I'm a college student who has learned to program. I have a game that is just wrapping up, and my graphics and design team is (Freshman) spotty. I'm planning for the worst, and would like recommendations for animation and design software that a programmer can easily pick up and use with no longer than 8-10 hours to learn it. If you could post a couple down below and a brief description of what it can do, that would be great. I will post my specifications below.
Working on Unity
Broke... Like College students are. I can put down a little money though
I will be creating a lot of sprite 2D images
I will be making somewhere around 2-5 animations depending on how well I pick up on it.
I do have Blender, but I cannot figure out how to color things on it. I barely figured out how to design an explosion.
Using of graphical tool can't make your graphical design and art better. You have to be an artist or learn to. So you can go with 2 ways:
1) Try to be an artist (it's hard long way full of risks). You need much time for practicing with ANY tools (pen and paper are good for the start). When you be able to create amazing things you find tools very quickly.
2) Focus on programming or game-design and use simplified design styles (baby-painting, hand-writing with pen, flat-design) or even use technical sprites like simple geometry. When your game will be almost finished you can hire an artist to redraw your art. It is much easier when your have all necessary image lists and even images with right ration and resolution. Just redraw them and put in your game and game is ready for production.
What I'm trying to say? Don't try to compete with your average graphics. Today's market is full of hi-quality games with amazing graphics. Impress gamers with your cool ideas and gameplay and may be they forgive you bad graphics. Anyway you have many options:
Make your game with technical images first and then will see what to do next (best option)
Use free images under creative commons license (it's difficult to gather full set of images in unique style)
Use primitive graphics that gamers forgive you (your game must be very cool)
Hire a professional artist (best option if you have money and finished game)
Regarding animations - it's pretty easy to avoid drawing each frame. You can transform your objects in Unity so that your scene will look vivid with standard Unity features
Sorry that I don't suggest you concrete tool, but I want to save your time and energy to encourage you making cool games, not fighting with tools that are useless for non-artist.
Related
So, recently I managed to land myself a Kinect v2 project (hurray!) on my Industrial Placement which is supposed to detect if a person is wearing the correct PPE or (personal protective equipment to you and me).
Included in this scope is detecting if the person is wearing the correct:
Hazard Protection Suit
Boots
Gloves
Hat
A beard mesh! (Only if they have a beard)
I have only recently begun working with the Kinect v2 Sensor so you will have to forgive any ignorance on my part. I am new to this whole game but have worked through a fair few examples online. I guess I am just looking for advice/sources on how best to solve the problem.
Sources online seem scarce for trying to detect if a person is WEARING something. There are a couple of parts to this project:
Split up human into components (hands, feet, head, body) while retaining colour. This part I imagine would be best done by the Kinect SDK.
Give a percentage likelihood that the person's hand part is wearing gloves, head part is wearing hat etc... I've seen some ideas for this including graphics packages such as OpenCV.
I'm looking for advice concerning both parts of this project. Feel free to ignore the waffling below, but I thought it best to post some of my own ideas first.
Idea (and worked example) 1 - Point clouds
I have done some preliminary projects involving basic detection of humans. In fact, grabbing the VS project from this source: http://laht.info/record-3d-video-with-kinect-v2-and-play-it-back-in-the-browser/ I have managed to create a .ply file out of human beings. The problem here would be trying to split the .ply 3D image up to identify the suit, hat, gloves, boots (and I guess) beard. I imagine this is a fairly complex task.
Of the 3 ideas however, I'm coming back around to this one. Splitting up a 3D .ply image and trying to detect the PPE could turn out to be more accurate. Would need advice here.
Idea 2 - Blob Detection
Using this: http://channel9.msdn.com/coding4fun/kinect/Kinect--OpenCV--WPF--Blob-Tracking I pondered whether there would be a good way of splitting up a human into a colour picture of their "hand part", "head part", "body part" etc with the Kinect v2 SDK. Maybe I could then use a graphics package like OpenCV to test if the colours are similar or if the logo on the suit can be detected. Unfortunately, there is no logo currently on the gloves and boots so this might not turn out to give a very reliable result.
Idea 3 - Change the PPE
This isn't ideal but if I can't do this another way, I could perhaps insist that logos would need to be put on the gloves and suit. In this worst case scenario, I guess I would be trying to just detect some text in 3D space.
Summary
I'd be grateful for any advice on how to begin tackling this problem. Even initial thoughts might spark something :)
Peace!
Benjamin Biggs
I'm trying to dip my toe into game programming, C# is the language I'm most comfortable with and what I want to use.
I've purchased a book and it's very good with the basic concepts but it's using GDI, bitmaps and sprites. I'm no artist and I'd like to concentrate on game play rather than eye candy, I'm more than happy with 'Dwarf Fortress' style of presentation.
DF doesn't seem to be a Console app (to my untrained eye). My question is can I access this 'graphic mode' from C# and if so how? Any tips links tutorials would be very helpful and appreciated.
Writing a 2D game in C# is actually very simple. Try with XNA. A simple tutorial that got me started with 2D was this...
http://create.msdn.com/en-US/education/tutorial/2dgame/getting_started
It basically covers a simple 2D side scroller but what you get from the tutorial will be useful in your DF like game. It requires you to create some graphics but like you said, those graphics need not be fancy. Drawing simple sprites will be easy enough.
Console games are a great way to enter the game making business or hobby, once you are very comfortable with c#, try to go to xna or unity. Xna is not being developed anymore and I don't find it very pleasant and prefer unity over it, but many people differ from me so please try it out for yourself. Unity is a 2D and 3D game engine wit a free and paid version. It can be complicated at first but very well made. You can develop in c# and many more languages with unity and it is a lot more flexible than xna.
I'm trying to implement a simple game - I've written a dial control but having trouble writing a on-screen thumbstick in Silverlight for Windows Phone - this would be a large circle - say 150px wide with a 25px circle which when held down moves round the centre much like a real thumbstick - like the Xbox 360 controller thumbsticks.
I'm finding creating this a little tricky - if there are any examples such as a Joystick one I can shrink down for example? Been trying to create something for ages and can't seem to figure it out - the centre circle is loaded from an Image and the Larger one too so it can be customised - getting the two to be within each other centred is the easy part!
As discussed, i'd suggest using XNA doing it since its considerably easier to do. With Mango you could combine XNA and Silverlight and therefore satisfy your needs for some Silverlight too.
Look at this example:
http://create.msdn.com/en-US/sample/touchthumbsticks
It shows how to easily create a thumbstick control. To restrict the area which you can touch, just create a new Rectangle at the position of the thumbstick with the size you desire and use the .Contains(...) overload to check if the position of the tap is inside it and then act accordingly (update the stick, or ignore input).
Check out the .Contains(...) function and its overloads:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/de-de/library/microsoft.xna.framework.rectangle.contains.aspx
I have learned that many programmers tend to stick to Silverlight for they think XNA is some kind of holy grail and is complex to program. It is not. It just needs a bit of getting used to, but you will surely enjoy the ride to XNA enlightment. I can tell, i did :) It's fun! Just trust a stranger on the internet!
If you need to stick to Silverlight and Pre-Mango, i fear i can offer nothing of value for you, and i fear you will suffer pain in trying to recreate the same functionality XNA already offers programmers for no charge.
I am using XNA to develop a game which requires both sound effects and music. I'm trying to figure out how to implement the sound engine. Microsoft provides the ability to use the Content Pipeline to load and play audio. However, I also seen people use Xact to do the same thing. My question is, whats the difference and what would be the better approach to making a sound engine?
Xact is feature rich but complex to use. It was originally the only way to play sound but people wanted something simpler so Microsoft added the content pipeline method.
Use the Content Pipeline if you want:
To play a sound (2d or 3d)
To not have to invest a lot of time
learning an audio framework
Use Xact if you want:
Categories of sounds that can be
interdependently controlled, like
mute game sounds but not menu sounds
Real time advanced control over sound
pitch, volume. For things like
turrets spinning up, cars
accelerating etc.
To have multiple varieties of a
single sound effect like a seven
different pain sounds and have Xact
choose which one to play.
To have a sound play with slightly
different pitch, volume, filter or 3d
pan every time it is played. This is
really good for bullets and
repetitive things like that. There
is nothing that says fake computer
simulation like a repeating sound
with no variance.
To allow a game designer or sound
designer full control to edit and
change sounds without touching the
code.
To have sound banks (collections of
sound) that you can load or unload as
a group, which can use different
compression settings and can be in
memory or streaming.
To mix the volume, pitch and priority
of sounds in an editor.
To apply filtering to a sound.
To control whether the sound is
looping or not.
To use DSP Effects
One of my favourite things about Xact is editing and previewing of sound functions in editor. For example a volume fade on a turret overheat sound. With XACT you can sit down with the sound designer, even if he's not a technical guy and edit the control curves until he's happy with the sound. Once you've set it up it's really easy to change later on. In this example image here a turret is overheated. At the end of the overheat cycle the hissing steam noise volume is reduced, but because it's a curve I have a lot of control over how the sound fades out. I've used this with a beam weapon as well, dropping the frequency according to a curve as it runs out of ammo.
I'm making a turn-based top-down game in C#. The graphics requirements are pretty simple: it's entirely 2D, requires drawing some images taken from graphics files (perhaps rotating them first), line drawing to make a hex grid and the ability to place text at any position on the screen.
I'm wondering what the best API is for doing these graphics. Is XNA overkill for this, is there something more appropriate? Thanks (I have zero experience of graphics or game development in .net so don't be afraid to dumb-down any answers).
I'd recommend XNA for this. If you don't want some of the overhead of XNA, I've found SlimDX to be a very nice little framework. They also provide some basic game classes to make this type of thing easy.
Doing your drawing directly in WPF is also fairly easy, but more difficult to extend later. XNA and SlimDX give you access to shaders, very fine grained control of alpha blending, as well as the potential to easily extend portions into 3D later if needed.
I've used the Farseer Physics engine before which was pretty cool and extremely easy to pickup (I am an enterprise developer, not a game developer). It works for Silverlight so you could actually make your game web based. I would suggest silverlight or WPF for 2D.
http://www.codeplex.com/FarseerPhysics
I would recommend WPF. Loading your graphics and moving them around should be fairly easy. Since WPF also is vector based, your line drawing is straight forward.
XNA would be the next step. Great support for sprite graphics and also gives you access to shaders.
If it is as simple as it sounds, and not even real-time, maybe you don't need any of this stuff. Drawing a hex grid and some images should not be hard even without a game engine. Maybe WPF would be good for this.
Given your requirement you could just use plain C# and the GDI (for 2d rastering). However learning XNA is easy enough, and it'll serve you well once you decide to make a realtime game (2d or 3d) down the road. Either way have fun, and if XNA seems to complicated when your starting out, just drop back to GDI. Making games should be as fun as playing them :)
XNA sounds like a good choise (it will better than using DirectX SDK !! and it is quite easy to learn)
You can do this by just using classes inside the System.Drawing namespace. And XNA is certainly overkill for this type of stuff. Also you would introduse many dependencies for your small game which might be an unwanted thing for your gamers.
Check out Unity 3D - it's based on C# and it can be used for 2D. It might be overkill (including price), but for game development it's in general HUGE help.