I actually wrote my first AngularJS app a few months ago, back in February. However, despite the long delay, I wanted to do a proper writeup describing my experience – mostly because it was a lot of fun!
Below is a screenshot and link to the demo site I created. It was a proof of concept for a simple consulting site, complete with real-time charts and graphs. If you open up the website in two windows, and change some data, both windows will automatically update – the graphs and charts will animate the change. Awesome! The code can be found on my bitbucket account.
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So I finally decided to take the plunge and start learning about hosting in the cloud. In the four years that I was out of the programming game, this has to be one of the areas that has seen the most rapid change and development. What was just starting to take off back in 2010 has now become a virtual necessity for most programmers, and is one of the most important things for me to catch up on. Seeing as most of my recent experience was in a .NET environment, I decided to get my feet wet with Azure.
It’s been quite a while since I’ve done any real web development, so it took me a few days to get up to speed with ASP.NET MVC 5, EF 6, and Azure, but after a weekend of tutorials and experimentation, I was up and running. The screenshot below is what I managed to create – a simple recipe website my mom has been wanting for years. Sadly, it’s far from finished, and is more of a quick demo to get me familiar with Azure. I doubt it will see true completion any time in the near future. Sorry mom!
Mom’s Best, a simple recipe website for my mom (no longer live)
I plan on leaving the site up indefinitely, or until Microsoft decides I can no longer host it for free. The code can be found here, on my bitbucket account. To wrap up this post, I’d like to give you a few of my first impressions of Azure, mostly pertaining to simple website development.
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I’ve given the shadow system some much needed love, so I figured I’d throw up a quick demo. It looks considerably better than the previous version. Here’s what changed:
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Removed the horizontal “swing” effect by skewing every vertex in a sprite based on its position relative to each light source, rather than skewing all vertices by a uniform value. This also has the added effect of allowing shadows to appear on both sides of a building when standing in front of it.
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Added a transparency lerp when close to the object’s pivot (vertically). This eliminated the vertical “swing” effect, and corrected issues with large objects (the inn) not being tall enough to properly overlap a large light source.
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Blur added. This also corrected an issue where the tops of fence posts appeared warped.
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Added a configurable vertical shadow offset for each sprite, which makes tree shadows look significantly better.
Web player (requires Unity Web Player)
Standalone
I’ve been working on a simple platformer for the past week or so, and wanted to get a quick demo up. It’s certainly not feature complete, but the first two levels are playable. It’s meant to be a sort of cutesy game, for kids. Check it out!
Web player (requires Unity Web Player)
Standalone
As I quickly learned, there are a ton of techniques and tools used for creating water in Unity. The Standard Assets package includes pretty much everything you need to get the basics done, but there’s loads of third party tools availble to extend that functionality. There’s tools like Flow and SmartWater, and there’s also lots of interesting optimizations, like creating custom water meshes. But, to my dismay, almost everything out there is designed for 3D environments.
Granted, it probably would have been possible to adapt some of these tools to achieve an acceptable 2D top-down water effect, but it would almost certainly involve code changes and creating a new shader or two. I was looking for a solution that would be simple to implement, well documented, and that didn’t involve adapting a lot of 3D objects or concepts. Here’s a summary of what I was looking for:
- Don’t need to interact with lighting
- Don’t need reflections
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Needs support for a transparency mask. Because we don’t have any 3D terrain in a true 2D game, we need a mask to define where the water is drawn, and at what opacity.
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Multi-directional and multi-speed flow map support (different areas of the same water texture can flow in different directions and at different speeds).
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A flow map generator/editor that can be used within Unity, so I don’t have to create them by hand in Photoshop
A few third party tools looked promising, like Flow, but they clearly designed for a 3D environment, and were a little lacking on documentation and examples. I wasn’t about to blow good money on something that I wasn’t even certain would support what I was trying to achieve. Since I was unable to find any sure-fire solutions on the asset store, I set out to create my own.
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I’ve got a basic demo up and running now, so I’d like to share. There’s a lot of work left to do, but it’s coming along!
Demo
Web player (requires Unity Web Player)
Standalone
Major Completed Tasks
- World builder tool
- Sprite builder tool for generating sprite effects (article coming soon)
- Zone importer wizard in Unity
- Imports all assets generated by world builder into current scene
- Collision detection import from Tiled
- Actor importer
- Automatically slices sprites
- Generates mecanim animations (directional movement, attack, cast, death, etc)
- Basic lighting system
- Time of day color
- Angled shadows (needs revamp)
- Positional shadows
- Multi-direction water flow shader, custom water flow vertex painter tool
- Basic weather system (rain, snow, water ripples)
- Polygon sound source system for large objects (rivers)
Coming soon
- Waterdepth/Transparency shader for all actors
- Shadow blur
- Redone shadow system (no more ‘swinging’, better skew method)
- Consolidated collision detection (article coming soon)
- Free camera mode (zoom, pan)
- UI
- Dialog system (using Articy Draft 2)
