PlayCanvas, the hidden WebGL editor gem

Good tools for having graphics & dev team working closely together has always been important for providing awesome digital experience! Back then, Macromedia/Adobe Flash was a 2D tool bringing together artists & coders, and that’s why it was so powerful and popular. Later Unity and Unreal Engine did the same for 3D. But those giants are too heavy for optimized web experience and the build workflow is long.

On the other side, the web itself, with evolving standards, is more powerful than ever: complex SVG animations? Hi lottie. Electron framework via Chromium enables softwares like VS Code, Slack, etc on the web. So why not having a powerful editor directly in the web and targeting the web? Here comes PlayCanvas.

Continue reading PlayCanvas, the hidden WebGL editor gem

Vectorized, extruded, and spatialized map data.

Or the GeoJSON, D3.js to Three.js pipeline.

It has been a while since our latest Three.js project! We’re mostly playing with Unity, but it’s always a nice feeling to get back to the web directly.

For this project, we’d to display a 3D map of the France with some sites informations points. The first thought concerned displaying a 3D map, we known we will need some svg at some point but then how to display it using Three.js? Also how could we put the sites/cities on the map correctly? Let see that!

Continue reading Vectorized, extruded, and spatialized map data.

Click Hanger – Procedurally generating a mountain

Today we’re proud to show our work on the latest game for the Française Des Jeux (France’s national lottery game)! Made with Isobar and our friends at James Bang.

Click Hanger, the first non lottery game of the FDJ, is a mobile climbing game available on Android and iOS.

Read more on its development process below!

Continue reading Click Hanger – Procedurally generating a mountain

Playing with AR & Vuforia

Augmented reality is one of the next big thing. It’s been present since a while (do you remember all those old cool Flash experiments in the browser?) but nowadays the tech is almost ready to blow our mind!

The Google Glass raised many criticism concerning private life but companies were very confident about the technology. Then the Microsoft HoloLens came on the market, but its pricing made it unaffordable for individuals.

During the same time, many companies tried to make AR working on devices: Google with special devices (Google Tango) and Vuforia established itself as a leader thanks to its SDKs. Apps & SDKs contiuned to improve during those last years (thanks to device performances and better cameras), but finally, this year, Apple with ARKit and then Google with ARCore show this technology was ready (on high end devices).

Maison Tangible
Guillaume Bertrand from Atelier Supersenor and 3615 Senor an artlab / hackerspace at Besançon, asked us to help him on an AR application. We’re glad to release the app for iOS and Android. Watch it in action:

Please help them to make their next collection live!

Lynx Optique
With James Bang, we made an AR app for a brand of optical shops with winning moments. After a digital form, visitors seek for a marker in the shop and once they found it scan it via an iPad. A cool Kinematic Inversion animation is displayed on the marker with the result. Here is the proof of concept:

And you what are you making with AR this days?

Franc-Tamponnage and creative coding

During one month, our Bourgogne-Franche-Comté region was in trouble: the music festival, called Franc-Tamponnage, for alternative, electronic and extreme kind was in progress. Our friends at Magna Vox planned dozens of concerts throughout the region.

For a specific set of concerts, we were in charge of creating a nice visual experience for visitors. It was the perfect opportunity for some creative coding! We were 3 coders on this project, Julien experimenting for the first time with openFrameworks, Tamsen playing around with one of his favorite toy: Processing and Aymeric making some good old Flash!

Here’s the recap by each of us :

Continue reading Franc-Tamponnage and creative coding

Sponsoring Piky Game Jam

From October to November, Dijon is the theater of many events related to video games. Welcome to the PIKY project!

Through creative workshops, exhibitions, shared playing times, meetings, concerts and a Game Jam, the PIKY project presents the wealth of video games. We’re very proud to be a project sponsor! Thus we helped to create the first Game Jam at Dijon:

There was no theme but constraints : we had to use sound (music, sfx, voice) and have some accessibility elements to persons who are not able to play normal games.

With Tamsen, Quentin, and a 3D artist we met on site (hi Léo!) we created a small game: Dedale4017. It’s a co-op exploration game on the same computer, one player can only hear sounds (in the role of a visually deficient or legally blind person) and the other one just see visuals on screen (in the role of a hearing impaired person). So basically since they can’t communicate in real life together, we made a dialog system in game based on pictograms and pre-recorded voice instructions.

Download the .exe (need 2 XBOX controllers), enjoy!

Thanks to all participants!!

Run pngquant via a NativeProcess: C#, Unity & AS3/AIR

After our Unity runtime SpriteSheets generator, it is a good idea to optimize the generated pngs files.

pngquant is a command-line utility and a library for lossy compression of PNG images. The conversion reduces file sizes significantly (often as much as 70%) and preserves full alpha transparency. In other words this is a must have tool if you’re working with many pngs!

I used many times pngquant directly from the command line, but depending your project, you might need to run it directly inside your application! I didn’t find example for doing this, and it was way harder than I thought due to my lack of knowledge with batch and shell scripts! So here we go:

We use custom batch file (for Windows) and shell script (for Mac OS X) for launching pngquant. It will take the path to pngs to compress and overwrite them.

OS X:

#!/bin/sh
#!/usr/bin/env bash
#$ -N $2

DIR="$( cd "$( dirname "$0" )" && pwd )"

(cd "$DIR" && ./pngquant -f --ext .png "$1"/*.png)

Windows:

cd %~dp0
pngquant -f --ext .png "%~1"/*.png

Now a C# example for calling thoses scripts, note it works fine with Unity too:

System.Diagnostics.Process process = new  System.Diagnostics.Process();

string exec = "";
if (Application.platform == RuntimePlatform.WindowsEditor || Application.platform == RuntimePlatform.WindowsPlayer)
	exec = "pngquant-windows.cmd";
else if (Application.platform == RuntimePlatform.OSXEditor || Application.platform == RuntimePlatform.OSXPlayer)
	exec = "pngquant-osx";
else
	throw new Exception("Platform not supported");

process.StartInfo.FileName = Application.dataPath + "/../../" + exec;
process.StartInfo.Arguments = Application.dataPath + "/../../png-to-compress";

// if your path have blank spaces use:
//process.StartInfo.Arguments = "\"" + Application.dataPath + "/../../png compress\"";

process.StartInfo.CreateNoWindow = true;
process.StartInfo.UseShellExecute = false;

process.Start();

And finally an example with AS3 for AIR:

var process:NativeProcess = new NativeProcess();

var startupInfo:NativeProcessStartupInfo = new NativeProcessStartupInfo();
var file:File = File.applicationDirectory;

var exec:String = "";
if (Capabilities.os.indexOf("Windows") >= 0)
	exec = "pngquant-windows.cmd";
else if (Capabilities.os.indexOf("Mac") >= 0)
	exec = "pngquant-osx";
else
	throw new Error("doesn't work on " + Capabilities.os + " operating system");

file.nativePath = file.nativePath + "/../" + exec;
startupInfo.executable = file;

var processArgs:Vector.<String> = new Vector.<String>();
processArgs[0] = File.applicationDirectory.nativePath + "/../png-to-compress";
startupInfo.arguments = processArgs;

process.start(startupInfo);

Be sure to have a look to PngQuantNativeProcess’s git repository to be up to date!

Unity – generate SpriteSheets at runtime!

Unity and plugins provide many great ways to build Sprite Sheets. However they’re used directly into Unity Editor or with an external software which is perfect in many case, but none provide the ability to generate SpriteSheets at runtime. So we made our own library.

The goal of a sprite sheet is to pack as many sub-textures as possible in one big texture. So the first thing to do was a packing algorithm. Fortunately we remembered the one made and open-sourced by Ville Koskela in AS3, so we started with a Unity C# port.
Click here to view the Unity rectangle packing example running in your browser in WebGL!

Once the packing algorithm done, we worked on a cache system so the generated sprite sheets are written and saved on disk for a future loading. The generator process won’t be needed anymore unless you increase your cache version!

Give a try to UnityRuntimeSpriteSheetsGenerator!

Unity – sprite packing

Best practices with Unity have always been an hidden gem. Most precisely concerning the Resources folder. Hopefully things are changing with Unity’s best practices guide! And things are simple concerning the Resources folder: just don’t use it!

Managing 2D Sprites in Unity is simple if you have a static scene: just put every sprite needed on your screen and you’re almost done. Obviously you should package them in Spritesheets. The easy way to do it is via Unity’ Sprite Packer tool. But what to do if you need to load Sprites at runtime? How to access a Sprite if it’s not linked directly on a GameObject or a Prefab and without using the Resources folder?

Create a ScriptableObject! They are the best way to store informations within Unity. Here is an Editor Script for generating ScriptableObjects with a list of Sprites for each Packing Tag mentioned:

using UnityEngine;
#if UNITY_EDITOR
using UnityEditor;
#endif
using System;
using System.Collections;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.IO;

[Serializable]
public class SpritesData:ScriptableObject {

	[SerializeField]
	public Sprite[] sprites;

	static public string assetDirPath = "RuntimeSprites/SpritesData/";
	static public string assetPath = "Assets/RuntimeSprites/SpritesData/{0}.asset";

	#if UNITY_EDITOR
	[MenuItem("Data/Create Sprites Data")]
	static void CreateSpritesData() {
		string dirPath = Application.dataPath + "/" +  assetDirPath;

		if (!System.IO.Directory.Exists(dirPath))
			System.IO.Directory.CreateDirectory(@dirPath);

		SpritesData data = ScriptableObject.CreateInstance<SpritesData>();

		List<Sprite> spritesList = new List<Sprite>();

		string[] anims = AssetDatabase.FindAssets("t:Sprite", new string[] {"Assets/Sprites"});

		string currentTag = "";

		foreach (string anim in anims) {

			string path = AssetDatabase.GUIDToAssetPath(anim);

			TextureImporter ti = TextureImporter.GetAtPath(path) as TextureImporter;

			if (ti.spritePackingTag != currentTag) {

				if (data && currentTag != "") {

					data.sprites = spritesList.ToArray();
					AssetDatabase.CreateAsset(data, string.Format(assetPath, currentTag));
				}

				data = ScriptableObject.CreateInstance<SpritesData>();
				spritesList = new List<Sprite>();

				currentTag = ti.spritePackingTag;
			}

			Sprite sprite = AssetDatabase.LoadAssetAtPath<Sprite>(path);

			spritesList.Add(sprite);
		}

		data.sprites = spritesList.ToArray();
		AssetDatabase.CreateAsset(data, string.Format(assetPath, currentTag));
	}
	#endif
}

Now that you have all your SpritesData you just have to create a MonoBehaviour with a public SpritesData[] spritesDatas; property, then you will have access to all your sprites! The good things is while a sprite isn’t displayed on Screen it’s not in memory.

Cheers!