BC Gesture Library– Get gestures in your Unity games in 10 min or less

Hey Everyone,

The BlackCherry Digital Media team is excited to introduce our awesome gesture script library to the Unity3D community, created to save developers time, and make touch-based game development extremely easy.



Overview
BC Gesture Library is an easy-to-use gesture code library that's been specifically designed for the Unity3D community by an experienced team of Unity developers. BC Gesture Library is a set of C# classes that lets a user easily access and apply gesture scripts to game objects in touch and mouse-based applications. Applying gesture code to objects is simple and straightforward: just drag the code for a particular gesture from the Project window, and drop it right onto a game object to give it gesture ability. It's that easy to use: just drag and drop. BC Gesture Library comes with a rich graphical UI allowing you to explore the extensive collection of gestures and options for touch, drag, slice, swipe and many more. The library’s user-friendly interface has been specially designed to give users the opportunity to test gestures before actually applying them to objects.

Background
BlackCherry is an indie game studio founded in 2004 that has been using Unity technologies to make awesome 3D games and animations since the introduction of Unity 1.2. For the past year our team of programmers has been putting together this handy library of gesture scripts that can be used while developing Unity-based applications. This easy-to-use script library has saved us a whole lot of time and effort in making our touch- and mouse-based games. We stand behind the BC Gesture Library as a tried and tested way to increase productivity by simplifying game development.

The BC Gesture Library is on sale at the Unity Asset Store NOW.

Price: $60

Check out our website for more info: www.blackcherrydm.com/bcgesturelibrary

Gestures Provided:

• Drag
• Line Swipe (including numbers, letters and geometrical shapes)
• Long Press
• Pinch
• Rotate
• Slice
• Swipe
• Tap
• Touch

Let us know what you think!

 

Nice job, specially Line Swipe looks interesting... Do you have any plans for Playmaker integration?

 

Hey, thanks! And yeah, we’re definitely looking to provide full support for popular visual scripting tools like uScript, Antares, and playMaker. We’ll keep you posted!

 

Looks great and seems to be very well put together. I was going to buy it right now - but then I though I have to ask - does it support multiple cameras? I have a HUD layer with ex2D which uses a separate camera and I will need interaction with objects in both the Main camera and the Sprite HUD camera (I suspect you use ray cast to detect object and I don't want to go in to the your code the first thing I do =)

 

The current product uses Camera.main for its camera. This has been fixed in our development version to use a camera property on each gesture. Each gestures class will be able to be given its own camera. We develop our own games using our gesture library and had already discovered this short coming.

We hope to have a new product with this fix updating in the Asset Store next week. A message will be posted on this forum when it happens.

 

Thanks for the reply. After looking at the asset store for about 2 hours I couldn't determine which package to go with - this new one or the "established" one with a lot of user feedback in the same price range. I really like your demo, especially since it came as an APK and with the line function - but I ended up going with "Finger Guestures" because of all the user feedback and the additional code included (e.g. samples for Camera Orbit / Zoom / Pan) etc.

I suggest adding some additional neat scripts for camera control, and insight to the code from your examples (not the actual library) - and maybe a bit more competitive pricing (until it has some user feedback) I think it could be a winner. I may even buy that one too =)

 

Im having a problem with the DragGesture. If I create a new scene it works perfectly, but theres this scene where when I use the "Do Drag" option and drag the object just a little the object almost immediately moves towards infinity in that direction. Its the same on every object I create. What could be wrong?

 

I believe it is a bug that we have fixed. We plan on releasing a new version of the library by the end of next week.

You might be able to work around the problem by keeping your camera closer to (0, 0, 0). In the bug I fixed, the drag got bigger or smaller depending on how far the camera was from (0, 0, 0). It is lucky we use the gesture library in our own game development which helps us find and fix gesture library problems and do some enhancements quicker.

 

Your answer made a lot of sense since the scenes where it isn't working are exactly the ones where the camera is far away from (0,0,0), so I was pretty sure it would fix the problem. But unfortunately it didn't do anything at all...

But then it turned out that it was because the camera was aligned with the y-axis, and turning everything around and making the camera point towards z fixed the problem. So it works now. Thanks for the quick reply!

 

Very impressive package, I found the APK through a Google search and loaded it on my Kindle Fire. You should put a link to that on the Try It page, Being able to load the APK made me very confident it really worked on a touch screen device.

All my tests worked except the 2 finger rotate, just jittered and didn't really work. 1 finger was very good, smooth, felt like I found make some cool stuff with that. 2 finger stretch resize was kind of iffy, it would stretch the logo but it was tough work. Known issue or Kindle specific problem ?
Is there a test package for iOS ? I couldn't spot one on the app store.

Thanks!

 

There is no way to provide an iOS build without putting it on the Apple Store. The best way to try it is to get the project and compile it for iOS using Unity to put on the device. Sorry but Apple does not provide an easy solution like Android does with apk files.

The two finger rotate and pinch work fine for us on iPad and Android. It is not really possible to test for Kindle because they require you to test using an Android emulator which will be single finger mouse based. Interesting how hard these companies can make testing on their devices.

 

Sorry I don't understand, I have tested your gesture APK on my Kindle Fire by doing "adb install BCGestures1_1.apk". So I didn't use an emulator.
http://blackcherrydm.com/bcgesturelibrary/extra is this file the latest build?

I loved the multi-line draw stuff, that could be very useful to me, but unfortunatle both the 2 finger rotate pinch pretty much didn't work on my Kindle Fire. Pinch is pretty important, rotate I could work around as the 1 finger rotate was very smooth.

Yes I understand you'd have to upload the iOS one to the app store, this is what I was basically asking, like Unity have uploaded many of their demo apps.

Thanks.

 

Yes that link has our latest Gesture library drop. Interesting that you could put an apk on your Kindle, I read that installing an apk was not possible.

It sounds like multiple touches are not working on the Kindle. If you go to the Touch gesture and try multiple fingers, does more than one finger register in the Finger Count property.? Touch is the best spot to see multiple touches in action.

George

 

Yes if I go into Touch it looks pretty good. Finger Count = 2, the smoke trails come up smoothly for both fingers and if I do a 1/4 turn it runs up 250+ Events.

In Rotation Finger Count also equals 2, but other things are weird. If I do a 1/4 turn it runs up just 10 Events jitters, the object goes maybe 1/12th of the way. Finger2: (x,y) will be blank until I move the 2nd finger, not sure if that's an issue, it does appear to have good data in it if I watch closely.
With 1 Finger If I do a 1/4 turn I get a fairly solid 30 Events, more if go slow, less if faster, always smooth.

In Pinch watching the Event readout closely it will often stay stuck on Received End at times when the pinch doesn't work, when it does Received Start Received Move can be seen. In Pinch dropping the 2nd finger immediately gets the Finger2: (x,y) populated that readout does look good.

I'll dig up the doc I used to hook up the Kindle Fire, it was basically install the older 2.3 SDK bundles hack a config file.

Thanks

 

Hey the plugin looks great. I'm specifically interested in the gesture recognition. Is it possible to create your own gestures like a circle with a line through it?

 

We have future plans of adding a line gesture creation tool to the Gesture Library. We use the Gestures in our own game development projects and continue to add functionality to the library that we will make available.

I could add a circle/line gesture for you that would be in a few gesture library files that I could give to you. I will need the gesture described in more detail.

Please give me your email or go to http://blackcherrydm.com/bcgesturelibrary/support and send an email to the support mail address on the page.

 

I have a game in which the player will need to draw different shapes on the screen using one motion and not lifting their finger during the gesture (triangle, circle, stars, houses). I can make my own gestures with the Line Swipe utility, correct?

 

Yes, you can analyze the Lines reported by the Line Swipe.

Although it is not documented or encouraged, you could also define your Line gestures by defining them in LineFactory. LineFactory contains the definitions for all the line gestures in the library. If you examine the definitions there is a straight forward logic to defining line gestures. Once added you can test them in the line swipe sample interface. This is a place we have I think we have done a great job, being able to draw gestures different ways, such as F (2 or 3 lines), W (vertical or angled), and E (2, 3 or 4 lines). The line gesture sample interface reports the different segments angles and relative sizes which the definitions use to identify gestures. The processing of Line Gestures is very complicated, I highly recommend limiting yourself to LineFactory which is perfectly safe and can be fun to play with although it is an internal mechanism for defining gestures. It would be a good idea to read the documentation about gesture composition before try to understand LineFactory.

That said, we will not support line gesture creation beyond fixing problems. We are always happy to hear your ideas for improving the gesture library. We do plan on supporting curves in the future.

 

Can an object be dragged while swiping? An object that sticks to your finger as you flick it?

 

Hello,
just bought the package....
i was little disappointed that the Demo that comes with the Package looks different on iOS...
If i open it in Unity4 and set it to iOS it look different to your online Demo...
So a Question is:
I want to move my Camera with a Swipe to the next position but only if i swipe over the half of my View... like you did with the background that change the Color each time if your swipe is long enough...So the Camera should move direct with the Swipe in same Direction but if the Swipe is to short it should go back to original position...
btw. different Demo Scenes would be great to understand how you can work with BC...
thxx
kerstin