fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
The Journey Day 13
By: Tony Miller
Tags: 3d, Technology, Game Development, Unity, Cinema

Final product for today

Putting in the six paneled skybox was really cool today. it gave my game the feel of actually being somewhere for the first time. But, it was when we got to the light probes section that I got to see for the first time how deep game creation goes. Clicking into my light probes pulled up every one in the scene. For those who are unfamiliar with the term, Light Probes provide a way to capture and use information about light that is passing through the empty space in your scene.

Similar to lightmaps, light probes store “baked” information about lighting in your scene. The difference is that while lightmaps store lighting information about light hitting the surfaces in your scene, light probes store information about light passing through empty space in your scene.

Light Probes are positions in the scene where the light is measured (probed) during the bake. At runtime, the indirect light that hits dynamic GameObjects is approximated using the values from the nearest Light Probes to that object.

While this may all sound like the ramblings of a random word generator it was all made clear to me seeing just how many light probes go into making a scene triple-A level. Walking through a wonderland of probes and strings, all of the little connection points showing the layout of light reading in the scene. It was kind of breathtaking to see the amount of detail that went into it.

This was where today’s journey would end. Hitting pause, on the screen I reflected on the day’s learnings. Sub meshes, occulsion mapping, light sourcing, and many more topics ran through my mind. Working their way into a picture of a scene. Like a self-replicating nanite, beginning to form a picture out of the steady stream of thought. We have indeed entered a new dimension.
AR-app in Unity
By: Karan Tyagi
Tags: Vuforia, Unity, Ar Application, AR, Augmented Reality App

Hi!

I have been reading a lot about Augmented Reality a lot these days; the challenges, the drawbacks and what all can be expected in AR in coming 5 years. I made this app about a month ago.

It was an interesting project to work upon specially for someone who is trying AR development for the first time. The thing which took majority of the time was setting up unity for AR. The app detects a 500 INR note and places the low-poly model on it. I followed a youtube tutorial to develop it.

Snaps:

Also, I have recently downloaded Spark AR and will be trying out that soon.

Video link : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QTsjiHTexI

Thanks for reading!!!
Enemy Waves — first attempt. Today I did a lot of white boarding on…
By: Kristin Treder
Tags: Unity, Unity3d, Learning To Code

Today I did a lot of white boarding on the tasks for Phase II. Here is the basic logic for the next 3 tasks:

Aggressive Enemies

Once this type of enemy comes within a certain close distance to the player, this enemy attempts to “ram” the player.

Pseudo code:

if distance between enemy and player is x

move towards player

Powerup Enemies

If a powerup is in front of one of these enemies, this enemy will shoot and destroy the powerup.

Pseudo code:

if powerup is in front of enemy (same x value)

shoot to destroy powerup

Enemy Wave System

Spawn enemies in waves, with each wave spawning more enemies than the prior.

Pseudo code:

initiate spawning after asteroid is hit

display wave count across screen via UI

spawn x number of enemies

pause spawning

display wave count across screen via UI

unpause spawning

spawn x++ number of enemies

pause spawning

display wave count across screen…

etc. (LOOP)

After getting this all out of my head and down on paper, I felt organized enough to start tackling the wave spawning system. I started by adding a wave manager to the Hierarchy and attached a wave manager script. I determined the most efficient way to accomplish this task would be to loop through the same loop while resetting the number of enemies spawned as well as incrementing the threshold of number of enemies spawned to advance to the next wave. I’d also need to “announce” the upcoming wave of enemies via the UI (almost to act like different levels and give the player a sense of advancement).

I then had to modify my Asteroid code. Instead of telling the spawning manager to start spawning immediately after the asteroid is hit with a laser, I call a method on my new wave manager script to initialize spawning. I also had to add a spawned-enemy counter to my enemy script in order to keep track of how many enemies are spawned. Once this count reaches a certain threshold, the player advances to the next wave of enemies.

Check out what I have so far. As you can see, there are TONS of enemies and TONS of powerups leading me to believe that I’m not stopping and restarting spawning correctly. At first glance it seems that there may be multiple instances of the same spawning script running at the same time. Stay tuned for the actual diagnosis and solution!
Day 18: A Series of Unfortunate C# Events
By: Brittany Lumanlan Martin
Tags: Gamedevhq, Unity, C Sharp Programming

Attempting to implement a wave sequence for my enemies has sent me into a cosmic spiral of endless code revisions and hours of eye-drying code debugging.

At the start of the day, I was set to code the behavior for my new enemy, deemed “Enemy2”. I quickly realized that when I attempted to run the game, Enemy2 would disappear. I figured it was a simple fix, as I had run into this issue before. I toggled the layer order to “foreground” in the sprite renderer, thinking the game object would surface from beneath the background. When that didn’t work, I tried to rotate the object on the x, y, and z axes. Adjusting the z axis brought me close, but Enemy2 was still disappearing when I hit play.

Not wanting to dwell too long on fixing this issue, I made a note to come back to it and tried to move on to creating a balanced spawning system. In this section, the requirements meant making powerups such as ammo more readily available than a powerup like health, seeing as that effect is more coveted and would even out the difficulty of the game. At this point, the code I had previously written for my enemy wave sequence wasn’t working ideally and I figured since I was already working on code for spawning, I would rewrite it. I spent hours on this, and it got nightmarish to say the least. None of the adjustments I made would make my enemy objects spawn in sequential waves.

As of writing this blog entry, I finally have my Enemy2 ship showing up as intended and firing off its weapon, the plasma bomb.

Some days a solution is right under your nose, and you won’t notice it until hours later. So it goes.

I have one last bit of code to write for the behavior of the plasma bomb, and it should be set. I’ll be having another attempt at that wave sequence in the morning.
An Intersection Test for Arbitrary Rectangular Prisms
By: Sean Finnegan
Tags: Game Development, Unity, Coding, Mathematics, Programming

Have you ever had two arbitrarily rotated and sized rectangular prisms, and wanted to check if they’re intersecting? I know I have! Just an old AABB won’t do the trick, as very snug fitting rectangular prisms need to be detected and dismissed. There are some dastardly configurations (for instance, imagine a very very small rectangular prism sitting just above the surface of a massive and highly skewed rectangular prism) which also need to be sussed out.

It turned out to be a surprisingly tricky problem, and I had to pull a lot of different things from a lot different places together to get it working.

So how does it work? Well first lets think about the problem in 2 dimensions. There’s 3 escalating tests we can run to check if these rotated boxes overlap. The first is to generate two axis-aligned boxes and run a quick AABB check as a broad phase check. The second is to iterate the points of one of the boxes and check the overlap. If there are any points within the box, the box is overlapping. If that is inconclusive, we run the final and most expensive test. First, we pick one of the boxes to define a set of axis in whatever dimensions we’re working with. We basically rotate the whole world in such a way that one box is now perfectly aligned with the axis. Then, we project to each axis. If any of the projections do not overlap, we can guarantee that the boxes do not overlap either.

It’s pretty much a straight shoot up into the third dimension for the first 2 tests. However, for the 3rd, instead of projecting a 1D line from a 2D shape as above, we instead project a 3D shape onto a 2D surface. To do this, we decompose the rotated 3D rectangular prism into its composite triangles.

3D space (left) decomposed into 2D screen-space triangles (right)

We can then flatten these triangles against a 2D axis by swizzling their coordinates. We then can do the much simpler test of if a triangle is intersecting an axis aligned rectangle, for each triangle. If any of the triangles succeed, the whole axis succeeds and exits. If all axis succeed, the test is a success and the rectangular prisms absolutely do overlap.

And there we go! What a time that was. But it works, and for pretty much every case you can imagine. You can find some Unity3D code which demonstrates this here.
Game Submitted, Finally
By: Aaron Black
Tags: Unity, Google Play Store, Mobile Game Development

I did it, I finally submitted my mobile game to the Google Play store. It took a while to figure out what I needed to do to fix my issue originally. As of yesterday the Play Store was giving me this error:

This release is not compliant with the Google Play 64-bit requirement.

The following APKs or App Bundles are available to 64-bit devices, but they only have 32-bit native code: [2]

Include 64-bit and 32-bit native code in your app. Use the Android App Bundle publishing format to automatically ensure that each device architecture receives only the native code it needs. This avoids increasing the overall size of your app.

There were a couple of things I had to do to make this right. First off, I switched to the Android App Bundle publishing format because I found through my search of the wonderful internet that that is the recommended way to publish anything to the play store. Like it says, it can reduce the size of the app, simplify releases, and enable advanced distribution features. I found this setting in my build settings in Unity when building for Android:

The next thing I did was to go into my Unity Project Settings > Player and go to the “Other” settings tab. Under Configuration there is a dropdown for the Scripting Backend, I changed it from Mono to IL2CPP. I also checked the ARM64 box which was not available before I changed the Scripting Backend:

There it was, I had it. I finally figured out what was happening with my build that was giving me such issues. Or so I thought. Just one more hurdle to jump. On build I was getting and error saying that Unity did not recognize my NDK I had set on there. The one that came with the download I guess was not the correct one. So, I downloaded the newest version or what I thought would be the right one, that didn’t work either. Then Unity said it doesn’t support the version I downloaded but it does support: Unity requires NDK r19 (64-bit) (19.0.5232133).

Great! So I found the NDK r19 (64-bit)(19.2.5345600) which was the only one even close to what Unity wanted. Still didn’t work. I had to dive in deeper to my google search and what I found out is that I had to just change the package revision number:

Thanks SHOLZ!! That did it for me. In case you don’t want to do that, I found a link to the proper version you would need:

https://dl.google.com/android/repository/android-ndk-r19-windows-x86_64.zip

That’s it then. My game is now under review at the Google Play Store and I am waiting for that to finish so I can share it with the world!
Bugs.
By: Kristin Treder
Tags: Learning To Code, Unity, Unity Game Development, Bugs, Unity3d

Today I spent the morning fixing some old bugs that were bugging the hell out of me (lame pun intended).

The first problem I tackled was my enemies firing lasers after they were killed, exploded, and incinerated. At first I liked that they shot off one last death-throw-shot right when they turned to space dust but then I realized it might not be as fun for anyone who might play the game and not yet know a death-shot was headed their way. In order to allow the enemy explosion to play out completely, we had modified the enemies so that their collider is removed immediately upon being hit so that they can’t cause any more damage but they were set to destruct 2.8 sec later, after the explosion could fully play out. However, since all the enemies were “alive” 2.8 sec longer than they should be, they were still randomly firing off lasers. So I went back in with an if-statement that only allows enemies with Collider2Ds to fire off lasers. And that problem was solved.

Next, I moved over to the player. I had never implemented the player exploding upon dying. I had saved it for later and later had become today! No time like the present. For this one, I used the existing explosion animation that is played by the asteroid upon being hit with a laser. I added a serialized field to the player and dragged and dropped the explosion animation prefab. The prefab itself already had the explosion audio so that wasn’t needed. I then instantiated the explosion prefab when player lives < 0 and that one is done now too!

The rest of the morning was spent going over my enemy and laser scripts, trying my darnest to remember what I did and trying to figure out the parts I didn’t understand. A lot of the upcoming tasks have to do with modifying enemies and if I don’t understand them, I can’t successfully modify them.

After lunch I got back to work on the Phase II tasks and decided to tackle the “Press C to attract Powerups” task. Since I have separate scripts for regular and rare powerups, I had to redundantly update both scripts with the same code. I used .MoveTowards( ) and even though I still can’t get it to quite work with my homing missile, this was a success! Check me out below attracting ALL the powerups:
Game Dev in Progress… Day 40
By: Cristian Aspacio
Tags: Space Shooter, Game Development, Intern, Unity, Games

Photo by Sebastian Herrmann on Unsplash

Hello and its Day 40 of my journey into becoming a fully fledged software engineer. The goal for today is to make final some final touches on our game and create a finished build. I was working on some fixes on some bugs that we found out while play testing the other day. I also managed to add a camera shake when the player gets hit.

The bug fixes that I managed to fix was that my Mid Boss was not rotating properly when instantiated and that it won’t fire it’s weapon. I figured out that the problem had to do with missing audio references because of how we set up the audio manager. We had to load from the main menu in order to fix it. The second problem is that the front weapon was not firing. We quickly found out that the wrong bullet prefab was being instantiated. We fixed it by assigning the right one in the inspector.

The last finishing touches I did was create a simple camera shake. However the coding and script was very simple but having it work in tandem with everyone else’s code was another matter. When I tried to merge my code with our working baseline, it messed everything up. We figured out that we erased the wrong line of code when we were resolving the merge conflicts and it was giving us a weird error. We tried looking it up to see if we can figure out how to fix it but it quickly became apparent that it was out of our scope of knowledge. Since we have a deadline to meet, me and Ryan will peer code the changes I made into his working project and let him push it up instead.

All in all, it was a hectic day. I worked on trying to figure out a way to get our WebGL build into a GitHub Page but had not luck last night. We will continue our work today and hopefully my peers had better luck then me. Thank you for reading.

_

Cristian Aspacio
7 Useful Unity Attributes That Make the Inspector Easier To Use
Tags: Attributes, Unity, Unity Game Development, Programmming, Games

SerializeField Attribute

If you want to write better code, of course, one of the main points is Encapsulation. For example, if you have a variable, which you do not want to be accessed by another class, you mark it as private. In this case, it will not show up in the inspector. Because, Unity only serialize public variables, so that they are being visible in the inspector and their values can be changed. To display a private field in the inspector, we can use SerializeField attribute.

Note: Using public instead of SerializeField attribute is not good practice. Whenever you want something to show up in Inspector, use SerializeField attribute.

Let’s see a quick example here:

In the script, we have 3 different variables. Two of them are private, and the other one is public. We have marked the first private field with [SerializeField , we have not marked the second private field with [SerializeField , and the public field will automatically be displayed in the inspector. So, let’s look at how they are showing up in the inspector:
Victory!
By: Jeff Shaw
Tags: Gamedevhq, Unity

After a long painful struggle with some remaining bug I finally finished the 2D Course with both Phase 1 & 2 and some extras like using Abstract classes.

One of the more frustrating issues was finding that I had changed a coroutine to public and tried to call it like a regular routine to display the game over text, but it was not throwing an error, but also not running. I had not recognized it was an IEnumerator coroutine and tried to call it like a regular routine from another script. In this case it would not throw an error, but the code would not execute. Traced it out with extensive debug.log statements. I think I had run into this in the past also, but still not certain if the failure to report the error was related to some other strange issues I had been experiencing since adding Abstract classes to my game. (I suspect there is some remaining reference to the non abstract class that had shown in other cases to cause crazy behavior and require a Unity restart).

In this case, I would see both my code generated messages and system generated error messages reporting in the upper righthand corner where it summarizes the messages, but nothing appeared in the console window itself (like this):

Note this was not just forgetting to press the button to show the message types. This was fixed by restarting Unity.

Addressed some other issues with the Boss death due to needing >= vs just > test in one of a series of nested if statements that stumped me for some time. And the homing missile problems are still not completely resolved to my satisfaction — for some reason it only finds one enemy type. After looking at this and rewriting it several times, I decided to change the spec to only home on this one enemy type. I wish I could use some sort of Wildcard or ‘contains’ expression in the find rather than having separate find statements for every enemy type (does not appear supported unless you implement you own substring search routine), but my explicit implementation should still work. Would like to spend time to review why this is happening with someone in the future.

Really fried after looking at so many issues and getting uncanny behavior that made me not knowing if Unity was not working properly or I had a code problem. I have used Unity for many years and one of it’s greatest strengths has been how solid it has been. So I’m rather unhappy to encounter these recent problems with Unity not working properly and needing a reboot. Probably due to something I am doing, and in particular my implementation of Abstract classes was definitely related at one point.

Happy to have knocked out the bugs and completed everything with the exception of homing missiles on all enemy types.
Day 17: Death Gas
By: Brittany Lumanlan Martin
Tags: Game Development, Unity, C Sharp Programming, Gamedevhq, Space Exploration

In a 2019 SPACE.com article, it was noted that carbon monoxide may indeed be a biosignature, or indicator of extraterrestrial life.

“…We could expect high carbon-monoxide abundances in the atmospheres of inhabited but oxygen-poor exoplanets orbiting stars like our own sun,” — Timothy Lyons, a professor of biogeochemistry at the University of California, Riverside (UCR)

Here, on earth, carbon monoxide attaches itself to hemoglobin and prevents blood from carrying oxygen — leading to asphyxiation. Now, assuming that the pilot of our beloved player ship is at least human-adjacent, it seemed fitting to make a negative pickup full of CO to damage the player, seeing as space is chock full of the gas. If collected, it subtracts a life.

I created this sprite for the CO negative pickup.

Death from Above 2079.

I’m currently working on the next requirement of Phase II, which entails creating a new enemy with a unique projectile and movement. Conceptually I have a spaceship that drops plasma bombs which explode after three seconds. Excited to showcase them here!
K.I.S.S.
By: Benjamin Lihn
Tags: Game Development, Software Development, Learning To Code, Unity, C Sharp Programming

In game development, as in life, we often overly complicate our problems. In a game development sense, I especially did this today. Welcome back a particularly successful mantra: Keep It Simple “Silly”

I’ve been developing various enemy types to be spawned during game play, and these differing types will have different movements, weapons, behaviors, and appearances. One in particular — the shielded enemy — was proving to be a sticking point for me.

I was confident that I had arranged everything properly: the visuals, the boolean operators to turn the shield on and off, the game object variable to store the sprite for the shield, and the code to disarm the shield when contacted by player laser. However, upon being hit by a laser, the enemy craft still showed its shield. In terms of the variables, the code was working properly. I confirmed this with various debug comments through the logic, but the visual shield was still present.

code looking fine…

from OnTriggerEnter2D(Collider) method

I banged my head against the wall a few times because the enemy would take two shots to destroy (as intended), but again the shield would not disappear. I pondered several ways to “cheat” around the issue, like swapping the enemy prefab for one with no shield, but I felt it more important to figure out a more proper way to get the task done. After all, debugging, researching, and thoughtful planning have gotten me this far — nearly completing a game in just a few short weeks (starting from ground zero!). As an aside, though a relevant reference, I once backpacked through Central America beginning with a Spanish language proficiency of relatively zero. About the same as my game development proficiency at the start of my internship with GDHQ. I’m certainly more fluent in game development now than I was at conversing in Spanish at the same ~four week mark!

I made a few temporary changes to game play to help me debug the issue more efficiently: spawn only the enemy type I was working on, and initiate a break/game pause when the enemy was spawned to make it easier to inspect in Unity. Super useful!

It was here that I finally discovered my issue. The shielded enemy type (clone) had its serialized field for the shield visual assigned to the enemy shield prefab in the project hierarchy. I needed to have that serialized field assigned to the child object of the enemy prefab instead, from the game hierarchy. Granted, they are the same image file — however, in order to activate/deactivate, Unity needs to be looking at the game object’s particular child.

K.I.S.S.

Problem solved — moving on to three more enemy types. And perhaps a boss enemy later! While I did feel frustrated throughout a good portion of the day, being able to solve the problem gives me relief and confidence that I will indeed continue to grow as a developer. The speed will come from repetition.
Game Dev in Progress… Day 39
By: Cristian Aspacio
Tags: Unity, Games, Game Development, Intern

Photo by heylagostechie on Unsplash

Hello and good evening. It is Day 39 of my journey to becoming a software developer. This is the last week of working on the game as well as probably my internship. Today we were told that we might not have the funding to continue the program. However, we plan to continue on this project and have it finished and presented by the end of the week. All of today was peer coding the game and fixing any bugs as well as to make finishing touches. Chris found some bugs while play testing it over the weekend. Two of the bugs involved two of the features that I worked on which was the unique enemy waves and the mid boss.

The first bug had to do with one of the weapons not damaging the the mid boss. This weapon is the wave weapon and unlike the fireball’s, it didn’t damage the mid boss because I didn’t program it in. The wave weapon had a different tag labeled as “Wave” so when my script checks for collisions, it only checked for projectiles labeled “Fireball” and “Beam”. The fix was simple, I copied how I was checking the Fireballs and just changed the tag to Wave.

The second bug had to do with the unique waves not destroying themselves. The way we had the unique waves setup is that the enemies are childed into an game object. This is because we wanted to do all the rotations on the parent rather then the child. However the parent object stays even though all the child enemies are dead. The way to fix this was that I created a script which destroys the game object when all it’s children are destroyed. Then I just attach this script to all the unique waves prefabs.

With that, were almost done and is now the final push to finishing up this game. We play tested it a bit and we quickly found out that the game is super hard. We had Ryan play it for around 30 mins and couldn’t beat it. Some balance changes are in order to make the game playable and I think that is our next step. We will also work on some post processing implementations to make the game a bit nicer to look at. Thank you for reading!

_

Cristian Aspacio
Phase II: Core Programming
By: Kristin Treder
Tags: Unity, Unity Game Development, Learning To Code

Despite my homing missiles needing a lot of work, I’ve decided to move on to Phase II: Core Programming, which is the last part of 2D Game Development course. The requirements of this last phase are to complete 10 of the following tasks:

As you can see here, my homing missile, when functional, will count as one out the the ten tasks. Also, I’ve already created balanced spawning in Phase I so that is done.

Next, I plan on implementing the “Player Ammo” which incorporates a visualization for max ammo next to the current ammo count. After messing around with this alllllllll morning, I ended up having to rewatch the tutorial in which we added the score to the game by adding the canvas. (2D Game Development >> User Interface (UI) >> Challenge Review Score Implementation Reboot.) I pretty much had it all figured out except I was missing the part where I had needed to add a serialized field to the UI script in which I could drag and drop the Max_Ammo_Text object. Oh well… perhaps I won’t forget next time!

Damage Powerup for Negative Powerup requirement

Next I decided to tackle the “Negative Pickup”. I found a pixilated skull png file and converted it to a sprite for a “damage powerup”. Upon collection, the player incurs one unit of damage. I made an executive decision to add the damage powerup to my RARE powerup script so that it spawns rarely.

Phase II Complete:

homing missile (half complete)

Player Ammo

Negative Pickup

Take a look at what I have so far:
WHAT A YEAR
By: Staffan Carle
Tags: 2020, Unity, Humanity

What a year, finally some movement towards commonness rather than alienation; of course the external separation and loss is hard, but what really counts — our internal unification — definately took a leap forward.
Becoming a Published Game Developer
By: Aaron Black
Tags: Unity

I did it, well almost. I finished the Dungeon Escape game for mobile devices. It is a very basic version of it but enough to publish to the Google Play Store. The Character is able to jump and attack, has an option to buy a flaming sword, and can also purchase boots that make him jump higher. I eventually want to add more features in such as using the chest to be able to open and get loot, have the key to the castle open up some kind of special door on another level with the ultimate prize, and possibly different kinds of enemies. I would like to expand this to multiple levels and add a boss possibly.

It was an interesting game to develop as I gained a few new skills in programming C#. I became very comfortable in using Abstract Classes with the enemy script. I also learned a bit about using singletons. The singletons I am still trying to wrap my head around them because they seem to work similar to the GetComponent() method.

I can use the Instance to call on anything in the script that it is in pretty similar to GetComponent():

UIManager.Instance.GetGems();

Im sure it has something to do with performance or working with abstract classes. I read in one article that the question of GetComponent() or Simpleton is like asking which goes faster? A Submarine or a car? Obviously two different mediums of transportation but they will both go pretty fast. this is something though I will have to go more in depth with in the coming days.

My game so far has come along pretty well I think:

I got the controls on there in a decent spot, all functioning well. I have a menu button on the top right to bring you back to the main menu so you can start over or quit the app. You can watch a video about Unity in the Shop down below to get 100G to purchase the boots, flaming sword, or key.

The only reason why I did not release it yet is that Im having issues with the build and google play store. It looks like I need to do some work in the Android Studio to build it there for production. Im not really sure what the solution is yet exactly but Im sure I will figure it out with google eventually.
Debugging
By: Jeff Shaw
Tags: Gamedevhq, Unity

Debugging and further cleaning up my code. Seeing that graph err reported like when needing reboot — Object reference not set to an instance of an object UnityEditor.Graphs.Edge.WakeUp () (at C:/buildslave/unity/build/Editor/Graphs/UnityEditor.Graphs/Edge.cs:114). Seems I have some other reference to my non-abstract class I can’t find yet. Some nagging errors still with my retrofitted “Lives” system seeming impacted by something else.

Spent more time connecting with folks on Discord and delving into the GameDevHQ and other Discord server resources. Also studying

Willem Reinier de Jong’s Linked-In: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wrdejong/

An amazing resource of Unity jobs worldwide.
One Universe
By: Surekha Kulkarni
Tags: Humanity, Compassion, Unity, World, Love

I am a fun loving woman who is absolutely convinced that this universe is one

We all humans were and are made equal.

We might have different nationalities, different cultures, different colors, different religions, different genders, financial backgrounds.

But we are at the forefront one huge mass of humanity .

All diverse but uniform in the sense that we all need love, care and affection .

We all crave for peace, money, family, stability, progress and growth in our lives.

If we are so all uniform as to our expectations from life , then why so much strife, so much vileness, so much hatred, so much feeling of othering?

Why is it that in the last so much centuries we have never really had peace and equality for all?

Why is it that countries fight against each other to protect every inch of their border ?

Why are same country fellows at each other throats and kill and maim each other under the name of religion, caste, language and so many other causes?

Is it not paradoxically that human beings are at times bestial creatures and at the same time capable of immense act of kindness to total strangers.

These contradictory and inconsistent human behavior fascinate and alternatively disturb me

We Indians specially are so enigmatic that to solve the conundrum of our nation, states , value systems, culture will not be something which can be solved anytime I feel.

The more we feel monochromatic the more the diversity in our midst hits us.

And it just takes a cricket match or some crisis when we all forget our so called differences and show our actual character and strength

Since ages all different spring sources have tried to divide and create chasms, partition and separation between mankind .

They have been more than successful and hence so many world wars, terrorist attacks, religious strife and border skirmishes which happen almost on a daily scale.

But the inherent strength of human mind and brain is what is keeping us afloat .

The phenomenal progress made in science, technology , medicine, space and so many other fields has led to more openness and concept of one people one world.

The more the divided the world has become, the striking reality is that today all our destinies are intertwined like never before. This harsh but factual reality has been bought out by the ravaging covid19 pandemic for the last 12 months .

Cant we all accept this maybe bitter or harsh reality for some that we are all only homosapiens and that’s the only category we all belong .
How to make your character more lively in Unity
Tags: Unity, Unity Asset Store, Unity3d, Unity Game Development

How to make your character more lively in Unity

Most often game developers forget to the small things that make the animation look lively. These small things doesn’t make a direct impact on the gameplay but if they are not implemented then it feels like something is missing in the aesthetic department. So what are these small things I am taking about and how to implement them.

What are these?

These are the effects that makes any character look natural. Let’s take an example to understand it better. Say you have a character with a cape in your game. During the character rigging you mostly concentrate on things like walk, run, fight, dead etc. When the game plays if the cape doesn’t more based on the character motion then it doesn’t feel natural. This can be the same with things like hair, tail, clothes etc.

How to fix this in Unity?

The answer is Unity dynamic bone asset. With this asset you can add physics to any bone of your character. It’s as simple as selecting and adding a component in Unity. Once you have done that you need to set some physics parameters to get it to look natural.
HMS Unity integration for Analytics kit and Crash Services
Tags: Analytics, Unity, Crash, Huawei, Huawei Mobile Service

Hello everyone,

In this article we are going to create Unity project and explain how to implement HMS Analytics kit and Crash Services.

Introduction

HUAWEI Analytics Kit offers a rich array of preset analytics models(Event, Behavior, Audience, Funnel, Retention, Real-Time) that help you gain an in-depth insight into your users, products, and content. With this insight, you can then take a data-driven approach to make informed decisions for product and marketing optimizations.

By integrating the HMS Core Analytics SDK, you can:

Collect and report custom events through coding.

Set a maximum of 25 user attributes.

Automate event collection and session calculation with predefined event IDs and parameters.

HUAWEI Analytics Kit identifies users and collects statistics on users by an anonymous application identifier (AAID). The AAID is reset in the following scenarios:

1) Uninstall or reinstall the app.

2) The user clears the app data.

After the AAID is reset, the user will be counted as a new user.

There are 3 types of events: Automatically collected, predefined, and custom.
Pramukh Swami Maharaj’s Saintliness (Part 4)
By: Param Shanti
Tags: Life Lessons, Compassion, Unity, Pramukh Swami Maharaj, Love

Inspiring Faith and Providing Solutions Through Letters

Through the last four decades countless letters from devotees to Swamishri have comprised of enquiries, personal conflicts, business problems and prayers. In his replies, Swamishri has pro­vided solace and guidance. He has always spared time to answer letters from children and seniors, scholars and the semi-lettered, and devotees and others. He has also patiently attended to letters, whether they were succinct or long-winded, leg­ible or illegible.

Swamishri has read and replied to letters in a variety of situations: during satsang sabhas, while travelling by car or train, on a railway platform, prior to his afternoon sleep, in an elevator, during a procession, and while talking on the phone. He attends to them whenever and wherever he is.

Once, the council members of Limbdi town had arranged a public function to honor Swamishri. The state finance minister and other dignitaries came on stage to present the citation. Swamishri remained absorbed in reading a letter till the point they came near to him.

Once, Swamishri had gone to Dr. Dikshit’s dental clinic to get an X-ray of his painful gums. While the dentist was making the preliminary arrangements Swamishri started reading letters. When everything was ready Swamishri was asked to sit on the dental chair. He got up without rais­ing his head, still engrossed in the letter. He con­tinued reading it while he walked to the X-ray machine and till the moment of taking the X-ray. In all, five X-rays were taken. He resumed reading the letters during each interval.

Once, Prof. Raymond Williams asked Swamishri, “How do you decide what to write to the questions posed to you?” Swamishri replied, “I reply with the inspiration of God. I tell all to repose faith in God. Without faith and trust in God nothing is possible.”
Within the Darkness, We Found Community.
By: John Board Ct
Tags: Sandy Hook, Newtown, Connecticut, Unity, Repair The World

Each year on 12/14 we are reminded of the fragility of life when 8 years ago, 26 souls were taken from us. As somebody who grew up right next to Newtown and eventually worked alongside First Selectwoman Pat Llodra; I know too well of the pain that the Sandy Hook community lives with.

In times of darkness and isolation, we look for light, and community — we look for unity. On this solemn day for our State (and for our nation), we are bound together in grief.

We are reminded in Ecclesiastes that there is time for everything and this past year has proven to be so. Starting with the coronavirus pandemic upending our lives and having to live part of the year in isolation. Yet today, we find light when residents will start to be injected with the vaccine.

This year also provided darkness with a divisive political campaign season, however, there is light at the end tunnel when on this day the presidential electors gathering to cast their votes in state capitols across the nation, and we have the community coming together to affirm our nation’s role in our democracy.

We are also in the midst, night five, of the Jewish holiday of Chanukah — the festival of lights. The Talmud, speaks of the purification of the Second Temple after the Maccabees, defeated Antiochus and how the menorah burned for eight days, even though there was only enough oil for one day’s lighting. The story of Chanukah reminds us to always keep the faith even during the darkest of hours.

Some of you might be wondering, why I am including these vignettes in my year 12/14 tribute. It is because the families and residents of Newtown have been able to turn their darkness into action, which has rallied the community together. While each individual has taken a different route to express their grief, they have all found a way to provide tikun olam (“repair the world”).

For isn’t that our goal in life: to leave the world a better place than when we arrived. Through times of darkness, we find purpose, a spark. When we find purpose in our lives, it brings communities together.

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An American Clarion Call
By: Sarah C. Brockman
Tags: America, Unity, Liberty

A poetic call to unite

Photo by David Everett Strickler on Unsplash

The Star Spangled Banner Waves over the land of the free.

We’ve sung this tune for a couple centuries.

America is beautiful from coast to coast, and includes some islands of the sea.

But our Brotherhood more precarious then we wish to believe.

We strive for our freedoms and liberties,

But distrust each other if we don’t think the same.

So much for unity in diversity.

Whatever happened to “United We Stand,

Divided we fall”? But don’t loose hope, not all is lost.

We are still marching on.

We will struggle, and grow, and reach new heights.

Some achievements will bring us closer together,

And yet other issues might cause more strife.

But we will overcome,

Because when we take a stand for good, together,

Nothing can stop us at all.

I bow my head and pray for healing in our land,

and when I stop, I know we’ve got work to do.

So I find some motivation to continue in this cause of liberty.

It is our turn now, and we’re not going to stop.

We must trust that we will solve the issues we face.

We are the people, who out of many nations, became one.

Let this be the American Clarion Call;

Call me a dreamer, but I truly believe that

If We Stand United, We will not fall!
CASTE
Tags: Books, Unity, Change, History, Racism

I am currently reading the book Caste by Isabel Wilkerson. The way the book connects the past and present across various parts of the world truly makes you appreciate the impact of history on the present day world. All my life I have tried to not box up people into generalized categories. I truly believe each person is an individual. But then upon reading this book, I cannot help but wonder if some of the things that have happened is because I was typecasted to a particular box. The histories of most countries are fraught with war and vengeance. While it is only human to seek revenge on people who have been responsible for atrocities directed your way, does it make any sense to propagate the atrocities and prejudices to future generations? And if your answer is Yes Do Not Forget, where will this circle of vengeance stop? Would it continue on till the end of world? While it makes sense to put oppressors and bullies in their place, I cannot find justification for subjecting future generations to the same prejudices. You come to this world with a clean slate and when you are told that it is because of your ancestry that for the rest of your life, you will treated in a certain manner, how do you come to terms with it? The person may think I have always treated other people with respect, followed rules, then why am I being marginalized this way for something that happened many years ago and wasn’t my fault.

World War II started an era of Cold War. The death of so many innocent people and the inhuman deplorable atrocities to which sections of people were subjected to is horrifying. Words fail me to describe my true emotions. The fact that people and entire nations were capable of such brutal inhuman treatment of other fellow human beings is just hard to comprehend. And this was just 70–80 years ago. We all have grandparents of that age. To what extent has human mind evolved to overcome such violent tendencies in just two generations? I don’t know about you, but I truly find it hard to put a mask of Hitler or Stalin on any of the older generation members I know and imagine them conducting mass murders on such a scale. When I first heard of the “murder gene” in a recent TV show I was watching, it made me laugh. Now, if I put it in perspective of this book, it is not difficult to follow the train of thought that might have brought about this discussion. The wars did take place and they took place just two generations ago. So, what is to say that it won’t happen again? However, where the genes have a role to play, so do the environmental and epigenetic factors. If we go down the rabbithole of putting a person in a particular mold because of their genes, it isn’t any different than the systemic racism that is currently underlying most societies around the world.

Uplifting sections of people to level the playing field makes sense but upliftment of one section should not happen at the expense of marginalization of another section.
Homing missile prototype
By: Kristin Treder
Tags: Learning To Code, Unity, Prototype, Videogames, Unity Game Development

I started off the day with creating and integrating a new Rare Powerup script which spawns on a much longer time interval. As I mentioned in my last post, the RarePowerup script is exactly like my original Powerup script with the only difference being the time interval of when powerups are spawned. I’m guessing this is quite redundant and that there is a more efficient way to handle this but this way works for now.

Once I had the new script attached to the rare powerups (homing missile and health), I made sure all powerups were spawning correctly and then I moved on to creating the actual homing missile.

My new homing missile sprite.

I found this png file of a purple laser cloud that I converted to my homing missile sprite by adding a 2D circle collider and a rigid body 2D. I also created a script dedicated solely to my homing missile and attached it to the new sprite.

As a first step, I made my homing missile function exactly as a laser by shooting directly up in a straight line. After I got this working, I modified the missile movement by using the Vector2.MoveTowards( ) method and set it up so it moves towards any game object with a tag of “Enemy”.

Homing missile — first prototype

As you can see here, I still have some major bugs to work out. The homing missiles continue to home in on where the enemy last was, even after the enemy disappears. The enemies were modified when attaching the explosions and were set to self destruct only after the explosion animation was fully played (so a couple seconds after the enemy is hit). Also, if there are no enemies, the homing missiles seem to move to random places on the screen and sit there until an unfortunate enemy runs into them. This is not how I intended them to work so I’m counting this as an important first step and will continue to modify.
Pangea (the husband)
By: Moses In The Wild
Tags: Unity, Love Letters, Recovery, Wedding Vows, Poetry

Maybe we are the mountain .. allowing others to climb us, standing perched atop our shoulders .. maybe you are like me .. kind instead of brutal.. brutal at times when kindness doesn’t fit. I like the way you say it, when you’re brave enough to say it …you say it. .. this fitting hand

Maybe I rode the wave without that taming harness called a boat and maybe the pull of the moon danced inside you, far before you saw light.. born this way.. maybe the water is muddied and the earth is wet.. we are fertile and the moss is proof…you, dancing like an asteroid, removing my collar.. we have been here as long as the tide as been here .. sand in my toes.. soap in your eyes.. where else would we fall? Take my cloth and bless it again.

I want to use the words.. and trust you’ll bring all your love .. and the last few weeks have been impossible to write so we lived it instead “(living is IQ).. who made it so easy .. and how did we become loving? What curtain was opened and what sky are we walking? You said no hard questions … born this way.. unmoving still I can carve you.. unyielding still I can move you, smooth as a pebble heavy as the sun

Maybe we stand on boulders an extension of you.. the old man and me .. while the old men mark you with wars and graves and flags and landmark.. maybe I too am a flag to pronounce.. spelling your name .. claiming your acre.. maybe we are mountains far too kind

Art credit : CREATURA ANTICA by Roberto Ferri.