Taiwanese People: Best Noisy Crowds in The World

Happy New Year

If I’m not on FAcebOok, I’m on the way to Google+. If I’m not on MSN Live Messenger, I’m on my way to Google Talk. Or not. If I’m not online, I’m just offline.

I’m a laggard that didn’t have a cellphone until like 20, and still miss phone calls every now and then. So, even if it’s 2012, I still have no plans to get a 3G smartphone & check my estuff every 15 minutes. And I’m likely to call my friends at 9AM when they’re in theater watching movies.

And I actually hope that people do the same. Happy digital era, but keep in touch!

Using Programmable Vertex Shader in Unity iOS

Before writing and compiling an example shader from NVidia Cg tutorial wrapped in ShaderLab, the first things I should’ve checked is the player target platform settings and the graphics emulation setting. Targeting OpenGL ES 1.1 wouldn’t get me anything but fixed-function pipeline, and even if I’m targeting OpenGL ES 1.1+2.0, I can choose to emulate 1.1, which when I’m just trying to learn programmable shaders I wouldn’t want to.

Blender Today

1. Applying multiple materials onto the same mesh object.

This is done by “assign”ing materials onto selected vertices in Blender 3D View’s “Edit mode” to create so-called sub-meshes. The FBX importer in Unity will describe the “Mesh” as having submeshes in the preview, like the iPhone-Match example code’s cards do: [40 verts, 36 tris, 2 submeshes  uv].

2. Exporting (character) actions / animations using FBX.

The most commonly adopted way seems to be managing the actions inside Blender .blend file, and export a single “Take” inside one FBX file. Meshes would be duplicated in the Unity project, but keeping actions separate in Blender’s DopeSheet-ActionEditor has its advantages over frame-concat method. It is likely doable, and seen on some sites that 1 FBX may contain multiple “Take”s == actions == animations, but I suspect those are done by custom FBX exporters and require coding efforts. Creating 3D Game Art for the iPhone With Unity provides in-depth explanations about the 2 methods I mentioned. More up-to-date ways may exist (if anyone knows, please inform me!).

[Update]

Exporting multiple “Armature actions” work with both 2.59 and 2.60. Object animations seem to be a different thing so must be exported with Default Take. Ref: Blender Bug Tracker

A Short Review on Zynga’s “Adventure World: An Indiana Jones Game”

Brilliant piece of work, I have to awe about its beauty. Spectacular HD graphics on 60 FPS, delicate level designs, Adventure World surely is a new thing on the social-network-gaming field.

My old laptop / PC can barely run it on its highest quality, but the fact that I had to lower the quality doesn’t stop me from wanting to play: because, unlike most of SNS games, it DOES have gameplay! The carefully designed levels / maps provide abundant interactivity objects / details for us to explore, even including a simplistic turn-based combat system, reminding me of good-old rogue-like games, but this time with fabulous graphics. 

On the monetizing part we of course care about, Zynga is quite generous in my point of view. Life in Adventure World surely gets tougher if you don’t pay the price (USD$10 for a toy whip is quite a lot!), but so far to lvl 13 I’ve not paid a penny while I would definitely pay at least a reasonable $5 for the fun it brought me. I do wish they dig more into the fix-rate market though: perhaps a nice set of gadgets / outfits for an intermediate player? (well I probably also have to investigate more on the goods they sell now)

For the free users, Adventure World is following quite strictly some golden ratio of advertising / spamming encouragement. A non-paying user like me would likely spam 100-200 acquaintances, invite 12-20 gamer-heads, and actually play with 4-5 close friends. And this game actually makes me think: why not? It’s a game worth recommendation anyway. I would even write a review about it.