A small side project...

Started by playniax, October 25, 2024, 02:14:22

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playniax

Hey everyone,

I've got a few random updates I'd like to share.

First off, many of you know me here as (Tony from) Playniax, but I'd like to introduce a small side project I'm working on called Codeslinger.

Under the Codeslinger name, I've just uploaded my first project: a Sprite Culling System for Unity. It's free (though any small contribution is always appreciated). As Codeslinger, I'll be creating assets, frameworks, and games. While Playniax is a partnership, Codeslinger will generally be my solo work. I'll be focusing more on this in the future alongside my work with Playniax.

You can check out my work as Codeslinger here

Currently, I'm working on a tilemap-to-3D system. In simple terms, it converts tiles from a tilemap into cube-shaped blocks, each face of which can be textured individually.

By the way, these components will eventually be integrated into Ignition or Pyro, but as part of a larger framework. The Codeslinger versions, however, will be more independent from other components.

As many of you may know, Playniax has primarily focused on frameworks, assets, and templates in recent years, with game development taking a bit of a back seat. While it's been rewarding work, I've really missed creating "real" or fully-fledged games. Over the years, I've built plenty of prototypes that are just gathering dust on the shelf (we all know how that goes). Some ideas were really good, and some... not so much. So, we've decided to shift a bit more focus back toward game development. I'll share more on that soon!

That's it for now, but stay tuned!

playniax

#1
A while ago, I worked with BYTEMAN on a template called Recoil.


We used Unity's built-in 2D tilemap editor to create a 3D environment. For that, I wrote a script that converts the tiles into a 3D mesh at runtime and applies a texture to all six sides. This approach saved us a lot of time back then.

I thought it would be fun to take this idea further and apply it to Playniax projects, so I started working on an advanced version. The version in Recoil applied the same texture to all six faces of the mesh, but the new version can apply a unique texture to each face. Once it's completed, it will become part of our framework.

Here's a preview of what something like this could look like:


Editor


Runtime

playniax

#2
Currently finalizing the demo for our upcoming release, TilesTo3D for Unity.

This tool transforms Unity's built-in Tilemap Editor into a powerful way to create 3D worlds effortlessly.

We're still fine-tuning the lighting and a few other details, but the release is just around the corner!

Below, you'll find before-and-after images and a short demo video.






Qube

Love it 8) It's these sort of things that should be provided by Unity themselves as free downloads to help new users. For many beginners it very daunting when trying to do a 2.5D platformer for the very first time.
Mac Studio M1 Max ( 10 core CPU - 24 core GPU ), 32GB LPDDR5, 512GB SSD.
Beelink SER7 Mini Gaming PC, Ryzen 7 7840HS 8-Core 16-Thread 5.1GHz Processor, 32GB DDR5 RAM 1T PCIe 4.0 SSD.
Microsoft Surface Pro 11 ( Snapdragon® X Elite ), 16GB RAM, 512GB SDD.
ASUS ROG Swift OLED PG27AQDM OLED 240Hz.

Until the next time.

3DzForMe

#4
This is fantastic work, very impressive. I did a 3D dice shaker in BLitz3D many moons ago, took a bit of head scratching to texture the individual sides and suss which side was 'up' when the dice landed. Happy Days, thanks for sharing  :D

Also wrote a 3d platformer, similar to your idea that would procedurally generate a snakes and ladders style 3D track for cars to race up with ramps and all, with a little help from the brill JV-ODE physics library. I did get a little carried away and created Jenga style towers that would collapse, the polycounts did start to test the 3D card a little!

Almost makes me want to dust of my Unity, although I think I'll be sticking to AGK for a while yet. Its all I can do to code in that these days.  :o 8)
BLitz3D, IDEal, AGK Studio, BMax, Java Code, Cerberus
Recent Hardware: Lenovo Re-furb'd Laptop
Oldest Hardware: Commodore Amiga 1200 with 1084S Monitor & Blitz Basic 2.1

Derron

Dunno if you do that already but the video looks a bit ... "sooner or later annoying by repetition" ... as it seems you just repeat the tiles on multiple "layers" (and one of them is "interactive").
I would suggest to allow "drawing" multiple layers to allow easy access to what is "hidden" and only visible because of moving and the parallax effect (hidden areas... :D). Also adds more fine grained control on what to display.

So tell me this is already possible and you just were not using it in the video to emphasize the "we bring your 2d layer into 3d 3d 3d...."


Another thing: in the video there is this "lighted" area of background tiles. And while moving there are these very bright "lines" flickering here and then on the borders of the "cells" - it only happens for the "bright" cells so ... what is this? an odd texture element/pixel-line reflecting the light? It is very distracting for me when looking at the video.

playniax

Quote from: Qube on December 07, 2024, 05:56:52Love it 8) It's these sort of things that should be provided by Unity themselves as free downloads to help new users. For many beginners it very daunting when trying to do a 2.5D platformer for the very first time.
Thanks, who knows, they might buy it from me and add it to Unity. LOL

playniax

Quote from: 3DzForMe on December 07, 2024, 07:06:19I did get a little carried away
This is definitely the danger of coding, something I struggle with as well. At some point, we really need to implement a feature freeze to move forward and avoid getting caught up in adding more features.

playniax

Quote from: Derron on December 07, 2024, 07:30:21Dunno if you do that already but the video looks a bit ... "sooner or later annoying by repetition" ... as it seems you just repeat the tiles on multiple "layers" (and one of them is "interactive").
I would suggest to allow "drawing" multiple layers to allow easy access to what is "hidden" and only visible because of moving and the parallax effect (hidden areas... :D). Also adds more fine grained control on what to display.

So tell me this is already possible and you just were not using it in the video to emphasize the "we bring your 2d layer into 3d 3d 3d...."
Thanks for the feedback! Just to clarify, the repetition happens because TilesTo3D has a feature called 'stacking' that allows tiles to be stacked along the Z-axis, which is why it might look repetitive. But what you're asking for is possible.

playniax

Quote from: Derron on December 07, 2024, 07:30:21Another thing: in the video there is this "lighted" area of background tiles. And while moving there are these very bright "lines" flickering here and then on the borders of the "cells" - it only happens for the "bright" cells so ... what is this? an odd texture element/pixel-line reflecting the light? It is very distracting for me when looking at the video.
Yeah, it's likely some sort of reflection issue. Since this is just a demo, I'll see if there's an easy fix for it.

playniax