Programming
- page 22Android Manifest File for a Game
Posted by Dimitri | Dec 15th, 2010
Android was designed to see every application as a collection of Activities united by intents. It also relies on the Activity stack to determine what Activity will be launched after the user finishes it by pressing the ‘back’ button. While the stack system is helpful for users and for some applications, this default behavior isn’t a necessarily a good thing for games.
That is mainly because of two things: a game use a lot of hardware resources from the device that runs it, meaning that having other activities in the same stack as the game Activity can have an impact on its performance. And the stack default behavior could lead to multiple instances of the same game running in the same stack.
Continue reading: “Android Manifest File for a Game”
Unity3D: JavaScript vs. C# – Part 4
Posted by Dimitri | Dec 12th, 2010
This is the 4th post of a series that tries to explain the main differences between JavaScript and C# when programming for Unity3D. In this post, some differences between yielding (pausing) code execution in these two programming languages will be pointed out. Before continuing, it is highly recommended that you read the first, second and third other posts of the series.
As explained before, yielding pauses the code execution, being very useful to game programming, as you have a better control when things will happen in your game. Whether using C# or JavaScript in Unity3D, one can’t simply yield the Update() method. There is a workaround for that, but as you might have guessed, they are different for the two programming languages we are discussing. Since these workarounds are often used, they will be the examples presented on this post. Let’s start by seeing how to yield a JavaScript code: Continue reading: “Unity3D: JavaScript vs. C# – Part 4”
Android: Changing the ‘back’ button behaviour
Posted by Dimitri | Dec 7th, 2010
Sometimes, when programming Android applications, there is the need to assign another behavior for the ‘Back’ button that isn’t the default one. Although not recommended, there are some cases that changing the ‘Back’ button behavior is necessary, such as to avoid accidentally finishing the current Activity.
For example, a text editor, should confirm if the user really wants to quit without saving the current changes, or a game, that check if it is the player’s intention to forfeit the current game session.
So, to start changing the ‘Back’ button, behavior, you need to override the onKeyDown() method and than check if the desired button has been pressed: Continue reading: “Android: Changing the ‘back’ button behaviour”
Unity3D: JavaScript vs. C# – Part 3
Posted by Dimitri | Dec 4th, 2010
This is the third part of a series that show some of the differences between JavaScript and C# when writing scripts for Unity3D game engine. I suggest that you read the first and second post of the series to better understand what is going on here.
In this third part, I will point out some differences between JavaScript and C# by writing a script that makes a GameObject move forward. So, let’s start with the programming language that will take the smallest number of lines to make a GameObject move, JavaScript: Continue reading: “Unity3D: JavaScript vs. C# – Part 3”