I am looking for real-world VR maps of the world which are high def like GTA level for a game project. I came across google earth VR and something like that would be perfect. After hours of falling into endless rabbit holes on the internet, I also came across WRLD3D which is paid, which is fine with me but it is hella cartoonish and looked like a joke. Any other things I could try out? I do realise mapping cities to street level in high def can be really difficult and companies like google wouldn't just give it out for free but nevertheless it's worth a try some of you wizards never fail to surprise me.
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I have been working Augmented Reality for quite a few months. I have used third party tools like Unity/Vuforia to create augmented reality applications for android.
I would like to create my own framework in which I will create my own AR apps. Can someone guide me to right tutorials/links to achieve my target. On a higher level, my plan is to create an application which can recognize multiple markers and match it with cloud stored models.
That seems like a massive undertaking: model recognition is not an easy task. I recommend looking at OpenCV (which has some standard algorithms you can use as a starting point) and then looking at a good computer vision book (e.g., Richard Szeliski's book or Hartley and Zisserman).
But you are going to run into a host of practical problems. Consider that systems like Vuforia provide camera calibration data for most Android devices, and it's hard to do computer vision without it. Then, of course, there's efficiently managing the whole pipeline which (again) companies like Qualcomm and Metaio invest huge amounts of $$ in.
I'm working on a project that does framemarker tracking and I've started exporting bits of it out to a project I'm calling OpenAR. Right now I'm in the process of pulling out unpublishable pieces and making Vuforia and the OpenCV versions of marker tracking interchangeable. You're certainly welcome to check out the work as it progresses. You can see videos of some of the early work on my YouTube channel.
The hard work is improving performance to be as good as Vuforia.
I have been making a game in sprite kit for some time now. I have added enemies and am wondering how I can control them around the map using AI(just like in any other game).
What I want is for the enemy to wonder around the TMX map, turning corner depending on random number. I have tried to do this but have run into many problems. Does anyone know of any articles that would help me with this? I have done some research. "PathFinding" and "A*" come up, but with know explanation or sample code on how to do it. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Welcome to SO. Let me start by saying that I too am currently searching for exactly the same thing. Unfortunately the pickings have been kinda weak, at least what I found so far.
I did find a couple of very interesting reads:
An article on the ghosts behavior of PacMan. Simple but very effective.
Amit’s Game Programming Information. A more general discussion about making games.
Gamasutra. An excellent resources for all things game design.
Designing AI Algorithms For Turn-Based Strategy Games. A Gamasutra article which is extremely useful in explaining turn based AI in plain english.
All these are very useful in their own ways and make you think. However, nothing I have come across provides a plain worded explination on a bad guy's logic (the PacMan article came close). Searching Amazon for Game AI books yields a bunch of books which are extremely expensive and read more like advanced quantum theory.
I ended up deciding on a simple approach for my game. I have my bad guy decide between 2 possible states. Patrol Mode and Attack Mode.
In Patrol Mode he sits idle for a few seconds, walks left or right until he hits a wall or other object, runs (same rules as walking), climbs up and down ladders, and does the occasional jump. I use arc4random() to decide what he does next when his current action is completed. This provides a truly random behavior and makes the bad guy completely unpredictable.
Attack Mode happens when the player is within X distance of the bad guy. The bad guy now has a different set of actions to choose from. Run towards player, swing sword at player, jump up, and so on. Again I use the random function to make the bad guy unpredictable. The results so far have been really excellent. My bad guy behaves like one of those hard to beat 12 year kids playing Halo.
The bad guy will continue to do battle until he dies, the player dies or the player runs away and is no longer within the X distance required for Attack Mode. You can of course fine tune bad guy's behavior by limiting jumping, time between attacks and so on.
Hope this helps and got your creative juices flowing.
The Wikipedia page for the A* Search Algorithm here contains a psuedocode example. All you really need is an understanding of how the algorithm works then you should be able to implement it. Googling for iOS and A* brings up several tutorials.
You have a tile map so it should be relatively easy to do what you want without A* like this bit of psuedocode.
// An Update function for your Enemy
function Update
paths = GetAllPathways()
if paths.length == 0
TurnAround()
else
randomPath = paths.Random()
TurnTowards(randomPath)
endif
MoveForward()
end function
function GetAllPathways()
paths = new Array()
if CanGoForward()
paths.push(forward)
end if
if CanGoLeft()
paths.push(left)
end
if CanGoRight()
paths.push(right)
end
return paths
end function
An algorithm like A* is really for more complex things (not random decision making) where you
can have a complex or dynamic map and want your enemies to target something or the player dynamically which is where A* comes into play, determining a way through the world to find the path to it's target.
I have followed the MSDN Platformer tutorial and made a variant with it.
However, I want to make a Platformer like the Super Mario games. Although I prefer to make a game with a basic level, instead of a side scrolling level.
I've read certain documents about using Tile grid to create my levels. Are there also beginner/full tutorials available to create a start?
Basically need help with the first steps of setting up a level.
Greets
I have not used XNA for about 6-7 months, but back when I was 'playing' with it, I was working on Windows Phone 7 games and learned a lot from this blog over here. His tile engine worked pretty good for me.
Although it looks like it is for RPG-like games, take a closer look at the examples, there is a 2D platformer example there too.
You must read this, otherwise nothing will make sense :)
I'm developing a game for iOS that should include the multiplayer. It's not a turn-based, rather a real-time game. I know I can use some different approaches here:
Game Center multiplayer (has matching and searching for matches, gives authentication out-of-the-box, additional are leaderboards and achievements)
As far as I know, OpenFeint also includes some multiplayer helpers
I can also write my own sever code, but woudn't it be reinventing the wheel? I'd also loose all the good stuff from GC...
Any suggestions here? What's the leading market solution, that doesn't take too much to integrate into a game; I'd like to be able to send short bits of data between players (player position + action taken) in a real time. Best would be to reduce the lag :)
personally, i think the easiest way to go is with gamecenter. it was pretty straightforward to integrate it into an existing game - i'd say it took 2-3 weeks. the main problems that we encountered were to do with the game simulation not being particularly suited to multiplayer, rather than anything to do with dealing with gamecenter.
You may also consider Nextpeer (disclosure: I work there). GameCenter is good, but it has the downside of not being cross-platform. We offer a solution that is cross-platform (iOS, Android and Unity3d) and is geared towards multiplayer in casual games. So we provide the hosting, the player-to-player communication, the matchmaking, and Facebook integration.
I am working on integrating geolocation services into a website and the best source of data I've found so far is MaxMind's GeoIP API with GeoLite City data. Even this data seems to often be questionable though. For example, I am located in downtown Palo Alto, but it locates my IP as being in Portola Valley, which is about 7 miles away. Palo Alto has a population of 60k+, whereas Portola Valley has a population of less than 5k. I would think if you see an IP originating somewhere around there it would make more sense to assume it was coming from the highly populated city, not the tiny one. I've also had it locate Palo Alto IPs completely across the country in Kentucky, etc.
Does anyone know of any better sources of data, or any tools/technologies/efforts to improve the accuracy of geolocation efforts? Commercial solutions are fine.
Where an IP comes up at the wrong end of the country, you probably won't find a better match elsewhere because it's probably an ISP that uses one group of IPs for customers in a wide area. My favourite example is trains here in the UK where the on-board wifi is identified as being in Sweden because they use a satellite connection to an ISP in Sweden.
A commercial supplier may be able to afford to spend more time tracking down the hard cases, but in many cases there just won't be a good answer to give you. They may, however, give you a confidence factor to tell you when they're guessing. I've heard good things about Quova, though I've never used them.
Assuming that you've got the best latitude and longitude that you can get (or can afford), then you're left dealing with cases where they pick the closest city rather than a more likely larger city nearby. Unfortunately I don't have the code to hand, but I had some success using the data from geonames to pick a "sensible" city near a point. They list lat/long and population, so you can do something like
ORDER BY ( Distance / LOG( Population ) )
You'd need to experiment with that to get something with the right level of bias towards larger cities, but I had it working quite nicely taking the centre of a Google Maps view and displaying a heading like "Showing results near London..." that changed as you moved the map.
I am not sure if this will help, but here is a site that has done a pretty good job of IP mapping. Maybe you could ask them for help :) seomoz.org
A couple of sites I saw referenced recently for free GeoIP services are
WIPmania
hostip.info