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Creativity / Re: Game Design Megathread
« on: April 19, 2016, 07:11:29 AM »
I'm working on a remake of the classic LEGO LOCO, adding some new features while I'm at it. I've realised a problem, however:
What you're probably noticing, aside from the disgusting colours (to keep me awake) is the amount of "skipping". In LOCO, you can hold the mouse button down and drag to create a line (or just paint an area, sort of like using a 1px brush in Photoshop). Because LOCO is a 2D game without frame-limits, it updates really loving quickly which means it can capture the mouse constantly. Unity, however, is a proper games engine that is constrained and can really only read the mouse once per frame (generally at a frame-rate of 60FPS). What you get is the mouse only reading 60 times a second, so if you move your mouse really loving quickly, the mouse will "skip over" units before its next checked.
I'm wondering how to solve this; you can see that it does appear in LOCO (look at some of the centre lines) but nowhere near as much and thus looks more polished. I could try line-approximation, where I compare the start of a click-hold to the end of a click-hold and then fill in the line between the two points, but this would only work for dead-straight lines on the horizontal or vertical. I could increase the size of the units by zooming in the camera, but that might be a bit annoying for the player. I can't lock the mouse-axis because Unity doesn't allow loving with the cursor position.
Anybody have some suggestions? It's not a huge problem, but it looks kind of crap and I'd certainly like to do something about it.
EDIT: And just to confirm, moving the mouse slow does create straight lines without skipping, but I feel that telling the player to "slow the forget down" is really just a workaround to the issue.
What you're probably noticing, aside from the disgusting colours (to keep me awake) is the amount of "skipping". In LOCO, you can hold the mouse button down and drag to create a line (or just paint an area, sort of like using a 1px brush in Photoshop). Because LOCO is a 2D game without frame-limits, it updates really loving quickly which means it can capture the mouse constantly. Unity, however, is a proper games engine that is constrained and can really only read the mouse once per frame (generally at a frame-rate of 60FPS). What you get is the mouse only reading 60 times a second, so if you move your mouse really loving quickly, the mouse will "skip over" units before its next checked.
I'm wondering how to solve this; you can see that it does appear in LOCO (look at some of the centre lines) but nowhere near as much and thus looks more polished. I could try line-approximation, where I compare the start of a click-hold to the end of a click-hold and then fill in the line between the two points, but this would only work for dead-straight lines on the horizontal or vertical. I could increase the size of the units by zooming in the camera, but that might be a bit annoying for the player. I can't lock the mouse-axis because Unity doesn't allow loving with the cursor position.
Anybody have some suggestions? It's not a huge problem, but it looks kind of crap and I'd certainly like to do something about it.
EDIT: And just to confirm, moving the mouse slow does create straight lines without skipping, but I feel that telling the player to "slow the forget down" is really just a workaround to the issue.
