Terence
Polar movement, i.e. moving objects at an angle, is something that people starting out in games programming often have trouble with. Coordinate systems are easy to understand, and so is moving things left and right or up and down; but what if you want to move at angles that are not parallel to an axis, like 30° upwards, or towards a target? How do you get a vector that represents that direction of movement?
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Emission maps (also known as emissive maps) are textures that can be applied to materials to make certain parts of an object emit light (like the cube in the image above). In Unity, lights from emission maps don’t start affecting the scene as soon as you place them on the material. There are a lot of settings you have to get right in your scene and material settings to get the emission maps working right.
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If you’re making your foray into games programming, vectors are an important concept that you’ll have to understand and work with. If you’ve been reading build-your-own-game tutorials and getting confused by all the vector math that’s been going on, this article is probably a good one to read.
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It isn’t particularly difficult to set up physics-based movement for objects in Unity — simply add a Rigidbody component onto an object that has a Collider component, and you’ll have yourself an object that moves and collides realistically with other objects.
If you start having fast-moving objects however, you might start to see these objects tunnel through obstacles.
In the second part of this series, we will be exploring how to give our projectiles a nice vertical arc as they travel towards the target. This article will expand upon the work in Part 1, where we coded a projectile that could home in onto the target and detect collision with the target without using Unity’s physics engine’s.
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If you’re developing a tower defense game, one of the first questions you are going to be dealing with is this: how do you make the projectiles that your towers fire hit their targets? After all, these fired projectiles take time to reach their targets – targets that are constantly moving. Sometimes, by the time a projectile gets to where it was aiming at, their targets would’ve sometimes moved out of the way.
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If your work involves sitting in front of a computer, chances are — at some point or another — you’ll have to work with digital images. For most people, it’s more than enough to know how to save images into the right formats. If you’re a game developer though, it’ll help to have a bit more in-depth knowledge, since you’ll be working with game engines that like to throw around obscure terms like true color, bit-depth or ARGB-16.
I struggled a lot with images during my early days in game development precisely because of these terms — Google searches and Wikipedia articles only led me to pages with big words that confused me even more. With time, I eventually figured things out — hence this primer. Hopefully, reading this means you won’t take as long as I did to figure things out.
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A common problem I see in novice Unity game programmers is that they often create too much unnecessary, duplicate code. Take, for example, the programmer who creates a simple 2D platformer with a player character and a generic enemy character to be duplicated across the level. What often happens is that two separate scripts will be created — one for the player character, and one for a generic enemy character. Each individual script will define its own behaviours for things such as movement, jumping, dealing damage and receiving damage, and most of the code between these two scripts is similar because the character types have so much in common.
If you’re a budding games designer in the midst of developing your game concept, understanding the different roles that game features and game mechanics play will help you have a better ideation process.
I’ve been freelancing as a web programmer for more than 6 years now, but (surprisingly) I’ve never known the intricacies behind how web domain names worked until today (I had to help a client resolve some issues regarding it). The understanding came to me in an epiphany only after I’ve read and pondered on many articles, Wikipedia pages and Stack Overflow pages over the past few days.
Because web domains can be an incredibly complex business, and all the online instructionals I’ve found are really long, I wrote this in such a way that it imparts a big picture view. Hopefully, it’ll help you figure things out faster than I did.