iOS forces you to use pretty animations: if you don’t tell it otherwise, it will use “ease-in/ease-out” curves to make things feel … smoother, less jerky. Unity is made for programmers; changes you make to position, size, rotation, etc all happen instantaneously. By default, they won’t even animate, will teleport […]
Yearly Archives: 2014
29 posts
What can you draw with a whiteboard, if you’re not an artist? Let’s see.. Many of my friends live on different continents. It was too late to post cards, and I was staring blindly at my whiteboard when I had an idea: A picture for everyone, photographed, emailed … Then […]
Entity Systems in Unity… some examples of the problems This is a new series of blog posts, where I’m going to document specific ways + concrete examples in which Unity fails (sometimes spectacularly) as an “ECS” game engine. I like Unity; but the core architecture (which is very old) is […]
Ask 10 game developers if you should use more script code or less, and you will get 11 different answers. They are all correct: it’s very situation-specific. Use of scripting languages is highly dependent on the humans and the practical / project-management issues. Why?
I reviewed a whole bunch of these on Thingiverse, and the best combination of simplicity and effectiveness appeared to be this one: …but you want to print these at 0.1mm layer height, or less, and that’s difficult with the model above. So I tweaked it a bit: NOTE: The WordPress […]
This is hugely important to 3D printing, and generally: no-one talks about it online (at least, not with any authority: more “blind leading the blind”). Which is silly: the engineering behind this is obvious (and it’s often obvious from looking at a 3D printer that it’s been under-engineered in this […]
This year, one of my goals was to build a sane, powerful, viable Entity System / Entity-Component System within Unity3D. Something I could build current and future games on, and save a lot of dev-time (both in ease-of-use and in easily adding missing features that I wish Unity had). @t_machine_org […]
Transferring server to new home. Allowed it to install latest versions of core software. Turns out … the lovely people at Apache have made major site-breaking changes to their config system, so that upgrading WILL break existing sites. Took an hour to discover that :(.
(a summary writeup of the things I tried – based on this Unity blog post: blogs.unity3d.com/2014/06/24/serialization-in-unity/ – to get Unity 4.5 to correctly serialize/deserialize simple object graphs) UPDATE: I belatedly discovered that EditorUtility.setDirty() is fundamental to Unity; if you have even one single call of this missing, Unity will corrupt […]
3D printers are almost unique as a product: they can upgrade themselves. The Rep2 is one of the most popular/successful “production ready” printers out there. This post looks at what to do when you get a new one to upgrade it to the latest, bestest it can be.
I needed fast, efficient, … but powerful, adaptable … pathfinding for my hobby project. My minions have to fly, walk, crawl, teleport, tunnel their way across a procedural landscape. Getting to that point has been tricky, but the journey’s been interesting. We want something that intelligently routes creatures around obstacles, […]
This is a blog post I wrote 6 months ago, and my life got too busy to finish it off, finish testing the code, improving the text. So I’m publishing this now, warts and all. There are probably bugs. There are bits that I could explain better – but I […]
Two things arrived in the post today, on the same day. (incidentally, one via FedEx, which was great, and one via UPS, which was dire – and gave my package to a stranger even though I was in the building WAITING for them to arrive). Here they are, side by […]
Why do we need this? In a bizarre move, Google deleted the perfectly good SMS app from Android. Yeah. Hmm. Well, read this TechRadar piece for some thoughts on that. Sadly, Google’s corporate policy is that the consumer is always wrong: you’re not allowed to simply “use the app I […]
Inspired by Markus / @notch, and how he got MineCraft going in the early days, I’m live-prototyping a game idea I’ve been thinking about for ages. It’s about exploring a landscape … where cities affect dungeons, and dungeons affect cities. (this is stress-relief for me, an “evenings and weekends” project. […]
2015 UPDATE: I discovered that dovecot now uses MUCH longer passwords than it used to, and the database tables I’d found online WILL FAIL to authenticate (they truncate your passwords!). Fixed below 95% of linux configuration on Debian servers is simple, well-documented, well-designed, easy to do, with only a tiny […]
Many businesses underestimate the power of a clever Pricing Model. I’m selling a new product at the moment (we’re helping schools teach children to program), so pricing models occupy a lot of my head right now. Startups are so unsure of what model to use that they often say “anything, […]
The importance of Re-use Here’s a story that may sound familiar: You downloaded Unity, watched some tutorials on YouTube, and had a physics “game” running the same day. Excited, you started writing the game you’ve always wanted to make. Possibly – bitten before when trying this with GameMaker etc – […]
I’m sure I’ve written about this before, but it’s come up again on Reddit, so here’s my thoughts… IANAL, but … I have been offered more than 100 NDA’s, both as an individual and working in large companies (including a games publisher, and including a funding team). I have signed […]
5 years as an iOS developer has pushed me to understand and improve my product/physical/functional design skills. Especially “industrial” design – problems and solutions. Here’s a great one I saw the other day: combining a Snellen Chart with Stopping Distances, i.e.: + Existing (bad) solutions The status quo on driving […]