Archive for the ‘Featured’ Category
Retro Review: Hauting Starring Polterguy (Genesis)
Posted by Dimitri | Filed under Featured, Retro Games
This game was released back in 1993 for the Sega Genesis. The game features a very unique premise: to scare a family out of their home. As the title states, it’s a “haunting” game, in which the player takes control of a ghost named Polterguy that has the ability to manipulate ordinary objects like chairs, bathtubs and other furniture to generate poltergeist events.
The exact reasons why Polterguy needs to make the Sardini family leave their home are not explained at any point of the game, the introductory animation only describes each member of the family as people that deserve to be hated: Vito, the father, is rich and has a MBA in “sleazy economics”; Flo, the mother, is a selfish housewife that likes to spend money and the kids; Tony and Mimi are just annoying spoiled children. At the beginning of the game, they are all eating at the dinning room when the chandelier falls right into the table where the Sardini was gathered. After a brief tutorial that explains the game’s basics, the player takes control of Polterguy.
Continue reading: “Retro Review: Hauting Starring Polterguy (Genesis)”
Unity: How to create a GUI Sprite Sheet – Part 3
Posted by Dimitri | Filed under Featured, Programming
The final part of a series that explains how to create a GUI Sprite Sheet in Unity. This post will focus on explaining how the code works. For those who haven’t read the first and second parts, please do before going any further. As most post series in this website, there is a download with everything that had been explained at the end of the post.
With all images and the GUI Skin already set at the Unity Editor, now we just need some code to render the GUI on the screen. The following script correctly renders separately each element from the sprite sheet, and it’s attached to the Main Camera:
Continue reading: “Unity: How to create a GUI Sprite Sheet – Part 3”
Unity: How to create a GUI Sprite Sheet – Part 1
Posted by Dimitri | Filed under Featured, Programming
This post is the first of a series that explains how to create a GUI sprite sheet (a.k.a. atlas map) in the Unity game engine. This map consists of buttons, text areas, backgrounds and other interface elements joined together to create various joined image files with all interface elements inside it.
Here, the focus will be on how to prepare and create this images at an image editing software, which is the most important step. The next post of this series will explain how to import these images in Unity and place them inside a GUI Skin object.
The first thing to do is to have all the GUI elements needed for the game or specific part of the game. They have to be already created before building the sprite sheet, at least their size have to be already defined. Throughout this post, the following GUI elements will be used to exemplify how to correctly join the images together:
Continue reading: “Unity: How to create a GUI Sprite Sheet – Part 1”
Android: Retrieving the Camera preview as a Pixel Array
Posted by Dimitri | Filed under Featured, Programming
This post explains how to take the live images created by Android’s camera preview feature and return them as a RGB array, that can be used to all sorts of things, like custom effects preview and real-time image filtering. This post used the CameraPreview class that already comes bundled with Android’s SDK because it has everything already set-up, that way is just a matter of inserting more code. The techniques shown here works with Android 2.1 and should work with versions 1.6 and 1.5.
The first thing to do is to import the API Demos project to your Workspace. To do that, in Eclipse, click File -> New -> Android Project. In the dialog that has just opened, give the project a name at the first field (like API Demos 8) and select ‘Create project from existing source’. Now browse to <Android SDK folder>\samples\android-7\ApiDemos. Finally, mark Android 2.1 as the Build Target and click Finish: Continue reading: “Android: Retrieving the Camera preview as a Pixel Array”
Android: Loading and playing videos from different sources
Posted by Dimitri | Filed under Featured, Programming
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.
Continue reading: “Android: Loading and playing videos from different sources”