Retro Review: Hauting Starring Polterguy (Genesis)
Posted by Dimitri | Apr 15th, 2011 | Filed under Featured, Retro Games
This game was released back in 1993 for the Sega Genesis. The game features a very unique premise: to scare a family out of their home. As the title states, it’s a “haunting” game, in which the player takes control of a ghost named Polterguy that has the ability to manipulate ordinary objects like chairs, bathtubs and other furniture to generate poltergeist events.
The exact reasons why Polterguy needs to make the Sardini family leave their home are not explained at any point of the game, the introductory animation only describes each member of the family as people that deserve to be hated: Vito, the father, is rich and has a MBA in “sleazy economics”; Flo, the mother, is a selfish housewife that likes to spend money and the kids; Tony and Mimi are just annoying spoiled children. At the beginning of the game, they are all eating at the dinning room when the chandelier falls right into the table where the Sardini was gathered. After a brief tutorial that explains the game’s basics, the player takes control of Polterguy.
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Unity: How to create a GUI Sprite Sheet – Part 3
Posted by Dimitri | Apr 11th, 2011 | Filed under Featured, Programming
The final part of a series that explains how to create a GUI Sprite Sheet in Unity. This post will focus on explaining how the code works. For those who haven’t read the first and second parts, please do before going any further. As most post series in this website, there is a download with everything that had been explained at the end of the post.
With all images and the GUI Skin already set at the Unity Editor, now we just need some code to render the GUI on the screen. The following script correctly renders separately each element from the sprite sheet, and it’s attached to the Main Camera:
Continue reading: “Unity: How to create a GUI Sprite Sheet – Part 3”
Unity: How to create a GUI Sprite Sheet – Part 2
Posted by Dimitri | Apr 10th, 2011 | Filed under Programming
This is the second part of a series that will explain how to create a GUI sprite sheet for Unity. For this part, we will take the images created in the first post and import them to Unity. Also, this post features how to correctly set the images to be part of a GUI Skin object so they can be used as part of a game’s interface.
After having all images correctly placed at the sprite sheet, create a new GUI Skin by right-clicking anywhere inside the Project tab and select the following: Create->GUI Skin. Then, import the images in Unity, by dragging and dropping them inside this tab. It’s a good idea to put everything GUI related at the same folder, like this: Continue reading: “Unity: How to create a GUI Sprite Sheet – Part 2”
Unity: How to create a GUI Sprite Sheet – Part 1
Posted by Dimitri | Apr 7th, 2011 | Filed under Featured, Programming
This post is the first of a series that explains how to create a GUI sprite sheet (a.k.a. atlas map) in the Unity game engine. This map consists of buttons, text areas, backgrounds and other interface elements joined together to create various joined image files with all interface elements inside it.
Here, the focus will be on how to prepare and create this images at an image editing software, which is the most important step. The next post of this series will explain how to import these images in Unity and place them inside a GUI Skin object.
The first thing to do is to have all the GUI elements needed for the game or specific part of the game. They have to be already created before building the sprite sheet, at least their size have to be already defined. Throughout this post, the following GUI elements will be used to exemplify how to correctly join the images together:
Continue reading: “Unity: How to create a GUI Sprite Sheet – Part 1”
Import STL libraries to the Android NDK code
Posted by Dimitri | Apr 4th, 2011 | Filed under Programming
This is a quick tip for those who are beginning to write native Android code. As one may have noticed, it isn’t possible to use containers like, string, vector, list inside the NDK samples. These are all part of the STL (Standard Template Library), and are expected to be available when writing C++ code.
To add STL to your NDK code, locate the Application.mk file inside your project’s jni folder. If it isn’t there, create it. Please note that the Application.mk is not the Android.mk file! The Android.mk file instructs the compiler and the JNI on how NDK code should be handled. The Application.mk, works similarly as the Android manifest file for your NDK code, allowing the programmer to add permissions and define other applications’ properties, like such as ‘enabling’ the STL support.
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