Repeating 2d world - xna

How to make a 2d world with fixed size, which would repeat itself when reached any side of the map?
When you reach a side of a map you see the opposite side of the map which merged togeather with this one. The idea is that if you didn't have a minimap you would not even notice the transition of map repeating itself.
I have a few ideas how to make it:
1) Keeping total of 3x3 world like these all the time which are exactly the same and updated the same way, just the players exists in only one of them.
2) Another way would be to seperate the map into smaller peaces and add them to required place when asked.
Either way it can be complicated to complete it. I remember that more thatn 10 years ago i played some game like that with soldiers following each other in a repeating wold shooting other AI soldiers.
Mostly waned to hear your thoughts about the idea and how it could be achieved. I'm coding in XNA(C#).

Another alternative is to generate noise using libnoise libraries. The beauty of this is that you can generate noise over a theoretical infinite amount of space.
Take a look at the following:
http://libnoise.sourceforge.net/tutorials/tutorial3.html#tile
There is also an XNA port of the above at: http://bigblackblock.com/tools/libnoisexna
If you end up using the XNA port, you can do something like this:
Perlin perlin = new Perlin();
perlin.Frequency = 0.5f; //height
perlin.Lacunarity = 2f; //frequency increase between octaves
perlin.OctaveCount = 5; //Number of passes
perlin.Persistence = 0.45f; //
perlin.Quality = QualityMode.High;
perlin.Seed = 8;
//Create our 2d map
Noise2D _map = new Noise2D(CHUNKSIZE_WIDTH, CHUNKSIZE_HEIGHT, perlin);
//Get a section
_map.GeneratePlanar(left, right, top, down);
GeneratePlanar is the function to call to get the sections in each direction that will connect seamlessly with the rest of your world.

If the game is tile based I think what you should do is:
Keep only one array for the game area.
Determine the visible area using modulo arithmetics over the size of the game area mod w and h where these are the width and height of the table.
E.g. if the table is 80x100 (0,0) top left coordinates with a width of 80 and height of 100 and the rect of the viewport is at (70,90) with a width of 40 and height of 20 you index with [70-79][0-29] for the x coordinate and [90-99][0-9] for the y. This can be achieved by calculating the index with the following formula:
idx = (n+i)%80 (or%100) where n is the top coordinate(x or y) for the rect and i is in the range for the width/height of the viewport.
This assumes that one step of movement moves the camera with non fractional coordinates.
So this is your second alternative in a little bit more detailed way. If you only want to repeat the terrain, you should separate the contents of the tile. In this case the contents will most likely be generated on the fly since you don't store them.
Hope this helped.

Related

Work out world coordinates relative to position and rotation of an object in lua

I am trying to make a new tool for the tabletop simulator community based on my "pack up bag". The Packup Bag is a tool that remembers world position and rotation of objects you place inside it, so you can then place them back in the same positions and rotations they came from when "unpacking the bag".
I have been trying to modify this so it spits things out in a relative position and rotation to the bag, instead of using hardcoded world coordinates. The idea here is that players can sit at any location at the table, pick the faction bag they wish to play.. drop it on a known spot marked for them and press the place and it will populate contents of the bag relative to its location.
Now I have gotten some of this worked out... I am able to get the bag to place relative in some ways .. but I am finding it beyond my maths skills to work out the modifications of the transforms.
Basically I have this part working..
The mod understands relative position to the bag
The mod understands relative rotation to the bag
BUT.. the mod dose not understand relative position AND rotation at the same time.... I need someway to modify the position data relative to the rotational data... but can not work out how.
See this video....
https://screencast-o-matic.com/watch/cFiOeYFsyi
As you can see as I move the bag around the object is placed relative to it.... but if I rotate the bag, the object has the correct rotation but I need math to work out the correct position IF it is rotated. You can see it is just getting placed in the same position it was as if there was no rotation... as I haven't worked out how to code it to do this.
Now I have heard of something called "matrix math" but I couldn't understand it. I'm a self taught programmer of only a few months after I started modding TTS.
You can kinda understand what I mean I hope.. In the video example, when I rotate the bag, the object should be placed with the correct rotation but the world position needs to be changed.
See this Example to see relative rotation ....
https://screencast-o-matic.com/watch/cFiOeZFsyq
My code dose this by remembering the self.getPostion() of the bag and the obj.Position() of the object getting packed up.. it then dose a self - obj and stores that value for the X and Y position. It also remembers if it is negative or position and then when placing it uses the self.postion() and adds or subtracts the adjustment value. Same for rotation.
Still I do not know what ot go from here.. I have been kinda hurting my head on this and thought maybe some of you math guys might have a better idea on how to do this.
: TL;DR :
So I have
bag.getPosition() and obj.getRotation()
bag.getRotation(0 and obj.getRotation()
These return (x,y,z}
What math can I use to find the relative position and rotation of the objects to the bag so if I rotate the bag. The objects come out of it in a relative way...
Preferably in LUA.. thank you!
I'd hope you've found the answer by now, but for anyone else finding this page:
The problem is much simpler than what you're suggesting - it's basic right triangle trigonometry.
Refer to this diagram. You have a right triangle with points A, B, and C, where C is the right angle. (For brevity, I'll use abbreviations opp, adj, and hyp.) The bag is at point A, you want the object at point B. You have the angle and distance (angle A and the length of the hyp, respectively), but you need the x,y coordinates of point B relative to point A.
The x coord is the length of adj, and y coord is the length of opp. As shown, the formulas to calculate these are:
cos(angle A) = adj/hyp
sin(angle A) = opp/hyp
solving for the unknowns:
adj = hyp * cos(angle A)
opp = hyp * sin(angle A)
For your specific use, and taking into account the shift in coordinate system x,y,z => x,z,y:
obj_x_offset = distance * math.cos(bag.getRotation().y)
obj_z_offset = distance * math.sin(bag.getRotation().y)
obj_x_position = bag.getPosition().x + obj_x_offset
obj_z_position = bag.getPosition().z + obj_z_offset
Diagram source:
https://www.khanacademy.org/math/geometry/hs-geo-trig/hs-geo-modeling-with-right-triangles/a/right-triangle-trigonometry-review

Endless scrolling over a 3d map

I have some experience with Metal and quite a bit with Unity and am familiar with setting up meshes, buffers, and the backing data for drawing; but not so much the math/shader side. What I'm struggling with is how to get an endless scrolling world. So if I pan far to the right side I can see the left side and keep going.
The application of this would be a seamless terrain that a player could scroll in any direction forever and have it just wrap.
I don't want to duplicate everything on draw and offset it, that seems horrendously inefficient. I am hoping for a way to either use some magic matrix math or some sort of shader to get things wrapping/drawing where they should when panning the map. I've searched all over for some sort of guide or explanation of how to get this working but haven't come up with anything.
I know a lot of old (dos) games did this somehow, is it still possible? Is there a reason why it seems the industry has migrated away from this type of scrolling (bounding to edges vs wrapping)?
I have created a simple example demonstrating what you're looking for (I think).
The basic idea of it is that you draw the map in a repeating grid, using the drawPrimitives(type:vertexStart:vertexCount:instanceCount:) method on MTLRenderCommandEncoder. As the instance count you want to pass in the number of identical maps you want to draw, extending it as far as needed to not see where it ends. In my example I used a simple 5x5 grid.
To not have the user see the edge of the map, we're gonna calculate their position modulo 1 (or whatever size your map is):
func didDrag(dx: CGFloat, dy: CGFloat) {
// Move user position on drag, adding 1 to not get below 0
x += Float(dx) * draggingSpeed + 1
z += Float(dy) * draggingSpeed + 1
x.formTruncatingRemainder(dividingBy: 1)
z.formTruncatingRemainder(dividingBy: 1)
}
This is how it looks:
Just a follow up on what I have actually implemented. First I essentially have an array of x,y points with altitude, terrain type and all that jazz. Using some simple % and additions/subtractions it is trivial to get the nodes around a point to generate triangles
On a draw I calculate the first showing point and the last showing point and calculate the groups of triangles shown between those points. The first/last point take into account wrapping, it is then pretty trivial to have an endless wrapping world. For each group a translation offset is passed via a uniform matrix for that group which will position that section where it should belong.
I set it via renderEncoder.setVertexBytes(&uniform, length:..., offset:...)

colour detection bot

I want to create a script to automatically click on a moving target on a game.
To do this I want to check colours on the screen to determine where my target is and then click him, repeating this if he moves.
I'm not skilled at programming and there might be an easier solution to what I have proposed below:
1/Split the screen into equal tiles - size of tile should represent the in game object.
2/Loop through each pixel of each tile and create a histogram of the pixel colours.
3/If the most common recorded colour matches what we need, we MIGHT have the correct tile. Save the coords and click the object to complete task
4/Every 0.5 seconds check colour to determine if the object has moved, if it hasnt, keep clicking, if it has repeat steps 1, 2 and 3.
The step I am unsure of how to do technically is step 1. What data structure would I need for a tile? Would a 2D array suffice? Store the value of each colour in this array and then determine if it is the object. Also in pseudo how would I split the screen up into tiles to be searched? The tile issue is my main problem.
EDIT for rayryeng 2:
I will be using Python for this task. This is not my game, I just want to create a macro to automatically perform a task for me in the game. I have no code yet, I am looking more for the ideas behind making this work than actual code.
3rd edit and final code:
#!/usr/bin/python
import win32gui, win32api
#function to take in coords and return colour
def colour_return(x,y):
colours = win32gui.GetPixel(win32gui.GetDC(win32gui.GetActiveWindow()), x,y)
return colours
def click(x,y):
win32api.SetCursorPos((x,y))
win32api.mouse_event(win32con.MOUSEEVENTF_LEFTDOWN,x,y,0,0)
win32api.mouse_event(win32con.MOUSEEVENTF_LEFTUP,x,y,0,0)
#variable declaration
x = 1
y = 1
pixel_value = []
colour_found = 0
while x < 1600:
pixel_value = colour_return(x,y)
if pixel_value == 1844766:
click(x,y)
x=x+1
#print x
print y
if x == 1600:
y=y+1
x=1
#print tile
pixel_value = 0
This is the final code that I have produced. It works but it is incredibly slow. It takes 30 seconds seconds to search all 1600 pixels of y=1. I guess it is my method that is not working. Instead of using histograms and tiles I am now just searching for a colour and clicking the coordinates when it matches. What is the fastest method to use when searching an entire screen for a certain colour? I've seen colour detection bots that manage to keep up every second with a moving character.

How to move image with low values?

The problem is simple: I want to move (and later, be able to rotate) an image. For example, every time i press the right arrow on my keyboard, i want the image to move 0.12 pixels to the right, and every time i press the left arrow key, i want the image to move 0.12 pixels to the left.
Now, I have multiple solutions for this:
1) simply add the incremental value, i.e.:
image.x += 0.12;
this is of course assuming that we're going to the right.
2) i multiplicate the value of a single increment by the times i already went into this particular direction + 1, like this:
var result:Number = 0.12 * (numberOfTimesWentRight+1);
image.x = result;
Both of these approaches work but produce similiar, yet subtly different, results. If we add some kind of button component that simply resets the x and y coordinates of the image, you will see that with the first approach the numbers don't add up correctly.
it goes from .12, .24, .359999, .475 etc.
But with the second approach it works well. (It's pretty obvious as to why though, it seems like += operations with Numbers are not really precise).
Why not use the second approach then? Well, i want to rotate the image as well. This will work for the first attempt, but after that the image will jump around. Why? In the second approach we never took the original position of the image in account. So if the origin-point shifts a bit down or up because you rotated your image, and THEN you try to move the image again: it will move to the same position as if you hadn't rotated before.
Alright, to make this short:
How can i reliably move, scale and rotate images for 1/10 of a pixel?
Short answer: I don't know! You're fighting with floating point math!
Luckily, I have a workaround, if you don't mind.
You store the location (x and y) of the image in a separate variable... at a larger scale. Such as 100x. So 123.45 becomes 12345, and you then divide by 100 to set the attribute that flash uses to display.
Yes, there are limits to number sizes too, but if you're willing to accept some error rate, and the fact that you'll be limited to, I dunno, a million pixels in each direction, you can fit it in a regular int. The only rounding error you will encounter will be a single rounding error when you divide by 100 (or the factor you used). So instead of the compound rounding error which you described (0.12 * 4 = 0.475), you should see things like 0.47999999. Which doesn't matter because it's, well, so small.
To expand on #Pimgd answer a bit, you're probably hitting a floating point error (multiple +='s will exaggerate the error more than one *='s) - Numbers in Flash are 53-bit precision.
There's also another thing to keep in mind, which is probably playing a bigger role with such small movement values; Flash positions all objects using twips, which is roughly about 1/20th of a pixel, or 0.05, so all values are rounded to this. When you say image.x += 0.12, it's actually the equivalent of image.x += 0.10, hence which the different becomes apparent; you're losing 0.02 of a pixel with every move.
You should be able to get around it by moving to another scale, as #Pimgd says, or just storing your position separately - i.e. work from a property _x rather than image.x so you're not losing that precision everytime:
this._x += 0.12;
image.x = this._x;

OpenCV: Generating points from image after thinning

I've ran in to an issue concerning generating floating point coordinates from an image.
The original problem is as follows:
the input image is handwritten text. From this I want to generate a set of points (just x,y coordinates) that make up the individual characters.
At first I used findContours in order to generate the points. Since this finds the edges of the characters it first needs to be ran through a thinning algorithm, since I'm not interested in the shape of the characters, only the lines or as in this case, points.
Input:
thinning:
So, I run my input through the thinning algorithm and all is fine, output looks good. Running findContours on this however does not work out so good, it skips a lot of stuff and I end up with something unusable.
The second idea was to generate bounding boxes (with findContours), use these bounding boxes to grab the characters from the thinning process and grab all none-white pixel indices as "points" and offset them by the bounding box position. This generates even worse output, and seems like a bad method.
Horrible code for this:
Mat temp = new Mat(edges, bb);
byte roi_buff[] = new byte[(int) (temp.total() * temp.channels())];
temp.get(0, 0, roi_buff);
int COLS = temp.cols();
List<Point> preArrayList = new ArrayList<Point>();
for(int i = 0; i < roi_buff.length; i++)
{
if(roi_buff[i] != 0)
{
Point tempP = bb.tl();
tempP.x += i%COLS;
tempP.y += i/COLS;
preArrayList.add(tempP);
}
}
Is there any alternatives or am I overlooking something?
UPDATE:
I overlooked the fact that I need the points (pixels) to be ordered. In the method above I simply do scanline approach to grabbing all the pixels. If you look at the 'o' for example, it would grab first the point on the left hand side, then the one on the right hand side. I would need them to be ordered by their neighbouring pixels since I want to draw paths with the points later on (outside of opencv).
Is this possible?
You should look into implementing your own connected components labelling. The concept is very simple: you scan the first line and assign unique labels to each horizontally connected strip of pixels. You basically check for every pixel if it is connected to its left neighbour and assign it either that neighbour's label or a new label. In the second row you do the same, but you also check against the pixels above it. Sometimes you need a label merge: two strips that were not connected in the previous row are joined in the current row. The way to deal with this is either to keep a list of label equivalences or use pointers to labels (so you can easily do a complete label change for an object).
This is basically what findContours does, but if you implement it yourself you have the freedom to go for 8-connectedness and even bridge a single-pixel or two-pixel gap. That way you get "almost-connected components labelling". It looks like you need this for the "w" in your example picture.
Once you have the image labelled this way, you can push all the pixels of a single label to a vector, and order them something like this. Find the top left pixel, push it to a new vector and erase it from the original vector. Now find the pixel in the original vector closest to it, push it to the new vector and erase from the original. Continue until all pixels have been transferred.
It will not be very fast this way, but it should be a start.

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