Programming
- page 18Unity3D: Creating a GUI with both 3D and 2D elements
Posted by Dimitri | Mar 2nd, 2011
This post explains how to create a GUI on the Unity3D game engine that has both 2D and 3D elements in it. Some may say that is just a matter of setting up a new camera with a dedicated culling mask just to render the 3D elements on the GUI. While this is partially true, adding a 2D image using a script with GUI function calls will cause the 3D image to be covered by the 2D image. That’s why this post will focus on how to set a GUI that has a 3D element with a 2D background.
As usual, at the end of the post, a Unity3D project is available for download with everything that was explained here.
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Using C# delegates in Unity3D scripts
Posted by Dimitri | Feb 23rd, 2011
When Unity3D 3.0 came out, it not only fixed a lot of bugs and added features, but it also upgraded the Mono version being used, including C# language features like namespace support, linq and delegates. This post is going to be about the latter, explaining what is a delegate and what benefits it could bring when using it to develop games on Unity3D.
Basically, in C#, a delegate is a reference to a method or to a group of methods that have the same signature (returns the same type and has the same parameters). A better explanation can be found at Microsoft’s MSDN C# documentation: Continue reading: “Using C# delegates in Unity3D scripts”
Game Programming Basics: Creating a FPS counter
Posted by Dimitri | Feb 18th, 2011
Sometimes, while creating a game, a programmer realizes that he/she needs to make sure if some part of the code is running fast enough, before adding more things that could cause the game to slowdown. To properly measure a game’s performance, there is the need to program a FPS (frames per second) counter. As the name suggests, it will count the number of frames that where rendered at the period of one second.
This is an essential information when creating games, as it will serve as a strong indicator to measure the performance impact of a recently added element to the game.
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Android: Loading and playing videos from different sources
Posted by Dimitri | Feb 15th, 2011
This is the 41st post on the website! It explains how to load images from a variety of locations, such as the ‘Resources’ folder, the SD card and from a remote server. As usual, the source code is available for download at the end of the post.
Let’s start with the basics: video formats. At the time this is being written, Android supports .3gp and .mp4 video files encoded as H.263,H.264 and MPEG-4 SP file formats. For an updated list, visit this link.
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