AGK: Action Game Kit (v1.5)

Looks interesting. It seems you have the enemy running around in a maze with corridors and rooms. Does the basic AI handle this kind of setup easily or did you have to modify the AI?

 

Hi guys,

I was wondering how to add extra buttons to the mobile controls, e.g. change weapon button etc.?

Also how to move the position of the controls, is this something that can be done within the project or need to contact Dan the author of the control package?

Thanks

 

I played around with the Control Freak settings a while back. You can make all of the changes you mentioned within Control Freak just by adjusting settings. Play around with the various options and you should be able to figure it out. I would be more helpful but unfortunately, I had to remove it from my build as it isn't compatible with Windows Store app build as of yet.

 

I understand, I'm trying to improve the GUI images of the controls as you can see the above games will all use same sample GUI and can be improved.
So this is just abit of photoshop work needed, and I guess moving the controls locations to optimize for handheld.

Oh and I finally got my game work on all Apple devices and the iPhone 4 without any glitch, so no need to redesign the actual game GUI as I planned to.
Will release soon and I will work on other platforms as a learning experience.

 

Cool ... was it a lot of work to get it to work on older versions of iPhones or a few minor fixes?

 

Try these settings:

1. Make sure all the materials used in the scene are using the included optimized mobile shaders.
2. All geometry should be tagged as "static" and lightmapped.
3. Set your rendering path to "vertex lit" instead of "forward." This should give the best performance boost.
4. If you're using Unity Pro, don't forget to rendering Occlusion Culling on the scene.

+ Other tweaks such a reducing terrain tree line and wind
+ Plus iOS tweaks for iPhone 4 slow load up (should be fixed in Unity 4.5)

Problem is I'm waiting for Unity 4.5 as there seems to be number issues with iOS and things should improve I hope

 

Cool .. thanks for the help. Some questions.

1 - Mobile shaders ... I never even realized that Unity had mobile shaders. Will definitely make that switch.
2 - I've done light mapping on all of my scenes and that helped a lot. I presume checking if something is static is the checkbox at the top of the inspector window? My understanding is that something moves in the scene (such as the player and enemies) should not be marked as static and therefore not light mapped. Is that right?
3 - Vertex lit rendering (or any rendering option) for Windows Store apps doesn't seem to be an option. Good to know for other platforms though ... I'll keep that in mind.
4 - I have Unity Pro ... how exactly do you render occlusion culling? I thought it was done automatically but I could be completely wrong. Is there a setting or some type of baking that's needed to be done before occlusion culling is working?

 

Hi Rajmahal, sadly I do not have the answers to your questions as I have only been using Unity for a few months now and still not a pro.
These tips where passed down to me, I can do Mobile shaders on own from the drop down menu not a issue and does help performance.
The rest of the complicated stuff I'm still learning by trial and error and also got the developers buddy to do changes for fixed price.
I think its best to search forums for best technical explanations as even if I tried I would not be able to give u full steps.

Thanks and good luck

 

I cannot compile to Windows Phone 8 - Not sure if you have managed to compile your game on this?

It seems there maybe some coding issue within the scripts - the AGK scripts are fine coded, but maybe a small workaround will be needed to ommit using a certain feature.

See my issue below, I hope get a response from Unity3D team.
(http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/248154-Build-Error-(Please-Decode)?p=1641031#post1641031)

 

I think I was able to compile ... however, when I tried to build to Windows Phone 8, Unity crashed. I'm not sure what the issue but I decided to put it on the back burner until after the Windows 8 launch.

I don't recall getting errors of the type you're linking to. Perhaps try compiling for Windows Store app and see if you get the same issues?

 

It seem safe to say: its a third party script that causing the issue.
Was very hard to find the error considering the error message did not take me to the script with the issue.
A wide search needed be done in Mono Develop.

I think Unity 4.5 may help your issue, so many fixes for Windows Store.

 

That's funny ... Unity 4.5 actually broke my game somehow so I downgraded back to 4.3 for now.

Anyway, has anyone noticed enemies randomly becoming frozen and not doing anything when they are hurt but not killed? It doesn't happen all the time but once or twice a level, I'll notice an enemy doing nothing after it was shot. It'll only begin to move again when I shoot it again. Most of the regular critters die with only a few hits so it's not very noticeable but the bosses and any creatures you create with more hit points seem to have this issue. I haven't changed the AI scripts in anyway so I'm guessing it's not due to a change I made.

 

4.5 Broke the AGK Game Kit?

If you happen to catch an error please let me know... I will make sure to Upgrade to 4.5 soon to resolve any issues there and provide patch, update for it.

 

It might be okay ... I think the issue had to do with another plugin that I was using.

 

It's possible to create more menus in the 'menu' scene of UAGK? I want to create a 'rate' and 'more apps' button using the scripts inside UAGK.

No need more help, I find the scripts that generate the text in the main menu and the folder Objects that create the text, thanks

Please, create more new features to the UAGK engine, it's a great system

 

i am new in uagk. I am a 3d artist. I want to spawn enemy like this. Can any one help me?

 

Hi all,

I manged to release my game on all platforms, I had some interesting email feedback.

Customers wished for:

- Arm to Arm combat when fighting a enemy or no bullets left.
- They wished for fixed Aiming controls - as poor aiming controls when shooting, slightly hard.

There is a number of things that can be added to the kit currently, I did custom build with Ammo control and Weapon change etc

Cheers

 

Just wanted to post a link to a game I released using this kit. It's up on the Windows Store and uses this game as a base but adds things like a new GUI using NGUI, weapon pick ups, limited ammo, achievements, etc. The game has 28 levels and is a free download (supported by ads and in-app purchases).

Gun Frenzy link in Windows Store.

Some screen shots:

screenshot_06142014_204732 - Copy by raj_dhillon, on Flickr

screenshot_06142014_204721 - Copy by raj_dhillon, on Flickr

screenshot_06142014_204911 by raj_dhillon, on Flickr

This is a really fantastic game kit ... the whole game took me just 3 months to put together, test and deploy (working part time).

 

Do you have a link? I'd like to check it out.

 

@ Rajmahal wow! very impressive work!!

 

Thanks ... couldn't have done it without you. Any other game kits in the works? I seem to remember you mentioning an over-the-shoulder view shooter kit?

Otherwise, I'm working on the Windows Phone port at the moment and it seems very promising so far. Runs fairly smoothly on a Lumia 920. I'll try to optimize it further though before release.

 

Hi guys, does anyone know how to get the controls working for a gamepad? I received some negative feedback from a control perspective because it didn't support xbox gamepad. I believe the only thing missing is the aiming button using the second joystick rather than mouse. I presume that would be in the Project --> Input settings ... any tips on how I could get this working?

 

Also getting much negative feedback about aiming controls, I already paid developer to help me build my project and to be fair invested some time and money into this. I'm not complaining as one may think - but simply stating points and facts.

One guy gave me positive review but look what he says:

"Just played a bit and found the shooting to be a bit annoying. There's no aiming system you kinda have to shot and keep moving the D pad until you hit them. While the zombies are taking your health. It has potential. Just give me a way to aim. I will leave it Installed and see the progress. I'm sure your planing on spreading the map as well. If you were to make this a game moga controller supported or any android controller this game will get more awesome. Just saying. Dev. Good luck"

Dont even know what mogo controller is and android controller??

I think best thing is to ask help from CONTROL FREAK - Dan. Make topic in his forum.

Really do not have time any more to pay each time for developers to make such small changes with knowledge one can do alone or maybe time to move on.

 

Seems like it's the same issue ... essentially lack of aiming ability with a d-pad. I'm actually surprised that people use gamepads that much on PC / Macs. I always just used mouse / keyboard personally ... oh well, I guess it's a new generation.

I'll ask Dan on the Control Freak forum if that's something his tool can do ... otherwise, I'll do some digging on how to configure gamepads in Unity. I think all that would be needed would be to have the second joystick in a typical dual joystick gamepad control aiming. Essentially have that do what the mouse does.

@MrEsquire: I don't have a gamepad to test on. Do you have one? If so, perhaps I could send you a screenshot of what settings I think would handle this in the Project --> Input settings and you could check if it works?

 

This is the first time I have request for special gamepad.
I found what they talking about: http://www.mogaanywhere.com/developers/
Will order this ASAP as will need I assume for future projects.

Still need the D-PAD aim issue sorted and I made a post within Dans forums as you was writing this.

 

Also:

Hi,
I think that changing the camera angle to 'top-down' view would help a lot.
To do this, you can create your own camera setup or modify the existing prefab ( 'Resources/Objects/Stage Setup/OBJ_camStage.prefab') by adjusting the 'Offset Default' and 'Rot Default' parameters.

But I really had no time to try and figure out best setting as not even sure this solve the problem

 

Looks like game controller support isn't even working yet on Unity for Windows store apps. Looks like it's a feature that'll come in Unity 5.

http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/675713/game-controller-support-for-unity-metro-aka-window.html

Therefore, probably no point worrying about it for Windows Store builds until then. I'd like to move the game to Steam or GOG at some point soon though so it would be good if we could get it working at least for PC / MAC builds.

 

I created a game using UAGK, but I found an annoying bug. When I use the trooper player, that use 2 joystick buttons(one to shoot and other to move), if I begin shoot first and hold the shoot joystick and can't move the player, I need to release the joystick to move. The controls only work correct if I begin to move first and the shoot.

I check the UAGK demo for android and it have the same problem.

This problem is related to UAGK or to Control Freak?

 

do you have the flag move and shoot checked on your ranged character script?

 

Hi, I can't find a 'move' and 'shoot' flag options to check inside my ranged character, I only found a 'Stand Attack' flag to check.

 

Does it work with a jump animation?! Mine doesn't seem to work. Nor does gravity seem to work because the player character doesn't fall off an edge either.

Q1) Should a jump animation worK? Or is something hard-coded that prevents it (If so, where?)? If it should work, I guess my animation itself has a problem.

Q2) This is probably the same issue: Gravity, how can I make the toon fall when he walks off the edge of the map?

 

@fabiobh, yes that's the flag, you need to make sure that flag is enabled (checked) so you can enable stand while attacking, or disable (uncheck) to allow your character to attacking while moving.

 

@Chance Touchstone No Jumping is Not supported... So you will need to Modify the Code to try an achieve a Jump Action. I don't really have anytime to play with the code to add this, but regardless even if we add a Jump it's not really a good idea right now because then if you make your character jump on top of objects, you now need to totally modify the the aim+attack system, as the Player will not Aim in a Downward or Upward Angle to Attack in an angle direction to Hit the Enemy. There is much more work that would need to be done so I'd recommend leaving out the Jump unless your ready to do more work.

 

@Kuroato, I want to leave the flag 'Stand Attack' unchecked because I want my character be able to attack and run at the same time,

but even with this unchecked, when the character is not moving and I begin to shoot, if I hold the shoot joystick, the character not move, I need to release the shoot joystick to be able to move the character. This way I can move and attack at the same time.

Resume, if I use the shoot joystick first, then the move joystick the character attacks but not move, if I use the move joystick first and then the shoot joystick, the character moves and attacks.

If my explanation is hard to understand, tell me and I'll create a video to describe it better.

 

this sounds like an animation problem... make sure you check and ensure all the animations are set to Legacy Animation, and your Run Attack Animation is Set to Default, Once or Loop. I forget which one is the correct one but try to toggle and play with these Animation Playback modes, i'm pretty sure you will find the solution here.

 

Hi Kuro,
i have been enjoying your kit so far and i glad that i bought your kit. i have been messing around and adding couple of feature in the kit. the project looks awesome now. however, i have a little problem integrating your kit with pool manager by pathological games. the kit is great but on mobile device, its too laggy due to heavy instantiate/destroy of the bullets. i need to change the instatiate and destroy function to spawn and despawn using pool manager.

i have successfully integrated the poolman, i am able to spawn the bullets as pooled object with poolman. but im having trouble with your destroy function in scr_projectile. i have replaced the destroy function in the scr_projectile with despawn function by poolman. but it seems like there is other function somewhere in other script that destroys the bullet other than the scr_projectile script. i have searched the whole solution to find the culprit which have been destroying my bullets without my knowledge but i couldnt find it.

i need to find the function that keeps on destroying the bullet and replace it with despawn function by poolman. maybe you could point me in the right direction.

thanks

 

I did notice the performance spikes too at the create / destroy on the profiler but I worked around them by just optimizing everything else. Lightmapping and light probes was a huge help as was switching over the GUI to NGUI. Managed to really spruce up the graphcis and still run smooth on mobile by baking all the lights and removing dynamic shadows.

 

@IllogicalGames, @Rajmahal I'll take a look at this destroy function soon as I can and let you know if there is anyway we can improve it. Thanks for pointing out the Issue.

 

I took a look at the Scripts myself and could not find anything else Killing the Projectiles besides what is setup in the Projectile Script. I did notice the FPS rate drop a little from 72FPS to maybe 65FPS when alot of Projectiles were flying around from multiple enemies and while shooting myself... I didn't think this performance was too bad. Seems to be OK on my end, not sure how we could improve this any more. Hopefully you can figure out a way to work out the performance issues on your end...

Originally this Game Kit was not Designed for Mobile, so that may be part of the issue... It was developed primarily for Desktop or Browser Games, then we later added Support for Mobile with the Help of the Control Freak Mobile Asset. So that's something people need to keep in mind when they see this Game Kit and notice there is Mobile Support but through a Plugin you must Purchase separately. I think that's sort of a indicator that this was not fully designed for mobile, but mobile being an add-on support feature.

Maybe you can also try Dungeon Breaker Game Kit:
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/10043

It's a bit more expensive, but it 100% supports Mobile directly as part of the Game Kit without plugins. Although it seems to be more for RPG style game, you may be able to Modify it to fit for a Shooter as I think they do have projectiles. I don't know how the performance is, but would imagine it would be well optimized for Mobile not sure.

I hate to promo other game kits lol, but I'd rather see happy users, than to pretend like we got the best of the best game kit, as I know our Action Game Kit does come with it's flaws, like no support for Height Maps for example.

 

hi thanks for the reply. i found nothing wrong with your kit, it fits perfectly for my need for my mobile shooter. the performance on mobile is great, except for the destroy projectile function, it eats up a lot of memory. thats why i need to replace it with poolmanager. maybe i overlooked somewhere else or just being careless. ill try to sort this thing out by myself. cheers

 

Similarly, I should note that I got a very graphics intensive version of your kit working on mobile devices like the Lumia 520 that only have 512MB RAM working smoothly. So I wouldn't worry about it, either. What I'm learning about mobile development seems to be the main thing is disabling real time lights and just baking everything and using light probes. You can get some great looking graphics running really smooth on mobile that way.

 

hi @Rajmahal, could you explain more in detail including step by step what did you do to improve frame rates for mobile?
currently im not baking my scenes, and im not using realtime lightmapping and no shadow but the game using UAGK still lags on my lumia 920

 

Sure thing .... in no particular order:

- Turned off all real time lights and instead baked all lights.
- Set up Light Probes (though if you want even better performance, you could not use light probes and just set the ambient lighting to something higher after bake).
- Used Cruncher plugin to reduce polygon count of all my 3d models and setup LOD groups. Used player settings to restrict LOD's to the lowest level for the quality settings supported by Windows Phone build.
- Set max size of all textures for the Windows Phone build to something very small (usually 128 bytes or 256 bytes). A few textures were left at 1024 bytes but not many (large, atlassed textures for my backgrounds).
- Removed all calls to OnGUI() and replaced with a GUI I developed using NGUI.
- Set lighting / rendering mode to Forward
- Switched all shaders to be the Unity Mobile - Diffuse shader.
- Set audio files to stream from disk rather than load into memory and made sure they were compressed MPEG rather than WAV.

By the way, are you using Unity Pro or Free? If you're using Free, you'll probably need to find some alternative to static batching. You could try Mesh Baker or Mad Mesh Combiner.

I didn't really touch the AGK code other than removing the OnGUI calls and doing some other stuff to add functionality (weapon upgrades, weapon drops, limited ammo, etc.).

If you want to check out the game, the link for the Windows Phone store is: http://www.windowsphone.com/en-us/store/app/gun-frenzy/bc740f8a-af56-46f6-b48c-4ec4c911e30a

A lot of the negative reviews talk about it not working on 512MB RAM devices but that's just because the early builds didn't work and I didn't know how to restrict access to 1GB devices and above back then. The current version runs smoothly on all devices and crash count is very low. Recent reviews have been good too, including from low memory users.

 

I am still very very impressed by your work, happy to see a game out Windows Phone and someone making a really good use of the game kit! I played the game and it's awesome!!

 

@Kuroato yea the game looks really great and tbh its my motivation to keep working on my project.

@Rajmahal thanks for sharing your input, from you, i learnt some new thing about mobile performance. Cruncher is really nice. btw i thinking to reduce the file size by not baking the scene, do you think not baking the scene would improve performance? im thinking to not using lights and fake the shadow with round projectors. ah yeah, im using unity free.

 

Thanks ... that means a lot to me that you like it. I built the game in around 3 months and then took another month of updates after the initial release. Without your kit ... it probably would have taken me 3 years.

@IllogicalGames: Light baking does use up more space for the light maps but you can adjust the max resolution of the light map textures to something fairly small afterwards and it will not add up too much to the build size. Still, it's your call ... I really like the graphics boost you get from light mapping and being able to switch off all the lights does boost performance. Be careful with round projectors as I believe the ones that come with Unity actually add a lot of draw calls and are not good for mobile. I ended up just not bothering with dynamic shadows and on a small windows phone screen, I don't think it's really noticeable (or at least not that noticeable). Regarding Cruncher, I only used it because I started off with desktop quality 3d models and basically reduced them to something workable on mobile. If you start off with mobile friendly assets, you won't need it. Also, I believe Cruncher only work on Unity Pro but there are other assets that do the same thing that work on Free so you can go that route if you want. Personally, I'd suggest just using cartoony, mobile friendly assets.

With Unity Free, you will need to do something to replace the built-in static batching to reduce draw calls. I would suggest combining all of your static mesh objects into one big mesh and material with Mad Mesh Combiner from the Asset Store. It's a cheap plugin and really helpful. For the GUI replacement, you can probably just use as is and see if everything else is enough to optimize for mobile or wait for Untiy 4.6 for the new GUI.

I would definitely recommend doing the easy stuff first such as replacing lights with baked lights (and higher ambient lighting), switching to mobile friendly shaders, using Vertext Lit rendering mode and so forth before tackling replacing the GUI. It wasn't a huge job but it still took a lot of time and probably didn't give that much of a performance boost.

 

@Kuroato: By the way ... any thoughts on replacing the AI with NavMesh? The navigation on the AI is pretty basic and I often find it stuck behind walls and such. I don't know that much about NavMesh but I think it would really improve the game kit if it leveraged it. You could then make much more complex mazes without worrying about enemy not knowing how to patrol for the player.

 

@Rajmahal right now im using assets that have low poly and is designed for mobile. and since the asset is already optimised for mobile, i dont think i will need cruncher at all. i also bought Urban Construction Kit and it have mesh combiner in it. thanks for pointing about combining mesh. i never thought about using its mesh combiner before. i will definitely use the mesh combiner after this.

whoa thats a lot of tips. thanks a lot mate!

and i agree with the ai, its too basic and it limits our creativity to create maze. i cant even add small obstacle such as trees, cars, etc without leaving the player the opportunity to exploit the game by kiting the enemy and make them stuck at obstacle. the only option i have right now is flat level.

 

Yes I know the AI is very simple... alot of things can be improved upon i'm sure... but I can only continue to stress that I am so busy busy working on my primary game project Heroes of Rune. I want to improve this game kit so much, but I only have so much time and resources available right now, especially adding that I have a family to provide and support.

So it's tough, but trust me I want to make it better, or maybe even Upgrade it to Action Game Kit 2.0 with lots of changes! alot of this take very good amount of time and careful design planning to ensure that we keep this game kit easy to use and clean coded. It's very easy for someone to just dump their source code from their previous game into the Asset Store and call it a Game Kit but yet the Code could be messy, or the game kit overall is not very user-friendly. The more features we add the more complex it can become if there is not careful planning and design before hand. So there is much I want to do, but it's easier to speak about about then do it of-coarse lol! esppecially when i'm so busy with other project.

So for now best I will continue to do is be here active on the forums, and support you all best I can until I have the free time to focus more on this to improve it the right way... and not just do small patch up jobs and make it messy.

 

Totally understand ... just a suggestion if you do a version 2 or something. I might take a look at some point and see if it's something that can be easily integrated.