Tag Archives: third-person

Unity3D Physics – Picking Up and Moving A Box (Fixing Bug in “Unfinished”)

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“Unfinished – An Artist’s Lament” was released about two months ago. I said I planned to release a small update, not to add content, but to improve some of the problems with it. One of the worst bugs is properly game-breaking: if you use an ability to move a box to be able to jump on, there’s a good chance it will wall through the floor or glide through the walls as you move it. This bug is fixed now, and this article is to help explain what I did before, what I did now to fix it, and will hopefully help other developers doing something similar.

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Unity 3D Jerky Camera – Resolved

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I’ve had issues with my Unity 3D project lately. If I zoom in towards a character and move around, the camera seems jerky, especially when looking at the background as I move. This doesn’t seem an issue with zoomed-out camera, strangely.

I’ve experimented a bit, but still don’t know exactly what the cause is. It seems the smoothing-variable I’m using has little effect, as when I zoom in the camera must follow more closely to the character’s position. It also appears mainly when I jump and walk, instead of just jumping or walking alone.

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Improving RAM For Hand-Drawn Pseudo-3D Graphics

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I keep thinking about better ways to improve my method for pseudo-3D hand-drawn graphics in games. It isn’t a very advanced method, and yet expands older methods that have been abandoned decades ago, creating traditional animation in 3D games in ways that computer animation has still be unable to mimic.

The problem with it? Never mind how it looks (I am not a professional animator in any sense, that it looks as good as it does with my ability alone is enough to convince me of its potential). It takes a lot of work to animate (still less than the typical animated film, which is hardly a comparison). More importantly, it takes a lot of RAM and hard drive space. Unlike CGI models, where the animation takes less data than the model itself (and thus animations can be added to a model with less concern), my method multiplies RAM used with every frame of animation. Every frame is its own, hand-drawn texture.

Add that there are different perspectives of one character (currently 24 in my latest version). If I have one animation with five frames, that’s 24*5 = 120 frames. If I have several animations, or add more frames for smoother animation, you can see how one character can have thousands of hand-drawn frames.

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Project James – Playable Test Demo of a Hand-Drawn 3D Game

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Ok, I’ve had my fun with some blogging, now let’s talk about why I’ve called you all here tonight.

From my previous post, you know that the first major game by Dust Scratch Games will involve 2D hand-drawn characters in 3D space.  That’s right: a hand-drawn 3d game. This isn’t necessarily the first time such a game was made: the JRPG “Time and Eternity” for the PS3 is advertised as the first playable anime, for example. But that game had the animated sprites in a fixed position in front of the camera, giving the impression of a crude first-person game with cartoons pasted on the front. This, among other reasons, was cause to generally poor reviews. Other games that tried hand-drawn images in games were either beautiful 2D games, or suffered for similar reasons of limitations in 3D.

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