Dynamically create sprite images for Cocos2d-iPhone - iphone

I'm working on a platformer, and looking for a way to create a sprite for an arbitrarily sized platform. For example, I may know I have a platform that should appear 200 pixels wide by 32 pixels high, and, say, I have a texture of bricks that I can tile to fill that area. I may also want to draw a black border around the platform. Is this possible at all? Anyone have any ideas for how I might go about doing this? I could always try generating the image on the fly and building a sprite with that image, but I sincerely doubt (hope) that this isn't the most efficient way of doing something like this.
Cheers,
Alex

You can use tiled maps for the platform. It will require you to plan your textures a bit differently, but it will probably yield better results.
You can read more about tiled maps here.

Related

Draw curved lines with texture and glow with Unity

I'm looking for an efficient way to draw curved lines and to make an object follow them in Unity.
I also need to draw them using a custom image and not a solid color.
And on top of that I would like to apply an outer glow to them, and not to the rest of the scene.
I don't ask for a copy/paste solution for each of these elements, I list them all to give some context.
I did something similar in a web app using the html5 canvas to draw text progressively. Here a gif showing you the render:
I only used small lines to draw what you see above. Here a very big letter with thinker lines so lines are more visible:
Of course it's not perfect, but the goal was to keep it simple and efficient. And spaces on the outer edges are not very visible in normal size.
This is used in an educational game working on mobile as a progressive app. In real world usage I attach a particles emitter to it for better effect :
And it runs smoothly even on low end devices.
I don't want to recreate this exact effect on Unity but the core functionality is very close.
Because of how I did it the first time, I thought about creating a big list of segments to draw manually, but unity may have better tools to create this kind of stuff, maybe working directly with bezier curves.
I a beginner in Unity so I don't really know what is the most efficient way to do it.
I looked at the line renderer which seemed (at first) to be a good choice but I'm a little bit worried about performances with a list of 500+ points (considering mobiles are a target).
Also, the glow I would like to add may impact on the technique to choose.
Do you have any advice or direction to give me?
Thank you very much.

Unity3D tileset lags

Thin grey stripes appear when I move my character. They was all over the place with "Allow MSAA", but without appear randomly. To create maps I use Tiled and Tiled2Unity. What should I do to fix it?
Allow MSAA
not Allow MSAA
See the following guide about this: http://tiled2unity.readthedocs.io/en/latest/fixing-seams/
The linked screenshot looks like you are working with pixel art. In this case I would disable anti aliasing, as it's usually the aesthetic to go with this pixel-perfect art style.
Other than that, if you want to keep anti aliasing, you can create a 1 or 2 pixel border around your sprites and let them overlap. Of course now you don't have pixel-perfect graphics, but if you want it smooth, this is probably the best way to go.

Using tiles as texture when zooming in on Object in Unity3d

I have a problem with an smartphone (android so far) app I am programming in unity3d.
I got the following set up:
I have a sphere on which, so far, I have a texture of the world. It's resolution is already set to the maximum but when I "zoom in" on it it just looks disgusting. I'd like to reload texture tiles like in Google maps to have a higher resolution without having a too big impact on the memory. Is that approach a good one at all? And if so: how do I do that?
Haven't found the right things so far or I just got them wrong.
EDIT: As some people probably get me wrong I try it again with some more details.
What I am trying to set up is the Earth as a sphere with a map. That map is okay as long as you dont zoom in too far, which is obvious because of the textures finit resolution. Now, to still have good graphic quality, when being zoomed in that far that one could see streets in a city I want to load additional "satelite pictures" like Google Maps does it (you know: you zoom in and Google Maps always reloads the images in that specific area to still provide a good graphic quality). How do I achieve that specific behaviour? Providing all the tiles i need is no problem, I got a Vector Graphic from which I could export all the needed tiles, but i don't know how to reload those tiles when zooming in at that specific area (to reduce memory consumption, drawcalls, etc).
Any help is really appreciated as I am a beginner in programming with unity. Thank you very much in advance!
Dustin
Are you actually zooming in or moving the camera physically closer? Unity has some internal filters that make textures easier to load at a longer distance. When zooming, the camera isnt actually moving closer meaning the more detailed version of it will not load correctly.
Also check your Max Texture Size setting for the texture you are using. Maybe it is turned down too low. Try turning it up to a higher resolution.
If it still looks blurry up close with Max Texture Size turned higher, your texture may not be high enough resolution to begin with. Make it a high enough resolution that it looks good up close. Then begin lowering the Max Texture Size resolution until up close it is "good enough".
Next, typically, it will start looking blurry in the distance or have distinct linear transitions from looking good to blurry. You can fix this by turning up the Ansio Level. Use this with caution because it increases the rendering load. Only use what you need, especially for mobile games.

Roads are looking blurry in Unity

I am trying to make some real looking roads in my game,but the problem is ,when i am using roads so they are little bit blurry at distance and look like a real one.Can any one please guide me to solve this.I have uploaded my pic here
Is there possible solution for this?
Yes, it is a common problem, for textures' rendering at a certain distance/angle. You should enhance the aniso level, in order to apply an anisotropic filtering on the blurry texture (you can also change the aniso level from the texture's component, as in the picture below).
If the road is created via a Terrain component (which I doubt, since you already have a sandy terrain at the bottom), you should change the basemap distance.
Check also Quality settings, it might have Anisotropic textures disabled.

Can this type of wiggle image deformation be done on iPhone without using openGL

I have a straight image and I want to deform it in a wave-like manner.
Original image:
straight texture http://img145.imageshack.us/img145/107/woodstraight.png
and I want it to look like this (except animated):
bent texture http://img145.imageshack.us/img145/8496/woodbent.png
I haven't tackled the learning curve of openGL yet so if I can do this with Core Animation it would be great.
Is this possible?
Unfortunately, I think this is a job for OpenGL. You could achieve the same affect in Quartz by slicing the image up vertically and drawing segments with different vertical offsets... but I don't think you'd be able to achieve good enough performance to animate it. (At least, with 1px or 2px wide slices)
You could also leave the image stationary, and use Quartz to animate a masking path that would create the waving edges. That probably wouldn't look too natural, though.
As far as I know, Core Animation on the iPhone isn't capable of doing this, either. On the Mac it comes with some more advanced filters, but I think you'd probably see a lot more stuff like this if the iPhone filters could do it :-)
OpenGL does have quite a learning curve, but here's what you'd want to do to achieve the effect: Create a flat rectangle in OpenGL with several verticies along it's length. Point the camera at the rectangle so that it appears flat. Then, use a sine() function of some sort to animate the verticies back and forth in place.
This approach is also used to achieve the rippling-water effect, and you might be able find an example or two of it.
Sorry to bring bad news :-) Hope that helps!