Anyone into Android programming?

[emjay]

I don't know about a solid following, but I know that Microsoft had XNA, which worked for Windows and XBOX, but they just couldn't keep up with support for it, so they discontinued support and supported Unity instead.

I don't think Unity DOES really support all new phone features, but I'm not complaining-- in a couple days, I can put together a little game, port it to my phone, and it works.  That's better than anything else I've found.

Roll a Ball totally works on phone-- in fact the Marble game I showed IS Roll-A-Ball, basically with a couple animated tiles and added a touch control.  If you ever want help with that, let me know.

Nah, I'm not complaining either - it's incredible that it can do what it does, but I won't waste my time trying to figure out how it does what it does

I just meant I didn't think Roll a Ball would work on a phone in the exact form it is after you finish the tutorial, not that it wouldn't work with additional tweaks. Thanks for your offer of help... I may well take you up on that at some point. I'm in a quandary now as to whether I should try and consolidate what I've learned in the Roll a Ball project with another related project of my own - i.e. the snooker - or whether I should just start on the other projects which are very different from the Roll a Ball project. I think the best way is probably to try and do both

[bennyboy]

My experience with programming is that whenever you do a tutorial, you should try to modify it because that really consolidates everything in your brain. At this point, you've probably basically learned how to copy scripts from the tutorial site to your files. I recommend playing around with the materials to make the stuff look cooler, or add more tiles to make a little track to go around, or something like that. Or try and make more triggers that do new things-- make your ball change direction, for example, or jump way up in the air, or blink to a new location. Of course, that's just my two cents, but that's my experience: when I play with stuff and try to modify it or add new ideas, it's a lot more fun and I learn more.

Snooker's a great idea. I know something about that project, and I can guarantee you are going to learn a very valuable lesson in making that game!

[emjay]

My experience with programming is that whenever you do a tutorial, you should try to modify it because that really consolidates everything in your brain.  At this point, you've probably basically learned how to copy scripts from the tutorial site to your files.  I recommend playing around with the materials to make the stuff look cooler, or add more tiles to make a little track to go around, or something like that.  Or try and make more triggers that do new things-- make your ball change direction, for example, or jump way up in the air, or blink to a new location.  Of course, that's just my two cents, but that's my experience: when I play with stuff and try to modify it or add new ideas, it's a lot more fun and I learn more.

Snooker's a great idea.  I know something about that project, and I can guarantee you are going to learn a very valuable lesson in making that game!

I'm happy to go with your expert advice I was leaning that way anyway for pretty much the reasons you said and I just think it would be much more fun to do my own project and especially snooker because I'm always looking for a good sim of that anyway The other tutorials can wait.

I'm intrigued about the valuable lesson I'm going to learn, but don't tell me As far as I can see at this stage, the problems I will have to overcome and which weren't addressed in the tutorial are these:

1) the pockets of a snooker table are not just gaps in the walls but have their own rounded shape (if I recall correctly) therefore since the plane in the tutorial is just a square, or a rectangle if you scale it, I'm going to have to figure out how to 'cut' circles out of the corners and the middle.
2) in the tutorial objects are picked up but here I need to transfer the force from the cue ball to the object ball and therefore make the obect ball move and transfer its own force to subsequent balls
3) in the tutorial the ball doesn't bounce of the walls so I'll need to figure out how to do that
4) I need to work out how to simulate friction because the balls lose momentum every time they hit each other, the wall, or even just rolling on the cloth - otherwise the game would be better called 'ice snooker' because the balls would be bouncing around forever. Also if I want to get really picky, there's the effect of the nap of the cloth, however slight it may be.
5) I need to be able to simulate the effects of spin on the cue ball, i.e. screw shots etc, because they divert the path of the ball away from the standard plain ball right-angle that is probably quite easy to do in unity. That will have to be trial and error unless some bright spark has already worked out all the figures for that, hint hint But I'll try not to get ahead of myself - first thing's first, get one ball to move another.

[bennyboy]

Understand that Unity uses NVidia's PhysX engine, which includes gravity, friction, rotational momentum etc. already built in.

1) To make the snooker table, you should use blender or maya and just model them. You can probably find a free table mesh online that you can download, but it shouldn't be hard to just make your own.
2) If you put a bunch of balls with Rigidbody components, then the basic physics is already taken care of, no programming or additional calculation required. Right now, you can go do this in literally 1 minute.
3) The reason they don't bounce is that you are probably still applying your force, which is identical to the bounce velocity, i.e. just let go of the controls, and the ball should bounce. Or see #4.
4) You can create a "Physics Material" which will set the bounciness, friction, and some other things of an objects material. Zero friction is fun, and is how I got my ball to move through the slide without getting stuck due to friction.
5) Yep, you can do this, too. That's why if you look at my demo game, the Earth is rotating-- I'm applying a horizontal force, and it automatically starts rotating due to friction from the floor. You can also set the center of gravity to affect how the rotation works.

Making some balls bounce on a virtual table should be easy. Getting it to properly match the physics of a real table and balls will be almost impossible, I'm guessing. But just because it's not a perfect physical simulation doesn't mean it won't be a fun game, and good enough to convince non-pros.

[emjay]

Understand that Unity uses NVidia's PhysX engine, which includes gravity, friction, rotational momentum etc. already built in.

Cool. I hoped that would be the case - that all obvious physics effects would be built in and just essentially tweakable.

1) To make the snooker table, you should use blender or maya and just model them.  You can probably find a free table mesh online that you can download, but it shouldn't be hard to just make your own.

Looking at those two programs, Maya and Blender, I can't afford Maya and in any case it looks incredibly complicated and used for making very realistic 3D effects for films and suchlike. Blender on the other hand is open source and free so that will have to be my package of choice but I'll still have to learn it, which could take a while because I've never used that sort of software.

The thing about me and programming is I prefer it when the programming environment is essentially self contained, as Unity seems to be and as VB was. It's a flaw I know but I just get overwhelmed if I have to reach far and wide for everything and have to constantly keep learning new technologies and plugins. I just can't do it, just can't keep up. That's why I'm no good at Web Development - because your average webpage requires so many different technologies working together and those technologies are always changing. But I need to learn that aspect as well here so although my tendency would be to try and do everything myself with the tools I'm familiar with, which in this case will be Unity, Blender, and anything else you recommend, I really need to be able to work outside the box as well and that means getting assets from varied sources. So in other words I'd like to make the table myself but I think I should also try and find one elsewhere just so I know I can.

2) If you put a bunch of balls with Rigidbody components, then the basic physics is already taken care of, no programming or additional calculation required.  Right now, you can go do this in literally 1 minute.
3) The reason they don't bounce is that you are probably still applying your force, which is identical to the bounce velocity, i.e. just let go of the controls, and the ball should bounce.  Or see #4.
4) You can create a "Physics Material" which will set the bounciness, friction, and some other things of an objects material.  Zero friction is fun, and is how I got my ball to move through the slide without getting stuck due to friction.

Thanks, I'll bear all this in mind when I come to it. But for 3) it doesn't bounce even when you're not using the controls, but I'm sure that's easily solved as you say.

5) Yep, you can do this, too.  That's why if you look at my demo game, the Earth is rotating-- I'm applying a horizontal force, and it automatically starts rotating due to friction from the floor.  You can also set the center of gravity to affect how the rotation works.

Making some balls bounce on a virtual table should be easy.  Getting it to properly match the physics of a real table and balls will be almost impossible, I'm guessing.  But just because it's not a perfect physical simulation doesn't mean it won't be a fun game, and good enough to convince non-pros.

Yes I was thinking about that. It's a long way off I know but I wouldn't mind there being some sort of training mode in my game with markings on the cue ball so that you can see the effects of spin. And that also reminded me that most of the time the cue ball is moving it's actually just skimming the surface of the table rather than rolling as it does in the Roll a Ball project. In other words it is spinning one way, dependent on what type of shot you've played, but it is moving another until a certain point when the spin takes over and starts to affect its path. That will be another interesting aspect to try and model.

Anyway I know I'll never be able to get it perfect but I think it will be a lot of fun trying  

[bennyboy]

Looking at those two programs, Maya and Blender, I can't afford Maya and in any case it looks incredibly complicated and used for making very realistic 3D effects for films and suchlike. Blender on the other hand is open source and free so that will have to be my package of choice but I'll still have to learn it, which could take a while because I've never used that sort of software.

The thing about me and programming is I prefer it when the programming environment is essentially self contained, as Unity seems to be and as VB was. It's a flaw I know but I just get overwhelmed if I have to reach far and wide for everything and have to constantly keep learning new technologies and plugins. I just can't do it, just can't keep up. That's why I'm no good at Web Development - because your average webpage requires so many different technologies working together and those technologies are always changing. But I need to learn that aspect as well here so although my tendency would be to try and do everything myself with the tools I'm familiar with, which in this case will be Unity, Blender, and anything else you recommend, I really need to be able to work outside the box as well and that means getting assets from varied sources. So in other words I'd like to make the table myself but I think I should also try and find one elsewhere just so I know I can.

First of all, web programming was (not so bad now), the MOST PAINFUL fucking programming torture anyone could endure. New standards came out, and half of browsers use them, and half of them don't. IE deliberately rendered things differently than Firefox just to be dicks, etc. If you've ever seen the letters IE6, just the site of them will make you pull your hair out in agony.

You should think of modeling as being in the more permanent category. I've been doing it for over 10 years now, and nothing becomes obsolete. Models from 10 years ago still look great, and work fine, and if you want to model in the old way, it's perfectly acceptable. The new developments are mostly in new layers of features: making clip libraries of your animations, having better tools for animating fingers or mouths or clothes, etc. etc. But none of it is required in order for you to "keep up." In short, I recommend learning at least basic modeling techniques. . . for a phone game, that will for sure be all you need.

10 seconds on google yielded:
1) A free pool table model designed on/for blender at >>> POOL TABLE <<< There are many more available online.
2) A timelapse video showing some guy building a snooker table from just a reference image. . . you'd need some experience to do it, but it shows the whole thing:




In short, you can probably download everything you need, and by the time you ever make a game good enough to try to sell, you will be able to make your own models.

[emjay]

Thanks Benny, that's really comforting to know you don't (or didn't) like web programming for the same reasons as me... nice to know I'm not alone

And that's great to know about the modelling aspect. It means I can spend the rest of my life mastering it

The only reason I wanted to make phone games was because of the ease of distribution that comes from having the Play store - just one $20 (or thereabouts) one off registration fee and then you can sell whatever you like and Google doesn't take a cut of any kind, as far as I know. I would guess/hope that it's the same on the Windows Phone though I've never had one. But if Windows has a similar easy way of distributing programs these days - an app store as it were - then I'd happily make programs for Windows. I'm a bit behind the times as you've probably guessed so I don't know much of what's going on in the Windows world at the moment. I've only had this laptop a few days and before that Linux and before that, Windows XP. And speaking of this laptop, lots of strange blocky 'artifacts' have just started randomly flashing up on the screen. I've never seen that particular fault before with a PC or laptop so maybe this one has been sitting around in a warehouse too long - after all it was brand new but with Windows 7 - how does that happen? I just hope it goes the distance.

Thanks for the video. It was actually kind of beautiful and relaxing in a hypnotic sort of way... could have watched it all day. And the result was amazing. Photo-realistic with incredible detail right down to a cloud of smoke under the lights. I don't think mine needs to be quite that detailed

I couldn't find any snooker table blender models on Google, just pool tables and billiard tables, and mainly with balls and I really need them without. So I've just decided to use the pool table you linked to. Anyway it doesn't seem to have spots so I can probably add snooker spots to it rather than pool. I imported it successfully into Unity and am now in the process of creating another 'scene' in the Roll a Ball project to house it - just to experiment a bit with it using the existing ball mechanics, before using it in a brand new project with different ball mechanics.

[bennyboy]

Yeah, I'm not an expert in the pool-family of games. However, modifying one table into another type would probably be a good beginner project for modeling in Blender. I'll be going through the Blender beginner tutorials too, since I really don't know how to use it at all. . . maybe we can learn together.

As for the blocky artifacts. . . this doesn't sound encouraging. I hope you have a warrantee for it, because to me it sounds decidedly hardware-related rather than Windows-related. My guess would be a gimpy graphics card.

[emjay]

Yeah, I'm not an expert in the pool-family of games.  However, modifying one table into another type would probably be a good beginner project for modeling in Blender.  I'll be going through the Blender beginner tutorials too, since I really don't know how to use it at all. . . maybe we can learn together.

As for the blocky artifacts. . . this doesn't sound encouraging.  I hope you have a warrantee for it, because to me it sounds decidedly hardware-related rather than Windows-related.  My guess would be a gimpy graphics card.

I'm still getting those artifacts now Like checkered rectangles of black squares or lines... kind of like different shapes and sizes of barcodes ...popping up at different places on the screen at random intervals, but with seemingly more frequency than yesterday. I think it's gonna have to go back It does have a year's warranty but I'm incredibly pissed off cos I just got all this cool stuff set up

So I might have to hold off on learning Unity and Blender for a while, but I would really like to learn Blender with you - it's really comforting when an expert is also a beginner in something Do you think I should wait for this thing to give out or send it back now?

[bennyboy]

You can try the following:
1) new drivers
2) clean out any fans to get better airflow
3) download and run "speed fan" and crank up the fan speed

But the problem is almost for sure that your graphics card is overheating (or just faulty), and if you have a warranty, you should RMA it ASAP.