Kategorie-Archiv: Gaming

Gaming, Mobile

Nintendo Switch – How to avoid damaging the screen in the dock

Nintendos latest console, the Switch, was launched only a few days ago but there already are people pointing out flaws in the first version.

This includes people complaining about the taste of the cartridges ( that is not a flaw, it is a safety measure ), the skin manufacturer dbrand discovering that the surface finish nintendo has choosen is not compatible with any adhesive for vinyl skins and a few people who managed to scratch their screens within a few days of normal use.

The last one is what concerns me personally. Some users managed to scratch their screens by simply using the dock. Apparently there is a chance that the plastic screen becomes scratched from the hard plastic used on the rails. Weiterlesen →

3D, Gaming, Programmierung, Unity

Stupid swarm agents in Unity3d for Global Game Jam 2017

Recently i participated in the Global Game Jam 2017 at our University in Koblenz. With a team of five on location and another helpful friend that donated the awesome music we made a small strategy game within this years theme „waves“ in the unity3d engine. The name is „Tower Offense – Final Wave“ and you can find the executable and the full unity3d project here.


The basic idea is that each player has a base that constantly produces small autonomous robots. These robots are under your control as long as the radio waves of your base tower or the radio towers you can build reach it. As soon as it leaves the influence radius of your towers it losses signal strength and eventually you loose control. You have the option to change from building attack robots to build harvesters which bring in ressources you need to build more towers. The aggressive robots try to find the nearest enemy robot or building and engage it. The enemy can, like the player, build more towers and when a hostile robot stays in the range of an opposing tower for too long, the owner of that tower gains control of the robot. The winning condition is easy: Destroy the enemy base!

My part this time was the programming of the „artificial intelligence“. But because i like to work quick and see results fast my solution might (definitely) not be the most elegant or efficient solution.
Weiterlesen →

Allgemein, Gaming, Programmierung, Unity

Version Control in Unity3D with Perforce

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We have been using Unity for a long time now and we have always been struggling with any type of version control / centralized storage for our projects. We tried different solutions like svn or git and always ran into troubles often sooner than later.

After licensing Unity Pro we planned to at least use the asset server to avoid having to sort trough tons of indiviual copies and „branches“ on multiple workstations. But unfortunately, when we finally found the spare time to set it up, the asset server was somehow marked as deprecated.  But the accompanying documentation page recommended Plastic SCM or Perforce as alternate solutions.

Our decision to try out Perforce was based solely on the fact that i had heard more about Perforce than Plastic SCM. Weiterlesen →

3D, Gaming, Programmierung, Unity

Unity3D – global Highscore for Android games without external tools

We recently released a little game into the wild: Just Jumping on the Google Playstore.

Beside creating an easy to pick-up game with some sort of addictive gameplay we wanted to create a bit of a competition by collecting global highscores.

There are many options on how to achieve this, most of them include external tools or libraries. And we wanted to avoid that. DIY it was…

What you need to collect global highscores:

  • A transfer method to get data from the device to where the scores a stored.
  • A place where you can collect the highscores. Preferably a web server with a database.
  • A way to identify players.
  • Methods to make cheating hard or impossible.

Weiterlesen →

3D, Allgemein, Effekte, Gaming, Grafik

Substance Designer – Seamless procedural textures

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seam_problemWer sich mit dem Texturieren dreidimensionaler Objekte beschäftigt wird einen Anblick wie auf dem Bild oben kennen. Teile des Modells haben eine umlaufende Textur die aber dummerweise an einer oder mehreren Stellen eine Unstetigkeit aufweist.

Nun kann man natürlich händisch die Textur korrigieren, zum Beispiel in Photoshop. Abgesehen von der Herausforderung diesen Bruch in mehreren Maps auf die exakt pixelgleiche Art und Weise zu korrigieren ist das eine Menge Arbeit. Und wenn dann noch größere Änderungen an der Textur anstehen muss dieser Aufwand gleich mehrfach betrieben werden.
Arbeitet man mit Tools wie dem Substance Designer von Allegorithmic, dann gibt es in der Version 5 ein kleines magisches Hilfsmittel, das einem dieses Problem aus der Hand nimmt. Weiterlesen →