Top down 2d and map making

An interesting time wrangling my enemy NPCs this evening. They target, chase and face the player. The issue I was having was the rotation only worked in 90 degree increments.
After adjusting a few different values and methods I couldn't get it just right, endlessly bodging the angles. How hard is it to make a sprite rotate to face another sprite? Success finally came through this line:

tranform.rotation = Quaternion.FromToRotation(transform.up, target.position - transform.position) * transform.rotation;
(from: http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/590504/sprite-face-second-sprite-only-on-z-axis.html )

The differing situations appear to be in the choice I've made for top down.

I've used some of the functions from CoherentNoise (available on the Unity asset store for free) combined with modified scripts from my spherical world engines and generated a few terrain textures with normal maps that export to disk, a few seed values should create what I need and then I can test them out for placement of items. Scaling them should give a decent sized "world" to visit and run about on.

 

What lightbox?

I really need to build a lightbox, this light is good for painting but not for pictures.

I need to wash and paint up some freehand stuff on the banners, then base them but huzzah, another unit.
These gentlemen will be joined by a Grandmaster of the Black Bear (an earlier picture who also needs basing) as a fun great weapon unit.

Setting up free email hosting with Microsoft

After far too long I've finally nabbed a domain for myself. Using the standard forwarding of email and an iframe redirect with cloaking seemed... a bit off. A quick search led me to Google apps who now charge for hosting an email domain, and to Microsoft who don't using mail.live (outlook.com) as the base.

Head over to https://domains.live.com and sign in, you'll get to the Domain settings mail setup.

The instructions are fairly straight forward, the only issue I had was configuring my dns settings via my provider. The advanced control panel on domains4less.co.nz had an odd layout that I had to get my head around.

Logging in, select domain templates from the menu and add a new template.

There is a selection of A records and MX records added by default, but following the instructions from MS I removed all the MX and set a single record prefixed with @, 10 priority and the address of the server (blah.hotmail.com in this case).

I then added the TXT record as they advised using the same prefix @ as the MX.

domains4less updates once every 30 minutes so I waited till the next tick and hit refresh on live.com. Nothing.

Waiting another 15 minutes for the settings to roll out properly and success! I was then able to configure the email account I wanted and logged into the familiar looking site of that account.

Now to continue setting up with an azure site.

Knights of the Black Bear WIP

Continued progress, riders are 90% done (it's always 90% though even when I think I'm done) and work on the horses has begun.

Australian Azure in 2014?

With the beta of Titanfall over it, friends that played it seemed to not notice the forcing of traffic to the USA. Being located in NZ, we generally end up accepting a latency ~150ms. Australias announced Azure block seems to be happening, but probably won't go online till the end of 2014 (most mentions say "live 12-18 months from announcement" which was March 2013)

This does concern a few consultants I work with in regards to Microsoft's push for O365, VoIP all cloud all the time. Being a gamer means we know, almost automatically adjusting to our 150ms hop, and accept that things can be a little mistimed between the game and the locally hosted voice comms. But as a Lync user stuck in the cloud I've seen a fair whack of consternation coming out. Why that latency in the office?

Back to games. I've played a little with some of the services, standup time and latency bothered me a fair bit, especially since the Unity app I was made relied upon that data. It's a good choice though, as far as free options. Unity worked rather nicely with the Azure addon from BitRave.

The app: a Warhammer Badlands campaign was prepped among the gentlemen. I thought "I should make something for it".
Get Unity to render a hex map of individual items, throw a mapped background against them like a spritemap, then load players and their armies.
Each player can then take ownership of a tile and it adds a semi-transparent material to it denoting colour of owner.

This data is stored to Azure on save, and loaded when needed. Worked like a charm once I figured out the gotchas of configuring the SQL tables via visual studio vs hosted database management console vs tables management console and their interaction through webservices and the json responses.

Lesson learnt: Follow the setup using the samples! It'll save you having to delete and recreate parts in the management of Azure to find the right bit.

Being creative

I post sporadically and it's rather annoying to come back here and go "oh yeah, I was going to write some words frequently".

So, more frequent updates time. Usually about Warhammer and code and such.

Unitys built in 2d setup has been about for a while, I finally got a look into it for a top down game. Have idea, make terrible programmer art, make idea work. I then spent far too long making better (but still programmer art) sprites for it. Tentatively called SG-R, a top down 10 mission/story based explore shooter.

Of which I do not have any screens of. Oh well.

Having completed my Ogre army I started missing sitting down and painting, so I fell back on my first army ever and picked up some Empire chaps.
Pictures after the jump