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 :

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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!

Memovox, AIR still on top

Two years ago, we coded a beautiful app named Geophysic for the famous luxary watches brand Jaeger-LeCoultre. Made with the cross-platform technology Adobe AIR, and Starling & Feathers, we finished the dev diary asking which other technologies could have done the app, but didn’t get a strong answer.
Today, with Pixelfordinner agency, we’re proud to share this new app named Wake-Up Memovox, for the same client, available for iOS and Android.
It was developed with the same technology, and if it’s obvious the game development market moves in favour of Unity, AIR is still rocking for making apps! Let’s see the development part!

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“Zip zip” avatar creator and character animation capture

“Zipizator” is a mobile app created by Ludo and Hyperfiction we developed to accompany the Zip Zip french animated television series’s release on a french channel.

It was fully created with Adobe Air.
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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:
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