I’m trying to download some assets from the Unity Asset Store, but clicking ‘open in Unity’ is not working. Chrome prompts me with an “XDG-Open” dialogue. Even after selecting “ok”, nothing happens.
So far, there are lots of complaints about the Unity Asset Store and how the only way to download some simple PDFs is via a giant, several GB Unity Editor.
Regardless, if you just want to download some assets for learning like I do, I found a simple workaround:
Open up the Unity Hub:
Click Learn:
Then Select the project you’d like to check out, and hit “Download”:
The biggest problem with this workaround is that it only works for learning assets. I can’t seem to find a way to download assets that wouldn’t typically be categorized under ‘learn’. If anyone has any suggestions or ideas, feel free to let me know!
By default, the project landed in my /tmp/ folder. Simply save the project to any location you like from inside the Unity Editor, or copy the contents of /tmp manually. Here’s some more information on how to copy projects. Hope this helps!
It appears that this issue is fixable. There’s a solid chance my xdg-open tool is not configured to open Unity when I click the “Open In Unity” link. I’m investigating further via these resources:
Welcome to this post-mortem article on my first complete game submitted to My First Game Jam 2020. This was such an amazing experience, I want to share as much as I can.
It’s good to be back! I feel bad for dropping the ball on weekly posts… especially after doing it for an entire year! Anyway, got some new stuff I’d like to document! So here we go:
For those of you who have been following along with my posts so far, you’ll remember I was working on a project called The Museum. That sort of… fell by the wayside. But! That project was started in Godot game engine, and that was the engine I chose to participate in My First Game Jam 2020. Coincidentally, that’s the actual name of the jam, and it was also my first game jam as well! The theme for the jam was: “Change”.
Day 1: What’s this game gonna be about?
I took the first few days just concepting a few ideas. There were lots of directions to take the broad theme. Eventually, I landed on a concept. You insert a bill into a shady-looking change machine. Then you spend the rest of the game banging on the machine, trying to get your money back.
Day 3: First Problem
Okay, I got a few assets done, got some of the basic code going, and pretty soon I ran into my first problem. Once I got a bunch of coins bouncing all over the place… how do I keep them all on screen?! Most standard platformer tutorials would just have you parent the camera to the player, and that’s it. But in my case, I had quite a few players that I wanted to follow.
So I ended up parenting all the coins in the game to a single node. Selecting that node, and looping through all its children to add them to an array called allCoins. Once I’d populated the allCoins array, I tried a few different methods to average the position of all the coins.
The idea was: Take the position data (Vector2) of every coin in allCoins, add them together to get for a sum total Vector2, then, divide by the total number of coins in allCoins. It made sense in my head, but it took a few days to figure out how to implement that in GDScript. Eventually, I got it working!
Day 4: New day, new problems
Now that I’d solved the camera tracking issue, there was a new problem. Once once coin fell through the gaps in the platforms, it just fell… and fell and fell. This caused the camera’s position (based on the average of all coin positions) to drop way down and just show the midpoint between the fallen coin and everything else.
Next, I set up some nodes that emitted a signal anytime a RigidBody2D came into contact with it. Once that signal fired, I had to not only remove the coin from the scene, but also remove it from the allCoins array. Those were two different things!
Halfway there!
Earliest recorded testing gameplay
Now it’s starting to feel like a game! I had a bunch of coins flying everywhere and, well… that was pretty much it. Feeling kinda good…ish
Closing in…
After a few more days of play-testing and letting a few friends and coworkers play around with it and share their ideas, I was getting my first ever feedback on a brand new endeavor! It felt amazing. This entire process really helped me mental health-wise in the middle of a full time job.
I didn’t like the first background artwork bits, and I wanted a little bit of parallax, but I knew I couldn’t have that much, being inside a machine and all… Eventually, I got rid of all the blue slotted background slides, and just went with a blue and grey hand-painted texture created in GIMP.
Game progress about 4 days after the first video was recorded
Last Minute Changes…
Up until the last minute, I was going with a sort of “compound interest” logic where for every coin you drop into the coin tray, the level reset and that number of coins was added to your total. So you’d start with 2 coins, and in about 2 minutes, you’d have over 100 coins flying all over the place. It made for great fun, but there was no real challenge for the player.
So in a last minute logic-change, I commented out the code that dynamically spawned new coins into the scene and went with a fixed number of coins per level. So now it was way more critical to get every. single. coin…
Increasing Difficulty….
This increased the game’s difficulty considerable, but I was still able to beat the game in wildly varying amounts of time from 5 minutes to upwards of 3 hours. But I was reacting a lot more to my own game now! It was very satisfying.
Personally, my weakest point is coding. I am still learning and getting used to the scene hierarchy and what I can and can’t do with Godot, and as a result… I feel like I spent a lot of time thinking about the game’s logic, and not as much time thinking about the game’s sound or music (there is no music) or artwork (none of it matches lol)
First comments and feedback
One of the first comments I got on the game after submitting to My First Game Jam 2020 was that I was taking all the control from the players hands and relying almost exclusively on physics and pseudo luck. Makes total sense, and I even had another friend suggest giving the player more than one button.
Overall, I leared a TON of new coding tricks, a lot of what Godot is capable of, and even more of what I’m capable of, developing games on open source everything. Thanks for reading! My First Game Jam 2020 was a blast, and I’m definitely looking forward to creating more fun games like this one. If you wanna see what the final result was, feel free to check it out:
I recently came across the opportunity to make my first decision toward my sport aviation journey. I had about $100 to spend, so I had a choice: I could book a discovery flight at my local airport, or I could get a flight simulator and a joystick. One experience would be real and over in an hour, the other would simulate reality, but I could play forever!
Why Not FSX?
If I were making this choice in late 2006, I’d probably go with Microsoft Flight Simulator X, just because they have dominated the flight simulator market for so long. Microsoft hasn’t updated their flight sim in several years, and I chose between FSX (released in 2006) and X-Plane 11 (released in 2017).
First Impressions
“Woah, that’s a massive download.” was my earliest impression. The core game and the included free DLC is pushing 60GB! Once I downloaded and launched, X-Plane 11 greeted with a basic, no-nonsense menu with a handful of options. I started my first flight, and promptly crashed. My joystick wasn’t working properly.
X-Plane Flight Configuration Screen
Joystick Configuration
It was unfortunate that my joystick didn’t load into a default configuration for X-plane, considering its popularity. Overall, not a huge deal. I would have been configuring my joystick anyway, but it’s more likely I would have done it later if I wasn’t satisfied with the default. As a total non-pilot civilian, I was (and still am) struggling with what specifically all the hundreds of commands are, and which ones I should map where. Despite being unclear on the commands, mapping the buttons is very straightforward.
Graphics
Woah. These are some of the cleanest graphics I’ve seen in a game. Runs well enough on my old GTX 970. It hangs up every now and again, but it’s barely worth mentioning. Only a 1 second hang every 30 minutes or so. X-Plane 11 is extremely stable running on Windows 10. I’ve not had a single crash (knock on wood).
This screengrab doesn’t even do it justice.
Simulation (Gameplay?)
Like I mentioned earlier, I’m not yet a pilot, so I can’t yet speak to the realism of the flight dynamics. However, the fact that X-Plane 11 comes with an airfoil maker leads me to believe the dynamics are pretty darn accurate. The airfoil maker allows users to design and test their own custom wing shapes, which is perfect for those interested in designing and building their own planes from scratch, plans, or kits!
X-Plane 11 also comes with a plane maker application that allows users to create and test their own full aircraft from scratch. You can create your design in plane maker, or even import your own .obj 3D files.
My only minor complaint is the radio communication within the sim. The speech isn’t the most realistic and comes off feeling very robotic, but it is great to help me get a better idea of how aviation radio communication is supposed to work.
Weather System
Okay, this thing is awesome. You can program every possible weather scenario at virtually any airport in the world. There are options to set custom cloud cover and wind conditions ever 10,000 feet. Perfect for practicing the most difficult crosswind landings.
Custom Weather Options Page
My personal favorite option is downloading live weather conditions at the location where you’ll be taking off. That way it keeps things interesting while also providing the most realistic flying conditions.
Time of day and live weather conditions matched to the real world
Community
Despite this game being nearly 2 years old, it doesn’t feel old at all. I think the biggest reason being the community behind this software. I feel bad calling it a game! And after buying the simulator, X-Plane even offers users the opportunity to upgrade their license for professional use.
The base game comes with 11 default aircraft, which is plenty in my opinion, to learn the basic mechanics of flight. However, there is a massive community on xplane.org who generously provide a vast library of new content. There you can download new planes, airports, and even plugins. (Hopefully there will soon be a plugin that will improve radio communication!) All-in-all, X-Plane 11 has proven to be an excellent simulator and doesn’t seem to be going anywhere anytime soon.
Full disclosure: at the time of this writing, I’ve logged 19 hours on X-Plane 11. I have every intention to keep flying and customizing for the many years that it will take me to make a fortune, get my pilot’s license, and rent a plane on a regular basis. But until then… X-Plane 11 is awesome.
