As this is my very first post on anything Unity3D related, I thought I would share this: The single, most powerful bit of code that I use. Every day. It’s not really that complicated, but before I discovered it coding for Unity’s GUI was a bit less pleasant.
What I’m referring to is a little tidbit that scales the entire GUI based on the resolution that the graphics were authored at. So without further ado..
(more…)
So I’ve been gone quite a little while.. It’s nothing personal, I’ve just had my hands in so many things and finding the time..
Anyways, I’ve been up to a lot of cool stuff! Upgraded job positions. Spent some time working with the Unreal engine. Made a big shift towards Unity3D. Finished up and started a couple huge multi-year projects. Got a motorcycle. Grew an awesome garden and beard. Good stuff.
I’ve been working on some libraries I’d like to share bits of. Also, to show a lot of recent Unity stuff. And don’t think I’ve forgotten about those Spritesheet tutorials. I’ve got about a billion requests for those.
Hope to add some stuff soon!
Ben
If you haven’t already read the intro to this tutorial, you can find it here. In it we are introduced to sprite sheets, what they are, and some examples for where to use them.
One of those examples included combining many assets into a single sprite sheet. We can then extract a portion of this bitmap as its own unique element and use it as if we had loaded it separately. This kind of sprite sheet could be used for a variety of things. Maybe you’re designing an interface and you want to group similar UI elements in order to load them all at once. You could also find yourself developing a game in which there are many items for the player to collect and you need an easy way to organize them. The example below shows such a sprite sheet:
Images © Nintendo
Like we mentioned above, this kind of sprite sheet would be the most useful to us if we had a way to extract an individual element from it. Thankfully with the help of some code and a little Triforce of Wisdom we can do just that.
Certainly many of you heard some speculation recently that the iPhone might finally be getting Flash, only to be followed by the disappointing announcement of – No, you wish, keep dreaming. Quite frankly I wasn’t too surprised or therefore disappointed, but still a little bitter. The idea of developing for perhaps the biggest technological craze of my lifetime would be both financially and ‘spiritually‘ intriguing. Since Flash content makes up a huge percentage of the web now and the iPhone is all about that it makes sense right? I mean even some of the clunkiest of phones now have the ability to display Flash content. So why won’t the iPhone get with the freakin’ program already?
Basically it all comes down to the fact that Apple can’t make any money off of browser based games and utilities. It would kill their App Store – Not to mention: Why would anyone still be willing to pay $100 A Year for the SDK if all you needed was some hosting space and a domain name?
It’s ok.. I didn’t think “There’s a Website For That.” was too catchy of a slogan anyways.
I’ve been using Flash Builder 4 beta for a couple of months now and for the most part have been quite pleased. FB is the follow up to Flex 3. Adobe states that the name change is to help distinguish between the open-source Flex framework and their commercial IDE. Makes sense, but personally I like the name packaged with the initial beta release – ‘Gumbo’!
So anyways, the license on my copy of Flash Builder mysteriously stopped working yesterday. After a brief panic attack I decided to check out the Adobe Labs website and noticed that the beta 2 release was out. Cool! As with beta 1, my Flex 3 license is supposed to provide me with a new working FB copy – however, licensing software is one of my least favorite things to do so I’ll get back to that after the weekend. The renewed 60 day trial will suffice for now.
Since I was in this ‘update’ state of mind I decided to peruse my usual avenues and came across some info concerning the CS5 Suite. My initial reaction was, “Oh God, not another one already..“. I still haven’t gotten used to the CS4 interface, and at my office I’m still using CS3. I’m also quite afraid of Adobe turning into another Autodesk. I have to admit though – as far as Flash goes, there is A LOT of cool stuff going on.
For starters, Flash CS5 ‘Viper‘:
and my favorite:
CS5 is set to release in April of 2010. I didn’t really spend a lot of time looking at the other aspects of the Suite, but one of the best resources for info I found is cs5.org. If there’s anything cool I missed be sure to let me know!
Ben
Kirupa
Nathan Szerdy