TU856/TU857/TU858/TU984 Games Engines 1 2023

Join the class on the World Videophone using the following link:

Resources

Contact me

Discord

Week 8 - Assignment proposal - physics

Video of the class

Week 7 - Review week

Week 6 - How does reality work?

Flipped classroom

Week 5 - Quaternions & the Metaverse

My popular Quaternions in Unity Video:

An ode to Quaternions

A quaternion is like a vector, but with a "w"

To construct one, use an axis and an angle, that's what we do

For rotations it must be normal, or otherwise its pure

So we normalise, divide by length, just to be sure

To invert a normal quaternion, we negate x, y and z

Multiply quaternion, vector, inverse quaternion and it rotates don't you see

A rotation of 0 radians is the same as two pi

To convert a quaternion to a matrix, we use the API

So here's a health to old Hamilton, your inventor it would appear

And to imaginary numbers floating in the hypersphere

Dr Bryan Duggan

Lab

Today lets make this system:

The system is a turret AI system for a game such as a tower defence game. In the video below, the red "tower" will turn to face the players tank and start shooting as soon as the player comes in range. To create this system:

Make the turret from two cubes and set a spawn point for bullets on the turret
Add a TurretController component to the turret. Add fields for rotationSpeed and fireRate (and any others you might need)
Use a SphereCollider on the turret and set isTrigger to be true
Override OnTriggerEnter and OnTriggerStay to detect the player
Use quaternions to rotate the turret
Use a co-routine to shoot multiple times per second

Week 4 - Vectors

Recording

Week 3

Recording

Lab

Learning Outcomes

Build a simple agent with perception
Develop computation thinking
Use trigonometry
Use vectors
Use the Godot API
Practice GDScript

Today you will be making this (click the image for video):

To start, switch to the master branch of your fork, update your forks to get the starter code and create a new branch for your work today:

git checkout master
git pull upstream master
git checkout -b mylab4

If you are on a lab computer, you will need to clone your forks. I have updated my version of Unity to be the same as the version installed in the labs, so opening the project should be fast now!

Open the scene lab2 to get the starter scene and code for today.

What is happening:

The red tank has a script attached called AITank that has radius and numWaypoints fields that control the generation of waypoints in a circle around it. These waypoints will be stored in a List. (Like an ArrayList in Java). It draws sphere gizmos so you can see where the waypoints will be.
The red tank will move from waypoint to waypoint starting at the 0th one and looping back when it reaches the last waypoint.
The red tank prints the messages using the Unity GUI system to indicate:
- Whether the blue tank is in front or behind
- Whether the front tank is inside a 45 degree FOV
- Use the Godot reference to figure out what API's to call!

I suggest you work on these tasks:

Task 1

Add code to OnDrawGizmos in the script AITank.cs to draw gizmos for the waypoints. Use sin and cod to calculate the waypoints. Don't add them to the list here, just draw a sphere gizmos at the position where each waypoint should be

Task 2

Write code in Awake that populates the waypoints List with the waypoints. Use a for loop, sin, cos and transform.TransformPoint.

Task 3

Write code in Update to move the AITank towards the current waypoint. When it comes within 1 unit of the waypoint, you should advance to the next waypoint. You can use transform.Translate, transform.Rotate, transform.position =, transform.rotation = Quaternion.LookRotation. Look up the Unity documentation to see what these API's do

Task 4

Write code in Update to print whether the player tank is in front or or behind the AI tank

Task 5

Write code in Update to print whether the player tank is inside a 45 degree FOV of the AI tank and whether the player tank is in range of the AI tank. In range means that the player tank is < 10 units away from the AI tank

You will use the following API's in your solution:

Quaternion.Slerp
Quaternion.LookRotation
Vector3.Normalize
Vector3.Dot
Transform.Translate

Week 2 - Learning Godot

Lab

Learning Outcomes

Make a procedural system in Godot
Use trigonometry and vectors
Use the Godot Editor & VS Code
Make commits on your repo
Use the Godot API's

Here is a video of what you can make today (click the image for the video):

I suggest you try and make a single circle of dodecahedrons first and then use a nested loop to make all the circles. You will be using the following Unity API calls in your solution:

Mathf.Sin(angle)
Mathf.Cos(angle)
GameObject.Instantiate()
transform.Rotate()

You will also need to know about the Unit circle and also how to calculate the circumference of a circle

Week 1 - Introduction

Lecture

Learning Outcomes

Install Godot & git for Windows
Get Godot running on the lab computers
Set up the fork, clone it, merge the upstream, commit and push into your fork
Create a little thing in Godot

Instructions

Install Godot on your laptop or get Godot going on the lab computers.
Fork the repository for the course (click the fork button above)
Clone the repository and cd into the folder you cloned:

git clone http://github.com/YOUR_GIT_NAME/GE1-2023
cd GE1-2023

Check to ensure the remotes are setup correctly. You should see both origin and upstream remotes. The origin remote should be the url to your repo and the upstream remote should be the url to my repo

git remote -v

If you don't see the upstream remote, you can add it by typing:

git remote add upstream https://github.com/skooter500/GE1-2023/

Switch to a new branch

git checkout -b mylab1

Now launch Godot and see if you can open the scene we made in class today and run it.

Make some changes and do a final commit

Submit the link to your fork