Posts Tagged ‘Code’
Posts that have some sort of code.
Android: how to create a loading screen – Part 2
Posted by Dimitri | Filed under Programming
This is the second tutorial from the post series that explains how to code a loading screen on Android. The first one can be found here. This post has a similar approach to the previous one, except this time, instead of using a AsyncTask to execute code on the background thread, a Thread and Handler objects are going to be used to achieve the same results.
The Activity featured below is somewhat similar to the first post, except this time, the UI rendering related functions calls will be more scattered throughout the Activity’s body. Additionally, the Runnable interface is going to be implemented multiple times in the below code. Not only that, but now it’s necessary to “kill” the thread manually after the code executes, a task that is handled automatically by the AsyncTask class (see this thread for more info).
All code has been developed and tested in Android 2.1, and is available for download at the end of the post.
Android: how to create a loading screen – Part 1
Posted by Dimitri | Filed under Programming
This is the first of three Android post in a series that explains how to code a simple loading screen that shows the progress of operation before the application’s View is loaded. This first tutorial objective is to create this loading screen in simplest way possible. The code featured in this tutorial has been developed and tested in Android 2.1, but it should work without much modification in later versions. All code featured in this tutorial is available for download at the end of the post.
Because of the nature of the Android operational system and the Activity stack, there’s no way to precisely determine the loading progress of an Activity. That’s why, in the below example, the Activity is going to be started, but instead of loading the standard View, it will load a ProgressDialog object and simulate a computationally heavy process on a background thread right on the beginning of the onCreate() method.
Unity: How to playback fullscreen videos using the GL class
Posted by Dimitri | Filed under Programming
This Unity programming tutorial explains how to use the immediate mode rendering available at the GL class for the playback of video files. There is already another post here on 41 Post that shows how to do the same thing using GUITexture component. However, in this tutorial, a quad is going to be rendered and the video will be played at its texture.
Not only the steps required for achieving fullscreen video playback are going to be explained, but how to properly scale the video based on the screen dimensions is also featured in this post. Warning: this tutorial works only with Unity Pro because the free version doesn’t support video decoding. This post has been created and tested in Unity version 3.4. At the end of the post, a Unity project featuring all the code explained here is available for download both in C# and JavaScript.
Unity: How to create a speech balloon
Posted by Dimitri | Filed under Programming
This Unity tutorial explains how to create a speech balloon, like the ones featured on comic books, in Unity3D. For any game, objects move around the screen, and in order to make the speech bubbles work, they have to follow the movement of these objects. However, the balloon can’t be translated in the 3D space, or else it will look like a regular billboard sign over the character’s head. So, it has to follow the character on the two dimensional screen space. The elongated edge of the balloon must also follow the character’s movement, stretching and shrinking accordingly.
To solve these two issues, a script is necessary, which will treat the round part and the triangular tip of the balloon separately.
The script will create a speech balloon by rendering these two parts separately. They must have the same color to create the illusion that it's a single element.
Android: Use ccache with Android NDK on Cygwin
Posted by Dimitri | Filed under Featured, Programming
This Android tutorial explains how to set-up ccache to work with the NDK on Cygwin environments. Ccache is a great tool that detects unnecessary code recompilation by comparing the current source compilation with previously cached results, thus reducing the time it takes to complete. The support for ccache has been officially added to the 7th revision of the NDK.
The instructions in this posts have been tested on Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bits and Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bits, using Cygwin 6.1, Eclipse 3.5.2 and obviously, Android NDK r7. The commands to compile Android native code are from this post. (more…)