Variance Theory

Apple Will Buy Adobe

Ben — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 16:19:49 +0000

(I wrote this originally on April 9, 2010 and didn’t have the balls to post it. My prediction still hasn’t come true, but it still could.)

So it’s been a day since my personal Twitterverse, which is comprised heavily of Unity and Flash game devs, exploded into a fearful frenzy over the latest changes to the iPhone developer agreement. It essentially states that apps created for the iDevices must be made entirely with Apple approved methods. There is little doubt that this has to do with the impending release of Flash CS5 and its ability to spit out iPhone apps without involving XCode.

So, my first reaction was “how does this benefit Apple?”. It took a night and a long drive to the DMV today to really come up with a compelling long term strategic theory, but I can see an endgame: Apple is going to buy Adobe.

Why? What? But Apple hates Adobe you say? They hate Flash you say? The only thing that Apple hates is not being in control of their platform, and you can’t blame them for that. But what is upsetting developers so much about this announcement is that Apple is implicitly saying “You cannot use these new, easier methods of developing applications. Instead, you must use our difficult ones.” The irony is that Apple is normally all about being the easier and more intuitive way to use technology… but when it comes to application development, this is just not the case. Their tools suck and are not made for the masses. They are made for those who are solely dedicated to Apple technology.

At the same time, web video is absolutely owned by Flash. HTML5 is neat, and Silverlight is interesting, but to be relevant today, your platform needs to run Flash video. Apple is not stupid. The cards they are playing suggest one of two outcomes – the death of Flash outright, or the purchase of Adobe and Flash through marginalizing Adobe stock, making it a cheap buy. Apple’s market cap is a staggering $218bn USD. Adobe’s is $18bn USD. No matter how damaged Adobe becomes over this, they’ll still hold valuable IP that Apple could use. Think Postscript, PDF, Photoshop… I don’t know how far it goes but there’s much there for Apple to leverage going forward.

As we march forward into the future of Apple’s platform dominance, Adobe knows it is screwed. It’s fighting hard, but without a quantum shift in strategy, it will die. Flash has peaked in its current state and it’s being attacked from multiple vectors – From the tech end by HTML5, from the business end by Apple, and by the developer end by migration to more flexible, powerful, and lucrative paths such as Unity and the iPhone. It would be smart of Adobe to sell. And it would be smart of Apple to not only own Flash, but to own the industry standard content creation tools that Adobe has created.

Unity Model Viewer In Progress – Rev 2

Ben — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 05:26:58 +0000

An addition to the Model Viewer – Animation switching. The viewer automatically reads the animations on a model and lets the user flip through them. The model is a blockout concept for an in-progress project my buddy Andy and I are tinkering with.

Please view the full post to see the Unity content.

Productivity++ or how I stopped bad browsing habits

Ben — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 04:29:38 +0000

Like anyone that works at their computer all day, I have to make a point of staying productive through periods of waiting. Waiting for an app to load, for a file to process, or anything else that takes me out of the Flow, and my habit is to reach for Firefox and pull up Facebook or Digg. These two sites really offer no value during the workday. Zero. Unfortunately they are horribly addictive.

Well, I’ve tried putting extensions on Firefox, but sometimes I’ll end up browsing with Chrome and BAM, before I know it I’m commenting on a photo of someone’s car or reading about the latest LOLCat to set the tubes on fire. Well my New Year’s Resolution was to put an end to this and at the very least start visiting sites that advance my life in some way.

So here’s what I’m doing and it’s working so far. See, most every computer nowadays has a “hosts” file, which takes precedence over everything in determining how a URL gets mapped to an IP address. By editing it strategically, you can redirect any attempt to visit one site to another. Wikipedia has a nice article on hosts files and how they work, but their links to instructions are poor. Try these instead:

Windows XP/Vista/7: http://www.fpweb.net/support/managed-hosting/hostfile-editing-support.asp

Mac: http://ocaoimh.ie/mac-os-x-how-to-update-etchosts/

Linux users already know this stuff.

So what you can do with your hosts file is map a site that you want to stop visiting to one that you want to start visiting. If you habitually type digg.com into your browser, then that will get remapped. Here’s what you need to do to map digg.com to answers.unity3d.com (because reading the Unity Answers site will certainly enrich you in some way)

Open up your hosts file per the above instructions
Get the IP address of answers.unity3d.com by opening up a command line/terminal and typing ‘ping answers.unity3d.com’ minus the quotes. In this case it is 64.34.80.165
In the hosts file, add a line that looks like this: 64.34.80.165 digg.com #digg->answers.unity3d.com
Then add a line that looks like this: 64.34.80.165 www.digg.com #digg->answers.unity3d.com
Save the hosts file
Try visiting digg.com and enjoy your self-administered smackdown.

I’ve already found that this has helped me break some bad browsing habits.

Robot – Rev 1

Ben — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 03:53:46 +0000

Putting together a model viewer – here’s a work in progress model as well.
The viewer is using the new screen space ambient occlusion in Unity 2.6 plus some regular shadows.

Please view the full post to see the Unity content.

Animated Texture Builder

Ben — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 06:20:31 +0000

Some engines (Unity, Unreal) support animated textures that are formatted in a grid. However not all engines support converting movies into this format. After looking around for something that would do this and failing to find anything, I wrote a 3dsmax script to help out with this process. It takes in one or more avi’s and builds a subdivided plane with the corresponding frames mapped to the quads. It then creates a camera. All you need to do at that point is set the render size and render out the camera view.

Download AnimTexBuilder.ms

VFX – MUA2

Ben — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 21:50:28 +0000

Towards the tail end of Vicarious Visions‘ work on Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 for the 360 and PS3, I contacted my old boss Steve Derrick and asked if he could use me for anything. The timing was right – they were a bit short on folks to do FX production. Since I had some experience with the tools and processes at VV, Steve asked me to come on and build some cutscene FX.

This was a blitzkrieg of a job. Entering crunch from the word go, it was 3 weeks to get set up, learn the new system, and produce a series of effects. For the most part, the scenes were entirely set up and just waiting for particles and corresponding effects, like lighting, screen flash, and physics chunks. I was given some solid direction by Brent Gibson and I had creative freedom in deciding how to execute the work which kept my motivation level sky high.

As with any large project, there’s significant overhead in integration. Checkins were only allowed after a team member had completely validated their work locally. This means lots of syncing, lots of building, and lots of waiting. At that stage of the project though, you do not want to be the sucker that breaks the build. Luckily I escaped the ire of Aaron, the lead engineer, and my checkins all cleared.

Overall, I would’ve been more productive had I been local for the duration of the contract, but with my wife ready to go into labor at any moment, I wasn’t able to go on site except for a day to ramp up and pick up a devkit. Still, what I was able to provide even under those circumstances was a win for everyone and I enjoyed the work immensely – even carrying a rekindled love of particle explosions into the creation of Detonator after my son was born.

Detonator – Explosions for Unity3D

Ben — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 16:54:35 +0000

(Update 10/26/2010 – A version of Detonator for Unity 3.0 is now available.)

Detonator is an extension for Unity3D that lets you make good looking explosions quickly and easily for your Unity projects. How you use it depends on who you are and what your goals are. Solo coders can quickly get prototype explosions going while artists can stack effects to quickly make complex explosions.

Detonator was created originally for the Unity Summer of Code 2009 – Major releases are hosted on the Unity website.

NEW! Download Detonator 1.3b for Unity 3.0

Download Detonator 1.02 for Unity 2.6

Instead of replicating the documentation here, which will change over time, here’s the webplayer that shows what Detonator can do.

Please view the full post to see the Unity content.

Bug Reports

If you find bugs in the package please report them by dropping a comment on this page.

Detonator 1.01 – Indie Fix

Ben — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 14:58:18 +0000

Thanks to everyone who pointed out that the initial release of Detonator did not play nice with Unity Indie. The Heatwave and its HeatDistort shader made it quite sad indeed.

Indie users note: After installing this package, delete Detonator/Resources/Detonator/Textures/HeatDistort

Update: Posted 1.02 – The fallback subshader in HeatDistort was not working properly. Now it is and you don’t need to delete that shader anymore. Woop!

Link: Detonator-1.02

Detonator release today?

Ben — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 04:21:21 +0000

(Update: Apparently the Unity guys had some issues updating their site. Stuff should be up 9/17)

Well as of this writing it’s not out just yet, but it will be very shortly. I’m going to bed in a few minutes and the boys in Copenhagen will be getting up, and Detonator, if not all of the SOC projects, will be released tomorrow. I wanted to just make a quick post for anyone that ends up here and is looking for more info, wondering where development is headed, or finds bugs.

I plan on continuing development on the project and will be posting the code and the current dev build to some public source sharing service like Assembla.com or Google Code in the next couple of days. I’m SURE that people will find bugs and I’d like to stay on top of them as best I can. Really, there was minimal testing done on this project so if something acts weird, it probably is.

In the meantime, if you find a bug and don’t know what to do with it, drop it in the comments here. Thanks!