In my 2d android game, I have an image of a map as the background. I want to spawn objects and make them walk to a given destination. However, I want them to walk on the actual roads. I tried to use pathfinding grid and navmesh, however, they are not accurate and therefore couldn't detect the actual small roads on the map. Any idea how I can achieve this?
Edit: I have a high res image with no labels. I also tried using a png of the roads layout and marking it as walkable but since the roads are small and too close to one another it doesn't draw the navmesh on them.
(red is the player, green is the given destination, blue is the path automatically created for red to walk on after the destination is given)
I have an image of a map as the background
This is the wrong type of data to start of with. To do any kind of navigation you will need some type of graph data, either to create a navmesh from, or to implement your own pathfinding (A star is not that difficult to implement). But creating a graph from just a image of a map will be doomed to failure since roads will be covered by labels and other kinds of visual noise. It might be a feasible approach if you could get "clean" image of sufficient resolution, ideally without any kind of anti aliasing or other processing that could interfere with analysis.
You would be much better of to start with an object representation of your map and either convert this to an image, or correlate the object positions to coordinates on the image. You may for example use the open streetmap API for this kind of data. Or just create your graph by hand if you only have a single small map.
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I'm new to Unity and I'm making a car racing Game. Now, I'm stuck at some point. I was looking for some solution of my problem, but couldn't succeed.
My problem is:
When I run my game on my phone, it sticks badly because whenever there are several buildings in front of the car camera, like one building behind another building, it lags. Reason for this is there are so many vertices and edges at that time, So the Car Camera is unable to capture all that stuff at same time.
How do I preload the 2nd Scene while loading 1st Scene?
I am using Unity free version.
In graphics programming, there is a common routine to simply don't draw objects that aren't in the field of view. I'm sure Unity can handle this. Check link: Unity description on this topic
I'm not hugely knowledgeable about Unity, but as a 3D modeller there's a bunch of things you can do to improve performance:
Create a simplified version of your buildings with fewer polygons for use when buildings are a long way away. A skyscraper, for example, can be as simple as a textured box.
If you've done that already, reduce the distance at which the simpler imposters are substituted for the complex versions.
Reduce the number of polygons by other means. A good example is if you've got a window ledge sticking out of the side of a building, don't try and make it an extension of the body. Instead, make it a separate box, delete the facet that won't be seen, and move it to intersect with the rest of the building.
Another good trick is to use bump maps or normal maps to approximate smaller features, rather than trying to model everything.
Opaqueness. Try not to have transparent windows in your buildings. It's computationally cheaper to make them just reflect the skybox or a suitably blurred reflection imposter. Also make sure that the material's shader is in Opaque mode, if it supports this.
You might also benefit a little from checking the 'Static' box on the game object, assuming that buildings aren't able to be moved (i.e. by smashing through them in a bulldozer).
Collision detection can also be a big drain. Be sure to use the simplest possible detection mesh you can - either a box, cylinder, sphere or a combination.
I need to be able to generate a 3D perspective from a bunch of 2D images of a pipe.
Basically... We have written software that interprets combined data from laser and sonar units to give us an image slice from a section of pipe. These units travel through the pipe and scan the inside of the pipe every 100mm.
All of this is working great. My client now wants to take all these 2D image slices and generate a 3D view so they can "travel" through the pipe looking at defects etc.. that are picked up by the scans. We can see the defects in the 2D images but there can be hundreds of images in a single inspection - hence the requirement to be able to look through the pipe.
I am doing this in VS2010 on the .NET 4 platform in C#.
I am honestly clueless as to where to start here. I am not a graphics developer so this is all new territory to me. I see it as a great challenge but need some help kicking off - and a bit of direction.
Any help appreciated :)
Mike
Well, every 10cm isn't very detailed.. However, you need to scan the pixels of the pipe, creating a list of closed polygons, then just use a trianglestrip to connect one set to the next, all the way down the pipe.
Try to start with very basic 2d instead of full blown 3d rendering - may be good enough. Pipe when you look at it from inside can be represented as several trapeze. Assuming your images are small cylinder portions of a pipe - map each stripe to trapezoids (4 would be good start - easy to position) and draw than in circular pattern. You may draw several stripes this way at the same time. To move back/forward - just reassign images to trapezoids.
If you need full 3d - consider if WPF would work, if not - XNA or some OpenGL library will give you full 3d.
You don't specify the context, 100mm sample intervals may be sparse (a 1m pipe) or detailed (10km pipe). Nor do you specify how many sample points there are (number of cross sections and size of cross section image).
A simple way to show the data is to use voxels where each pixel on a cross section is treated as a cube and adjacent samples form adjacent cubes (think Minecraft). The result will look blocky but as it's an engineering / scientific application this is probably preferable. Interpolating the model to produce a smooth surface may hide defects or make areas appear to be defective. Also, rendering a cross section through a voxel is a bit easier than a polygon surface.
I have never written any silverlight apps but I am looking to write a 3d viewer for earthquakes and have it run from my web site.
I would like to create a simple viewer so the user can change the "camera" ie their perspective. The view could contain up to 10,000 objects in the 3d space.
I want the ability to quickly view this - I have seen this on a Power Basic application and want to do this for the web.
I have a current web site at http://canterburyquakelive.co.nz for earthquakes in Canterbury New Zeaalnd and I want to learn the basics so that it can be more interactive.
I want to say for example (to start) place 2 objects in a "space" that I can define and move the camera in real time.
The system must support up to 10,000 objects in the end of the day.
Each object can be a simple circle - no need for special pixel shaders
I am unsure of the exact functionallity of the system at the moment so if I can find a tutorial that allows me to place someone (a circle) into a 3d world (space) and change the camera that would be good.
Any ideas appreciated - there seems to be so much about 3d and silverlight that I may be getting lost in the "gloss" of new features where I need some basics and I can learn and adapt over time.
** Added comment + image **
Basically I am waiting to create a page that look like this using Silverlight. But I am open to any technology.
I've never done 3D in silverlight so I can't exactly answer your question as asked but in general to display geographic markers in a 'real' 3D terrain is quite involved. At a minimum you're probably looking at:
Obtaining binary height data files (last time I looked, NASA gives this away)
Reading and interpreting said files to get 'bitmap' height data
Choosing and dealing with projections (e.g. UTM)
Deciding how to tesselate your bitmap height data
If you want it textured you'll need to also obtain satellite data for that, again converting or processing it to account for projection.
You could ignore the terrain height, but that may not simplify things depending on how 'bumpy' your terrain is.
For a pre-defined small enough area, you could perhaps pre-author a 3d model of the terrain in some 3D package but displaying your markers will still require a projection from long/lat into your 3D space, and you'll still need to know terrain height (unless you do mesh collision with the static model).
Rendering the markers is pretty straightforward by comparison, choose from:
Use a 3D model e.g. a 'pin head' (simple but not always visible)
Render a regular n-gon with 'viewer facing' polygons (resolution independent but maybe ugly)
Render a quad with a circle texture on it (low poly but what size texture to choose?)
There are probably libraries that do some or all of this for you, so if you are set on rolling your own then some of the things I've mentioned could form the basis for your search.
However, given what you've described of your site and situation I suspect you'd be better off avoiding all that work by using a pre-existing solution. E.g. the Google Earth API.
You could consider 3D web plugins that -granted- take you away from Silverlight but that might speed up your development process. I'm thinking in particular of e.g. the Blender 3D web plugin. I can understand the need to write your own viewer, but think twice before you re-invent the wheel. Good luck!
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I have a shopping mall directory image (for example like this: http://www.westfield.com/annapolis/map/ ) and want to make an application like this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNj8D8JKv-4&feature=related where I can draw the path between two locations without needing make many images for the paths.
So, What techniques (Library, programming techniques, softwares .. etc) do you suggest to do this using .NET (Windows Forms/ WPF) application?
EDIT for BOUNTY
I am looking for some start like. I am on 3rd Floor. I have a image of third floor. There is a point of entrance from 3rd floor in map. There are 29 seats in the floor. I want to show with line path, where is somebody's seat. I want to do it through Web App. C# MVC 4.5 Where should I start from ? Any sample code will be very helpful.
I solved similar problem some time ago. In short, I was making a game like Heroes of Might and Magic and since I didn't want to draw background myself I decided to use a static image which I would simply manipulate along with player moves.
So we found an open-source game with a map editor that we used for creating of a map background. Then we created a mapper that would load an image created from the map editor and user would mark places on a grid. The following image is a screenshot from our map mapper.
There was the image, and drawed grid with adjustable size for cells so that we could map objects very precisely. The yellow boxes with an item inside are mapped objects (some of them actually do not give a sense, it is just a proof of concept). When we were content of the result, we would safe position and information about all obejcts to a xml file so that I can be used from our game application.
In our game we have defined a class called TileMap that was aware of all objects (stored as instances of a class Tile) on the map and all players move requests were permitted or forbidden by it.
Finally, this is how I would solve your problem. I have only positive experience with this solution. Create an application that would allow to you to specify where there is a path, where there is a store and how it is called, and so forth. Serialize values to xml or another format you are confident with. Then, create an application that works with these obejcts, define a tile map and you are nearly finished. Now you just need to implement path finding and drawing. Path finding is easy, there are plenty different algorithms with different efficiency and speed. Once you know what tiles you have to cross in order to get into a destination, simply draw stars, arrows or whatever you like above the tiles.
Cons
you need to create two applications
Pros
no need to generate more images, you are drawing on a transparent layer and you can safe already generated paths in memory or file
quite easy implementation, just a lot of code
feel free to choose a technology - we used WinRT, but WPF and even WinForms are also suitable
if you like GUI applications, you will have a plenty of fun while doing this :)
Feel free to ask any design and even implementation details questions .
Prepare the list of all places that you want to be searchable. Give each one an ID. The stairs and elevators should have IDs too.
Create the map floor masks. The easy way is the "coloring book" technique. Create semi-transparent layer in Photoshop and overlay it above the map. Then, draw the walls with some set "color 1". Then, draw each distinct place with a distinct color. Just convert the place ID to Hex and use that hex value as the color. Draw the mask for each floor (in a separate image).
Create the map loader. It should load the mask images and extract the object position and passing ability information. You have to find the position (x, y, floor) of each place by scanning the maps and looking at the pixel color hex value. You have to locate the stairs and elevators, their positions and the floors that they connect.
Implement the pathfinding algorithm like A*. It's quite easy and looks like viscous water flowing to the destination's low point. For each position (x, y, floor) one can move in any of the four directions where there aren't walls. And if there is an elevator at that point, one can move to some other floor. The algorithm can quickly find the best route between any two (x, y, floor) points.
When user gives you the name of the place where he wants to go, you need to find out the user's position coordinates (you may try to use GPS) and the destination position (use the object location table, you prepared when you loaded the map on step 3). Give these two (x, y, floor) points to the pathfinding algorithm to get back the route - the sequence of the (x, y, floor) points leading to the destination.
Analyze the route. You need to scan the route and find out what floors does it pass through. Split the route in chunks where each chunk belongs to a single floor. Now you have a list of floors and the route points for each of the floors.
Visualize the floors and their route parts by drawing the route points over the floor maps. To increase the root point spacing, you may just draw every 10th point or so. With HTML5, the sequence of route points can be drawn as an SVG or canvas overlay on top of the floor map image background.
The best way to set up something like this is to pick up a book on game programming, as it will give you a lot of information on setting up paths around "solid objects". The actual UI technology should not matter as much, so choose WPF or Windows Forms, HTML5 etc. Of the choices you have, I would probably aim for WPF or Silverlight, as it gives you much more flexibility on creating the UI. But I would not be adverse to HTML5 either.
You can definately do the whole thing in WPF, you're looking at drawing simple paths so you need to chunk your project into multiple sub issues:
1) How to draw the UI area (i assume you already know that)
2) How to draw the map, it heavily depends on the map data you have but it could be as simple as a single image, please add more detail for your source
3) How to figure out the path, for this you will need to use some form of pathfinding algorithm (one of the simplest one is A*, but there is a myriad of algorithms for different needs)
4) How to draw the Path, this depends on what you're looking for once again
I know it isn't much of an answer yet but depending on your needs (please add a comment bellow) i'll edit it to help you the best i can.
It would be pretty significant undertaking if you are trying to do this whole thing by yourself. All you have is image of shopping mall. From there you need to convert it in to vector data which in itself a fairly significant project. Then you will need to design navigation algorithms and then you need to setup UX for the whole thing. IMO, all these would require a lot of resources and research if you want to do this nicely and accurately.
Fortunately here is a good news: Google has been trying to do same thing for quite sometime and throwing lot more resources than that are likely at your disposal. Their effort is called "indoor mapping" which you can pretty much leverage out-of-box for your scenario. I'm going to give out here pointers to start you off as you have asked.
First visit Google blog to get familiarize with their indoor maps initiative. Then try out adding your floor plan in Google maps here. You are basically uploading image and aligning with the building in Google maps at this point. Here's another tutorial. Note that this does not make your floor plan navigable and may not show yet users location on it because to do that you need data from wifi/cell towers to triangulate users location on floor plan. We'll go over that next. If you have tons of these floor plans, I'd suggest taking help of mechanical turk or such service to have other humans do it for you cheaply. Google maps allows you to keep floor plan privates by using overlays but likely you don't want to do that so users can access it from anywhere.
Next, you want to make your user locatable on your floor plan. This involves getting data such as wifi/cell tower signals at different points on your floor plan. Google has app for this. And here's little demo. You can also use SketchUp to add vector data and polygons.
Next, you want to embed Google maps in your app so it becomes integral part of your app instead of users having to go through Google Maps website. To do this look at Maps SDK (here's link for iOS, and snippet for indoor maps).
Good luck!
You may easier this job by looking into Google map indoor solution. http://maps.google.com/help/maps/indoormaps/
No programming except a web page is needed.
In this game im trying to create, players are going to be able to go in all directions
I added one single image(1024x768 2d texture) as background, or terrain.
Now, when player moves around I want to display some stuff.
For example, lets say a lamp, when player moves enough, he will see lamp. if he goes back, lamp will disappear because it wont be anymore in screen
If Im unclear, think about mario. when you go further, coin-boxes will appear, if you go back they will disappear. but background will always stay same
I thought if I spawn ALL my sprites at screen, but in positions like 1599, 1422 it will be invisible because screen is only 1024x768, and when player moves, I will set place of that sprite to 1599-1,1422-1 and so. Is it a good way to do this ?
Are there better ways?
There are two ways you can achieve this result.
Keep player and camera stationary, move everything else.
Keep everything stationary except the player and the camera.
It sounds like you are trying to implement the first option. This is a fine solution, but it can become complicated quickly as the number of items grows. If you use a tile system, this can become much easier to manage. I recommend you look into using a tile engine of some sort. There are a lot of great tile map editors as well.
Some resources for using Tiles:
Tiled -- Nice Map Editor
TiledLib -- XNA Library for using Tiled Maps
What you're describing there is a Viewport, which describes a portion of the 'world' that is currently visible.
You need to define the contents of your 'world' somehow. This can be done with a data structure such as a scene graph, but for the simple 2D environment you're describing, you could probably store objects in an array. You would need to bind your direction keys to change the coordinates of the viewport (and your character if you want them to stay centered).
It's a good idea to only draw objects that are currently visible. Without knowing which languages or packages you are using it's difficult to comment on that.
I would look into Parallax scrolling. Here is an example of it in action.
If this is what you require, then here is a tutorial with source code.
XNA Parallax Scrolling
After you are finished with basic scrolling, try to implement some frustum culling. That is only draw objects which are actually visible on the screen and avoid unnecessary drawing of stuff that cannot be seen anyway.
I would prefer solution number 2 (move player and camera) - It would be easier for me, but maybe its just personal preference.