Archive for the ‘Programming’ Category
Android: Acessing the gyroscope sensor for simple applications
Posted by Dimitri | Filed under Programming
This post explains how to get values from the gyroscope (or any sensor that returns the device’s relative angle) to create simple application. The reason why I’m stating ‘for simple applications’ is because the code featured here is already deprecated. I’m just explaining how to do it because it still works, and it’s very clean and short to explain, as opposed to the new method, which is much more accurate but more complex to implement.
Still, it’s possible to use it for simple applications, although, if the application requires accuracy from the sensors, such as augmented reality applications or even games, it’s recommended to use the getRotationMatrix() method from the Sensor Manger class instead.
With that said, the following code just prints the rotation values from the gyroscope on the screen: Continue reading: “Android: Acessing the gyroscope sensor for simple applications”
Android: How to return RGB values from an image file
Posted by Dimitri | Filed under Programming
Surprisingly, it’s quite easy to get the RGB value from an image file in Android. It’s certainly a lot easier than retrieving the pixel values from the Camera Preview. All that is required is to load the image file into a Bitmap object and them call the getPixel() method from the loaded bitmap.
It’s also possible to call this method to create an array of alpha and RGB values (ARGB) without calling the copyPixelsToBuffer() method, avoiding the use of buffers in Android which make things more complicated than it should be. As an example, the following code prints the color values of the pixels from the 4 corners of the image in LogCat and creates a RGBA array that stores each pixel color value:
Continue reading: “Android: How to return RGB values from an image file”
Unity: How to use a GUI Texture to play fullscreen videos
Posted by Dimitri | Filed under Programming
Warning: this tutorial only works with Unity Pro because the free version doesn’t come with video playback support. The code was created and tested with Unity version 3.3. It won’t work for versions 2.6 and below (requires some adaptation).
This Unity post explains how to set up a GUI Texture at the Unity editor and the code necessary to play a fullscreen video, that can be used for the studio logo animation at the beginning of the game, the game’s intro or any other video that needs to take the whole screen. It also explains how to properly scale the video based on the screen dimensions. At the end of the post, a Unity project featuring all the code explained here is available for download.
Continue reading: “Unity: How to use a GUI Texture to play fullscreen videos”
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 2
Posted by Dimitri | Filed under Programming
This is the second part of a series that will explain how to create a GUI sprite sheet for Unity. For this part, we will take the images created in the first post and import them to Unity. Also, this post features how to correctly set the images to be part of a GUI Skin object so they can be used as part of a game’s interface.
After having all images correctly placed at the sprite sheet, create a new GUI Skin by right-clicking anywhere inside the Project tab and select the following: Create->GUI Skin. Then, import the images in Unity, by dragging and dropping them inside this tab. It’s a good idea to put everything GUI related at the same folder, like this: Continue reading: “Unity: How to create a GUI Sprite Sheet – Part 2”