Clik here to view.
Custom Unity Terrain Material / Shaders
I love Unity – it’s one of those environments that’s actually a pleasure to program in, but its terrain system seems somewhat lacking behind its other features, requiring quite a lot of hacks and...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Keeping Track of Targets in a Trigger
Unity provides the OnTriggerEnter() and OnTriggerExit() events that fire whenever a collider enters or exits the designated trigger, and also an OnTriggerStay() that fires in every frame in which the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Glass Shader
I’ve seen a lot of posts recently from folks trying to create shaders that recreate the appearance of glass. I guess the reason is that glass is a pretty common material, but modelling its appearance...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Project Spark : First Impressions
Project Spark is an upcoming game/game creation environment/educational coding tool/interactive story creator/all/none of the above. Actually, I’m not quite sure what it is (nor exactly who it’s aimed...
View ArticleClik here to view.
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...
View ArticleClik here to view.
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...
View ArticleClik here to view.
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...
View ArticleClik here to view.
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...
View ArticleClik here to view.
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...
View ArticleClik here to view.
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...
View ArticleClik here to view.
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!)...
View ArticleClik here to view.
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...
View ArticleClik here to view.
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,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
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...
View ArticleClik here to view.
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...
View ArticleClik here to view.
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...
View ArticleClik here to view.
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...
View ArticleClik here to view.
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...
View ArticleClik here to view.
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:...
View ArticleClik here to view.
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...
View Article
