Status Update (Mini Break Edition)

In case you haven't been reading any of my unity forum support thread. I'm currently away from office on a semi vacation which involves a lot traveling and chaotic, spontaneous schedule. Personally, it has been pretty good fun and refreshing, to break from the normal routine. Unfortunately my work load has take a huge hit.

Despite my best effort to work using whatever time I have got left. A MacBook-Pro is simply no substitute for a PC with 25 inch screen, where I can work better and faster without the need to shuffling the all the windows on screen every 5 seconds. As good as the MacBook-Pro is, it's simple a tool for me to build and test my stuff on iOS.

Still, I did just most of the new update for TDTK on it. And yes, TDTK v2.1.3f1 has just been submitted to AssetStore. No major addition yet, but I'm playing with quite a few ideas that might just make it to the next update, v2.1.4, which I think wont be ready at least until new year, if all the idea does make it to release.

Also, Unity4, why you no have new GUI system yet?!

Nope, It's not Tetris

It just appear that I've got some free time on my hand for the last few days and I thought of trying something new (or rather old) for a change. And this is what I have come out with:

It has the gameplay of Tetris for now but no, it's not Tetris. At least that's not what I intend to call it. There's a very good reason to it. Turns out there's actually a bloody copyright to the game. That's utterly bollocks in my opinion when such claim is made to a game. If that's that is true and right and practise by every developer in the industry, imagine what would happen? Everyone would just stop making game and sue everyone they can find.

Anyway, since there's a copyright claim to it and I've no intention of getting sued, I shall have to tweak the gameplay before I could put it on a AppStore. If I ever come to that stage. It's still very unpolished and unoptimised at this moment. I have only worked on it for a few days with spare hours. We shall see where can we go from here.

Have to say it's been fun and it's quite satisfying seeing it work. It's not much, but you can have a go too if you fancy it. Here's the webplayer, comments/feedbacks/questions are welcome! Hope you enjoy the music!

edit: ops, just notice that there's no control instruction/tootip in the game. So here it's:

• wasd and arrow keys - left, right down and rotate
• space - pause/resume, restart when game over

Annoucing TDTK Free!

It's TDTK and it's free!

Well it's not the full version of course, much of the feature in full version is stripped down but it should cover the basic for a simple TD game. The feature of course included:

SpawnManger with configuration spawn setting:
 - time-based spawn (spawn on a fix timer)
 - wave-based spawn (spawn as soon as the last wave is cleared)
 - round-based spawn (spawn based on user input after each wave)
 - support multiple creep type in each wave, with individual creep interval, delay and such

Towers:
 - TurretTower, standard backbone tower in any TD game
 - AOETower, damage/debuff any surrounding creep within range
 - SupportTower, to provide damage/speed/range buff to nearby towers

Creeps:
 - Configurable move speed and HP

Flexible Scene Setup:
 - Flexible platform/grid placement
 - Each platform/grid can be customized to support/not-support any tower type.
 - Path can be setup as easy as placing waypoints

Others:
 - various shootObject/effects are supported
 - projectile, beam, visual effect
 - damage, damage over time, slow, stunned
 - detail documentation from straight from full version

note: PathFinding and mazing are one of the many things that are not supported in this free version.

For obvious reason, minimal support will be given to free version. The priority will be given to the full version.

You can download it from Unity AssetStore.

Please consider to make a donation or buy the full version if you find this useful.

InputTouches v1.1.3 now live!

It's about damn time. Version 1.1.3 is finally live on AssetStore. After almost 3 weeks I first submitted it. Turns out there's some faulty submission of some sort that the earlier submissions were overlooked.

Anyhow, it's now live and hence this post. The details of the updates are as follow:

• Added JS counterpart to all the C# examples
• Added isFlick variable to DragInfo, indicate if it's a (very) short drag
• Pinch Event now pass PinchInfo which include the magnitude of the pinch as well as the finger's position.
• Pinch Event now pass RotateInfo which include the magnitude of the rotation as well as the finger's position.

You can get it on AssetStore. For more information, please visit the official support thread.

PathFinder v1.1 is Now Live!

I'm pleased to announce that PathFinder has been given a major overhaul and is now live on AssetStore. Following is the update:

• Added a new graph type which is more memory and performance friendly
• Added binary heap based sorting to the search algorithm, make the search faster
• Path-smoothing has been reworked entirely
• Reorganise structure of the code
• All Example scripts has been rewritten
• C# counter part of the source and examples are now included

With the addition of the new graph and binary heap based sorting, it goes without saying that the new code is a lot more faster. Well, just have a look at this video, I think it shows more than I can possibly say.

The scene shown is setup with a square grid with grid size of 0.5 over an area of 100x100. Effectively 40k nodes. The grid is then optimised and clustered into smaller area based node for more efficient search algorithm. In older code, search a path from end to end with such node resolution would take easily take up to 0.1second or longer. With the new code, well as you probably can see, the queue time for the search is hardly noticeable even with a handful of agent call for search every 0.1seconds. This is largely thanks to the new adaptive node that I used. The adaptive node clusters together an area of smaller node into one. This reduce the total node needed across the whole scene. And since the new node cover a bigger area, the search would involve much less node as each adaptive node would cover much more ground than the evenly distributed grid node. The two images below would show the strong contrast between the two node types.

Adaptive Node, it takes much less of them to cover the area

Typical grid node, there's thousands of them to cover the area

Also the path-smoothing has been improved. The old algorithm has a tendency to cut through area which is suppose to be unwalkable. The new algorithm has eliminate this entirely. And it has a build in mean smoothing to make the corner more... smooth.

Having say that, the new PathFinder is by no mean perfect. There are a lot of places which can use more work. You can expect me to keep working on it. And I have to say, at this point, the path smoothing seems to be a lot more taxing on the performance than the search algorithm itself. I totally didn't expect that. I'm guessing the next logical step would be optimising the path smoothing.

Status Update (NSS is awesome edition)

Just Submitted an update for PathFinder v1.0. I have put substantial amount into this update, almost everything has been rework. But I'll talk about it in later post, probably when the update is approved by Unity. But if you have been following the blog, it's basically about a more optimised and efficient graph type, as well as path-smoothing and addition of C# version of the code.

It's a bit worrying to be honest. My submission of last InputTouches update has been pending for more than 2 weeks. It normally take only a day or two, makes me wondering what has gone wrong. It's also frustrating at the same time that there are people who surely could use the update (which I promised) and I can't get it out. If you are wondering what's the InputTouches update is about, it contains some requested minor change by user as well as a whole set of examples in JS.

I'm looking forward to the approval of these two package. Also I have some plan for AssetStore, possibly a shocker, so stay tuned. :)

Apart from these, I've been working on a new but quite interesting free-lance work. It's still in early prototype and the game won't be available anytime soon. Still, it's always exciting to work on new stuff/mechanic that I haven't try before.

Finally, I should explain the title. What the hell is NSS? It's short for New Star Soccer. A ridiculously addicting and fun iOS game. It's rather terrifying, I find myself play it on my phone all the time, whenever I can, even when I can play stuff like guildwars2 and PES on my PC. However I suppose only those who have interest in football could really relate to it. The fact that it's so simple and yet it manage to capture some of the essence a whole a player contribution in a football match thing successfully is really impressive. Well not all of it is brilliant, certain aspect of it is quite arcady and gamey. Still credit where credit's due, it's really good. Consider that fact that it cost only $1 and it's free to try out. But if you plan to try it out, be warned that it's addicting as hell, so try at your own risk.