Category Archives: Unity

Doing Some Unity Refresher Reading

On the flight to San Diego I did some Unity refresher reading and some thinking about game ideas that might be worth playing with.

I was looking for references to ScriptableObjects in the books I’ve got and didn’t find them. Guessing the focus there is too new to show up. I’ll post a bit on the ideas front over on PandaMallet in a bit.

It has been a slow summer on the home technical front and I really want to get that stuff rolling again as we move into fall. Plenty of interesting stuff to do, just need to find the time and decide to focus.

Bouncing Around a Bit Today

Building C++ supporting libraries on my small dev machine. Looking at another pass of C++/CLI work and some more thinking about motion capture options.

I’ve built zlib and bzlib2 yesterday. To get these building with VS 2017 I built them with their standard build procedures (which appeared to build 32 bit libraries) and then created visual studio 2017 projects to build the same pieces using fresh settings.

I’ve got boost, openssl, opencv and the mongodb c and c++ libraries on my list for today. The mongodb libraries are my primary target here though all of the above are of interest. This is also what is driving my CMake reading as several of these libraries use CMake for their builds.

I’m pretty interested in C++/CLI as a way to get access to C and C++ functionality from C#. Given the productivity that C# provides, access to C and C++ APIs and libraries from that environment would help quite a bit. My primary driver was access to the Win32 file ID API for some file management work, but Win32 APIs keep coming up now and again. I do need to take a look as some newer C# libraries that Malcolm suggested that may provide pre-packaged access here.

In the past, I’ve run into build issues when combining C# and C++/CLI in the same project. I expect this was setup issues so I’m now looking to take a more serious look at this.

The motion capture work will start out with OpenCV and getting my web cams running with code behind them to process the images. I’m thinking that pre-recording things and then post processing might be a good idea…using a light strobe to synchronize things could simplify time sync as well. Much to consider…

Next Steps

I’ve got boost, zlib and libbz2 built on boojum now. Next step will be to test the installs with a small program or two. Hoping that all went well and I have usable, native, win64 libraries available.

Once those have been checked out I’ll take another run at building the MongoDB drivers…this time on boojum rather than chaos. Boojum has a shorter history and is distinctly less cluttered than chaos so I’m hoping that this just works. Expecting less than that though…I’ll probably need to dig deeper into he CMake configs to get where I want to go. I’ll update as I move forward…now off to lunch though.

Looking at 3D location of Objects with Multiple Cameras

We tried doing some motion capture with a kinect 2 today. Results were mixed though less than ideal.

I am thinking of using OpenCV to acquire images and use them to register locations in three-space. I currently have two high quality cameras and a lower quality one to play with…I expect that if things go well I’ll likely pick up a third higher quality camera to work with along with some hard-mounts for them in the basement. Ideally I’d love to be able to code up some decent motion capture functionality using cameras and reference marks on limbs.

A bit of experimentation will be required in order to get there though.

I am wondering whether a faster, lower resolution webcam might do better for this. There are some $20.00 a piece cameras with USB-2 interface out there (Microsoft Lifecam-3000 or Logitech C270) instead of the higher-end, USB-3 autofocus Logitech C930e. Both wondering whether the lower resolution and USB-2 may provide a higher frame rate and whether fixed focus will stay consistent without periodic refocus hits.

Unity Investigations…

I’ve been splitting my experiments with Unity between this blog and pandamallet.com (where I put ‘creative’ things.

More graphical content and thoughts on game design possibilities have lived on the creative side while more technical, C# coding and Unity script coding bits have lived here.

I’m going to move to keeping everything in one place for convenience and accessibility. From here on, I’m going to put all of the game programming related content on the creative side and keep my career blog for more directly coding related items and similar things.

As pandamallet.com does not share with linked-in at this time, this will mean that anyone who was watching these goings-on through linked-in notifications will need to pop over to pandamallet to see what’s up going forward. I will look at making sure that all of my sites (pandamallet, my main blog and my career blog) are publishing to my twitter feed when something new is added to make this (perhaps) a bit easier.

Unity Editor Activity and Digging Deeper

More after hours digging into Unity (slowed down by some necessary after hours work related items…probably going to continue for the balance of the week as we wrap up a tight sprint 🙂 ).

Cross Platform VR and Flat Display

I am coming to the conclusion that I need to dig deeper into the prefabs provided with the various VR SDKs that matter to me (daydream, vive and cardboard). It appears that the different vendors implemented their own event systems that aren’t necessarily interoperable. If we want to build code that plugs into any of these systems, we’ll need to address this.

I’m not currently sure how best to deal with this. Trying to build wrappers sounds nice for compatibility but has potential limitations. Changing the prefabs in-place provides more leverage but means potentially having to make the changes repeatedly as new versions appear with other features that we want. This won’t be resolved without some digging into the code and experimentation.

Unity Editing Support

I was recently playing with some asset generation scripting. Malcolm had commented that it would be nice to have a way to quickly create a room of any desired size with appropriate wall textures and texture scaling. I whipped up a very quick and simple script to take a wall, floor and ceiling prefab and build a complete room out of the set.

This worked quite nicely (though many details to be added such as the texture management) but had no visibility in the editor. You added an invisible GameObject to the scene, set its parameters and then when you ran the game you got a magically created room.

I was looking at the editor side options last night and it appears to be relatively straightforward to make the script do its thing in the editor as well as at game run time.

I’m going to play with some of this soon to see what I can put together. Being able to build more complicated, programmatically generated items in the editor would be a great capability to have available. Prefabs are fine for simple things but I’d rather have the option of generating a family of possible items from a script. Editor side visibility is a key part of making something like this useful.

Having fun playing with this stuff as work projects at the moment are in stabilization and thus mostly running down defects and back-filling missed requirements rather than building new architecture and the code to support it.

Unity and Multiple Platforms

I tried to get a single Unity project to build for multiple platforms over the weekend. The code I’m writing is probably best suited to a flat screen with mouse and keyboard quite honestly. That said, I’m interested in working with VR systems and thus intend it to run on the platforms that I have available. This gives me:

  • Flat screen with keyboard and mouse.
  • Google Daydream VR with Daydream controller.
  • HTC Vive with two Vive controllers
  • Possible Google cardboard with no controller (perhaps a game controller as a stretch?).

Multiple Platforms from One Project

Sam had run across a couple of projects that claimed to work across platforms last week and sent me a link. Over the weekend I pulled the projects down and ran them on the Daydream without problems. They were a bit awkward to use as neither of them used the daydream controller effectively (one seemed to be built as a cardboard app, using the sight axis for selection).

I took the project that had been targeted on the Daydream and re-targeted it to the PC with a Vive headset attached. I got errors (don’t have the exact form) that suggested that I needed to load the Steam VR SDK in order to make things work. In the end I loaded the SDK from the asset store. This did allow the Vive headset to connect but did not display the information panels that the project was designed to show. At that point I shelved the project…I’ll probably return at some point to look deeper into the implementation, but for now I’ve had enough.

Switching Platforms in a Project (the hard way)

Later in the weekend I tried simply creating a project with a few simple assets and adding in the two SDKs. I was able to get the Daydream up and running (tried that first) by making the usual additions to the scene for that SDK and setting up the platform. To get the Vive running I had to delete all of the Daydream items from the scene and add in the usual Vive content. That too worked as expected.

The surprise came when I switched back to Daydream again. I continued to get errors indicating that the Vive input mapper json file was missing. It appears that something Vive related was still attached to the project and looking for Vive specific assets. This is another area where I may dig deeper at some point. For the moment I’m moving on.

Modular and Layered

I did dig through a good bit of content over the weekend (both video and online blogs/documentation) that suggested Unity supports external code assemblies linked in. This leads me down the road to a more modular approach.

  • Provide multiple .NET core assemblies that aren’t Unity specific code to implement the ‘business logic’ of the game. This keeps the complex code (game rules, world generation and storage) and other such items in a place where they can be unit tested and managed as pure code assemblies.
  • Manage all Unity assets that aren’t target specific in free-standing packages that get bolted into a target specific frame at the last moment.
  • Build the SDK specific parts of the game as thin wrappers over these other assets. These will be asset packages and projects that contain only target specific items and user facing elements.

I’m going to head down this road next and try structuring a new version of my Cluster game to support this approach. I started coding up the game generation part on Sunday and will likely try bolting a version of that into a VR frame as soon as it is complete enough to be usable.

Unity Event SYstem Looks Like the Next Stop

A quick perusal of the documentation suggests that I’m going to need a better grasp of the unity event system to get my handling of VR controller raycasting working as I’d like.

My stars (and anything else that wants to be responsive) will need to handle input events and thus detect when a ray touches the construct (and stops touching it). This should allow me to do the sort of ‘hover text’ I want. I’ll likely try to work this up tonight and get my inflating stars code working with the DayDream (and perhaps the Vive as well).

I’m still wishing for a decent solution to modularity that would let me keep the common assets between the three platforms I’m interested in separate enough to make sharing them easy.

I’m currently maintaining three divergent versions of the code and assets with each configured for a different system. As the game rules implementation develops, this is going to become hard to support.

Unity flat screen mouse pointing is working

I just pushed an update to github that detects mouse over of stars in the game screen and temporarily bumps the size of the star up by a factor of eight (to show you pointed at it). I’ve also got some other minor bits working such as finding a script on an object given the GameObject .

I need to add code to read in the star names file. I also want to make the DayDream pointer do this same thing to stars you point at. In the longer run, I expect to add a UI panel that displays additional information about the star when you point at it and may very well magnify the size of the star and any associated information at the same time.

Now on to seeing what I can see with DayDream…

Got the Static Assets in Place…

Now I’m stitching in some game logic and properties related to game play. Still need to get the systems loaded from the static stuff I’ve added and start building some game play but it feels like things are moving at a decent clip.

I’m also going to be looking at keeping some of the game logic in external, non-game assemblies. Being able to pull in external code that can be unit tested and perhaps even deployed in other areas is useful.

Hoping to get the basics wired in and then get back to interface work. I need to get the VR controls started. A user should be able to switch perspectives between several fixed camera spots with the controller. They need to be able to get a basic view of the state of the board from a distance and be able to view full details of a given star by pointing their controller at it.

  • View basic star information available to a given player from a distance.
  • Assemble a fleet (if fleet markers are available) from ships present at a star.
  • Task an existing fleet with going to another system.
  • Allocate this turn’s production to construction or research.
  • Side effect of the above, move population from a planet surface to colony transports.
  • Check transit time from one star system to another.
  • See beacon area of effect for your existing beacons.

Looking to store static data strings in a unity asset

I’m now looking to store static text (potential names to be selected randomly, object configurations, etc.) in an accessible unity resource/asset. I want the game to access and load this information and the information to be packaged as part of the game after a build (i.e. in the DayDream *.apk file that gets deployed to the device).

Got it…text asset in a resources folder. My list of star names is now in place. Now I need to shuffle them and associate them with stars and (hopefully) display the names near each star. Ideally I want the name tags to always be positioned so that the normal of the tag passes through the camera and the vertical axis of the label tag passes through the associated star with a fixed distance maintained between the bottom edge of the name plate and the center of the star. Ideally the top of the name plate would be ‘up’ to the viewer as well. I’ll have to look into enforcing these constraints once I’ve gotten any sort of name tags working 🙂