NxtGen Media - The Freeman View

iPad Thoughts

I have been following the iPad press with keen interest. I think that it was a phenomenal move to encapsulate the most common user apps into a single sexy no nonsense device. This is a device that I could get my Mom, and for the most part would cover everything that she would want to do with a computer. I would only have to do minimal tech support for it if at all. The price is right, and I could see this thing becoming commonplace in schools, hospitals, boardrooms, and all types of jobs. I don’t own a Mac, but I am seriously considering getting an iPad after it goes through an iteration or two. That is very telling in itself. I have an iPod, no iPhone, am a diehard PC guy and yet I am considering this device. Very telling indeed.

The make or break for this thing I feel will be the apps. With the right apps it can go anywhere. Well maybe not anywhere, but an industrial strength version would remedy that. What is really interesting to me is that this very chic multimedia device does not run Flash in the browser. I don’t know why Apple chose not to allow this, but I can say that it is obviously a move that makes a clear statement to Adobe. I could be very wrong on this, but I can’t see that this was an oversight. I interpret it as ‘Screw you and your software. We don’t want your stinking software on our device’. Or maybe, ‘we don’t want browser based Flash apps bypassing the App Store’.

If this device does become hugely popular as the iPhone did, and still does not run Flash apps well, that definitely will be a hit to Flash. With all the Flash content out there and the move towards more robust Flash RIAs, (which seems to me would be great on the iPad if performance could be addressed) it would seem that the more apps available browser or store, the more people would use it. I am not sure how this obviously political move will roll in the long run for either company. Only time will tell. Meanwhile, I continue to play with Unity3D and hope that it will work on the iPad as well.

The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs

I have to do my fair share of presentations. Never hurts to take tips from a master.

Learning Unity

I have been using Unity every spare chance that I get for a few months now. I find myself looking for every chance that I can find to get back to it and learn it. It ain’t Flash. It is not an easy transition to 3D development. Without an artist, I have to learn another 3D modeling program (Blender). I now have to consider a whole new dimension when coding. Thankfully scripting in SecondLife has helped ease some of that transition. I have gone through the Tornado Twins awesome tutorials as well as reading Will Goldstone’s great, Unity Game Development Essentials, which I will review at a later date and checking out his videos. All that being said, it is obviously a pain to learn a new technology, but that pain is far less than the excitement of finally having a tool that does web 3D so well.

I don’t have anything I care to show just yet other than programmer art and such, but I must say that I am excited about what is possible even at this stage of learning. I still work in Flash during the day, and I wonder if Adobe is going to eventually address this growing trend toward a 3D web. Flash is getting better, but I when I watch my kid playing Farmville and I look at the quality, I just shake my head. She still sits there and plays it though, and that in itself is very telling. I can’t help but see a tremendous opportunity here for the player that has a perceived 98% browser penetration, to make a move to crush the competition. Video is covered, web apps are covered, but games clearly need a more powerful player, and that is where Unity is really shining.

I don’t know how the Unity player penetration is going, not really caring a whole lot at the moment as our audience will be required to download the player. I am sure that it has grown since last October, and most likely will continue to do so as more people learn it and release their creations. For now I am in the learning phase, and quite pleased with the progress.

-DCF

Friends Doing Stuff

Love it when fellow creatives are on the move and doing things. I used to work at a company in Miami called LearningSoft back in the day (circa 2000). It was focused on creating learning based games and activities, so we had a mix of designers and developers on staff. The company fizzled, but many of us still keep in touch after all these years. Two of the Flash designers recently sent me some info on what they have been up to. These guys are pretty incredible in their own right.

Carlos Pita, aka ElPitaMan, has posted some one of his work on You Tube. It is an animated holiday ecard created for the clients of Televisia. He not only does the animation, but also does all the voices in his creations. Dude is incredible.

My other bud, Ansar Sattar entered the Animae Caribe Animation and New Media Festival, and won the Best Caribbean Animation award. He took on the difficult task of alerting Trinidad audiences to the threat of dengue fever borne by the Aedes Aegypti mosquito, and made the presentation a funny informative cartoon. Dang! He actually pulled off making that topic interesting and fun. Awesome work!

Ansar in the News: Ansar Sattar drawing attention with Trini-style fine tooning

DCF

The New Year

Happy New Year to all. As much as I don’t like to make resolutions for the new year I feel the need to put some stuff down as a marker to look back on next year. Last year marked the year of working in Second Life and Opensim extensively. This will continue in this year, but I am really pushing for more work in Unity and Flash. I witnessed corporate downsizing and a host of other effects of the economy of 2009. I am blessed to still be working and in a company that is now taking a new direction. I came through a knee surgery this year that was 50/50 in terms of what I would be able to do. As a martial artist, this is a scary prospect. I am blessed to say that I can still do martial arts.

This year I want to focus on:
- Really understanding Unity - Unity is like a new toy to me. I can do things in it that I have never been able to do. It simply is one of the most amazing tools I have seen for this type of development to date. The fact that the indie version is free is awesome. For games, both 2D and 3D it is truly incredible.
- Moving from Javascript to C# in Unity - I have been using javascript in Unity, but now want to move to C# because it just makes sense from a development perspective when dealing with both Unity and Opensim
- Working more in Flash Builder rather than Flash Pro - Flex has got the RIA thing down. For web apps, it is awesome
- Moving from Truespace to Blender - Loved TS in its day and will continue to use it for its swf exporter, but it is a dying application. Blender is coming into a new version and a new interface and does not look like it is going away anytime soon

- Documenting the ??? fighting system - Been working out MMA style and pretty much have mixed the hands style of Wing Chun with the feet of Tae Kwon Do. It just made sense. Things we noted:

• Six feet away from a powerful kicker, an inside fighter is toast if he gets caught by a well placed kick.
• The reverse is the same for the distance fighter. Once the gap is closed, if all they have is feet then they are toast when it comes to an inside fighter
• Ground is a whole other game - WC ground tech is brutal is great for the street and not for the ring. Jiu Jitsu has this pretty much ‘locked up’ and is indeed superior
• As a fighter ages he can’t do the high kicks of TKD (not with much power), but can do the lower kicks of WC and TKD with ease. These are now the base kicks.

Documenting what has worked and has streamlined everything is now the challenge. No forms now, just drills and techniques by the number.

I have never done this before on a blog. When I look back in 2011, I want to be able to say I knocked out all of these. None are difficult, but will take time and discipline.

DCF

Flash Platform Gaming Technology Center

Adobe announces a site that will be dedicated to game development. With all the growth and change in the browser based gaming space over the past year, I am not surprised. Farmville consumes so many of my friends time it’s not even funny.

Adobe has made some good moves this year, and is in a very good position in terms of browser penetration. Flash has become a big part of the user web experience and has a good chance of becoming the platform of choice for interactive media on the web. Still, as I maintain my Flash skills, I also look to Unity3D simply because of the superior firepower.

Flash is a great all around development platform that keeps getting better, but the Flash player still needs a boost in performance for the gaming side. If Flash gets to the performance level of the Unity engine, Adobe wins big. It does appear that Adobe will eventually get the Flash player to the level of performance of Unity, but just how long that will be is the question? My guess is that with everything heating up the way it is in online gaming, it should be fairly soon.

Adobe Flash Platform Gaming Technology Center

Odd character in Flex, PHP, and JSON

Been busy as all get out these days. Seems like since it is the holidays, things would be slow. Guess this is a good thing. I  have been working on a Flex project using JSON and PHP. Basically, I am using httpService to get data from MySQL using the PHP JSON functions. Fairly straight forward stuff.

I had used this setup in a previous project so the code was already setup. I had my method set to POST in the flex service and was getting the data just fine. All was good until i tried to decode with JSON.decode(). I kept getting this parsing error on a single character. This was the same code I used before, with very minor changes.

I checked up and down trying to figure out what got screwed up. My returned JSON string appeared to be valid. I ran it through the validator and it was fine. Turns out that a question mark was being returned by PHP as the first character of the JSON string. Not very obvious to see just echoing the JSON string to the screen on the PHP side. I ended up processing the string to remove the character before decoding it, but I still don’t know why the question mark shows up in this project and not the previous one.  Very odd.

DCF

Blender 2.5 Alpha Available

The Blender 2.5 alpha is out for testing. I have not been a fan of Blender in the past, but seeing as my favorite hobbyist 3D modeling software (Caligari Truespace) went belly up, I gotta start looking into something that will be around for the long haul. You can still download Truepsace from the what’s left of the Caligari site, but who knows how long that will be kept up? I’ve used Truespace since version 2.0. I also use it because it has a swf exporter plug-in, and works well in Windows 7, and for the moment it is free. That being said, who knows how long that will last? If nothing else happens to Truespace, I’m giving it two years of useful life, hence the reason I am looking at Blender.

Blender never really set well with me because the interface was so difficult to get used to. This new version is supposed to address the interface, and I am rather excited about giving it a shot. Up until the release of Unity Indie, 3D modeling was never really anything more to me than a hobby. With Truespace, I could design interfaces and export them to Flash, but that was pretty much it. For anything more powerful, I needed a 3D engine. Now, I have to get serious about 3D if I hope to produce quality work in Unity. Truly a game change is on. Could the days of the lone wolf developer be coming back? Very exciting days ahead.

D

A New Hope

I’ve been working with Unity3D for a few weeks now, and I am totally pumped. In fact, I am more than just pumped, I am inspired. I had no idea how long I have been waiting for this day to come, hell I did not think it was even possible and so quickly. It is like being in the desert with a limited amount of water, and coming upon an oasis with not just a spring, but a well of ice cold water. I had some idea of what I wanted from a development environment, but had no way of realizing it. Director and Flash were as close, as I could get to having an app that would allow me to produce the type of web media I was dreaming of, but fell short in way too many areas.

This move by Unity to make the indie version free was not only brilliant, but I am starting to believe that this could be the start of a new era in web media. A revolution if you will. The power that Unity has is simply immense when it comes to web. It supports 3D gaming now, but how much of a stretch would it be to add flex-like support to Unity? I mean seriously, it will be trivial for Unity to do 2D apps. I already know that as soon as I can save enough pennies I will be upgrading to the pro version for home. My boss was so impressed by the quality of Unity that our next projects are now all slated for Unity. Flash still has a place in our tool kit, but it may be losing its prominence very soon. It is truly a great time to be in web media.

D

Unity3d free?!!

Last week, I sent DiamondTearz an email asking him was he still excited about Unity3D. I sent this, because I was considering buying it, despite my reservations about player penetration and such. He wrote me back that not only did he love it, but that the indie version was free.

Shocking? Absolutely. The few things that were holding me back from pursuing development were obviously player penetration, and not really wanting to spend $200 on a technology that I was not sure was going to be around for the long haul. With the $200 barrier gone, I would be crazy not to seriously begin developing with this engine. All I have to lose now is time, and I am betting that with the release of the indie version, player penetration is going to increase and Unity will be around for some time to come.

Excited? More than you can imagine. The little bit I played with Unity before, gave me the impression that this was huge, but I was just not ready to spend time with something else over my beloved Flash. Too many years in the development relationship with Flash, but god was I tempted. Now with this release, I see at the very least I can begin to realize prototypes and experiments that were simply not possible in Flash. I would often go home from a day of working in Flash, and work on games and experiments in Flash. Now I will be doing that ‘homework’ in Unity. I can’t remember the last time I was so excited about a home project. Oh yeah, back in the days when I first started using Flash. This move by Unity was brilliant. It will be very interesting to see what happens in the industry as a result.

DCF