Zalo DS Blog

Wednesday, January 08, 2020

A little bit of what I've been working on

Happy New Year everyone! Since I posted this on twitter in summer I've been willing to sit a little bit and write a small post talking about all the things I have been coding during the past year and a bit further
https://twitter.com/Zal0


Read more »

Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Thursday, November 01, 2018

Simple yet powerful FSM implementation

There is one thing common to all the games I have worked on and all the languages I have used: state machines, or how they are called nowadays: FSMs (finite state machines). You don't really need to learn anything before starting to use them and probably you have already used them without even knowing it. As seen in the Game Programming Patterns at some point you end up using them naturally.

But, event though the idea is pretty simple and intuitive, iterating it and creating something that really makes your life easier it's a bit more complicated than it seems. I'd like to show you how I have been iterating my FSM over the years and what are the main problems that I have seen in other approaches
Read more »

Labels: , , , , , , ,

Monday, August 14, 2017

Properly doing cameras interpolation through a target (II)

This is the 2nd post on the series Properly doing cameras interpolation through a target:

Having fun interpolating cameras? Let's take a look at some issues of the Camera interpolator we started on the previous post and fix them

The Rotation issue

If you test the interpolator a little bit you'll see it behaves very well even with moving objects. Because it focuses on the target it doesn't matter if it is moving or not, on any step of the interpolation it places itself on the target position and then interpolates from there.

But there is an issue interpolating between rotating cameras. Make the target rotate by adding the next script to it

and then set any of your cameras as children of the target so they rotate with them. Now pay attention to what happens when you interpolate from this camera to itself:
Read more »

Labels: , ,

Tuesday, August 08, 2017

Properly doing cameras interpolation through a target (I)

This is the 1st post on the series Properly doing cameras interpolation through a target:
- Properly doing cameras interpolation through a target (I)
- Properly doing cameras interpolation through a target (II)

Not sure everyone knows, but I am the kind of player that one day is enjoying the latest Zelda and the next day can be playing a Nintendo64 game on my favourite emulator. I don't play too many games (not that I ever had, usually when I was a kid I could get 5-6 different games a year, so I am fine with this) but the few ones I do I like to get to at least one of the endings.

Jumping from Banjo Kazooie to Zelda Breath of The Wild I could appreciate an evolution on the cameras Interpolation both games were doing. This is something that I wanted to work on for a long time, so after seeing it every night in Zelda BOTW I decided to implement it once and for all.


Read more »

Labels: , ,