Posts Tagged ‘GAMEDEV’
Saturday, October 3rd, 2009
Tags: 3d, GAMEDEV, torque, TORQUE 3D, unity, unity 3d, unity3d
Posted in 3D ENGINES, 3d, GAMEDEV, GAMES | View Comments
Saturday, September 26th, 2009
Electronic Arts is using Unity 3D to develop Tiger Woods Online. The game is currently in beta. It was announced that they were using the engine in June on their blog but only on the reposted version here not the original post where the engine was just deemed “new technology”.
This is a major shift in the game industry and how it is being expanded into online properties that rival or better the console and desktop versions through online communities. Quake Live from id software uses their own system that wraps existing games (originally developed by Gaim Theory then bought by id Software) and instant action technology from garage games that runs instant action. All these systems have provided us browser based triple AAA style gaming fun. It looks like that movement will continue as more and more game companies and publishers see the valid capabilities of Unity 3D to deliver when you need really deeply immersive 3d experiences in the browser. Also other systems like Torque 3D, Quake Live technology and more will be seeing this trend continue when it comes to games online. It is also becoming a choice for online web based 3d MMOs such as Fusion Fall and Marvel Super Hero Squad.
Tags: based, browser, DEVELOPMENT, ea, experience, game, GAMEDEV, instant action, live, online, quake, TECHNOLOGY, tiger, torque, unity, unity 3d, unity3d, woods
Posted in 3D ENGINES, 3d | View Comments
Tuesday, April 14th, 2009
JiglibFlash has been updated on a few fronts…
Recently added include, you can now use RADIANS or DEGREES to manipulate objects in the engine, also adding standard yaw, pitch and roll methods.
There is a mouse interaction now available with a MouseConstraint class to allow the user to drag a 3d element with the mouse which is great for gaming and interactive 3d physics scenes.
New class: MouseConstraint
There has been a new class to the Papervision3D plug-in called MouseConstraint and a new example to the Papervision3D examples folder. The class basically allows you to attach a world constraint to an object and simulate dragging.
The best update though is you can now use any of the major open source flash 3d engines as the renderer: Papervision 3D, Away3D or Sandy.
AS3 Flash 3D Physics Engines
Tags: 3d, ACTIONSCRIPT, AS3, GAMEDEV, jiglibflash, PHYSICS, wow
Posted in 3D ENGINES, 3d, ACTIONSCRIPT, ACTIONSCRIPT3, ARCHITECT, AS3, AWAY3D | Comments Off
Tuesday, March 24th, 2009
AngryAnt brings us a nice library for pathing and behavior trees in Unity3D with excellent editor integration. Path library I reviewed and is an extremely deep and complete library with autocomplete node collections from colliders, ability to connect different networks and detection from mesh as well as GUI tools using Unity3D editor scripts. The release is solid with documentation, video samples and is very easy to integrate. If you have a need for AI, bots, scripted animations or other madness in your game be sure to check out the pathing library and or the behave library from AngryAnt to implement or research.
Path Features
Specs:
- Available for unity indie as well as pro licensees
- Can run in webplayers as well as stand-alone
- Requires no additional installations
Features:
- Easy to use editor interface
- Navmeshes
- Waypoint networks
- Cached pathes
- Distributed processing using coroutines
- Tag-filtered pathfinding
- Hierarchal “grid network” pathfinding
- Auto-recalculate on runtime network changes
Tutorials
I recommend you study the “Editor demo” unity project available on the Path download page. This project will be used in the tutorials below and contains an example Path setup.
Tutorial 1 – The basics
Runtime reference
The Path project comes with a small, but effective runtime API. The following links list the classes herein and their methods / properties.
Path unity package
|
|
|
The Path package contains all you need to start using the Path editor and run-time components in your project. |
Demo unity project
|
|
|
The Demo project is a complete unity 2.5 project with Path already added, a sample Path collection set up and example scripts requesting path calculations and following them. |
Behave Features
Specs:
- Available for unity indie as well as pro licensees
- Can run in webplayers as well as stand-alone
- Requires no additional installations at runtime
Features:
- Implements behaviour trees
- Re-use common behaviour by reference
- Drag and drop editor interface inside the unity editor
- Simple connection to character actions via C# interface
- Designed trees are built to .net assembly code for maximum performance
- Runtime debugging features
- Powerful stand-alone editor – including web version
Behave unity package
|
|
|
The Behave package contains all you need to start using the Behave editor, compiler and run-time in your project. |
Behave 0.3b hotfix
|
|
|
This hotfix solves a few critical issues with Behave 0.3b and unity 2.5. It’s still quite buggy and I’m working on a more extensive rewrite. Stay tuned. |
Demo unity project
|
|
|
The Demo project is a complete unity 2.1 project with Behave already added, a sample behaviour tree designed and compiled plus an example script showing how compiled behaviour trees are integrated with unity MonoBehaviour scripts. |
Behave builder application
|
|
|
Behave builder is a stand-alone application offering the behaviour tree editors (excluding the compiler) outside the unity editor. It is currently OS X only. This application is also available in an online version – check it out in the “Preview” section of this page. |
Example library
|
|
|
CitySimulation.behave is the library used in the demo project – saved as a Behave builder file. You can use this file directly in the online and offline version of Behave builder or import it to a unity project via the Behave “Assets” menu. |
Tags: behave, behavior trees, GAMEDEV, path, pathing, unity3d
Posted in 3D ENGINES, 3d, GAMEDEV, GAMES, OPEN SOURCE, PROGRAMMING, TECHNOLOGY, TOOLS, Uncategorized, mono, network, unity3d | Comments Off
Tuesday, March 24th, 2009
It appears Torque3D is going to compete with Unity3D in a browser based 3d plugin front with a Torque3D toolset and pipeline that target the web.
They announced this on gamasutra recently on how instantaction and torque3d technology is similar yet different. InstantAction is an engine wrapper where the web plugin for Torque3D is more tighly coupled with the Torque3D engine. Instantaction.com technology allows you to wrap an existing game engine for the web which is a competitor with the gaimtheory engine that is used on quakelive.com.
I have been a garage games torque developer and member since 2003 and worked/bought with each engine they have put out from the old school Torque Engine, to Torque Engine Advanced for various game development projects and now they are throwing in on what appears to be based on their instantaction.com technology but using the Torque3D engine. This is very interesting, they might even have a channel/appstore to release games on instantaction.com?
Unity3D has recently taken my time in the full immersion 3d for the web space, the mono engine that runs the scripting is a huge feature. Coding in C#, Boo and javascript is great, and the pipeline for Unity3D is unmatched.
A bit of history, I have been interested in this since Director introduced 3d in director 8.5 in 2001 (how was that not a major revision I don’t know) and the killer Havok 3d physics engine within it. Way ahead of its time. But Director 3d was extremely limited with w3d (not even a decent blender exporter) and it literally has not advanced since that time in terms of ability to develop better for it and the IDE. It was trapped in this little IDE and quirky Lingo language. They tried to save it with javascript, a valiant effort but it still withered due to lack of openness of development for the player (a mistake they aren’t making with Flash now at Adobe). So making full immersion 3d games was not really ready for the web, Director was notorious at crashing browsers and took way too many broken plugins to get a basic engine.
So I went to mods in HL (quake 2 engine), Unreal and when I realized there was no way me or my friends could foot the license fees of either engine we went to Torque in 2003. It was great, large terrains and highly compact engine because it had to run Tribes with 64 players years before anyone else approached 64 players and arguably still played better than 64 player fps now. It was affordable. I have been interested in the movements to make torque an active x control in 2005/6 and Think Tanks did just that. It was very nice, I thought soon after it would be everywhere. But it has taken until now and a new engine called Torque3D before this has been realized years later. This is hard stuff to get right creating a plugin that works cross browser and performs well (browsers had to catch up as well). The culmination of that technology progression has happened and 3d on the web for game development appears to be bigtime in 2009.
Unity3D meanwhile since 2005-6 has gotten it nearly all right so far for a few years now, especially the pipeline and the webplayer. Torque has always had an poor pipeline, not as bad as writing your own engine from scratch and all the tools but in the early days pretty close. Proprietary formats like dts for models made finding the right exporter tasking. There were just so many walls in what was supposed to be a pipeline, largely due to support for formats that were small enough for slower networks and machines of the past. Unity3D gets all this right from the start, pipeline is not an issue. Torque3D seems to address this with their new tools, support for Collada, but unfortunately still scripted with TorqueScript. If Torque3D could wire in Mono and the capability to code in Javascript, C#, Boo or other Mono languages this would have been cool, or at least a semi-standard scripting language like Javascript, Python etc that would be great. TorqueScript was a big feature and UnrealScript is very similar in how it interacts with the engine, but these days we want standard languages that have engine features built in. Maybe this will happen down the road, but the format support is very nice.
For 3d, prior to Unity3D, the web was still owned by Director but that has changed in the last few years. It won me over for immersive 3d games that are web capable and able to port to other platforms and markets. Casual is still done with Flash and mobile space is targeting iphone. Unity3D can run on web, iPhone, Wii, desktop. Torque3D can run on web and also has paths to desktop, iPhone, Wii, XBOX360. You see what is happening here? It is very cool indeed. No doubt the competition in this area is getting to a point where some good innovation and happenings are taking place, what are you going to do with it?
Tags: browser, GAMEDEV, NEWS, torque, torque3d, unity3d
Posted in 3D ENGINES, 3d, ARCHITECT, ENGINE, GAMEDEV, GAMES, MARKET, NEWS, PROGRAMMING, RENDERING, TECHNOLOGY, Uncategorized | View Comments
Wednesday, January 21st, 2009
The unity3d platform is about to realize about 900% or 9x more possible market for selling their wares and I believe will blow up with unity 2.5. Unity3d 2.5 will bring a windows IDE and development environment to unity3d developers. Many game companies are heavily invested in Windows and having this option is breaking down a huge wall to get this development platform and engine into many new hands and companies.
The best part about unity 3d development is the hardware acceleration, the fantastic pipeline, the ability to publish desktop, web, mobile (iphone) and console (wii) is pretty amazing. All using the powerful mono open source .net framework as a base.
Full update list:
Windows Editor Support
Unity 2.5 adds full support for Windows Vista and XP, with 100% feature parity and interoperability with Mac OS X. The Unity Editor has been rebuilt to look, feel, and function identically on both operating systems, each running the same underlying engine. The best part? Unity on either platform can build games for either platform — cross-platform in the truest sense.
A Whole New Look
Find the tools you need quickly and easily. The Play buttons are front and center, clearly visible and inviting you to play, test, and improve your work. And when you do, they light up, dimming the rest of the application, drawing your attention to the most important things in the play experience you’re creating.
Precise Navigation and Placement Tools
Improved Usability
Snap any object to customizable increments of position, scale, and rotation values. Drag objects around, clamped to any surface collision. Manipulate objects in local or world space. Use the new flythrough controls to get around easily. And did we mention the completely redesigned rotation tool?
3ds Max Importing
Drag and drop your .max files right into the Editor, including support for all skeletal based animation, multiple UVs, and vertex colors. Autodesk 3ds Max now joins the existing support for Maya, Blender, and all other 3D applications that integrate with the latest FBX plugin on the Windows platform.
Completely Customizable Editor
UnityGUI, Unity’s own GUI creation system, now powers the entire Editor and allows you to integrate your own unique level design tools, AI control tools, debugging tools, difficulty tuning tools, or anything else you need. Over 130 new API entry points enable you to create specialized, customized editor tools and build them into the existing Editor interface.
Tabbed Interface
We took cues from the best designed applications, and the rewritten editor has received dozens of improvements. The most visible change is the tabbed interface, where every part of the interface can be moved, undocked to a secondary monitor, and even stacked to achieve logical grouping.
Information at Your Fingertips
We’ve gone to great lengths to make sure that you always have the info you need, when you need it. Model files have previews right inside the inspector. Audio Clips show their waveform with click-to-play behaviour. Meshes show the detailed rendering stats – and that’s just scratching the surface.
Tags: game, GAMEDEV, mono, osx, unity, unity3d, windows
Posted in .NET, 3D ENGINES, GAMEDEV, GAMES, PROGRAMMING, RENDERING, TECHNOLOGY, mono, unity3d | View Comments
Monday, January 12th, 2009
(use arrow keys and spacebar to control the red ball)
A new 3d physics library is under development and in early stages called jiglibflash. Like the Box2D ports it is based on a C++ library of the same name called jiglib, only this is 3D instead of 2D. It is similar in purpose to WOW Engine which is the other current open source 3d flash physics engine. For more on this toolkit see the links below.
UPDATE: katopz has also ported this to use Away3D as the renderer.
UPDATE: Also updated for the sandy3d engine as the renderer.
Tags: 3d, AS3, FLASH, FLEX, GAMEDEV, PAPERVISION, PHYSICS
Posted in 3D ENGINES, 3d, ACTIONSCRIPT, ACTIONSCRIPT3, ARCHITECT, AS3, GAMEDEV, GAMES, MOTION, OPEN SOURCE, PAPERVISION, PHYSICS, TECHNOLOGY | View Comments
Sunday, December 14th, 2008
Unity3D is a great platform for developing 3d games where you need hardware acceleration beyond what Flash 3d can give you for the web.
There are lots of great independent gaming companies and web gaming companies realizing this and here in the #phx Arizona market a few good ones including Flashbang Studios on their Unity3D gaming site Blurst. I have been developing Unity3D for about 6 months and it is great where you want 3d environments over 2000 polys for the web. The power of 3d hardware rendering on the web combined with a great development environment is making it possible to make really fun games with unity3d.
Unity3D Games Released Recently
Flashbang recently released Minotaur China Shop to add to their Blurst.com site of Unity3D games and community. They detailed the launch day at their blog. It is a pretty fun game and once you get further into the game design with different paths, selling products or thrashing your china shop for insurance and strategic upgrades it has legs to keep interest.
Minotaur China Shop Trailer
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/2474951[/vimeo]
There are lots of great Unity 3d games out there here is a list of the best of 2008:
[source]
Tags: best, GAMEDEV, GAMES, gaming, unity, unity3d, web
Posted in 3D ENGINES, 3d, BEST OF, GAMEDEV, GAMES, MARKET, PROGRAMMING, TECHNOLOGY, Uncategorized, unity3d | View Comments
Saturday, October 11th, 2008
as3isolib is a great isometric library for actionscript 3 by Justin Opitz. This is a lower level isometric library that could be used in building your own isometric gaming engine or learning more about the popular isometric view in games or other flash content.
From building basic blocks…
To constructing sprites and objects with individual iso objects with their own bounding boxes.
This sample shows a two piece tree, a common issue with sprites in isometric is where to slice them up. This sample shows a tree with the leaves able to be in front of a character so that you could walk under the tree and be in front of the trunk but covered by the trees. Essentially height is respected.
Sample code for the tree tutorial:
package
{
import as3isolib.display.IsoSprite;
import as3isolib.display.primitive.IsoBox;
import as3isolib.display.scene.IsoGrid;
import as3isolib.display.scene.IsoScene;
import flash.display.Loader;
import flash.display.Sprite;
import flash.events.Event;
import flash.net.URLRequest;
public class IsoApplication extends Sprite
{
private var scene:IsoScene;
private var assets:Object;
private var loader:Loader
private function loadAssets ():void
{
loader = new Loader();
loader.contentLoaderInfo.addEventListener(Event.INIT, loader_initHandler);
loader.load(new URLRequest("assets/swf/assets.swf"));
}
private function loader_initHandler (evt:Event):void
{
buildScene();
}
private function buildScene ():void
{
scene = new IsoScene();
scene.hostContainer = this;
scene.container.x = 200;
scene.container.y = 200;
var treeTrunkClass:Class = loader.contentLoaderInfo.applicationDomain.getDefinition("TreeTrunk") as Class;
var treeLeavesClass:Class = loader.contentLoaderInfo.applicationDomain.getDefinition("TreeLeaves") as Class;
var grid:IsoGrid = new IsoGrid();
grid.showOrigin = false;
scene.addChild(grid);
var s0:IsoSprite = new IsoSprite();
s0.setSize(25, 25, 65);
s0.moveTo(50, 50, 0);
s0.sprites = [treeTrunkClass];
scene.addChild(s0);
var s1:IsoSprite = new IsoSprite();
s1.setSize(125, 125, 100);
s1.moveTo(0, 0, 75);
s1.sprites = [treeLeavesClass];
scene.addChild(s1);
scene.render();
}
public function IsoApplication ()
{
loadAssets();
}
}
}
current features
- simple scene creation
- 3 primitive types
- base class for displaying user-created content
- plenty of styling option on vector based primitives
- integrates well with a variety of tween engines
- standard 3D isometric positional sorting
So get busy building the flash version of roller coaster tycoon…
Tags: ACTIONSCRIPT, AS3, FLASH, FLEX, game, GAMEDEV, iso, isometric, orthographic, projection
Posted in ACTIONSCRIPT, ACTIONSCRIPT3, ARCHITECT, AS3, DEVELOPMENT, ENGINE, FLASH, FLEX, GAMEDEV, GAMES, LIBRARIES, OPEN SOURCE, PROGRAMMING, RENDERING, TECHNOLOGY, TOOLS, isometric | View Comments
Sunday, September 28th, 2008
Flash 10 security changes requiring user interaction are pretty breaking but they are for good reason. Still though, the user could be inundated with prompts much like UAC on Vista. But, it is necessary otherwise security holes can be troublesome with the flash player and the “sandbox” of the web. Much like Java signing, Active-X acceptance, and thus local file access, these actions need some user approval, it is that liability thing.
But what is a bit lost in this is some of the new support specifically for game development and app development.
Support for things like RTMFP which is bringing UDP support to flash. UDP and reliable UDP (ordered) is really needed when it comes to larger scale networking applications and support for p2p apps. Games for instance, that are large like MMOs and highly interactive real-time engines, need UDP to be able to scale. So this is pretty useful, yet it currently looks like it is tied to Flash Media Server. It appears Adobe is staying ahead of SmartFox, Red5 and OpenFMS with stuff like this.
Another great move in the way of security updates for Flash 10 for games is the allowing input from keyboard keys while in full screen mode. All these games and apps look pretty sweet in full screen until you try to use them. There is only support for “Tab, the Spacebar, and the (up, down, left, right) arrow keys” but that is a start. Enough keys for a casual game. But still most keys could safely be used it must be a multi-platform support thing.
Limited full-screen keyboard input
Currently Flash Player does not allow keyboard input when displaying content in full-screen mode. Flash Player 10 beta will change this, allowing for a limited number of keys to be usable in full-screen mode. These include Tab, the Spacebar, and the (up, down, left, right) arrow keys.
Flash 10 is getting local save and load, this is great for any type of online editor, game or application. The ability to work on a file immediately without the server round trip initially is great. I hope this is extended much further to local save and load with very high limits, there has been some confusion on the file size limitations here. Ideally this would be extended much further if the product direction is right. Typically making apps or games with more than 5-25MB of content quickly become non-economical in bandwidth such as gaming assets due to browser cache size limitations (defaults IE=50MB, Safari 5-25MB, FF3=50MB), I wish there was a better way to allow local saving for long periods of time. Almost installing apps via flash with extended cache, talk about killer app feature. Downloading 10 MB of gaming assets that you know will be there for the month rather than the day.
Paste events can read the clipboard. Using the clipboard is another great useful tool in applications and online editors.
Data can be read from the Clipboard inside a paste event handler
In Flash Player 9, the system Clipboard could not be read at any time. With Flash Player 10 beta, the new ActionScript 3.0 method Clipboard.generalClipboard.getData() may be used to read the contents of the system Clipboard, but only when it is called from within an event handler processing a flash.events.Event.PASTE event.
So yes, the security user interaction changes do break current features but it also takes this platform a bit more into secure applications and game features from security changes, hopefully these features are extended much further but they are on the right track.
Tags: ACTIONSCRIPT, ACTIONSCRIPT3, AS3, clipboard, FLASH, FLEX, future, GAMEDEV, local, MARKET, network, RTMFP, udp
Posted in ACTIONSCRIPT, ACTIONSCRIPT3, ADOBE, APPLICATIONS, ARCHITECT, AS3, DEVELOPMENT, FLASH, FLEX, GAMEDEV, MARKET, MULTI-USER, PROGRAMMING, TECHNOLOGY | View Comments
