sOur's sandbox

Notes of problem approaching from a newbie programmer

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I’m not dead! I’m just lazy.

Long time no see. Decent amount of time has passed since last post. Just to show that I still exist I’ll make a post about my current project situation.

Sadly I stopped playing with Unity and #C. It didn’t hooked me. Recently I started learning about web development. I learned basics of front-end and currently learning about back-end. To be more specific: JavaScript ( Node.js, Express.js and p5.js ) it’s quite interesting. It resembles a lot LUA, maybe it’s one of the reason why I didn’t quit yet. ( I know that you can code in Unity with JavaScript, I just didn’t tried it yet. )

Also started working on my Garry’s Mod projects. Have few nice ideas that I want to see come alive. I always try to make a small introduction video about my projects, of course if they are big enough for 1 min. video.

If you find this “dry” text entertaining you might want to check from time to time my YouTube channel. I’m not a regular YouTuber that uploads videos on regular basis, I upload only when I have something to show. 

If you have any questions or just want to chat send me a message on steam or youtube. You can try sending it on tumblr but I don’t promise that I’ll answer it as soon as possible. 

Youtube

Steam Profile

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Learn and apply

I’ll let myself to skip the formal part of post.

So yesterday I completed one of the hardest Space Shooter problem, the “array or List” problem. So I learned the hard way that List is way better than array for what I’m looking for. Today I had a chance to show what I learned in past so I made asteroid falling/passing mechanic ( also tried something new with prefabs) and implemented some weaponry.

Progress:

Talking about asteroids, well the whole principle is the same as passing star one ( Post where I talked about scripting passing stars ). There is a global limit, spawning cool down, one loop for checking position, another loop for destroying fallen asteroids. But the interesting part is pre-codded ( or at least I would like to call it like that ) prefabs. In passing star script I codded entire small star behavior inside background script and for some people it might look too messy ( and in the mean time for me too ) because, what I think, background shouldn’t be responsible for separate object mechanics ( despite that I use background script as a main game script ). Of course I had to try something different, so I made an asteroid prefab with small script inside that describes asteroid movement mechanic and all I had to do in background script is to spawn and check the position. In general, the code itself looks more clearer and easier to understand.

The weaponry, well I didn’t had to think a lot because I already did two similar systems the main different is that the projectiles have to go upward instead of downward. Of course I had to add collision system, used CircleCollider2D and what I did: every time projectile enters a collision with object it checks object’s   tag, all asteroids have “asteroid” tag so if tag matches projectile and asteroid gets removed, and public variable “asteroid_currentCount” ( in background script, which tracks current amount of asteroids in game ) gets decreased by 1.

And almost forgot to mention, I added Ship movement. It’s very basic: A - move to left, B - move to right. When ship gets close to border the AddForce function gets canceled and it’s drag get increased x10 ( makes stopping a lot smoother, not instant. Nobody likes instant stop ).

As always link to source files:

Link to github! ( Yeah Hyperlinks! )

P.S. By the way, my all time goals in scripting is to implement path finding algortihm ( Dijkstra’s for begging would be alright ) and script maze generator. I know that they are basic and I could use examples to make them. But for now I want to get comfortable with C#

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Sharpening skills

Recently I started a new project. It will be something like “Space Invaders”. I thought it’s not that hard to make it and I might give it a shot. So here I’m making prototype of classic space game.

Progress: I’ve made an background that slowly slides down and made small particle-like stars to slide down ( imitation of passing stars? ).

Background sliding was the easy part, however making passing stars took some time. At first I tried to use arrays for storing each star object it all went okay until I came to part where I had to check star’s position and if it went beyond limits remove it. At first it looked like it is working but after few tests I realized that it is not even close to what I want so the endless struggle began. The code began to look messy, lots of useless dummy-variables and endless debugging. After a lot of failures I realized that looking for bug is pointless and I need to find another way to solve this problems.

And this is where I instantly remembered “List” library from Unity scripting tutorials and so I started to implement List! The whole script looked very similar to previous one with arrays. I managed to script the whole thing and, well, it worked but in the same time it didn’t. The stars were appearing, passing and disappearing but the console was flooded with errors: “InvalidOperationException Collection was modified”. After spending some time googling I found out that “foreach” loop in C# doesn’t like to edit List that it is currently looping through ( it sounds logic enough ). So after research and bit of thinking I came up with idea to make secondary list to store star-objects for later destruction. Currently, passing star script contains two main loops: first one who checks passing star position and if it is out of boundaries it gets stored to second list, where the second loop is responsible for deleting elements from first list.

Why arrays at first point? Well, from codding in LUA I was pretty comfortable with arrays that don’t have determined size, it was very convenient and useful but before I started learning C# I didn’t knew that there are languages that require set size for array.

For those who are interested how my script look like:

https://github.com/siauras/Small-Projects/blob/master/Space_shooting_source/backgroundBehaviour.cs

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New ideas, new things to learn

It’s been a while since I wrote here. So to keep myself up to date I’ll write something.

Recently I came up with idea to recreate an classic game  “Tetris” in C# but as scripting experience has shown I’m currently not ready for it. Tetris is going to be put off for a while ( actually until I get confident with my scripting skills ).

To keep myself busy, I’m going to make few simpler scripts. Currently I’m thinking about Tic-Tac-Toe. ( I saw Unity has integrated networking system, I might try ).

Scripting progress: currently I have encountered a major problem ( major for me, minor for everyone else ) I can’t understand how local and world positions works in Unity. Had a lot of problem with calculating direction from specific object to mouse but I hope soon I will tackle it.

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First step in a road of learning

Just finished first Unity project “Snakie”. As the title says it is a classic game “Snake” prototype.

It took me a lot of time to finish but despite the struggle I not only managed to complete it but I also learned an important lesson about C# List (library?). Also as you can see I tried to play a bit with lighting just to see how it works.

I suppose I have to explain the basic algorithm of this particular script. At first we generate the tile map ( grid ). Tiles are basically 3D cube objects. During the grid generation I assign multi-dimensional array value to tile gameObjects ( cubes ). “i.e. tileHolder[x,y] = tile1″ this will help in further script development. After the grid is done generating I set the middle tile to snakes head and tile before it ( x-1)  to it’s first body segment  At this moment I started to code the movement mechanics, they are pretty self-explanatory with keys “WASD” you determine the snakes movement direction and every half second ( 0.1 sec.) snakes position gets updated. Then comes the snake body following mechanic. The mechanic contains two main parts, the first one is responsible for setting first segment of body part to oldSnakes ( after snake makes a movement we save it’s previous position) coordinate position. The second part of movement mechanics is looping through all left snake body segments and setting their position to previous one segment. After movement mechanics I script the collision detection everytime snake changes position it checks if the new position isn’t it’s own body, if it is then end game else continue. Then comes the random food spawning position which is very simple, randomly spawn a yellow cube between whole grid size

Yeah, explaining script working algorithm isn’t my strongest area. I’ll add the source code for interested ones. Code left with all comments and functions without use because it will show how I approach problems.

Github of “Snakies” source files:

https://github.com/siauras/Small-Projects/tree/master/Snakie-source_files

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Hello World!

“First of all, I don’t want to call this project my blogging. It’s just thoughts about programming from amateur perspective but for the sake of first post I will use word blog.”

Yep, you are right, here is official sOur’s blog. The “blog” project was stuck on my white board for a week.

So little introduction I think you would be nice, so this blog is about my programming projects. Main goal of it is to clear my mind and to have notes about approaching new problems in scripting. Currently programming is a hobby for me and it’s pretty obvious ( lack of optimization in scripts choosing harder paths, etc... ).

 Also this blog will help me to improve my English writing skills, I know I need it.

P.S. I’m new user here so I need to get used to tumblr and writing such articles? :)