Fugu Talk

Each release of HyperBowl for the iPhone is a bit of an ordeal, since main development takes place on the web player version with Unity Pro, and I have to copy that latest snapshot to Unity iPhone and then hack away at it until it runs at an acceptable frame rate. Sometimes I forget an optimization or two that I’d made in a previous release, so this seems as good a time as any to jot down the steps. These are what I remember now – if I missed any, I hope they’ll come back to me as soon as I start.

1. Duplicate the Unity Pro project, open up the new project in Unity iPhone, watch it convert.
2. In the Player Settings, set the game name
3. In the Player Settings, set the most aggressive speed and code stripping settings
4. Copy the splash screen and icon files into the project, assign them in the Player Settings
5. Replace control and option scripts with iPhone counterparts
6. Set Static on all static game objects
7. Assign batching script to object groups that move together
8. Replace certain materials (like bump maps) with simpler ones
9. Change diffuse materials to vertex lit
10. Remove transparent objects as necessary
11. Remove lights as necessary
12. Remove particle effects as necessary
13. Remove blob shadows as necessary
14. Replace Unity water with simple water
15. Use the iPhone background shader for the background
16. Replace Ogg Vorbis sound with uncompressed or m4a sounds
17. Replace any DXT compressed textures with PVRTC compressed textures
18. Set accelerometer frequency to zero

And of course, profile, profile, profile…

I was content to use one of the presupplied themes for my twitter account, unti I saw a twitter profile page with a photo as the background. I thought, that’s lame, I can do a better job. After trying out various layouts that didn’t squash or stretch properly or blend nicely with the content area, I climbed back into my graphic design comfort zone and just used one of my beach photos.

This isn’t a view of HyperBowl that you can normally see in-game, but my cat stomped all over my keyboard and trackpad, resulting in this scene from the Unity Editor. I thought it was pretty.

The HyperBowl Forest lane without and with fog:

I used to be one of those programmers who complained about receiving terribly vague bug reports that resemble my nephew’s account of how he got a coin stuck up his nose ( “I didn’t do anything…”). Now I’m on the other side – recently I submitted a report in which I described step-by-step how to reproduce the bug from a newly-created project, and I got a reflexive “can you attach a project” response for my trouble.

I fear now that we’re in the texting and YouTube era, bug reports will require video. I’ve even seen one game QA group attach or link movies to their bug reports on their own initiative (I think it was Darkwatch, but I’m not sure). I found one HyperBowl bug demonstrated on YouTube, which was good motivation for getting it fixed…(I can prioritize bugs based on the number of YouTube views)

Another Blue Mars walkthrough:

I’m a long-time emacs user (beginning with Zmacs on the Symbolics Lisp Machines) and I’m still holding out, using XEmacs on Windows and Aquamacs on MacOSX. But with Unity, I haven’t tried changing the default editor, largely out of apathy, and also Unitron is adequate and has a nice auto-coloring feature for Unity functions.

However, one of the “Google Friday” projects at Unity is an Emacs mode for Unity Javascript, so I just had to try it out. First, I specified Aquamacs as my Unity editor:

Then I downloaded the elisp file from the blog article and placed it in my user Library/Preferences directory for Aquamacs.

Finally, I placed the loading code specified in the blog article into the Preferences.el file (shown in the same directory above). So far, looks good!

A nice WIP outpost in Blue Mars.