So I'm doing a 3D game for kids for Android and iOS in Unity, but i'm new in game developing and it's been really difficult to plan the assets.
We need to create 2D animations (paper like characters) and the characters have to be really detailed with great animations.
We have been thinking of several options:
We could create frame by frame animations but our designer says there has to be at least 24 images per second (because of 24 fps per second) with this the app will be very big.
Other option is to create 2D models in Blender and animate them there, but it's a lot of work and could take a lot of time.
The last option is to have the pieces of the model an animate it throughout code but it's a lot of work and I believe the quality of the animations would be low.
What's the better way to create 2D animations in Unity?.
Thank you!
Have you explored the 2D sprite engines that are available in Unity? Whoever said "Unity isn't really an engine designed to work with 2D stuff" is talking guff. I have just started working on a hobby 2D game and am using a Unity plugin called Orthello (see WyrmTale website for info). It handles sprite sheets, animations, collision detection and more without you having to write loads of code to do this. The learning curve is a bit steep and the examples on their website aren't the best but I found replicating the sample solutions that come with the download the best way to get something working.
There's also a similar tool called Sprite Manager 2 but you have to pay for that (I think). Check out the asset store for more information.
I would be really interested to hear if Orthello is what you're looking for and how you find working with it - please let me know via http://markp3rry.wordpress.com if you can.
Just because the app runs at 24fps doesn't mean you can't just display the animations for more than one frame of the main loop. It might not be smooth, but then again looking at the sprite sheets of games like super street fighter it doesn't look like they're at anywhere close to 24fps (the sprite sheet for Dhalism in SF3 Alpha is a 210kb .gif file on my computer, and there's less than 252 frames of animation on it. Likewise, the total storage space take up by every character sprite in Dustforce takes up a mere 7mb, though those sprites are just 192x192, maybe too low-res for you. They do look like paper though). I doubt that anything involving blender would take longer than hand animating -- Blender does key frames for you.
Related
I want to apply little tricky fluid ink animation as same as the below image:
I want to achieve using the basic classes only like applying scale, translate etc. I don't want to go with 2D or 3D. As I have checked some of the links they are suggesting frame animation but It doesn't have smooth transition.
Kindly suggest best way to achieve this animation.
Thanks,
"I don't want to go with 2D or 3D."
Well.. I don't know about you but those are the only options until we have 4D screens and mindsets.
But I guess you mean using 2D images or 3D models.
Unless you want to procedurally generate that (which can be quite a pain) I'd suggest using a spritesheet, there may be better ways to do this but I think a spritesheet on 30fps might be the easiest + fluid way to do this, increase FPS to increase fluidness (until the max of androids 60 fps screens)
Basically:
Create a (example) 256x128 sprite, and "manually" animate the sphere to the other side of the image, saving each "frame" and either create 1 big texture with all the frames (most efficient) or save each frame independently (lower on RAM if you manage it well, but it'll be hard to get 60 fps with this due to loading times)
You can check the recently announced Lottie library (by Airbnb).
It is a library for Android that parses Adobe After Effects animations exported as json with Bodymovin (related project) and renders them natively on Android devices.
I am looking at making a simple game. Without giving out the entire story, I need to draw two pieces of fruit (with arms and legs), who do different movements. They can do a few different actions (less than 5) and they also react to each others actions.
I'd like it to look simple. Very 2D, kids sort of graphics. Maybe shaded, but nice bright happy colours.
Let's say an action is to 'throw ball'. I'd like to see a semi smooth arm action. Smooth if possible.
So, I found a tutorial, which used sprites, and a PNG with 3 different states of a person walking. So, very basic. And I was able to make it walk across the screen, leading each part of the PNG for each state, and iterating through that over and over again, while moving the image.
I got pretty happy with my progress, and would like to base my game on that sort of model - but ... is using sprites, and loading areas of the PNG to make the image move correct? My PNG would be large if I want maybe 20 images just to throw the ball.
But if that's the right way to go, then great! It seems you can go with OpenGL and all that, but that's for 3D graphics right? Using sprites, and a few PNG with images would be OK for perforamnce and all that?
OpenGL is a valid choice for 2D or 3D, you shouldn't have any performance issues.
It will work fine for your game, and would likely be much smoother than trying to use android animations, which are not hardware accelerated on Android 2.x.
I need to provide some 3D rotation of images, like credit card (please check the video in the link)
I want to know is it feasible or not, in the case of Android. If yes, how can I do that.
The card must have some thickness.
It definitely is feasible, but you will have to do some studying:-).
Start here: http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/graphics/opengl.html
But you may also achieve your goal by just using the video you have posted in your link.
Some context would be useful such as will this be a loading screen? Something in video? etc?
For instance, if you are trying to make a website style layout and have the card up at the top always spinning, I would advice against that on any mobile device as its a waste of performance.
If instead you are using it as a loading screen then again I would advice against it as you are going to spend a lot of time initializing open gl and loading the texture and mesh for the card as well as any lighting you need and then initiate animators and do the spinning etc.
As previously stated OpenGL would be a way of doing this; however, this is not a simple few lines of code. This would be quite the undertaking for someone unfamiliar with OpenGL and 3D modeling to accomplish in a short time frame.
Question: do you require a native Android app, or would it be alright to use Flash Player? You can find tons of interactive 3d geometry demos on http://wonderfl.net - I forked one that had a plane, switched it to a cube, and you can download the results -
3d box on wonderfl
Not OpenGL - the example I found was Papervision3D (which is out of date a couple of years) - but software rendering is fine for 12 triangles. You, of course, would have to import your card faces as texture images if you want to make it look like a credit card.
I want to know the best way or a tool for making a good Android game!, I mean by "good" that the game must have a nice performance no lags or something like that, ..
So I will begin by 2D game development, and I want to avoid "Game engines"! ..
So what's the best way?! - to make it by Open GL ES or there another way?! ..
You should be able to learn a lot about open gl graphics programming by looking at Replica Island. Its an open source 2d Platform game which uses no engine.
The author gave some talks on Google IO which might be of interest to you:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4Bk5rmIpic
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-62tRHLcHk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdvaPyq_eBU
It's possible that this is considered too broad a question - we can't tell you how to make a game. But in response to your last question: yes, OpenGL is the best way to make a high performance game in 2D or 3D. If you have a more slow moving, turn based game, then you could stick to a Canvas on a SurfaceView or even use basic View widgets to build up the layout of a game board.
But if it's your first game, unless you have a lot of time and patience, I would strongly urge you to try an existing game engine. You may not realise how much work goes into a decent game engine until you're halfway (or 10% of the way) into making one. Have a look at the source of an engine like LibGDX and think about whether it's the sort of thing you'd be able to write.
There's plenty of info in the Android graphics dev guide.
You do not need a game engine to develop a 2D game in Android. You do not need to use SurfaceView either. SurfaceView, OpenGL and AndEngine and (maybe other game engines) have issues with consistent sprite animation speed and size of sprites across the various Android devices. Especially when the game has complex sprite movements. I went crazy trying to build a 2D game with consistent speed movement of sprites and sprite sizes in relation to screen size and density (e.g. tablets vs phones). So, I decided to drop the game engines and this is how I accomplished my first recently published 2D Android game:
Use drawable-nodpi for sprite images (gives sprite size consistency
across screen densities and sizes)
Use different layouts to support various screen sizes (e.g.
layout-large, layout-xlarge, etc...)
Use TranslateAnimation and ObjectAnimator to animate sprite movements across screen
Use math to figure out sprites collision (e.g. screen coordinates and sprite location etc.)
Use handlers and condition statements to control the game events
You can test the outcome of following the above guide to developing a 2D Android game without game engine by checking out the game. It is called Yum Yum Pow available on Google Play. The free limited version is available also on Google Play. I can only link to free apps I think, so here it is:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.wildroid.yum.yum.pow.limited
If u are planning to build a simple game then stick with Basic android.If it is a big game,With out game engine your game developing will be a heavier process.if u want to use a lot of images then memmory problem will occur(OOM).if u are comfort with the game engine that will be easy for future game developing.if u are making a simple game then there is no need of game engines.
there are so many game engines available
andengine,libgdx,cocos2d..
I'm working on a live wallpaper that incorporates some water ripple effects on touching the screen but I'm a little stuck.
Would it be better to create multiple images and loop through them to create a ripple animation or would it be better to distort the bitmap a bit before I place it on the canvas?
This is a video of a very nice ripple effect done through OpenGL.
I don't have any experience yet with OpenGL and was wondering if it is still possible to create a 2D water effect on the live wallpaper?
I wanted to implemented a realistic ripple effect in Android too, so will share my experience:
As a reference implementation i took Sergey's Chikuyonok JavaScript port of Neil Wallis Java algo. Here's a playground where you can experiment with original JS code: http://jsfiddle.net/esteewhy/5Ht3b/6/
At first, i've ported JS code to Java only to realize that there's no way to squeeze more than 1 fps on my Huawei U8100 hardware. (There're several similar attempts on the net with the only conclusion: they're ridiculously slow).
BTW, this SO answer was quite useful to get basic understanding of how to code an interactive graphics in Android: https://stackoverflow.com/a/4946893/35438. I've borrowed fps counter from there.
Then i decided to try Android NDK to reimplement original algo in pure C (my first encounter with it in 10+ yrs!). Despite NDK's docs being somewhat confusing (especially as to requirements and prerequisites), it all worked like a charm, so i was able to achieve up to 30 fps -- it might not be too impressive, but still, a radical improvement over Java code.
Finally, i've put all my work online: https://github.com/esteewhy/whater , so feel free to play with that. It contains:
Interactive bouncing ball code mentioned above (just for the reference).
Water ripples Java port (slow like hell!)
Water ripples C implementation (needs NDK to compile and JDK to create .h file).
(The project is not "clean", i.e.: all binaries are there, so can try to run it "as is" even without NDK.)
You can find an example of a touch ripple effect here:
https://github.com/MasDennis/RajawaliExamples
It utilizes the rajawali OpenGL ES framework/library. You can download the rajawali examples app from the market to see how it looks. Browse through the "src" folder and you will see the TouchRippleEffect activity and renderer. Hope that helps.
I'm no expert in this, but I believe the typical way to do water effects in OpenGL is with a fragment shader. With a static image as a texture, your shader can vary the texture coordinates used for sampling that image, to distort it in arbitrary ways.
Calculate the pixel's direction and distance from the center of the circle, and adjust the texture coordinate toward or away from the circle's center based on a sinusoidal function of the distance, and you should get a nice ripple effect.
Judging by the description of that YouTube video you linked, it sounds like that's done by using a grid of triangles and adjusting the texture coordinates only at the vertices. That should work too, but it won't look as good unless you use a rather fine grid. Doing it per-pixel with a fragment shader is the ideal, but I don't know whether that would cause performance problems on a phone's GPU.