Programming

Android runs on a variety of different devices. In order to improve the way your app looks on different phones, depending on their screen size and resolution, Android offers the possibility to use different layouts for different screen sizes. This is the topic I’ll discuss in this article. Summarizing the Demo Application First of all, I would like to briefly discuss the app, the optimization of which will be discussed below. The app serves as a tool for the card game “Magic the Gathering”. While this app was my first real application for Android, this side project has evolved over time and accompanied me on the way to Android development. I maintain the sourcecode on GitHub and you can download the app via PlayStore. ...

The dxGrid grid control for Xamarin, which DevExpress provides free of charge, is a powerful feature for mobile application development. However, many of the functions are a little bit hidden. In this article I will discuss how to customize the display of column values. In my concrete example my grid contains a numeric column, which can contain numbers with or without decimal places. I want these decimal places to be displayed only if they exist. The magic term that DevExpress provides fortunately is DisplayFormat. You can use this parameter to make various adjustments that describe the corresponding value and its representation. ...

This article describes the process of creating voxel explosions in Unity by using particles. For our models, we use MagicaVoxel, but every other tool can be used as well. The final result will look similar to this: Setting up the test environment For test purposes, I’ve set up a basic FPS environment using the built-in CharacterController package. I then added a gun model to the _FirstPersonCharacter _game object, which is located as child element in the hierarchy of the FPSController. The following snippet shows the code I added as a custom script component to the gun: ...

Some time ago, I created this game (online playable version) in Unity, and I wanted to be able to play it on my Android phone. Since the input options on the smartphone are slightly different from those on the pc, a certain amount of adjustments were necessary. I won’t go over the specific details on the game mechanics, you can check out these on GitHub, they are described in the README file. However, the basic concept of the game is the movement of a cube to one of the directions up, down, left or right. The information about which direction to use is displayed on the screen. ...

In this post, I’ll be covering the basics of building a simple chess game in Unity and C#. The MVP of this project will be a fully playable 3D chess game for two players. Each character will only be able to make moves that comply with the rules. After slaying a king, the game is reset. To improve the game, menu scenes, statistics and a simple AI will be added later. The final project and its source code is available on my GitHub-profile. ...