Unity Crash Course

This week I attended a lecture series in Unity hosted by ITU. Two nice guys from Unity, Joe and Emil, gave a guide tour through a lot of Unity's features from animation, textures, GUI and editor scripting. They covered tons of stuff and it turned out to be a nice introduction to Unity.

Adding to the greatness of it all was the time given to questions from the audience. I got to ask what was wrong with the sprite sheet animation code since it was giving my this odd graphics problem over time. At first Joe found it just as strange as me but after a trip back to the Unity-factory he could give me the solution.

It turns out the offset float value on the y-axe kept in increase over time. This would be fine if it wasn't for the fact that the float as it increased would be round up thereby constantly increasing in inaccuracy.

Solution: Adding Mathf.Repeat to the offset's x value with the length of 1.
offset.y = Mathf.Repeat(offset.y,1);
This ensures the value every time it goes above 1 is returned to count from 0 instead.

And now it works! Yaaahhhhhh!

Sprite Shiit

As I wrote last I've gotten the sprite animation somewhat working and I've even found a good way of making the sprite sheet. But I still haven't found the trick to getting the quality of the images right :(

So to start with the quality seems fine almost anyway as you can see here:

But after a while of running the application the graphics get blurred as you can see in this second screenshot. I have no idea why.

If anyone out there has an idea as to what I'm doing wrong then please comment.

It Moves!

I've got the code for animating sprite sheets working. I had made the mistake of setting a variable as a float instead of an integer. In human lingo this mean I was working with a decimal number where I was supposed to use a "whole" number. I took me a while to figure this out, but by now at least I understand the code I borrowed a lot better.

I changed this:
float index = Time.time*fps;
to this:
int index = (int)(Time.time*fps);

Current screenshot of application:

Everything looks a mess. I'm trying to figure out why my graphics gets pixelated now that I've change to Unity3 and while doing so I've piled graphics in different resolutions.

Talking of Unity3 the mysterious icon issue has been fixed and it's now super easy to add an icon picture under the player settings and best of all - it works!

Power of Two

I'm slowly starting to figure out how I can add graphics to the game. Basically I'm getting tired of the green, red and blue squares. So now I'll go for red, yellow(!) and green blinking circles instead.

I'll be working with sprite sheets for the animation. So far I've managed to get a clumsy animation running on the iPad by using a piece of java script I borrowed from the Unity community wiki. But I want to work in C# so now I have to rewrite it.

Oh and the "power of two"-title refers to the fact that in order to get nice graphics on the iPad I have to remember to use image sizes that are a power of two e.g. 256 x 1024.