I have a simple DES model where spheres pass through 4 stations whose delay times are adjusted by parameters connected to sliders. I flood the system with variation at two stations and I'd like to clear the stations and queues. See images and code in photos. After the reset, an image of the sphere remains in the lower right corner of the queue location even though there are no agents in the queue and the queue size is 0. Why does this image remain here?
You removed the agents from the queue but did not destroy the agents. So they just continue to "live" somewhere and seem to choose the bottom right corner as the default animation position. They probably also all stack on top of each other.
Either destroy them as well or use the jumpTo(x,y) method to move them out of sight
Related
I have a game that requires the player to roll two die. As this is a multiplayer game, the way I currently do this is have 6 animations (1 for each die's outcome). When the player clicks a button, it sends a request to my server code. My server code determines the die's outcome and sends the results to the client. The client then plays the corresponding animations.
This works ok, but has some issues. For instance, if the server sends back two of the same values (two 6's, for example) then the animations don't work correctly. As both animations are the same, they overlay each other, and it looks like only one die was rolled.
Is there a better way to do this? Instead of animations, using "real" dice? If that's the case, I always need to be sure to "pre-determine" the outcome of the dice roll, on the server. I also need to make sure the dice don't fall off the table or jostle any of the other player pieces on the board.
thanks for any ideas.
The server only needs to care about the value result, not running physics calculations.
Set up 12 different rolling animations:
Six for the first die
Six for the second die
Each one should always end with the same modeled face pointing upwards (the starting position isn't relevant, only the ending position). For the latter steps you'll probably want to adjust the model's UV coordinates to use a very tall or very wide texture (or just a slice of a square one). So not like this but rather all in a line 1-2-3-4-5-6.
The next step is picking a random animation to play. You've already got code to run a given animation, just set it to pick randomly instead of based on the die-roll-value from the server:
int animNum = Mathf.Floor(Random.Next()*6);
Finally, the fun bit. Adjusting the texture so that the desired face shows when the animation is done. I'm going to assume that you arrange your faces along the top edge of your square texture. Material.SetTextureOffset().
int showFace = Mathf.Floor(Random.Next()*6); //this value should come from the server
die.renderer.material.SetTextureOffset(1f/6 * showFace,0);
This will set the texture offset such that the desired face will show on top. You'll even be able to see it changing in the inspector. Because of the UVs being arranged such that each face uses the next chunk over and because textures will wrap around when reaching the edge (unless the texture is set to Clamp in its import settings: you don't want this here).
Note that this will cause a new material instance to be instantiated (which is not very performant). If you want to avoid this, you'll have to use a material property block instead.
You could simulate the physics on the server, keep track of the positions and the orientations of the dice for the duration of the animation, and then send the data over to the client. I understand it's a lot of data for something so simple, but that's one way you can get the rolls to appear realistic and synced between all clients.
If only Unity's physics was deterministic that would be a whole lot easier.
Since there is no accumulation buffer in opengles, what shroud I do to achieve a trail? If I use frame buffer to simulate it, will it cost too much to make the tail looks smoothly?
There is usually not enough data to create a trail from a single state. Even including the speed will make it look very poor if the ball changes the direction of movement. So some kind of information of the previous object states is quite necessary.
It would be possible to use a separate channel to hold the previous states such as stencil buffer or even the alpha channel on which you could create a decay system. That means you would draw the ball on this channel on every frame but before drawing it you would reduce the whole channel by some value so the "older" parts slowly fade out. This separate ball drawing would need to be something like a radial gradient so you will receive a relatively smooth trail but will be far from perfect and for relatively fast movement some additional post processing will be mandatory unless the result is incidently a desired effect.
A more suitable approach is to contain an object position trace on the CPU. Simply keep pushing current positions on the stack and removing those being too old (for instance keep 20 latest positions). Then use these positions to create a shape representing a ball tail. At this point the chances are limitless. For instance you may design a tail as an image and then create a rectangle-like shape from the positions which produces an awesome tail effect if done properly.
I am making a game and i have come across a hard part to implement into code. My game is a tile-bases platformer with lots of enemies chasing you. basically, in theory, I want my enemies to be able to, every frame/second/2 seconds, find the realistic, and shortest path to my player. I originally thought of A-star as a solution, but it leads the enemies to paths that defy gravity, which is not good. Also, multiple enemies will be using it every second to get the latest path, and then walk the first few tiles of it. So they will be discarding the rest of the path every second, and just following the first few tiles of it. I know this seems like a lot, to calculate a new path every second, all at the same time, if their is more than one enemy, but I don't know any other way to achieve what i want.
This is a picture of what I want:
Explanation: The green figure is the player, the red one is an enemy. the grey tiles are regular, open, nothing there tiles, the brown tiles being ones that you can stand on. And finally the highlighted yellow tiles represents the path that i want my enemy to be able to find, in order to realistically get to the player.
SO, the question is: What realistic path-finding algorithm can i use to acquire this? While keeping it fast?
EDIT*
I updated the picture to represent the most complicated map that their could be. this map represents what the player of my game actually sees, they just use WASD and can move around and they see themselves move through this 2d plat-former view. Their will be different types of enemies, all with different speeds and jump heights. but all will have enough jump height and speed to make the jumps in this map, and maneuver through it. The maps are generated by simply reading an XML file that has the level data in it. the data is then parsed and different types of tiles are placed in the tile holding sprite, acording to what the XML says. EX( XML node: (type="reg" graphic="grass2" x="5" y="7") and so the x and y are multiplied by the constant gridSize (like 30 or something) and they are placed down accordingly. The enemies get their frame-by-frame instruction from an AI class attached to them. This class is responsible for producing this path and return the first direction to the enemy, this should only happen every second or so, so that the enemies don't follow a old, wrong path. Please let me know if you understand my concept, and you have some thought/ideas or maybe even the answer that i'm looking for.
ALSO: the physics in this game is separate from the pathfinding, they work just fine, using a AABB vs AABB concept (the player and enemies also being AABBs).
The trick with using A* here is how you link tiles together to form available paths. Take for example the first gap the red player would need to cross. The 'link' to the next platform (aka brown tile to the left) is actually a jump action, not a move action. Additionally, it's up to you to determine how the nodes connect together; I'd add a heavy penalty when moving from a gray tile over a brown tile to a gray tile with nothing underneath just for starters (without discouraging jumps that open a shortcut).
There are two routes I see personally: running a quick prediction of how far the player can jump and where they'd jump and adjusting how the algorithm determines node adjacency or accept the path and determine when parts of the path "hang" in the air (no brown tile immediately below) and animate the enemy 'jumping' to the next part of the path. The trick is handling things when the enemy may pass through brown tiles in the even the path isn't a parabola.
I am not versed in either solution; just something I've thought about.
You need to give us the most complicated case of map, player and enemy behaviour (including jumping up and across speed) that you are going to either automatically create or manually create so we can give relevant advice. The given map is so simple, put the map in an 2-dimensional array and then the initial player location as an element of that map and then first test whether lower number column on the same row is occupied by brown if not put player there and repeat until false then same row higher column and so on to move enemy.
Update: from my reading of the stage generation- its sometime you create- not semi-random.
My suggestion is the enemy creates clones of itself with its same AI but invisible and each clone starts going in different direction jump up/left/right/jump diagonal right/left and every time it succeeds it creates a new clone- basically a genetic algorithm. From the map it seems an enemy never need to evaluate one path over another just one way fails to get closer to the player's initial position and other doesn't.
I am implementing a turn based game, there are two sides and each side has several units, at each specific moment only one unit can move across the board.
Since only one unit can move at a time, after i figure out where it should go, as far as the simulation is concerned it Can instantly be teleported there, but playing the game you would want to see the unit moving so that you realise who moved and where he went.
The question is, would you put the movement algorithm (eg interpolating between 2 points in N seconds) in the model and then have the view show the unit in the interpolated position without even knowing that it is moving, or teleport the unit and notify the view that it should show the unit moving as best as it wants.
If you would take the second approach, how would you keep the simulation from running too far ahead of the view, would you put the view in command of resuming the simulation after the movement ended?
Thanks in advance, Xtapodi.
Ah, yet another example that reminds us that MVC was never originally designed for real-time graphics. ;)
I would store the current position and the previous position in the model. When the object moves, the current position is copied into the previous position, the new position is copied into the current position, and a notification is sent to the view that the model has changed. The view can then interpolate between the old and the new position accordingly. It can speed up, slow down, or even remove the interpolation entirely based on the specific view settings, without requiring any extra data to be stored within the model.
Rather than storing the current position and the previous position, you could instead just store the last move with each unit, and the move itself contains the previous position. This is probably more versatile if you ever need to store extra information about a move.
What you probably want is to have the unit image move each frame. How far to move the image each frame is similar to your interpolation.
unitsPerSecond = totalUnits / (framesPerSecond * totalSeconds)
So if I want to move an image from position 0 to position 60 in 2 seconds and my framerate is 30, I need to move 60 units in 60 frames, therefore my speed is 1. So each frame, I move the image 1 unit, and if moving the unit will take me beyond my destination, simply set my location to my destination.
Is there a standard Aqua way to handle a practically infinite document?
For example, imagine a level editor for a tile-based game. The level has no preset size (though it's technically limited by NSInteger's size); tiles can be placed anywhere on the grid. Is there a standard interface for scrolling through such a document?
I can't simply limit the scrolling to areas that already have tiles, because the user needs to be able to add tiles outside that boundary. Arbitrarily creating a level size, even if it's easily changeable by the user, doesn't seem ideal either.
Has anyone seen an application that deals with this problem?
One option is to essentially dynamically expand the area as the user scrolls through it - any time the user scrolls within X units of an edge, add another unit in that direction. Essentially, you'll never be able to scroll "all the way" to an edge, because the closer you get the farther it will expand.
If the user scrolls back away from the edge, contract it to back to no more than X units beyond where there is actually content.
Have you seen what Microsoft Excel does for this problem? It has to represent an unbounded space with scrollbars, as well.
One solution is to define a reasonable space for the original level size, and when the user scrolls to one tile away from its bounds, add another row or column of tiles, and adjust the scrollbar accordingly. This way, the user never reaches the actual bounds.
If the user decides to cut down on the level size, you could also add code that shrinks the "reasonable space" once an unused row consists only of empty tiles. This saves the user from being stuck with a huge level that they scrolled through, with no way to shrink it.
Edit: Same as Dav's answer. :)