Is there a way to correctly tween/animate meshes in Flash authoring tool?
Shape tweens don't recognise movement of specific vertices, don't preserve connections and generally mess things up. Shape hints are too few for any non-trivial mesh, and too much manual labor anyway.
I am trying to accomplish smooth animation between two mesh shapes, but with all the points and vertices preserved, and no new points/vertices added.
Meshes in question are strictly 2D, but I won't mind if the solution called for Actionscript/Papervision3D assistance, although the authoring of keyframe mesh states needs to be done interactively in flash authoring tool (too complex shapes/movements to code them by hand).
Ideas?
Depending on the animation, bones might help. Though you need Flash CS4 to use them.
Their available from the standard toolbar.
Related
http://app.geokone.net/ is an open source javascript app for generating shapes (if you can look at it, it's really fast, for 5 seconds, I'm sure you'll get the idea).
It's hard for me to go through it because it's a lot of code, what is the general idea?
also, I need those shapes as GameObject with polygon collider around them (anything from 0 to 20 of them on the screen at the same time, could be different shapes also), is it even possible with GL?
would GL help me? I think GL would be fast for just 1 shape or something (as it's using recursion), but for what I want, I think drawing them in real time to a texture, then using the texture as a sprite would be faster (as I can save the sprite for shapes that are the same), or maybe I should use a shader? any other method that you can think of?
and for the algorithm itself, what is the general idea?
You don't want to use GL, look into custom mesh generation with MeshFilter. It is required for the colliders anyway.
Meshes have to be updated just once and probably will be faster than any optimisation you proposed. You might need a shader to draw it, though.
As for the algorithm, I'm afraid you have to look into it yourself or hire someone for it. StackOverflow is for helping with issues, not doing the work for you. If you need a hint, look into basic fractals
Recently I explored some libraries where I can visualize graphs from Neo4j, but didn't get a clear view wich one to choose, so I have a couple thought I'd like to share.
My requirements and wishes - after search throught REST API with cypher query visualize graphs with all relationships, nodes. And result make interactive - able to drag/drop... opportunity to reveal other nodes/rels on click. Import nodes throught json data and be able to show quickly up to at least 400 elements.
So I more or less explored further libraries:
Three.js - mostly for 3D. (If I don't need 3D then better not to choose this one)
Arbor.js - drawing leaves up to you, mostly layout library
VivaGraphJS - easy to use, but almost no documentation :(
D3.js - Looks fine, but uses SVG
Cytoscape.js - looks fine, but I read that I can't use it with Neo4j. Is D3.js the right choice for real-time visualization of Neo4j Graph DB data why?
Processing.js - have it's own language similar to Java. I'm not so much in Java-like language (yet).
And I have a couple questions:
1) Whats your experience - benefits, weakneses of libraries?
2) I suppose I want to use canvas insted of SVG? (a lot of small elements on the screen).
3) Arbor is special library for layout, but others don't have layout algorithms or what?
I'll appreciate any opinion! :-)
I pondered a similar situation. I chose sigma.js.
1) Whats your experience - benefits, weakneses of libraries?
sigma.js is specific to graph rendering. d3 is a full on toolbox for visualization. Since I only want to draw graphs, the concise sigma.js interface was easier to work with. I think this is the video where the creator talks about how sigma.js is able to do incremental rendering and thus perform better and handle more vertices/edges smoothly.
2) I suppose I want to use canvas insted of SVG? (a lot of small
elements on the screen).
sigma.js renders to the canvas.
Here are the sigma.js examples. The "hide nodes" example shows mouse interactions. Additionaly, here is a blog post showing how one can easily integrate neo4j w/ sigma using a very minimal amount of data massaging code written in node.js. It would be easy to port this to any server language.
I don't see sigma.js in that list which you might want to take a look at as it is very useful (example)
You will have to somehow handle the rendering of the received data (i.e. go from a data structure to its visual representation) and this depends on what are you trying to show / say with that visualisation, how you want to do it and how you want it to look like.
As a starting point, i would go with D3 and Sigma.
I note that Gephi is not on your list. As a standalone visualiser/editor, its the best that I have used (you just get the neo4j plugin, and it will import the source files of the database and let you view it). Its also Open Source, so you can include it as part of a project.
Also missing from your list is the yFiles family of graph visualization libraries.
The JavaScript variant of if uses both Canvas, WebGL, and SVG. This can give very good performance and high-quality visualizations at the same time. For hair-ball-like graphs (thousands of dots and lines, but probably no text) you can use WebGL and Canvas and when you zoom in to actually make sense of the data, you can use SVG to get detailed high-quality visualizations with labels, icons, data-bound visualizations, etc. You can use both techniques in the same visualization, even at the same time, benefiting from the best of both worlds (demo).
Connecting yFiles to Neo4j is easy using the JavaScript Bolt driver.
Aiming at 400 elements in the view is a good idea. While larger graphs tend to look really nice, most of the time you won't gain a lot of insights by looking at "hair-balls". These almost artistic visualizations all look very similar and as such carry little to no information. Often you could just as well display a static image showing the first google image search hit for a "hairball graph" query :-)
In order to better support the user during exploration, filtering, grouping, nesting, and dynamic interaction should be added to the viewer application. How this can be implemented, very much depends on the business domain in the visualization, though and there are only very few generic approaches that work for generic graphs.
Disclaimer: I work for the company that creates the above mentioned visualization library. I do not represent it on SO, though.
Is there a way to create and use a simple 3d model on the Unreal Engine?
Your best bet would be to create the initial 3D asset in a third party tool and import it into the IDE. From there you can change the texture map, and manipulate the aesthetics in one way or another, but the initial 3D model should be in an external 3D format, and then placed as a prefab into your world.
Creating an object dynamically in UDK is cumbersome and requires lots of tweaking, and won't save much in terms of cost of resources. Especially if you want it to look good and more than just 3D meshes thrown together rudimentarily. It is possible, but almost not worth it, especially if you have 3DSMax, Maya, Cinema4D, MotionBuilder, or one of the other hundred tools available to do the grunt work for you.
Most 3D Engines (IE Unity, UDK, Torque, Cry and now Havok) support many formats, and especially the unversal FBX. You could even use google sketchup and export to DAE or FBX format to get it into your Engine. Grant it you lose a lot of the elements, but the basic 3D mesh stays relatively in tact.
I'm seeking a dynamically updatable, "real-time" map visualization toolkit that would support the following concept:
A user-controlled pilot's eye view flying above a landscape where the topography is
dynamically changing (hills rising and falling, slip/sliding around, valleys opening and
filling) in real-time. (Currently just a color-coded landscape surface would be acceptable, although the eventual goal is to overlay terrain/map imagery.)
Another process is dynamically updating the landscape topography data
as our fearless flyer passes over it.
There's lots of 3D visualization "explorers" out there, but they all seem to either be limited to a static data set, or require that the dynamic evolution of the data visualizations all be calculated in advance and then strung together as an animation. And flight simulators of course all pretty much assume that the topography doesn't change while in flight.
Technical wishlist:
Linux
C API preferred, but open to C++ or Java (or Ada :-)
Free/Open source preferred, but will consider proprietary
Performance: Well, I'll try to work with whatever it's got
If C++ is ok, and you don't require something too high level, I'd HIGHLY recommend OpenSceneGraph for a project like this. I used it on a project several years ago to display various forms of geospatial data on a globe (vector coastline data, sat imagery, etc).
Do keep in mind you're not limited to writing your entire solution in C++ :)
Our 3D visualization app combined our C++/OSG 3D library for graphics, a Java front-end for the GUI, and some old fortran code for the serious number crunching :O
Whats the best way to detect collisions in a 2d game sprites? I am currently working in allegro and G++
There are a plethora of ways to detect collision detection. The methods you use will be slightly altered if depending on if your using a 2d or 3d environment. Also remember when instituting a collision detection system, to take into account any physics you may want to implement in the game (needed for most descent 3d games) in order to enhance the reality of it.
The short version is to use bounding boxes. Or in other words, make each entity in the world a box, then check if each of the axises of the box are colliding with other entities.
With large amounts of entities to test for collisions you may want to check into an octree. You would simple divide the world into sectors, then only check for collision between objects in the same sectors.
For more resources, you can go to sourceforge and search for the Bullet dynamics engine which is an open source collision detection and physics engine, or you could check out http://www.gamedev.net which has plenty of resources on copious game development topics.
Any decent 2D graphics library will either provide its own collision detection functions for everything from aligned sprites to polygons to pixels, or have one or more good third party libraries to perform those functions. Your choice of engine/library/framework should dictate your collision detection choices, as they are likely far more optimized than what you could produce alone.
For Allegro there is Collegro. For SDL there is SDL_Collide.h or SDL-Collide. You can use I_COLLIDE with OpenGL. DarkBASIC has a built in collision system, and DarkPhysics for very accurate interactions including collisions.
Use a library, I recommend Box2D
This question is pretty general. There are many ways to go about collision detection in a 2d game. It would help to know what you are trying to do.
As a starting point though, there are pretty simple methods that allow for detection between circles, rectangles, etc. I'm not a huge fan of gamedev.net, but there are some good resources there about this type of detection. One such article is here. It covers some basic material that might help you get started.
Basic 2d games can use rectangles or circles to "enclose" an object on the screen. Detection of when rectangles overlap or when circles overlap is fairly straightfoward math. If you need something more complicated (such as convex artibrary polys), then the solution is more complicated. Again, gamedev.net might be of some help here.
But really to answer your question, we need to know what you are trying to do? What type of game? What type of objects are you trying to collide? Are you trying to collide with screen boundaries, etc.
Checking for collision between two balls in 2D is easy. You can google it but basically you check if the length of the two balls radius combined is larger or equal to the distance between the center of the two balls.
Then you can find the collision point by taking the unit vector between the center of the balls and multiply it with one of the balls radius.
Implementation of a collision detection system is a complicated matter, but you want to consider three points.
World of objects. Space Partitioning.
If you do a collision check against every 2d sprite in your world against everything else, you'll have a slow slow program! You need to prioritize. You need to partition the space. You can use an orthogonal grid system and slice your world up into a 2d grid. Or you could use a BSP tree, using lines as the seperator function.
Broad phase collision detection
This uses bounding volumes such as cylinders or elipses (whichever approximates the shape of your sprites the best) to determine whether or not objects are worth comparing in more detail. The math for this is easy. Learn your 2d matrix transformations. And for 2d intersection, you can even use high powered video cards to do a lot of the work!
Narrow phase collision detection
Now that you've determined that two or more objects are worth comparing, you step into your fine tuned section. The goal of this phase is to determine the collision result. Penetration depth, volume encompassed, etc... And this information will be fed into whatever physics engine you got planned. In 3d this is the realm of GJK distance algs and other neato algorithms that we all love so much!
You can implement all of this generically and specify the broad and narrow resolutions polymorphically, or provide a hook if you're working in a lower level language.
Collisions between what? It depends whether you use sprites, concave polygons, convex polygons, rectangles, squares, circles, points...