03.08.10

Fugu Maze Photos

Posted in Apple, Games, Pets, Unity at 12:03 am by Phil

I’ve been unable to google the source of the recent upturn in Fugu Maze sales on the App Store – the most I can tell from my AppViz report is that it might be taking place in Great Britain. And since it has taken place since the most recent app update, I’m going to guess that part of the popularity is due to the photo picker feature (if that’s true, then the Unity iPhone Enhancement Pack has already paid for itself!)

Customizing a maze with your own “wall photo” may be more fun to some than actually solving the maze. Here are some screenshots of my tests, using an old college photo, a picture of my cat, and a baby picture of my nephew.

02.27.10

A Really Small Unity Web Player

Posted in Games, Internet, Unity at 1:02 pm by Phil

How small can you make a Unity web player? Well, I haven’t bothered to try building an empty scene to see its size, but it must be less than 20K, because my menu scene on Fugu Games is 19,534 bytes. I wouldn’t say it’s imperative to make it that small, but it is the first scene that automatically loads on the site’s home page, so it should load reasonably quickly for anyone, anywhere (as long as they’re on a platform that supports the Unity web plugin). And if some Flash developer starts acting superior about file sizes, you can retort “can you do 3D in  20k?”.

There isn’t much to this scene – just some textured spheres scripted to constantly look at the mouse position (just in case you didn’t realize this is 3D), a single directional light (again, 3D), and some mouseover and mouseclick behavior, the latter which loads the bigger players (some of which could use a Biggest Loser treatment).

Even with this simple example, it took a little effort to squeeze it down. One standard technique – scale down the textures size. The original size of the texture is overkill for small spheres. Setting the max texture size to 256 didn’t noticeably degrade the graphics (although 128×128 started to look coarse).

A less obvious source of unnecessary texture size is the font. There’s just one font here, but we’re certainly not using the whole Unicode character set. And I decided I didn’t really need mixed-case text.

Finally, I removed the Pro and Standard Assets from the project, primarily to remove the scripts I’m not using. Even unused scripts are built into the web player.

02.26.10

Facebook-dimeRocker-HyperBowl update

Posted in Games, HyperBowl, Internet, Unity at 12:28 pm by Phil

The bad news is that the HyperBowl Facebook app was down much of yesterday. The good news is that it’s back up with an updated dimeRocker-Facebook platform. I hastily rebuilt HyperBowl with the new API and uploaded it last night,  but I did take the time out to try out the new themes, eschewing say, the RPG themes, so previous players may notice the new look:

I think that space theme blends well with the logo scene. It was about time for a HyperBowl Facebook update, anyway – I’d updated the other HyperBowl web players with some improved GUI screens (in particular, the arcade multiplayer selection screen) and spent some time compressing audio to get the player size down (from 10MB to 7MB). Now I think it’s time to diverge this version a bit and try out more of the dimerocker API to get some real Facebook integration, maybe by GDC (the problem is, GDC is my deadline for everything!). Stay tuned.

02.24.10

The Cost of Living

Posted in Consumer at 11:43 am by Phil

A recent reading of Richard Tedlow’s excellent biography of Andy Grove renewed my appreciation for Moore’s Law, which states that the number of transistors that can be placed on a chip will double every two years. This is why my latest MacBook Pro costs less than an Apple computer from 30 years ago.

Meanwhile, I have C-SPAN2 on right now televising the hearings on the latest Anthem Blue Cross rate increase. I say “latest” because I haven’t heard anyone mention that Anthem raised rates last year. I joined Anthem two years ago because my previous insurer, Healthnet, quadrupled my premiums over five years and then for a while terminated me after they lost (i.e. cashed without crediting me) my check, then after I complained to the State of California sent me a half-hearted apology blaming me for writing illegibly – which normally is a pretty valid accusation, except they addressed me as “Ralph Chu”.

I haven’t had a similar dispute with Anthem, but they did increase my premium immediately upon acceptance because I take cholesterol pills, and then another $2 per bill for not letting them automatically draft from my checking account, and then premium increase last year and the now much-publicized increase. Altogether, my premiums have doubled in two years (you can see why I didn’t allow them access to my checking account – they might decide it’s more efficient to empty the whole thing immediately).

Oddly, my cholesterol pills have gone up in price, nearly doubling in the last five years. Each batch is getting more expensive to make? (Apparently there’s a big pharma inverse to Moore’s Law).

Not everything has gone up. My car insurance has gone down over the years. As with computers, you get more car for the money these days, too (although not on the same curve as Moore’s Law – otherwise, we’d be commuting to work like George Jetson). Some costs have been volatile. Like real estate. I bought my condo in 2001 – it might list for 30% more now, but probably would take longer to sell. However, compared to three years ago, it’s a deal. Gas also has gone up and down, but I’d guess over the past decade it’s up at least 50%. I just read that college tuition has outpaced inflation over the last twenty years, which means it’s probably been doing that longer, since I went to college twenty years ago and I heard something similar then (business schools, heal thyself!)

The problem is that, as far as I can tell, pay hasn’t gone up, except for a Web 2.0 bubble a few years ago in Silicon Valley. As a contractor, I can get paid what I quoted ten years ago (with a bit of eye-rolling and hand-wringing), and a good way to avoid taking on more projects is to quote more. On the other hand, most of my work is in the game business, which isn’t notoriously high-paying. But the IGDA has stepped up and is now offering a group insurance plan, which was a timely factor in my recent membership renewal. It would be an interesting turn of events if people started entering the game industry for the benefits.

02.23.10

15 Things You Should Know About Breasts

Posted in Design, Internet at 10:24 am by Phil

I’m posting this as an example of graphic information presentation and as a public service. Really.

15 Things You Should Know About Breasts
Via: Online Schools

02.19.10

HyperBowl on Scoreloop

Posted in Apple, Games, HyperBowl, Internet, Programming, Unity at 12:27 pm by Phil

HyperBowl is now on Scoreloop. Here’s their supplied score widget showing some HyperBowl activity.

I’m not sure Scoreloop really meshes that well with HyperBowl. For example, I set the score sorting to descending by level and descending by score. The problem with that is a low score on the Forest Lane will be ranked higher than a high score on the Rome Lane. On the other hand, if I sort just by the score, then the easy high scores on the Classic Lane will dominate. Ideally, I’d like to see high scores per level. It might make more sense to just use Scoreloop one the lanes that I release as individual apps.

Related to that, right now it seems you can beat a challenge score from one level with a score from another. That’s probably my mistake, though – I should defer the initial option to start a challenge until after the lane selection (right now it’s in an earlier menu). One update, coming up.

Still, there is a problem in that anytime the Scoreloop GUI is brought up, the challenge option is there, which means it shows up when you finish a lane and the score is submitted. I think the idea is that you’re supposed to handle that eventuality in your own code, but using the supplied Unity plugin, your options are limited. I may try Agon Online, next. I started with Scoreloop because they reached out to me and they actually had some printed documentation. My first impressions are that Agon may have the easiest integration and more comprehensive documentation and OpenFeint has the most involved, but also the brings the largest player base. But we’ll see…

02.18.10

My Goodreads Book Montage

Posted in Books, Design, Internet at 8:18 pm by Phil

My time-wasting activity of today was to try out the various widgets on my web accounts. My favorite one is this “book montage” from Goodreads.


Philip’s book montage

Shadows at Dawn: A Borderlands Massacre and the Violence of History
The Teeth May Smile but the Heart Does Not Forget
Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes
Official Book Club Selection: A Memoir According to Kathy Griffin
The Yiddish Policemen's Union
Blue Mars
Joker One: A Marine Platoon's Story of Courage, Leadership, and Brotherhood
The Reel Truth: Everything You Didn't Know You Need to Know About Making an Independent Film
Alton Brown's Gear for Your Kitchen
Frommer's Toronto 2009
Y: The Last Man Vol. 10: Whys And Wherefores
Collada: Sailing the Gulf of 3D Digital Content Creation
Akira, Vol. 3
Akira, Vol. 1
Fray
No Country for Old Men
Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Wolves at the Gate
Common LISP. The Language. Second Edition
The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, 20th  Anniversary Edition
Rome 1960: The Olympics That Changed the World
Supercade: A Visual History of the Videogame Age 1971-1984
The Forever War
Digital Beauties: 2D & 3D Computer Generated Digital Models, Virtual Idols and Characters
Storm Front
What Happens Next: A History of American Screenwriting
If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B Movie Actor
Designing Interactions
Self-employed Tax Solutions: Quick, Simple, Money-Saving, Audit-Proof Tax and Recordkeeping Basics for the Independent Professional
The Cathedral & the Bazaar : Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary
Power-Up: How Japanese Video Games Gave the World an Extra Life
The Zen of CSS Design: Visual Enlightenment for the Web
Band of Brothers: E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne from Normandy to Hitler's Eagle's Nest
Snow Crash
The Accidental Tourist
Mac OS X Internals: A Systems Approach
Ringworld
Game Design: Theory and Practice
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
The Spy Who Came in From the Cold
Truman
The Last Picture Show: A Novel
Lonesome Dove
Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art
Devil in a Blue Dress
American Tabloid
L.A. Confidential
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
Sin City, Vol. 2: A Dame to Kill For
Sin City, Vol. 1: The Hard Goodbye
Burden of Proof
Personal Injuries
Ultimate Punishment: A Lawyer's Reflections on Dealing with the Death Penalty
The Laws of Our Fathers
Presumed Innocent
Have Space Suit, Will Travel
Starship Troopers
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
XPD
Spy Line
Funeral in Berlin
Spy Hook
Spy Sinker
Mexico Set
The Ipcress File
London Match
Berlin Game
Watchmen
The Zen of Fish: The Story of Sushi, from Samurai to Supermarket
Ringworld's Children
Andy Grove: The Life and Times of an American
Slippage: Previously Uncollected, Precariously Poised Stories
Dreams from My Father
Little Children
Anathem
All the Pretty Horses
An Expensive Place to Die
Battle: A Visual Journey Through 5,000 Years of Combat
Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Predators and Prey
C# 3.0 in a Nutshell: A Desktop Quick Reference
Angel: Blood and Trenches
Angel: Not Fade Away
The Invention of Air
Macromedia Flash Professional 8 Game Development
3D Game Environments: Create Professional 3D Game Worlds
Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream
Unquenchable: America's Water Crisis and What To Do About It
Learning Flex 3: Getting up to Speed with Rich Internet Applications
Angel: After The Fall, Vol. 4
Buffy The Vampire Slayer Omnibus Vol. 7
iPhone Games Projects
Learning PHP, MySQL, and JavaScript: A Step-by-Step Guide to Creating Dynamic Websites
Angel: After the Fall, Vol. 3
Dexter By Design
The Art of Game Design: A book of lenses
Masterminds of Programming: Conversations with the Creators of Major Programming Languages
MySQL and mSQL
American Gods
The Ringworld Engineers
Serenity Vol. 1: Those Left Behind
The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One
Beginning iPhone Development: Exploring the iPhone SDK
A Briefer History of Time
Buffy The Vampire Slayer: Time Of Your Life
Game Physics
Game Physics Engine Development
CSS: The Definitive Guide
CSS: The Missing Manual
Japanese Americans Of The South Bay, CA
Neuromancer
Mechanika: Creating the Art of Science Fiction with Doug Chiang
Quantumscape: The Art of Stephan Martiniere
Ansel Adams At Manzanar
Sin City: Family Values
The Fourth Hand
KURSK: The Vital 24 Hours
Comics and Sequential Art
Black Hole
Lonely Planet Hawaii the Big Island
Lonely Planet Taiwan
Japan
American Born Chinese
Angel: After the Fall: First Night Volume 2
Angel: After The Fall, Vol. 1
Mystic River
Open Source Licensing: Software Freedom and Intellectual Property Law
MediaWiki
The Book of Air and Shadows
Abstraction and Specification in Program Development
CG 101: A Computer Graphics Industry Reference
The Day of the Triffids
The Imp of the Mind: Exploring the Silent Epidemic of Obsessive Bad Thoughts
The iPhone Developer's Cookbook: Building Mobile Applications with the iPhone SDK
The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama
Business and Legal Primer for Game Development
Serenity Official Visual Companion
Kosovo: What Everyone Needs to Know
The Madwoman of the Sacred Heart
Buffy the Vampire Slayer Omnibus Vol. 5
Scripting Your World: The Official Guide to Second Life Scripting
Akira, Vol. 6
Akira, Vol. 5
Akira, Vol. 4
Best Places Southern California: The Best Restaurants, Lodgings and Touring
Akira, Vol. 2
Real-Time Rendering
Real-Time Rendering
Blink
OpenGL
OpenGL Programming for Windows 95 and Windows NT
OpenGL
OpenGL Programming Guide: The Official Guide to Learning OpenGL, Version 1.4, Fourth Edition
The Design of Everyday Things
Special Effects Game Programming with DirectX w/CD
3D Game Textures: Create Professional Game Art Using Photoshop
Darkly Dreaming Dexter
The Right Mistake: The Further Philosophical Investigations of Socrates Fortlow
Starbucked: A Double Tall Tale of Caffeine, Commerce, and Culture
How Wikipedia Works
The Brass Verdict
C: A Reference Manual
Effective STL: 50 Specific Ways to Improve Your Use of the Standard Template Library
The C++ Programming Language
Large-Scale C++ Software Design
More Effective C++: 35 New Ways to Improve Your Programs and Designs
Effective C++: 55 Specific Ways to Improve Your Programs and Designs
Game Boys: Professional Videogaming's Rise from the Basement to the Big Time
Farmer in the Sky
The Post-American World
Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History
Beginning GIMP: From Novice to Professional
Buffy the Vampire Slayer: No Future For You
Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Long Way Home
Digital Character Animation Book: 1
Revolution in the Valley
No Beast So Fierce
Designing Your Second Life
2005 Artist's & Graphic Designer's Market
Havana Bay
Eric Sink on the Business of Software
Peopleware : Productive Projects and Teams, 2nd Ed.
Multimedia Demystified: A Guide to the World of Multimedia from Apple Computer, Inc.
One L: The Turbulent True Story of a First Year at Harvard Law School
Anne Tyler: Three Complete Novels: A Patchwork Planet * Ladder of Years * Saint Maybe
A Remarkable Mother
Buffy the Vampire Slayer Omnibus Vol. 4
Amazing Spider-Man: Coming Home
December 6
Fell Volume 1: Feral City
The Art of Darkwatch
The Unofficial Tourists' Guide to Second Life
The Rough Guide to Videogaming
Finding Battlestar Galactica
Green Mars
The Evolution of Useful Things: How Everyday Artifacts-From Forks and Pins to Paper Clips and Zippers-Came to be as They are
Small Things Considered: Why There Is No Perfect Design
The Integral Trees and The Smoke Ring
Riverworld and Other Stories
Stalin's Ghost
The Puppet Masters
The Real Mars



Philip’s favorite books »

Gauche Scheme

Posted in Programming at 1:10 am by Phil

I’m one of those Lisp loyalists who goes on and on about how I did this and that in Lisp and why do we have to mess around with all these newfangled languages when we had all those features in Lisp way back when (see my dated whinging). But I’m not enough of a loyalist to actually stick with Lisp (unless you count a tiny bit of Emacs customization). I still have my copy of CLtL2, but it’s buried under a stack of books on Python, Ruby, C#, Java, Javascript, Actionscript….

Nevertheless, there are still some Lisp practitioners plugging away. For example a friend of mine, Shiro Kawai, has implemented Gauche Scheme, intended for system scripting and accompanied by a number of extensions, such as OpenGL bindings. This is intriguing – the first Lisp I learned was Scheme in the now defunct 6.001 course, then I learned Zetalisp and Symbolics Common Lisp on the Symbolics Lisp Machines. So when I moved on to Lucid and Franz Lisp on Sun workstations and Windows PC’s, the implementations seemed a) huge and b) somewhat removed from the OS. Meanwhile, with scripting languages like Perl, Python and Tcl showing up, I wondered why we couldn’t script in Lisp? (A decade later, I’m asking the same question about game scripting languages) The Gauche-GL extension also makes me think all those GLUT demos could be done in Gauche-GL

I don’t speak Japanese, but I’m sure Shiro explains the  possibilities better in this Google Talk.

02.16.10

Fugu Maze 1.7

Posted in Apple, Games, Unity at 4:51 pm by Phil

It’s only been a week since the last Fugu Maze update, but I couldn’t wait to add the photo picker from the Unity iPhone Enhancement Pack. Double-tap the screen, and you can paper the walls of your maze with baby photos or cat photos (at least, that’s what I tested with).

To avoid confusion with the single-tap operation of the flashlight, I decided to just leave the flashlight on.

WordsEye Feature 1.4

Posted in Apple, Unity, WordsEye at 1:08 am by Phil

WordsEye Feature 1.4 is on the App Store. This update uses the photo picker function in the Unity iPhone Enhancement Pack that allows you to select and play your own tunes while viewing the WordsEye pictures.

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