3DU: Bocce Classico

[KittyMac]

Horribly incomplete, but at least its playable :lol:

http://www.littlegenerals.com/BocceClassiche.zip

For those who don't know about Bocce, you can find out more at this website (http://www.bocce.org/rules.html).

I have a lot of spit and polish to apply before the deadline, but I'm hopeful all will come together well. My experience with Unity so far has been "so-so", but I won't elaborate until later.

Comments are appreciated, but keep in mind there's a lot missing that is already on my list ;)

And if anyone knows how to get the GUIText to increase in size and still look good (ie, changing the transform's scale and unclicking the "Pixel Correct" box looks pretty darned ugly) I'd greatly appreciate the advice.

[funkboy]

Looks like your game is about as complete as my curling game :)
But just as you said, it's playable, and that's what counts! Unity is pretty nice for that I think.

I don't know bocce, and I'm too tired to learn right now... but looks like you're doing good things. I like the little squirrel guys.

Do the balls come to a stop a little too soon? The friction seems a bit off, but maybe that's because it's different in the game I'm developing right now (Curling 3D).

[MattDiamond]

And if anyone knows how to get the GUIText to increase in size and still look good (ie, changing the transform's scale and unclicking the "Pixel Correct" box looks pretty darned ugly) I'd greatly appreciate the advice.

I think the best thing to do quality-wise is render a new font at the size you want. Fairly recently Unity added an easy way to import TrueType fonts, and it's a life saver compared to the old method:

http://unity3d.com/Documentation/Components/class-Font.html

Bocce: Is there a way to increase/decrease the force of the throw? Also, if I stand in one place and throw, the ball always ends up landing right next to the previous. A throw mechanism that required a consistent action by the player (e.g a mouse swing) would avoid this.

I like the squirrels! I just wanted to run my guy around and kick the balls with his feet, which currently aren't treated as physical unfortunately. :-) Not in keeping with the Bocce rules I guess.

[KittyMac]

Do the balls come to a stop a little too soon?

I don't think so, but I'm not 100% happy with their physical attributes either. You play on a court of sand (not ice) so they should stop fairly quickly to be realistic. From what I can tell, bocce is similar to curling except it is not played on ice, and the pallino (the white bar) is your target, not a predetermined place on the field.

http://unity3d.com/Documentation/Components/class-Font.html

That's exactly what I couldn't find, thanks!


Bocce: Is there a way to increase/decrease the force of the throw?

There will be :-)

There are two general types of throws, an aerial throw with a little backspin (for precise placement) and a "bowling" throw with front spin for knocking other bocce around. I have both impemented in code, but not in the UI yet.

[aarku]

And if anyone knows how to get the GUIText to increase in size and still look good (ie, changing the transform's scale and unclicking the "Pixel Correct" box looks pretty darned ugly) I'd greatly appreciate the advice.

In the Import Settings (Settings button at top of Project view) for the font you are using there is a Font Size field. If you increase this it'll up the resolution of the font texture it generates. From there you can change the transform's scale as you mentioned and use something like GuiRatioFixer (http://www.unifycommunity.com/wiki/index.php?title=GuiRatioFixer) to adjust for aspect ratio.

Cheers,
-Jon

[Najdorf]

Hate to tell you this but it should be "bocce classiche" as bocce is plural :p (spell classic-a)

[KittyMac]

My thought was that "bocce" was plural for "bocci", but that "bocce" in this sense refered to a game (which is singular). Hence, "Bocce Classico".

Of course, I don't live in Italy and it's been years since I studied Italian in college :lol:

[MattDiamond]

In the Import Settings (Settings button at top of Project view) for the font you are using there is a Font Size field. If you increase this it'll up the resolution of the font texture it generates. From there you can change the transform's scale as you mentioned and use something like GuiRatioFixer (http://www.unifycommunity.com/wiki/index.php?title=GuiRatioFixer) to adjust for aspect ratio.


That's interesting. I knew that Unity lets you reimport assets like images and meshes after you edit their import settings, but for some reason I never thought that you could do it with fonts too. Nice to know that works [for fonts that were imported from a TrueType font.]

[HiggyB]

I think this could be a very fun game once you get the other bits in, like clear choices of throws and control over the power used. Also where's the target (the pallino)? Keep it up, I'd like to see how your game turns out overall!

[KittyMac]

Updated:


Introductory screen
Power bar; allows control of power, spin, and angle of throws
Throw preview
Target circle to let you know where you need to land


Bocce Classiche (http://www.littlegenerals.com/BocceClassiche.zip)

:zzz:

[KittyMac]

My experience with Unity so far has been "so-so", but I won't elaborate until later.

Ok, it's now later :mad:

My experience with using Unity for this contest has been extremely mixed. I spent about 40-ish hours actually working on this entry, which is a mark up to Unity for its ease of use and ability to get something running fairly quickly. I like the production pipeline. I like the number of options and built-in components it offers. The built-in physics is cool (although it tends to shoe-horn what types of games people make with Unity).

However, a larger portion of time I've spent fighting (to me) a very buggy product. In the short time I've made this entry, Unity has "corrupted" my project twice (corrupted in the sense that when I open it in Unity, Unity itself immediately crashes). The first time was relatively minor (a crash in the language parser caused my project to crash immediately upon load. An hour or two later I narrowed it down and rewrote the script, fixing the problem). This morning, I wake up to find that my game's main scene file (Game.unity file) causes Unity to crash when loading my project. Every time. Without fail. And it's all binary, so I cannot go in and manually remove peices to see what might be causing the crash. If I remove it then it loads swell (albeit there's only the help screen).

Since (most) of the work is in that scene file and mere hours are left till the end of the contest, to me this represents a catastrophic failure on the part of this application. By the time a bug was reported, a fixed version (hopefully) returned, and resumption of work the deadline will be long past. Congrats, we just missed our ship date.

Besides these two major problems, I noticed Unity is also a little too aggressive in its updating of resources. For instance, it took me about half my time with Unity to realize it recompiled scripts when they're saved even while the preview mode is running. This immediately causes a Null Object exception, usually resulting in a crash or two. The same problem occurs when you modify a script, immediately switch to Unity and press "Play". Unity is still compiling the saved script, but it starts playing anyway. This results in another Null Object exception, even though there's no problem with the code but only that Unity decided to run without waiting for it to finish compiling!

There are lots of other little things that I don't like about Unity, but not as major as the above. The inability to create a game with user-resizable windows. The lack of any really good tools for making a GUI (GUILayer's suck, and using a separate camera to mimic a GUILayer has its own disadvantages). Not being able to use C instead of a scripting language. Apparent inability to really customize the resulting game to make it a better Mac application (we live in a Cocoa world after all).


Will I use Unity again? Probably for my next project. Will I trust it not to screw things up? Definitelty not.

[MattDiamond]

Rocco,

The new version you posted really came along in a very short time. Kudos! I especially like the translucent ground markers and the throw preview arc. Very smooth presentation of a non-trivial user interface.

Perhaps this isn't the best place for the discussion, but I'll just react a bit to your reported Unity issues. (i.e. nothing further in this particular message is about Bocce.) Perhaps it'll get split into a new thread at some point.

I'm a little alarmed by all the Unity problems you ran into. As you know I've not had quite such bad problems. Was looking forward to seeing the potent combination of your skills and Unity, so it's disappointing.

Since you mention it, I now realize that I've just gotten used to not changing scripts while my game is running (to avoid those null references.) I hadn't consciously noticed myself doing that. OTEE can and should probably address that issue.

My Unity project this year went much smoother than last year's, probably a combination of me using the product more "correctly", improvements made by OTEE, and Unity training me to subconsciously to avoid certain things like modifying scripts while the game is running in the editor.

I don't share your dislike of the scripting; C# is a fine language, and the Unity sandbox is how you get such painless Web/Universal Binary/Windows builds. The Pro version does give you an option to make direct OpenGL calls and compile your own DLL plugins, but I'm not sure if that helps you.

I intensely dislike the way Unity conflicts with source control, and I know you feel the same way.

OTEE probably has more to learn from new people like you trying out Unity than from me, given that the longer people have used it, the more they find ways to accomodate it. I hope they are monitoring this, but you may get a better response by posting in their forums and/or submitting bug reports. They are usually pretty aggressive in following up over there.

Fingers crossed you'll get your project back intact... I trained myself to make backups of my project whenever I start to make changes to it. That was a year ago and naturally it hasn't corrupted or crashed-on-load since. :-) But it's still a useful habit because sometimes I want to remind myself what the old value of a property was.

Hope you fix your problems to your satisfaction.
Matt