I have for a really long time been searching for a tutorial for an augmented reality application where the users can rotate and\or move a rendered 3D object with hand movements. I have found a few example applications of this, but none with viewable sourcecode, or in any way allowing me to change the models loaded.
What I need is either a working application that I can tamper with in AS3, or a decent tutorial for creating this kind of motion tracking. (I have been able to create a motion tracking application in itself, but not as an AR application where the models loaded are the ones affected by my movement.)
I am rather new to augmented reality programming, and only have the basics of marker based AR down, but I really don't need anything fancy, nor do I particularly need to understand the cone 100% (though obviously it would be better if I did). I just need it to work.
What you need is FLAR toolkit.
http://www.libspark.org/wiki/saqoosha/FLARToolKit/en
Here's a tutorial: http://mlab.taik.fi/mediacode/archives/1939
Enjoy
Related
I'm developing a game based on the libGDX framework in eclipse that will have smoothly movements between my entities, so for that, I have used TweenEngine (and it is working nice), but recently I found that libGDX have its own class for interpolations.
I know both are for tweening (or for nice and smoothly animations), and I just want to know if there are technical difference or limitations between this 2 options basically because if both are the same, I would opt for the second one since it is already inside libGDX.
From one side there's generally better to use included tools because of integration and final application size (not saying of setting up the environment or exporting project problems).
On the other hand please notice that Libgdx Interpolation starts to be useful only when you are using it with Scene2D actions. And here is the problem in my opinion because you must implement stage and actors mechanisms - which is good idea by itelf but can be almost impossible if you have created almost whole application without it.
Then I would recommend you:
choose Scene2D actions + Interpolation easing if you are able to implement Scene2D in your project and the easing actions are only reason you want to use Tween Engine
choose Universal Tween Engine if you want to stay independent of new machanisms and use Sprites etc in traditional way
For the past year I have been working on an isometric city builder. So far I have not used any framework apart from a loose PureMVC clone.
I have heard of Starling but only recently have I played with it.
From my research, the performance boost is fenomenal, but this forces me to manage my resource a lot tighter.
At the moment, I am exporting building animations one building at a time, in ~16 frames/pngs. These are cropped, resized and exported in Photoshop by a script and then imported in Flash, then exported as a swf, to be loaded / preloaded / postloaded on demand.
The frames are way too big to make a spritesheet with them, per building. I believe its called an atlas.
These pngs are then blited between lock() and unlock(). After the buildings + actors walking around are sorted, that is.
I am unsure if just using starling.Movieclip for the buildings, where instead of loading the pngs, I would build a MovieClip symbol with its frames. So bliting wouldn't even be necessary. Unless adding bliting on top of Starling would improve performance even more. That would allow fatter features such as particles effects, maybe some lighting.
Google isn't offering me a strait answer, thus I am asking here.
Google isn't offering a straight answer because there isn't such. It depends very very much on what you've done, how much knowledge you've got and what are your goals.
Using Starling gives benefits as well as drawbacks. Your idea of resources will change totally. If you really have enormous amount of assets, then putting them into GPU will be really slow process. You must start from there - learn what Starling does, how resources are managed with it and what you need to change in order to make the transition between the two.
If this is not that hard and time consuming task, you will have some performance optimization. BUT again it depends on your current code. Your current code is really important in this situation as if it's perfectly optimized your gain won't be that much (but commonly would still be).
If you need to switch between graphics regularly or you need to have dynamic assets (as images for example) you must keep in mind that uploading to GPU is the slowest part when talking about Starling and Stage3D.
So again, there is not a straight answer. You must think of GPU memory and limit, GPU upload time, as well as assets management. You also need to think of the way your code is built and if you are going to have any impact if you make the switch (if your code heavily depends on the MovieClip like structure, with all that frames and things) - it will be hard for you. One of the toughest things I fought with Stage3D was the UI implementation - there is almost only Feathers UI which will take you a few weeks to get along with.
On the other hand, Starling performs pretty well, especially on mobile devices. I was able to maintain a stable 45fps on a heavy UI app with a lot of dynamic loading content and multiple screens on an old iPhone 4S, which I find great. Latest mobile devices top at 60fps.
It's up to you to decide, but I'll advise you to have some experimental long-lasting project to test with, and then start applying this approach to your regular projects. I've done the dive to use it in a regular very tightened deadline project, and it was a nightmare. Everything worked out great, but I thought I would have a heart attack - the switch is not that easy :)
I would suggest using DMT for rasterizing your vector assets into Straling sprites at runtime, and it'll also keep your DisplayTree! meaning that you'll still have the parent/child relations that you had in your Flash Assets.
DMT will not duplicate assets, and will rasterize the vectors into texture atlases only one time (Cache is saved)
you can find it here: https://github.com/XTDStudios/DMT
Novice programmer here.
I'm currently coding a simple game with the title screen and the main game loop in separate "keyframes" (this is in CS6). Once I transition from the title screen to the game keyframe I'm concerned that the buttons/movieclips/variables are going to stick around and waste memory + clutter the screen.
If I have the variables/functions set to "private" will that help the garbage collector take care of them? How should I go about "clearing the screen" and making sure I'm not being wasteful/leaking memory?
None of the tutorials or books I've been reading to learn AS3 have really covered this topic, if there are any good guides or obvious tips I've missed as far as memory management best practice goes in AS3 I'm interested in seeing them. The only thing I've learned so far is that I should manually set all my event listeners to weak reference.
Bonus question: I'm using a full-screen bitmap and blitting things onto it for my display. If I am blitting dozens of objects onto the screen per frame I don't need to worry about the blitted "sprites" that are being "covered up," do I? I'm hoping that the bitmap is one pixel thick and not just stacking things on top of each other.
Firstly, the only way you will have total control over your resources is if you leave the timeline for what it was intended for, creating and exporting assets in to swc or swf format, which you can embed the former and either embed or load the latter.
What you should be doing is learning how to develop in an Object Oriented manner, starting with a Document class (as you're using CS6) and then building your game using a series of classes which have defined tasks. Using classes promotes re-usability throughout your game. Depending on the complexity, I would consider a framework like PureMVC or Robot legs.
Garbage collection in flash is mark and sweep, which means you have to de-reference all your objects, which usually starts with removing associated listeners, timers and any further references to them, eg. clearing from arrays or objects hashes. Finally you would set the object in question to null which makes it 'elligible' for garbage collection but does not actually guarantee it. Flash will come and clean up as it sees fit.
Personally if you could get hold of Flash Builder, this has a fantastic memory management profiling tool, when you are developing using OOP mentioned above, you can use this tool to see all the instances that exist in your game. Now the good part here is you can do a memory snapshots in time, and compare them to see which objects linger around and are causing memory leaks. There is a garbage collection button which you should invoke between capturing snapshots, this is only available as you are developing, though using Adobe AIR you can force gc calls manually.
Regarding your bonus question, im not sure how you are doing this blitting, if you are adding objects to the stage this is increasing memory, you cannot avoid this. What you describe as 1px thick is what flash renders, you can see what is being redrawn by right clicking on the stage and selecting the redraw regions option, to see a red box showing what flash has to redraw, it will only redraw what it needs to, this is useful to check if your frame rate suffers.
So to summarize:
Consider using Flash CS6 for creating assets.
Learn about Object Oriented programming in Actionscript 3.
Consider developing in Flash Builder (or free Flash Develop).
OOP will help with organisation and de-referencing objects for garbage collection.
I hope this helps and good luck with your game.
paper.js
EaselJS
fabric.js
KineticJS
Hello guys I am new in html5 canvas development and I am lost in choosing canvas frameworks. There are so many of them that I can't find out what to use. So here I am! I want your help to choose which one is better for my needs. There are my needs
1) I want the framework used Vector graphics, I know canvas is not DOM, I realy don't care about it but what I mean is I want to manipulate with objects after its creation, PaperJS has this feature I don't know about others. If advanced mouse events will be available it would be better.
2) I want to use the framework for images, I will load image and animate them with canvas, move, animate some colors...
3) I want the framework to be fast because of my needs (image animation should be smooth)
4) I want the framework to have good community because I know I will need some help.
So what do you think which one is better for me? and please if you can write down from my list which are the strength and weakness for each framework?
HTML5 canvas is still very fresh environment. You can get impression there is a lot of tools already available, they are often quite immature though.
My answer will cover only part of your question because I used only KineticJS and EaselJS.
You can start from reading opinions at this page (mine is the last one at the bottom).
Speaking shortly KineticJS has lower entry barrier. It's simple drawing library and has some support for mouse events too. At the time I was trying to use it it was barely extendable. I found it really hard to customize for my needs.
EaselJS is a bit harder to start with, but it's more advanced too. Now it's part of other libs set known all together as CreateJS. It seems that lot of development going around there.
Both Kinetic and Easel supports mouse event. I don't remember
well the Kinetic, sensing 'onMouseOver' is costy with Easel though.
Also both mentioned libs allows objects manipulation. You can find
here TweenJS also useful as addition.
Again both Kinetic and Easel allows this. Easel also has support for
sprites - 'animated images' well known for web game developers.
I'm not sure about Kinetic as I haven't reached animation part of my
project before I dropped it (the lib, not the project). With Easel
speed is tricky. It has some optimization methods implemented like
for example objects cache or snapToPixel flag. Examples seems to run
really well. However for my project using Easel smoothness still is
an issue despite quite a lot of effort put in optimization. Maybe I
misused the API or there is still place for more optimalization I
haven't noticed.
Both libs are quite young but seems to be actively developed.
Authors are rather responsive. Community still isn't big, but I
guess CreateJS as more complete set of tools for creating games will
grow faster.
If you want to check here is the project I mentioned. It's a web page made with usage of EaselJS + TweenJS. Still needs some minor tweaking though.
I'm searching for Depth map algorithm for action scrip 3 (or some other language).
My goal is to generate depth map for static image on run time.
I have fount this example http://kode80.com/2009/06/29/papervision-zbuffer-and-dof/, i didn't have the time to investigate it's code but i have the filling its working only with 3d models.
Worst viable option is server side technology that does the work.
Extended description:
I have a task to develop flash application where 3d rotation of a head is simulated by a 2d image uploaded by the user.
There are some japan guys that have managed to do that (http://hairtry.jp/), but the technology that they are using is server side. It generates swf fail with precisely coped eyes and image for the depth map of the uploaded picture. I can't find out what is the sever side technology that they are using so I'm searching for any posible workarounds.
Thanks in advance.
Cheers,
Chavdar Slavov
your easiest solution would be to use a 3d engine, Paper vision seems to be getting out dated, theres a lot of documents on how to use, and tutorials but again not much has been happening with them lately. i suggest Away3d "www.away3d.com" they seem up to date.
for what your asking it is possible to do this 100% in flash but to create a 3d head at runtime and fill the face with hieght maps this is possible, you would need to look at bitmap manipulation.i dont think this is an easy task, what you should learn first is how to add an image to a spheric surface dynamically than look into height mapping by converting certain coulours from the image into different levels of depth i must say im sure this is advanced stuff, i manged to animate a globe that was this same method it looks dodgy but it gives you some source code in the FLA
http://www.ffiles.com/flash/animations/globe_animation_3496.html
The above link will allow you to download my source files, the animation it self is a scrolling image but i used Actionscript to give the globe depth and a sheric look