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Channel: Alastair Aitchison
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I’m Back! Having Escaped the Room…

*Apologetically knocks on door* Ooooh, hello again. Remember me? Crikey – has it been that long? I’ve been doing quite a lot over the last two years – new jobs, many new games and projects, and just...

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Guess Who Reloaded for the Rainbow Jam 2016

I recently enrolled to take part in the Rainbow Jam but, with somewhat of a lack of foresight, failed to realise I was going to be on holiday in France for most of the jam period, without either a...

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Bulk-renaming files

I recently found myself needing to rename around 100 files. The reason was that I had saved a series of video fragments from the middle of a much larger streaming video – so the fragment number of each...

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Unity Shadertoys (a.k.a Converting GLSL shaders to Cg/HLSL)

If you’ve tried dabbling with shaders at all, you’ve probably come across ShaderToy – an online shader showcase with some pretty amazing examples of what’s possible in a few lines of shader code,...

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Multiple Mice Input in Unity

I’m a big fan of local multiplayer – as far as I’m concerned, being bundled up with your mates cajoling each other and screaming at the TV is the very essence of gaming. I had an absolute blast at the...

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Learnings from Unite 2015

I spent the last three days having a lovely time in Amsterdam attending the Unite Europe 2015 conference. This is just a place for me to gather my notes/thoughts while they’re still in my head:...

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Modding Mario

Video footage of the two finalists in the recent 2015 “Nintendo World Championship” competing in speedruns of customised Super Mario Bros levels has generated some excitement for the upcoming “Mario...

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Creating Windowless Unity applications

I remember some while back there was a trend for applications to seem integrated with your Windows desktop – animated cats that would walk along your taskbar – things like that… What about a windowless...

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Creating a Unity game stretched over Two Monitors

I guess many developers, like me, use a dual-output graphics card to make their Windows workspace extend over two monitors. I’ve been experimenting with whether it’s possible to make a Unity game that...

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Creating “Hand-Drawn” Terrain in Unity

I’ve had a few questions recently about how to apply my hand-drawn shader pack on Unity terrain. So here’s a guide (written using Unity 5, but the instructions should remain almost identical in Unity 4...

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Adding Shadows to a Unity Vertex/Fragment Shader in 7 Easy Steps

This was a question asked on the Unity Forums recently, so I thought I’d just write up the answer here. Unity provides its own unique brand of “surface shaders”, which make dealing with lighting and...

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Using the Stencil Buffer in Unity Free

News concerning the recent release of Unity 4.6 was largely dominated by its new UI system. However, closer inspection of the 4.6 release notes reveals some other interesting changes and improvements,...

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Optical / Spatial / Dimensional Trickery in Games

I’m currently considering a game design that makes use of various optical and logical tricks to fool the player as to how objects in the game are spatially-related – and thought I’d start by doing a...

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Previewing FBX Animations in Quicktime Player

I’ve been building up a library of FBX animations from a combination of MoCap stuff I’ve found around the internet and my own lovingly hand-crafted (though rather stilted – I’m not a natural animator!)...

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Spacescape

Everyone likes a good space game, right? Then you’ll need some way of creating spacey backdrops. You could go for an 8bit parallax pixel starfield, or, at the other extreme, you might use authentic...

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Grabbing and Converting Adobe Streaming Video Fragments

I was recently interviewed by Mustard TV for a feature on the Norwich Sound & Vision festival, in which I’ve been involved. The feature was broadcast on Freeview cable TV but I can’t pick up the...

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Underwater Effects

There’s lots of resources that describe techniques for realistic rendering of water surfaces. Unity comes supplied with several standard water assets, and there are some excellent descriptions of more...

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The Hunt for Napoleon

I was commissioned to create a game for the “Nelson’s Norfolk” exhibition that has been running in The Forum, Norwich throughout August. “The Hunt for Napoleon” is a first-person adventure set during...

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Batch Conversion of BVH to FBX Motion Capture files

Continuing my foray into the world of motion capture, I’ve been building up my own collection of mocap data files from various sources I find on the ‘net, with the hope of ultimately using them to...

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A Simple Mind-Reading Machine

Just for fun, I decided to implement a "Mind Reading Machine" based on the work of Claude Shannon and D.W. Hagelbarger. If you’re not familiar with it, there’s a good summary of Shannon’s idea here...

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