A fox's Art Stash

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So I had some fun not long ago following a little Blender 2.8 tutorial by Blender Guru on Youtube, so here are some progress photos as well as the finished product.

The Sword of Protection

So this bit nearly killed me but it’s done!!

This little guy here wants to learn some new tricks, right now he’s working on ‘Walking the Dog’.

I’m still alive!!

Hello everyone, long time no see!

I suppose I’d better explain why I’ve been a bit quiet lately.

First off, I’ve gotten a new job! I’m happy to say that I’m now working for Sypro; a software development company based in Hull’s old town. It’s been pretty good so far, and the people I work with are cool; if I fluff up a task or not sure how something works, they give me a hand and walk me through…

As spoken about in this blog post I took part in this year’s 3 Thing Game (3rd November 2018) and I will be speaking about the game in more detail here.

This year me and my team had the words: Premier, Racing, and Starting. It was hard trying to think of some way to incorporate the words “Premier” and “Starting”, “racing” and obvious but in the end, we went with giving the dinosaurs a crown and having a minigame for deciding the speed of the dinosaur.

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For the minigame the player had to catch as much meat as they could falling from the sky into a basket within 10 seconds, and the amount they caught dictated how fast they would run; an object from the minigame scene is kept loaded when the scene changes to the main one and holds onto the score values in script.

Next came the actual race and we had a few issues when decorating it mostly from how too many trees caused the game to lag at times, but this could’ve been from the hardware limitations; the university computers my team mates used are thin clients with very little processing power of their own.  In the end we just used enough props and models to make the map look nice and some of you may recognise them as the same ones from a previous 3 Thing Game I did.

While you can’t see it here, I did use the unity addon probuilder to make the tracks boundary walls and when given a certain material, while they are visible in the editor, they don’t show up at all during actual play and keep the players on track.

This however didn’t always work and if the players went fast enough, they would clip through and go flying off into the void. There was also an issue of balance which came from the minigame if one player caught a lot more meat than the other, so we ended up hiding a few pieces around the track which would increase the players speed to hopefully narrow the gap.

  The thing I’m most proud of is having the game being two player especially as it was one of our stretch goals and weren’t sure if we’d get it done; I hadn’t made anything locally two player before and it took a little while to hunt around the internet to figure out how to get all the cameras, controls, score handling, everything else to work correctly.

One of my favourite parts of this is the castle in the centre put designed and put together by Alex Simpson. It splits the track into different paths and the pink block moves from side to side as an added obstacle in the players way.

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Another thing I enjoyed was the music; Leo Withers has done a fantastic job and the amount of thought he put into the music is evident even for such a little game.

Of course there are a few issues with the game or things that I’d like to improve on;

The Speed modifier.

I experimented with the speed code for some time but sadly I didn’t have quite enough time to perfect it such as putting in a hard limit on the players max speed and have them accelerate during play.

Map design tweaks

The map isn’t the best and while it works, I’d have liked to have had more time dedicated to just making the scenery rather than having to reuse old assets of my own or use some from the asset store. I’d make a simple fence texture to put around the track instead of the invisible walls. Plus, I’d want to rework the boundary walls too, to let players slip around tight corners as I noticed some of those who played the game tried to do.

Asset changes

While I’m happy over all with some of the things I made they’re a bit lack-lust so they would receive some visual changes just to make them look a bit nicer. With the flags I had the plan to play around with Unit’s new shader modules and get them to wave in the breeze.

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Ui changes

Aside from the menus the UI in this game just isn’t there. Things that were planned were a speedometer during the race, scores for the two players I the minigame and a timer for it too. One thing that players asked for though was a little marker on the minigame on top of the screen pointing to where the meat would be falling from next.

If you want to download and play this game for yourself you can do so here, or even check out the code here.

3 Thing Game November 2018

Another November, and another 3 Thing Game complete, but this time around there were a few things different from last year; for starters the organiser (David Parker) was kind enough to open the event to Hull Alumni so there were a lot more people, and the pizza didn’t go nearly as far this year. Secondly, mirroring the discussions of crunch time in the games industry right now the event was split…

C4DI Scale Up Launch

Last Thursday (25th October 2018) I was lucky enough to be invited to the launch for the C4DI Scale Up scheme with Barclays Eagle Labs.

The main event for it was the talk by Dave Keel, C4DI Leader, who gave a talk about the stuff going on in Hull and even revealed that the avocado fad started in Hull (I doubt it but it’s a fun thing to think about), and I learned the definition of a Scale Up:

“A…

Before I continue I just want to stress that I am by no means an expert in UI design, especially for the HoloLens, and a lot of this post will be me reiterating the tips and tricks I’ve picked up from the Visr leaders, HoloLens officials I was able to speak with a few people from the HoloLens team at Microsoft, as well as a few things I stumbled across and my own thoughts on each.

So without further ado, let’s begin.

Make some mock ups

I cannot put too fine a point on this but for the love of god either make your own mock ups or get someone else to do so, so you have something to work off or aim for. This can save you a lot of time and hassle later. In the worst-case scenario without it, like in mine unfortunately, you may end up with a sub-optimal user experience which doesn’t work for its intended use or user story and have to scrap the whole thing to get something decent.

How detailed these mocks are depending on personal preference and how much information you want to put into one image for the rest of your team to share; from what I’ve seen in examples you want to show the range of different states such as when a feature is being used or even when something goes wrong!

Personally, I tend to favour pen and paper drawings for how quick and simple they are to make, letting me jot down ideas as soon as they come, however they don’t offer much guidance on the overall design and can sometimes end up being very unclear. As such I’d recommend using the pencil and paper approach as a starting point and then moving on to digital, more refined versions later on.

Furthermore, you’ll probably want to give some idea of how the UX reacts to input, it doesn’t have to be too detailed at this point but as before you’ll want to have enough to get across the general idea of what’s happening; e.g. does something shake or change size when the user looks at it?

Colours and backgrounds

HoloLens stuff uses white on grey background and the colour black becomes invisible, and even darker colours can have this effect too so choosing the colours scheme suddenly becomes a lot more complex.

You’ll see in a lot of Microsoft own HoloLens products they favour the colours blue, white, and dark grey, as these colours work well not only with each other but a variety of different colours too. This is important to note as you may have a button with a transparent background so any text or icons on it must be a colour which can work well against a variety of different colours, textures and objects.

Additionally, some shaders on materials won’t work on the HoloLens hardware; one idea was to a frosted glass effect for the menus and whilst it worked on Unity it ended up crashing the app on the hololens.

If you want some help deciding on a colour pallet I’d suggest firstly keeping things simple and regulating yourself to just a select few and looking into some colour pallet generators for ideas. The two I recommend are Coolors and Color Mind both of which I use for my own projects on a regular basis.

Placing the UI

The key goal of the HoloLens is to put information INTO the world; not over laid on something or stuck to the users face like a HUD, but IN the world.

Don’t stress if you’re struggling with this concept because I did too, and still do to a degree, and the best advice I can really give is to really look over the videos Hololens has on its YouTube channel  and trawling through various websites to see what others have done. Try thinking of the World as the Desktop only that you’re not bound by having everything in a window (yes, I know that almost all of Microsofts own apps have everything in a window but it tends to defeat the purpose of the HoloLens, doesn’t it?) so you could have one button near to the users right hand or sitting atop a surface whilst the thing they’re looking at hangs on a nearby wall. Again, play around and see what works for what you’re trying to do.

You should also be aware that the human brain is very, very, very dumb and you’ll either find your user trying to reach out for the ui or gesturing to something that doesn’t actually exist (as I have done multiple times). To avoid this, you’ll want to keep things just out of arm’s length, or perceived to be just out of arm’s length, as much as you can although for some applications this may not be best for usability. There’s also something called a Clipping Plane, where the holograms become invisible if the user gets top close, which is normally set at 2.0m but depending on the type of application you’re making you may want to have this smaller or larger.

I’ve been fairly interested in PHP and SQL for a while now, and although I’ve had some experience with the two it but it’s always been as separate things during university rather than together, so decided I’d give it a go.

To begin with I started by just practising a simple php script in a web page, it was also a good excuse to find my starting spot again when I get around to going over HTML. In this example I just wanted to re orientate myself with PHP and HTML so focused on something extremely simple; a Hello World sort of thing which would take in the user’s name on one page and then says “Hello (their name here)”.

This also shows a little exercise I did a bit earlier outputting an array when the page, and the script on it, is called.

Introducing SQL

After that I decided to try something a bit more complex and throw some SQL into the mix. This started off with downloading MySQL Workbench and related software to work with WAMP and having a small play with it.

This small database is made of two tables; one for an artist with their name and an ID number as the primary key, and another for their albums with an assigned ID, name, year of released, and the key from Artist table as a foreign key.I decided against doing anything too fancy with foreign keys for nowas I’m still getting a hang of SQL workbench so I don’t want to push the boat out just yet!

  With the database itself all set up, and filled with some basic data, the next part was building up scripts in PHP which would be able to get a hold of the data from the database, display it, and even add new data as well.

I did end up following a few guides for this, one I’d recommend is by Derek Banas on youtube, he’s a bit fast but covers everything pretty in depth.

The first step was to allow the web page to access the database giving it a usable login; I originally wanted to provide a specific user for it to use but I had some troubles with it when setting up the SQL database to being with so for now I’m just giving it access to use the Root user. I had a few other issues with the set up but it came down to simply being a spelling error accidentally using mysql_connect rather than mysqli_connect which meant functions in other scripts wouldn’t work!

The require once in this script calls upon the connection script above, removing the need to keep a connection ongoing. It then sends a query to the database, right now just lists out everything by name but could be replaced with an Asterix (*) instead.

TADA!!

The web page for entering in information to the database comprises of a form for the user to enter the information into, when the user clicks the send button that data is passed onto another scrip which checks over that everything is present.

When entering a new item to the table there’s also a check to make sure that the user has provided everything need and avoid any problems that may crop up otherwise. If the user doesn’t give all the information needed they’ll receive a little error message and asked for the missing information. There are still one or two problems still such as if the artist ID given is 0 it thinks that the user hasn’t given anything so throws an error, and it’s procedural so if one thing is missing all the others below will be seen as missing too.

  Now once everything works properly we can enter in the album information and double check the database to see if it’s there.

TADA!!

Although this is a simple and basic php, SQL link up I’m still really proud of it and will be developing it further later on. The big thing I want to do is link up the other table and display its information as well as using a drop-down menu to select the artist by name rather than having the user enter in the artists id. Additionally I’ll be working on error detection/correction later on and the general presentation of each page.