mattrix/futile

A super simple Unity 2D framework

Futile (2021 Edition)

Futile is a code-centric 2D framework for Unity.

This is for those of you who want to do everything in code with as little editor integration as possible.

If you've used Cocos2D or Flash you should feel right at home.

It's in development and completely undocumented... but it works.

2021 note from Matt: Futile hasn't been updated a whole lot since I first released it, but it has been used (and continues to be used) in a bunch of real games

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Go to http://struct.ca/futile for UnityPackages and instructional videos

Ask questions and share stuff you've made on http://reddit.com/r/futile

Submit bugs and feature requests to http://github.com/MattRix/Futile/issues

Futile works great with all versions of Unity (but let me know if you have any issues!)

How to try the demo project:

How to open the project

• Grab the project from github and put it somewhere - For the lazy, here's a zip of the whole repo
• Make sure you have Unity installed
• Go into FutileProject/Assets and open FutileScene.unity

Third Party add-ons for Futile

• https://github.com/ManaOrb/FSceneManager (Futile Scene Manager and Parallax Scrolling Layer)
• https://github.com/mattfox12/FutileAdditionalClasses (including animated sprites and TMX tilemaps)
• https://github.com/Grizzlage/Futile-SpineSprite (for using animations made with Spine)
• https://gist.github.com/jpsarda/4573831 (FDrawingSprite.cs, for drawing lines)

Legal stuff

Futile contains many ideas from Prime 31's UIToolkit: github.com/Prime31/UIToolkit

The MiniJSON parser is by http://github.com/darktable

The demo project also uses Prime31's fantastic GoKit tweening library: github.com/Prime31/GoKit

The code and art assets (except for the font) can be used for anything, however the sound effects and music are not to be used in anything else

GoKit's license is here: https://github.com/prime31/GoKit

The font is Franchise

MIT License

Source code for Futile is Copyright © 2019 Matt Rix and contributors.

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS,” WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

futile's Issues

Look into CreateVBO issues on iPhone, toggle for ping-ponging mesh

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/118723-Huge-performance-loss-in-Mesh.CreateVBO-for-dynamic-meshes-IOS

In Unity 3.*, we may need to add a toggle that lets a user "ping pong" between two different meshes to avoid the CreateVBO problem. In Unity 4 we should use mesh.MarkDynamic().

All of this may be overkill for certain situations, so we should make it optional.

Check out MeshCreator, see if it could help at all.

https://github.com/uclagamelab/MeshCreator

Decide whether FButton isEnabled should eat touches

In some scenarios, you'll want a disabled FButton to still "eat" touches so that they don't go through to other buttons. I should figure out a way to allow both possibilities, and have a sensible default.

Unity 4 code should use gameObject SetActive()

I mistakenly used gameObject.activeSelf as a setter instead of using gameObject.SetActive() in the new Unity 4 code in the FRenderLayer.

It should just be a simple matter of search and replace, not a big deal at all.

Add support for trimmed and rotated atlas elements

It'll save significant texture space if we can use the trimmed and rotated atlas elements that TexturePacker can output.

For the most part it shouldn't be too tricky, but there might be some issues if the font atlas gets trimmed or rotated.

Test FSliceSprite with different resolution levels and resource sizes

Make sure the units it uses for the slice insets are always correct.

Investigate using Alpha Cutout shaders for masking

Use this as a reference, see if it's possible:

http://www.starscenesoftware.com/stuff/unity/CircularHealthBar.html

This may also lead to enhancements on modifiable FShaders.

Whit's scrolling issue

Whit had an issue where when objects that were off-screen were later moved on screen, they wouldn't show up until a depth change happened: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4CeCvzdjng&feature=player_embedded

I'm guessing it has to do with Mesh.Clear() in the renderlayers. There are probably some other ways I could solve it though...

Spriter Support

Support for Spriter, the animation editor.

Could use this as a base for the data parsing: https://github.com/Thinksquirrel-Software/spriterdapi-unity

Use a dictionary for the charInfos

This will help those who have many different foreign characters in their font files:

http://www.reddit.com/message/messages/fbvil

Use Futile on a 3D surface

See if Futile can be used in 3D, or rendered onto a 3D surface as a texture... it might require doing raytests with touches and turning them back into touch events, or something like that.

Let FButton hit rectangles be overriden

See this issue: #39

Basically it'd be really useful to allow the option of FButtons getting passed a custom rect to use as the hit area instead of always using the bitmap's texture rectangle.

Rare glitches with FContainer zsorting

Check the hash algorithm and make sure it's not dumb, maybe some other things could cause it too, so some tests are necessary.

FLabel vertical alignment has issues

http://www.reddit.com/r/futile/comments/z3639/possible_bug_in_flabel/c61hivb

Strange Scaling behavior for 1x1 pixel images

See, my issue here: http://www.reddit.com/r/futile/comments/yqhl7/a_message_to_those_using_futile_for_ludum_dare/c5ykllw
I'm confident that part of the problem is me, but I think there is a bug here too.

Futile needs better mouse support

We need some kind of FMouseableInterface that gets mouse move events.

This probably solves the FButton issue as well.

LoadImage doesn't preserve image's size

I wrote a small tutorial with the goal of minimizing the steps need to get Futile up and running. So, I use the LoadImage method instead of taking all the steps need to set up an Atlas. In my example, the image is rendered distorted. Here's the tutorial: http://www.mrphilgames.com/futile-quick-start/ and here's the code: https://gist.github.com/3521647

Text quad centering isn't always perfect

I think this means the quads aren't getting measured correctly, but it's worth looking into. I noticed it with the "GO!" button in Madness.

Integrate with OS keyboards (especially on mobile)

Look into how easy or hard this will be to integrate.

Simple Particle System

Make Atlas unloading work better

http://www.reddit.com/r/futile/comments/102nsz/little_crash/

Make sure to look into how the indexes change when an atlas has been unloaded/reloaded.

Also, maybe see if we can use the ~ deconstructor to keep a list of whether all the old atlaselements have truly been removed?

Integrate a particle engine into Futile

Either use Unity's built in particles, or a custom built Futile-specific particle engine, or both!

Add RemoveAllChildren() to FContainer

An idea from Owen, pretty straightforward, just a handy thing to have.

FNode should have LocalToScreen()

Weirdness with DirectX texture offsets

http://www.reddit.com/r/futile/comments/11lg4t/bug_incorrect_scaling_at_the_edges_of_a_sprite/

Perhaps the camera can be offset? Or perhaps we can offset just the y by and incredibly small amount?

FButtons should have hover states

Right now the FButtons are very touch focused, so there is no hover/rollover state when you move the mouse over them.

Support mouse right clicking

Might just need a function that gets the mouse position in Futile units.

Text is sometimes blurry

This is actually a really tricky problem to solve properly, but I've got some ideas for how to figure it out. It's especially important to get it working crisp on iOS at non-retina resolutions.

Futile and C#'s trig are inconsistent with each other

See http://www.reddit.com/r/futile/comments/11mzh9/trig_andor_unity_coordinate_system_question/

Create FRenderTriLayer

This will allow layers made out of tris instead of just quads (the normal FRenderLayer will be renamed to FRenderQuadLayer).

Using extended/non-contiguous characters in GlyphBuilder results in IndexOutOfRange in FFont.cs

Here is the pertinent part of the GlyphBuilder output:

page id=0 file="Andika.png"
chars count=189
char id=210 x=2 y=2 width=34 height=49 xoffset=2 yoffset=0 xadvance=29 page=0 chnl=0 letter="Ò"
char id=211 x=38 y=2 width=34 height=49 xoffset=2 yoffset=0 xadvance=29 page=0 chnl=0 letter="Ó"
char id=212 x=74 y=2 width=34 height=49 xoffset=2 yoffset=0 xadvance=29 page=0 chnl=0 letter="Ô"

The problem appears to happen in FFont.cs, from the following lines:

lines 231 - 235:

else if(words[0] == "chars") //chars count=92
{
    int charCount = int.Parse(words[1].Split('=')[1]);
    _charInfos = new FCharInfo[charCount+1]; //gotta add 1 because the charCount seems to be off by 1
}

The above code should determine the maximum charID but instead uses a count. This is not valid if there are characters missing from the GlyphBuilder set.

line 333:

_charInfosByID[charInfo.charID] = charInfo;

In this case the charID of 210 is immediately larger than the character count, which causes OutOfRange. For this case I am able to just change line 191 to _charInfosByID = new FCharInfo[256]; and comment out the updating based on count.

Perhaps a better solution would be to use a HashMap or similar for _charInfosByID.

Implement automatic line breaks in FLabel

It'd be nice if the FLabel could do automatic line breaks based on a certain max label width.

FButton does not properly use expansionAmount

expansionAmount was being applied in HandleSingleTouchMoved and
HandleSingleTouchEnded but not HandleSingleTouchBegin.

This change to HandleSingleTouchBegin in FButton.cs corrects the issue.

@@ -98,7 +98,11 @@ public class FButton : FContainer, FSingleTouchableInterface
{
Vector2 touchPos = _bg.GlobalToLocal(touch.position);

- if(_bg.textureRect.Contains(touchPos))

•  //expand the hitrect so that it has more error room around the edges
  

•  //this is what Apple does on iOS and it makes for better usability
  

•  Rect expandedRect = _bg.textureRect.CloneWithExpansion(expansionAmount);
  

•  if(expandedRect.Contains(touchPos))
    {
        _bg.element = _downElement;
  

Fonts without a space character throw an exception

http://www.reddit.com/r/futile/comments/yzhgy/problem_importing_a_font_front_bmfont/

Research implementing the SysFont library

https://github.com/imkira/unity-sysfont

Implementing this will allow people to use system fonts, including rendering foreign characters and other fun things... could be very handy.

Look into using mesh.MarkDynamic() in Unity 4

From what I've heard, dynamic meshes will behave better in Unity 4 with MarkDynamic() set, especially on iOS.

UnityEngine.GameObject.active is obsolete: Unity 4

Just installed Unity 4. Everything seems to be working fine with Futile except for this warning:

Assets/Plugins/Futile/Core/FRenderLayer.cs(110,29): warning CS0618: UnityEngine.GameObject.active' is obsolete:GameObject.active is obsolete. Use GameObject.SetActive(), GameObject.activeSelf or GameObject.activeInHierarchy.'

Just thought I would give you a heads up!

FButton issue on Android with Unity 4

Here is the info I was given:

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The problem is that the FButton will become untouchable after the app entered to the background and then goes back. I've recorded a small video about this. http://sound.bai-hua.org/temp/IMG_0107.mov

The banana project is running under Galaxy Nexus, and built with Unity 4. And it seems is an Android only issue, everything is alright on iPhone.

The solution I found is set shouldMouseEmulateTouch to true for all platforms. Just not sure if it's the proper way for this case.

Integrate physics with Futile

Integrate with the built-in Unity physics engine. Create a separate physics library/engine/thing to do this so that it doesn't overcomplicate the normal Futile stuff. It'll probably be stored as a separate github project.

Create a "wipeable" sprite

Create a sprite that allows itself to be wiped, somewhat like a rectangular masked. Ideally it'll be wipeable in all 4 cardinal directions (including multiple directions simultaneously).

Don't use file extensions on any atlas element names

This will lower the amount of confusion people have between single image assets and atlas assets.

Use custom GameObjects as FRenderLayers

This will allow people to make whatever kind of render layers they want.

FButtons should have hover states

Right now the FButtons are very touch focused, so there is no hover/rollover state when you move the mouse over them.

It should be easy to use Futile as a UI layer for 3D games

Figure out what needs to be changed/tweaked so that it's easy to use Futile as UI for 3D games. Also, make a quick under-10-minute video showing how to create text atlases and stuff to make it work.

Allow for simple wipeable/maskable sprites.

Some sort of simple UV wipe/mask should work, somewhat like scrollRect in Flash.

Ability to add material properties to FShaders

It'd be neat if you could add material properties (perhaps as a dictionary?) to FShaders, to allow for more complex materials.

BMFont files with an extra line at the end blow up in FFont

http://www.reddit.com/r/futile/comments/yzhgy/problem_importing_a_font_front_bmfont/

Make a sprite that can do radial wipes

Use CCProgressTimer (from Cocos2D) as a reference for the radial stuff. (Note that FWipeSprite can already do the horizontal and vertical wipe stuff).

https://github.com/cocos2d/cocos2d-iphone/blob/master-v2/cocos2d/CCProgressTimer.m

Font kerning is awful

Fix the font kerning, which is awful and broken right now.

FRepeatSprite / FSprite constructor bug w/ fix

Hey Matt, switched to your development branch and noticed a possible bug in FSprite that crashes FRepeatSprite

FRepeatSprite's constructor calls the empty base constructor in FSprite. This prevents _localVerticies from being allocated and causes UpdateLocalVertices in FRepeatSprite to crash.

I've fixed this in my fork by changing the constructor to this..
protected FSprite() : base() //for overriding{
_localVertices = new Vector2[4];
}

I'm not 100% how to put in a pull request for this fix from my fork, but wanted to give you the heads up.