Fuck.

So I had a quick look and sure enough the site was riddled with malware and other horrible things. I take responsibility for not being vigilant enough and letting my updates lag the releases by a few weeks here and there, so I have nobody to blame but myself.

Still sucks tho.

In any case instead of trying to pick out the infected bits i just nuked the site from orbit and started fresh. I did check my database to make sure it was not infested, so I dont have to go back through my years of sporadic blog posts in the database looking for hacks, so that is good.

That said, I have not the time nor the energy to restore the look and feel of the site so we are stuck with the generic wordpress look and feel.

So here is my protip for the day: keep your wordpress installs up to date! otherwise you will be the one getting that email.

Cheers!
-Ben

and now a word about platforms

The Android marketplace (and the other Android compatible app stores) are all a bit different, and you are not required to have an account at the store to use your Android phone. This is a boon for some people who don’t ever need to buy stuff, or don’t want their credit card details on file somewhere, but it is a bane for the casual games on those devices. Adding that extra hurdle just to spend a few bucks on an app seems to take it’s toll in purchase numbers.

Cheers!
-B

Anyhow one huge frustration I was having was that the sound and video that worked just fine in the older SDKs no longer seemed to work on the simulator. (everything works fine on the device) I had a few bugs with the way the 3.2 and above handle video, but even after sorting that out it refused to work on the simulator.

I have been pulling my hair out about this for a week now. I mean, it is not a huge deal, I can get by without sound in the simulator, but it is really annoying when i KNOW the code is fine.

Just to be clear: I have a hybrid OpenAL/AVAudioPlayer sound management system, and the videos are all played with MPMoviePlayerController (using the old ways on the old systems and the new ways on the new systems) everything works groovy on all of my myriad devices but NOT on the simulator.

The movies wont even kick off, you tell them to play, and you immediately get MPMoviePlayerPlaybackDidFinishNotification. No errors, nothing.

I finally figured it out! It was my iSight camera. I have an old school original firewire iSight attached to my MacPro for the iChatting etc.. I disconnected that from the system and suddenly sound and video are working again! So I guess I would suggest to anyone else having similar issues: disconnect any external devices that deal with sound or video and see if the problem persists.

Anyway, I am glad I figured out the problem, but I am a bit annoyed that I have to unhook my iSight in order to be able to develop with the simulator. Mighty annoying.

Cheers!
-B

Just released a new little app: iRaspberry. It was actually last week, but I am perpetually behind, so there you go. Apparently we got some 12,000 downloads the first weekend, so that is cool :-)

It is free to download, and you get two of the raspberry videos for free, and there is an in app purchase to upgrade to the full app which gives you 16 ways the stick out your toungue at people :-)

anyhow, it is a silly thing, but lots of fun, so check it out!

Cheers!
-B

I am just playing around with making myself some groovy looking wallpapers and lockscreen backgrounds for my iPad and realized it is not as easy as just whacking up some 1024×768 image. There is the whole auto-rotating issue. In the end I decided to make a template, and I made it just a wee bit nicer so I could post it here.

Lovely isnt it?

The basic upshot is that for desktop wallpapers (the one that shows up behind your icons) your best bet is to make a 1024×1024 image and the center 768×768 is the area that will always be visible.

Here are some examples I took, to give you an idea:

It is important to note that the iPad overlays a gradient on top of your image (as well as icon shadows), so if you want to be color-perfect then you will want to take that into account.

As for the lockscreen, it is a slightly different beast since it has the overlay bars. In portrait, you have the same 768×768 ‘safe’ area in the middle, but in landscape that is chopped down to a slightly thinner slice of image:

Thats it! have fun, make some cool wallpapers!

Cheers!
-Ben

Here is the amazon link:

http://www.amazon.com/Beginning-iPhone-Games-Development-Cabrera/dp/1430225998/

Anyhow, it is a really good book, even if you are not a beginner. Here is a snippet from the promo blurb about ‘what you will learn’:

• Efficient methods for drawing in 2D and 3D to the iPhone screen
• Game-specific animation techniques with Core Animation
• To use OpenGL ES for more complex and realistic gaming backgrounds and action
• Numerous ways to add music to enhance the gaming experience
• How to give your users access to their iPhone libraries from within games
• The tools and techniques of 3D audio for creating even more realistic gaming experiences
• How to do networking right, including two-player games over Bluetooth and multiplayer games over Wi-Fi

I wrote the chapters on OpenGL, so feel free to ask me any questions you might have about them :-)

Enjoy the book!
Cheers!
-B

Thanks to anyone who stopped by the Unity3d booth at GDC and said howdy to Sandor and I and checked out the multi-touch table: the FishTish.

As promised, the updated uniTUIO scripts have been made available on the xtuio.com site!

They have actually been up for quite some time now, but I ahve been (as usual) either too busy or too lazy to get a post up, so here it is:

Note: they have been pretty much fully redesigned to take advantage of the ‘iPhone Input’ style of touch detection.

What does this mean? Well, the older scripts used a more centralized raycasting and distribution method. There was one main event handler that took each touch point and checked to see if it collided with any registered ‘touchable’ objects. This is a perfectly good design, and it works very well when you have lots and lots of points (in other words, you are only raycasting once per touch per frame)

However, we decided to go away from that and create a fake iPhoneInput class that you can access from the desktop version of Unity.

Why?

Well, the most compelling reason was so that we could quickly and easily port iPhone apps to the touch table. Once I had the faux iPhoneInput class that was being populated with TUIO generated touch information, then it was trivial to take a few of the iPhone apps (and most all of the Unity iPhone tutorial projects) and simply drop them in and have them ‘just work’.

In fact, funny story: On the first day of the GDC expo, I had another Unity/iPhone dev come up and he was excited about the FishTish and thought that his app: iPottery would work really well on it. I grabbed the code from him with the intention of dropping in our scripts and installing it as one of the demo apps on the FishTish. Well, that day was quite a long one and I did not have the energy to actually do anything with the script until the next morning. I spent approximates 15 minutes with a totally unfamiliar code base (iPottery scripts are all in JS and the uniTUIO stuff is all in C#, so that also speaks to how simple it is to use them :-) and I had it working no problems. I spent most of my time deleting the onGUI stuff (onGUI doesnt work with uniTUIO, soory!) and adding some guiText/guiTexture based buttons instead.

For the next two days of the expo we showed off iPottery along with all the other demo apps and it worked great!

Ok, enough of my tangent, how does this actually work?

Well, grab the sample project from the link above, there are two scenes, one called ‘basic touch’ and one called ‘buttons’. Buttons actually contains the entirety of ‘basic touch’. (it just has more buttons in it)

Effectively what the new scripts provide is am iPhoneInput class that you can use in your TUIO enabled MT apps just like you would if you were writing an app for your iPhone or iPad. I have provided a dozen or so scripts that show some examples of how to use the iPhoneInput to do things like basic drag/scale/rotate and build buttons using either GUIText/GUITextures or 3d objects.

I havent had time to put together a video yet, but the code is pretty easy. The only thing that you will need is to make sure that you have an active BBiPhoneInputManager script running somewhere in your scene.

I use the BBTouchManagerStarter script to check to see if there is already an input manager and if not then make one. This is good because if you switch scenes, the input manager does not get destroyed. In an actual deployment, you can just instantiate one in your opening scene and be done with i, but during testing when you want to be able to just look at the scene you are in, this can become cumbersome, so I use the BBTouchManagerStarter in all my scenes instead.

Cheers!
-Ben

I am going to be in San Francisco in just a few days for GDC 2010. If you are going to the conference and you want to meet up, let me know. I will be giving a few talks at the Unity3d theatre about uniTUIO and Sandor and I will be showing off Sandor’s ‘FishTisch’ (fish table) which is his big multi-touch setup (also in the Unity booth) so come by and say howdee!!

In the next few days (or maybe next week, during GDC) I will put up some new uniTUIO scripts that make it quick and easy to port over your Unity3d iPhone games to the Unity Desktop and make use of TUIO for your multi-touch controls!

Cheers!
-B

I started on “Mole – The Quest for the Terracore Gem” last october. Chris (the designer) and I worked hard on a prototype that we got out in about three weeks. We submitted that to the Muse games contest as well as the GDAA indie game contest at GCAP 2009.

Originally we were slated to do an iPhone release in mid December 2009, but since we got picked as a finalist for the GDAA Indie game contest, we decided to focus on polishing a desktop version that we could show off at the conference. This paid off huge in terms of really good gameplay additions as well as some invaluable data collected watching people play the game at GCAP. We took all of that information and updated the gameplay to make it even better and also spent a few weeks getting it running on the iPhone. After a good bit of external beta in mid January, we released it to the app store in early Feb.

Unfortunately somewhere in the final frenzy to get the game out the door one of the meta data files got overwritten with an older version. We built that into the version 1.0 release and pushed it to the store.

UNfortunately that little thing caused the game to go looking for some resources that no longer existed at the end of a level and was causing crashes. I hate crashes. As soon as we found out about the crashing bug we pulled the app from the store and pushed up a fixed binary. We had some great help from some of the touch arcade forum regulars who notified us of the bug right away, so thanks to them we were able to pull it so quickly and get the fix out straight away!

Although the initial app was approved in about 2 days, the fix took about a week to get through the process (still way faster than last year, so: yay Apple!).

In any case, Mole is out now, and we have had a great response to it.

Just a few weeks after I started dev on Mole, I was approached by Tin Man Games to take over the Gamebook Adventure development.

This turned out to be a much larger job than I had originally anticipated and it took about a month longer than we had hoped. However, the final product is really great. The time we spent to make sure the game was polished and performed well really paid off. There are a few bugs in this first release and we are working on a fix for them right now.
We have had some good press coverage for GA:

PocketGamer UK review
TouchArcade Review

Next up! We are looking to finish a handful smaller more casual titles that we have had in production for awhile now, SkateDude and BMXDude are at the top of this list as well as a couple new games called ‘Steam Pilot’ and ‘Gooey’ that I will post about later.

Cheers!
-Ben

If you already had OpenCV installed (as many of us do) then you probably would not have noticed, but it is kinda nice to have it all in one package when installing on new machines and stuff like that.

Anyhow, I update the link in the earlier post, and here it is again if you want the binary:

xTouchV1.01.zip

This seemed to work on my Snow Leopard laptop that did not already have openCV on it, so hopefully it will work for other people as well :-)

Cheers!
-B

And let me know if anyone finds anymore bugs :-)