Lab /

Meet Hutch the best friend of Starxi!

Hey folks, today I’m glad to introduce you Hutch. This post follows my thoughts from a previous one. I was looking for the next tech for providing mobile, desktop and web games. Starling is great, but since Flash Player is dead again, its future is less brighten. I used Flambe in the past, and was pretty happy but today it isn’t supported anymore (though we’re waiting a long time announced update!).

Looking for a good cross-platform 2D engine
I looked the interesting series of blog post by Prime31 seeking for the best 2D game engine/platform. He finally choose MonoGame, but unfortunately for me it doesn’t export for the web. In his evaluation it meets many Haxe frameworks and LibGDX. Being not so much familiar with Java and with the death of RoboVM I don’t considered LibGDX as an option.
Concerning the Haxe libraries, my issue is still the same: there aren’t enough Native Extensions (except for Flambe which targets AIR) and the js minified is close to 1Mo.

On an other part, I enjoyed working with Pixi.js and Haxe thanks to this extremely well supported externs. Unfortunately, targeting mobile application with HTML5 is a nightmare. Cordova‘s performance aren’t really good and Cocoon is just an expensive black box…

So what was the solution?
Continue reading Meet Hutch the best friend of Starxi!

Retrieving the names of your scenes at runtime with Unity

Edit: this script is awesome, and if you combine it with a ScriptableObject you’re ready to go!

Retrieving the names of your scenes at runtime with Unity is a common problem. The API of Unity doesn’t provide an easy way do to so. With the quite recent SceneManager, I thought Unity had finally provided something to get information about your scenes you have added in the Build Settings. No way !

I faced this problem when implementing a little configuration GUI, where the user has the possibility to indicate the order the scenes will be played. Yes, I could have hard-coded this, but it’s not the elegant way in my opinion. Thus, I made some investigations to get once for all the names of my scenes.

Continue reading Retrieving the names of your scenes at runtime with Unity

Playing with VR and Unity

Today, Virtual Reality (VR) may be the hottest topic for interactive developers (Augmented Reality will be the next within few years for sure). Many constructors propose their own Head Mounted Device (HMD) : HTC & Valve with the Vive, Oculus, with their Oculus Rift and Gear VR for Samsung mobiles, Google and the very cheap DIY Google Cardboard, and many other ones. Naturally, Unity, which is the leading global game industry software (45% market share, 47% of developers), rapidly proposed built-in functionnalities to handle some of the VR devices.

In the end of the last year, we have been asked to create Unity tools to quickly prototype virtual visits with the Google Cardboard. It was the perfect project to dive deeper in the world of VR. Here, virtual visits were a set of photo-spheres and video-spheres, which are respectively photos and videos projected inside spheres, giving you the impression you are surrounded by the scenery (think about Google Street View). Furthemore, some parts of the photo-spheres had to be interactive and display some additional content like photos, videos, text, …

Continue reading Playing with VR and Unity

Reset git repository to a new commit

Git is an awesome version control system, popularized by Github. Working on a big project, you might need to add (huge) binaries, or libraries, or even psds, videos… to your repository. We’ll not judge this method, it has its pros & cons. The fact is: if those big files change often, your repository will increase very quickly. And sometimes your own code versioning is not a big deal. It’s stable, and for newcomer it doesn’t need all the git history and its 4Go (yeah, I already experienced that). So let see how to reset your git repository to a new commit:

Firsty, save your local .git/config file somewhere on your disk. Then:

rm -rf .git
git init

Import and overwrite your previous .git/config file. Then:

git add .
git commit -m "Repository reset"
git push -f origin master

Et voilà!

A cool thing to notice is on Github and Bitbucket, you won’t lost data subscriptions, stars & forks.

Maybe you need a backup on a specific URL just in case…? Just create a new repository, and in your .git/config file change the url and push 😉

Encoding BitmapData using AS3 Worker

Though AS3 Worker class is available since a while, its introduction on iOS is recent: less than 6 months. With AS3 workers being available everywhere, it’s about time to create small libraries multi-threaded with just a few lines of code!

If you never played with Worker, you should give a look to this great series of blog post.

There are several ways to create Worker, but if you don’t want to fall in a pitfall while using ANEs in your project, I recommend to use them via a loaded SWF.

So here is a small example making a simple library for encoding bitmap data and save images on disk via a Worker:
Continue reading Encoding BitmapData using AS3 Worker

From Unity 2D to Unreal Paper 2D

The Game Developers Conference is coming quickly and we’re impatient to hear the announcement from the big guys!

Since a while I wanted to give a try to the Unreal Engine. I’d no doubt that it could outperformed Unity on complex 3D rendering stuff, but for this first test I focused on simple 2D stuff to get familiar with the user interface, engine build process, scripting… Unreal Engine sounded like an indomitable beast in my mind (I spent hours on Unreal Tournament when I was young) but coming from an Unity background, the beast was easily tamed! If you never tried the Unreal Engine, the first thing to do is to check the Unreal Engine 4 For Unity Developers!
Continue reading From Unity 2D to Unreal Paper 2D