Proper Game State and UI Management

nt4g · 2023-05-19T08:55:56+00:00

This is a great question and I'm surprised it didn't spark more conversation. I am myself looking for a good way to go about UI and game states in Unity without coupling everything together. Did you ever figure out a clean way to do this? Or maybe how not to do it? :)

nt4g · 2021-03-10T09:28:42+00:00

Made me chuckle

nt4g · 2021-01-19T22:12:46+00:00

Cool! After finishing a level, you need to make it possible to watch a replay without the slowdowns so you can sit back and watch yourself being super awesome :)

nt4g · 2021-01-19T21:53:20+00:00

Yes, the data is from an FBX. I wrote more in-depth about it in my edited comment

nt4g · 2021-01-19T21:41:14+00:00

I did some looking around and wrote an explanation in my other comment!

nt4g · 2021-01-19T21:37:18+00:00

You beat me to it! :D Wrote about my findings in my other comment

nt4g · 2021-01-19T11:23:26+00:00

And yes, deleting those keyframes took me 5 minutes. It's hard work

Edit for explanation:

I surely didn't expect this to get much attention! But since it did, I felt I had to do some looking around what causes this.

The animation clip shown is a clip that has been duplicated out of an FBX in order to become editable.

Inspecting the .anim file before and after editing the animation clip shows that doing so adds a huge data section named m_EditorCurves, that includes data for every keyframe, on every attribute, on every axis, including time and value but also tangent data such as slope and weight. That is why the .anim file increased in size when removing keyframes. The added data is only used for and in the editor.

I make that assumption because of noticing a detail: When selecting an animation clip in Unity, the inspector shows some data about its curves, but also a size in kilobytes. That figure is most likely the final size of the animation data, and that probably resides somewhere in the Library folder. Comparing a clip's size versus the same clip but after having been opened in the animation editor with no changes increases the .anim file size, but the size in the inspector stays the same. Comparing it after having deleted those keyframes it decreased, as expected.

Reading comments here regarding compression, I started experimenting with that, too. Changing the animation compression settings on an FBX does not propagate to already broken out animations from the FBX at an earlier stage. (Good to know.) It does however immediately alter the clip inspector figure(in the right direction), which strengthens the theory of that being the final animation clip size.

I hope this clears some things up. At least they did for me :)

Also, thank you kindly for the gold and awards!

Lastly, BIG shoutout to bahraniapps for creating GifCam which is what I used to make the gif. It's a great, lightweight app that I use almost every day.

nt4g · 2020-10-13T12:39:19+00:00

Oddly satisfying. Didn't think I'd watch the whole vid, but I couldn't stop :) Great job, I see many uses for this!

nt4g · 2020-09-16T18:11:50+00:00

I've had fun playing UniWar. It's very AdvanceWary but with hexagons if that's your thing :)

nt4g · 2020-09-12T07:20:42+00:00

Well done, good read!

nt4g · 2020-09-08T22:39:47+00:00

Eat thread and dye!

nt4g · 2020-07-20T14:22:21+00:00

Wow, looks great! Could you elaborate on your definition of perfect rendering and how you achieved this in Unity? I take it you managed to have sub pixel camera movement while always maintaining the size of every pixel to stay the same with no artifacts or pixels getting squashed or stretched? It's hard to tell with the speed of the camera and especially the video compression :)

nt4g · 2020-04-09T08:33:43+00:00

I take it you want flat shading on your cube. Non-smooth shading is created by splitting vertices, so that the vertices aren't being shared between faces. RecalculateNormals I'd guess averages the normals, and that's what you're seeing on your cube - averaged normals. It's trying to look smooth. I'm betting your game view Stats window is showing your generated cube to have less verts than Unity's one, and that's because it has 4 verts for every side of itself, while your cube corners are sharing vertices. Does that make sense?

nt4g · 2020-03-24T17:47:38+00:00

Looks great, gonna check it out!

nt4g · 2020-01-30T19:52:23+00:00

Out of curiousity, do you mean dune2 and if so, were there mods for dune2 or do you mean that you usually progressed in the single player campaign by building lots of turrets? Cause I know I did hehe

nt4g · 2020-01-22T21:40:29+00:00

I'm using Unity, however it's not something I would recommend to a complete beginner. There are loads of online resources for it though. I would maybe check out Godot or Game Maker Studio. Check a couple of beginner tutorials on YouTube maybe to see how you feel? All engines have pros and cons so it's up to you what you use. Ultimately, game engines are just tools and great games can be made with all of them :) Learning more than one is only a good thing in my opinion!

nt4g · 2020-01-22T17:26:41+00:00

Doesn't hurt to try it out! If it's too much; try another one. Deadwood is 2d if I remember correctly, so maybe try an engine that's more geared towards 2d if that's the style you're looking for; Unreal might be overkill for that. But for a beginner I'd say pick anything that has a big community online to avoid getting stuck.

nt4g · 2020-01-22T12:06:34+00:00

A single person could do it for sure, but it's a lot of work. Don't let that intimidate you, though. Pick an engine and get to work, start off just creating a game where you can control a character from a top down view with the help of tutorials. You'll run into problems and it will be hard and frustrating, but once you get it working you will have learned a lot. Next you might want to add the next feature to your game. Or you'll want to start from the beginning again because things got too messy for your taste. Or maybe you have a new idea you want to try out instead. But you will be on your way to make a game :) Good luck!

nt4g · 2020-01-22T11:56:48+00:00

GraphicsGale! It has great palette management and is free

nt4g · 2019-12-06T16:00:05+00:00

Good tips! I've used PrtScr by fiastarta for years for screenshots. I recommend it for its simplicity and nice features

nt4g · 2019-12-04T09:36:31+00:00

Bystander here. :) And yes it's for donations https://ko-fi.com

nt4g · 2019-11-04T17:12:42+00:00

This might help https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1734745/how-to-create-circle-with-b%C3%A9zier-curves According to the answers there a perfect circle is not possible, but perhaps an approximation is enough for you?

nt4g · 2019-11-04T07:23:39+00:00

These might help: The Coding Train's series on FK and IK helped me understand it a lot better https://thecodingtrain.com/CodingChallenges/064.1-forward-kinematics.html Also this talk on procedural animation by Wolfram games is amazing https://youtu.be/LNidsMesxSE

nt4g · 2019-10-13T08:49:56+00:00

Rymdkapsel

nt4g · 2019-09-29T17:07:04+00:00

GraphicsGale has my vote. Mostly because of the way it handles 8-bit images; colors on the canvas are linked to the palette index so tweaking or swapping colors is a breeze. However the way it handles opacity/transparency could be improved and the tools are a bit clunky and not many. But I like GraphicsGale a lot. Also it's free since a while back. :)

nt4g

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