding your question about detecting a bottle I would most certainly use the 3D model detection feature. You can read the official docs here.
You need to first generate an approximate of the object in a 3d modeling software and the use their program to generate the detection model. Then you put this in Unity and setup the detection. (no coding needed)
I have some experience with this kind of detection. I used it to detect a large 2mx2m scale model of an electric vehicle. It works great, you can walk around it and it tracks it through and through. You can see a short official demo here
Hope it helped to explain this in short!
Detecting vertical planes is possible now with ios 11.3 and apple arkit 1.5 (a good example: ARKit Vertical Plane Detection ).
But there is one condition; you need to have some color differences or structure on your wall in order to get detected.
Is it also possible to detect blank walls or walls that have 1 color?
There is a natural tension here that imposes some inherent design constraints.
For ARKit to even “see” a surface for purposes of world tracking — before even detecting it as a plane — the surface needs to have some texture. Variation in color, relief, points of high contrast, something that causes it to have some visual features.
That’s okay for a lot of horizontal plane detection use cases, since people like to buy tables made of wood, install floors made of tile, take countertops for granite, etc. But a lot of walls in home and office environments are lightly textured or featureless. You probably can’t get your customers to change their walls. (If you do, though, I can refer the guy who did great textured paint on my house...)
So instead you need to think about how this fits into your AR experience at a basic design level...
For horizontal planes, you could make experiences where a small stretch of floor/table near the viewer becomes the play field for a game or whatever, but you can’t just flip that on its side for a vertical plane experience.
Vertical planes detect better at larger distances — you can find a wall when you see its edges, or the furniture backed against it, etc.
Use estimated plane hit tests to place content on a wall, and refine your placement when plane detection kicks in later.
Don’t use vertical planes the same way you would horizontal planes. They can be boundaries or background scenery instead of the focus of an experience.
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 created a 3d environment full of 3D cubes, does anyone have any idea how you would detect a touch on one of these Cubes. I thinking if I could get the cubes screen position (coords start from bottom left) then it would be pretty easy
UPDATE:
I added the function -(CGPoint)getScreenCoorOfPoint:(IMPoint3D)_point3D which seems to give me my items position in the world but the bit I am now stuck on is:
I have objects that have a position
I have my position in the world (gluLookAt eye[0], eye[1], eye[2])
and then I have where I tapped on the screen
How do I join all this up, its the last thing in my way to archiving greatness!!!!
Look up OpenGL picking on Google. There are two main methods to accomplish this, I recommend you use the second one described at OpenGL.org as it does not involve rendering anything offscreen:
[…] involves shooting a pick ray through the mouse location and testing for intersections with the currently displayed objects. OpenGL doesn't test for ray intersections, but you'll need to interact with OpenGL to generate the pick ray.
Also see this question for some discussion on the matter:
Screen-to-World coordinate conversion in OpenGLES an easy task?
I'm attempting to build a Lunar Lander style game on the iPhone. I've got Cocos2D and I'm going to use Box2D. I'm wondering what the best way is to build the floor for the game. I need to be able to create both the visual aspect of the floor and the data for the physics engine.
Oh, did I mention I'm terrible at graphics editing?
I haven't used Box2D before (but I have used other 2D physics engines), so I can give you a general answer but not a Box2D-specific answer. You can easily just use a single static (stationary) Box if you want a flat plane as the floor. If you want a more complicated lunar surface (lots of craters, the sea of tranquility, whatever), you can construct it by creating a variety of different physics objects - boxes will almost always do the trick. You just want to make sure that all your boxes are static. If you do that, they won't move at all (which you don't want, of course) and they can overlap without and problems (to simulate a single surface).
Making an image to match your collision data is also easy. Effectively what you need to do is just draw a single image that more or less matches where you placed boxes. Leave any spots that don't have boxes transparent in your image. Then draw it at the bottom of the screen. No problem.
The method I ended up going with (you can see from my other questions) is to dynamically create the floor at runtime and then draw it to the screen.