As if the world was not a bad enough place – I put up a new blog about Random Stuff. It’s in Lithuanian and is mostly about that “life” stuff; no triangles there.

Here it is: aras-p.info/blogas

Seriously, what are they up to? Intel acquires Offset Software, a game development studio that is doing a game and an engine. Wait, I was thinking the game and tech are for PC and Xbox360? What would Intel do with that?

Not so long ago, some well known graphics guys went to work for Intel. A while ago Intel acquired Neoptica…

Signs of Larrabee coming? Intel starting to take GPUs seriously? Something else?

I decided to make a very small game with Unity. Coincidentally, Danc of Lost Garden fame just announced a small game design challenge called “Play With Your Peas“. It comes with a set of cute graphics and a ready-to-be-implemented game design. What more could I want?

So it’s a small very small 2D game without any next-gen bells and whistles. It can probably be done casually on the side, by allocating an hour here and there. We’ll see how it goes. Hey, I never actually done any game in Unity, I only make or break some underlying parts…

Of course, first I start with no game, just imported graphics. Hey look, I can do sprites!

Then cook up some base things: define the game grid, throw in some basic user interface on the right hand side, and make it actually do something. This wasn’t so hard; that already gets me an almost working level building functionality. It does not have fancy block building delay or block deletion yet; that will come later.

Next come basic physics. Danc’s design calls for simple arcade-like physics (things moving at constant speeds, bouncing off at equal angles, and so on), but in Unity I have a fully fledged physics engine just waiting to be used. Let’s use that.

The design has sloped ramp pieces, which are hard to approximate using any primitive colliders, so instead I’ll use convex mesh colliders for them. Now, on this machine I only have Blender, which I totally don’t know how to use; and I was too lazy to go to PC and use 3ds Max there. What a coder does? Of course, just type in the mesh file in ASCII FBX format. Excerpt:

; scaled 2x in Z, by 0.85 in Y
Vertices: -0.5,-0.425,-1.0, 0.5,-0.425,-1.0, -0.5,-0.425,1.0, 0.5,-0.425,1.0, -0.5,0.425,-1.0, -0.5,0.425,1.0
PolygonVertexIndex: 0,1,-3,2,1,-4,1,0,-5,2,3,-6,0,2,-5,2,5,-5,3,1,-5,5,3,-5

It’s a left ramp mesh! So much for fancy asset auto-importing functionality, when you don’t know how to use those 3D apps :)

After a while I’ve got peas being controlled by physics, colliding with level and so on. Physics is very bad for productivity, as I ended up just playing around with pea-stacks!

So far there’s no game yet… Next up: implement some AI for the peas, so they can wander around, climb the walls, fall down and bounce around. I guess that will be more work and less playing around… We’ll see.

So I decided to check out Crysis myself. A demo for a non-gamer like me would be perfect, I thought.

It’s probably three frames per second. In the menu!

I did not see the game itself yet, got bored while waiting for the after-menu-but-before-game intro movie to end (it’s not skippable, and it also ran at about three FPS). This is after watching half a dozen obligatory before-menu intro movies at 3 FPS with stuttering sound (“nvidia,vidia,vidia,vidia… the way it’s meant,meant,meant,meant…” – TWIMTBP).

All of this on a half-decent PC, I think – Intel Core 2 Quad, 4GB RAM, Radeon 3850, Windows XP, latest drivers, none of extra stuff running; the PC is able to run other 3D stuff just fine. I’m sure the developers and EA’s testing labs have tested everything extensively, but sometimes something completely random apparently can make things be oh so slow. Oh well. Get back to work.

This is just too cool: Off-Road Velociraptor Safari game. Read that again. Who says game industry is all about sequels and safe licenses?

You drive a jeep with a spiky ball, and your goal is to chase down raptors and send them to the future, presumably to end world hunger. Or you can do stunts. And you the driver are a raptor, only you wear a hat and a monocle.

Just go and play it already: raptorsafari.com. It’s free.

Or watch a trailer if you want to miss all the real fun, or read a press release. Of course it’s made in Unity, in two months from start to finish.

To me, this is a perfect example of focus. Basically there are three things – 1) vehicle, 2) raptors, 3) physics mayhem – and that almost describes a game. Yes, there are crates and stunts and achievements and online leaderboards, but that’s just additional stuff on top of the core game.

Sounds like a good plan for making game prototypes:

1. Think up a game idea and describe it in one concise sentence. The idea may be totally crazy, like in this case. I guess an idea like Velociraptor Safari would not fly in a pitch at any publisher, but that does not matter at this point.
2. Get a small team of smart people. In Flashbang’s case, it seems they were 4 to 7 person team.
3. Choose a game engine/toolset that will allow you to make your game fast. *cough cough*
4. Do it!

All the above requires is a small smart team and groceries/rent for a couple of months.

Your original idea may be totally crazy, but with the actual working prototype at hand it might just work. Looks like Velociraptor Safari really clicked something on the internets (see Kotaku, JayIsGames, Destructoid, TIGSource, AtomicGamer, …).

(cross-posted from blogs.unity3d.com)

One of our customers found an interesting bug the other day: embedding Unity Web Player into a web page makes some javascript animation libraries not work correctly. For example, script.aculo.us or Dojo Toolkit would stop doing some of their tasks. But only on Windows, and only on some browsers (Firefox and Safari).

Wait a moment… Unity plugin makes nice wobbling web page elements not wobble anymore!? Sounds like an interesting issue…

So I prepared for a debug session and tried the usual “divide by two until you locate the problem” approach.

• Unity Web Player is composed of two parts: a small browser plugin, and the actual “engine” (let’s call it “runtime”). First I change the plugin so that it only loads the data, but never loads or starts the runtime. Everything works. So the problem is not in the plugin. Good.
• Load the runtime and do basic initialization (create child window, load Mono, …), but never actually start playing the content – everything works.
• Load the runtime and fully initialize everything, but never actually start playing the content – the bug appears! By now I know that the problem is somewhere in the initialization.

Initialization reads some settings from the data file, creates some “manager objects” for the runtime, initializes graphics device, loads first game “level” and then the game can play.

What of the above could cause something inside browser’s JavaScript engine stop working? And do that only on Windows, and only on some browsers? My first guess was the most platform-specific part: intialization of the graphics device, which on Windows usually happens to be Direct3D.

So I continued:

• Try using OpenGL instead of Direct3D – everything works. By now it’s confirmed that initializing Direct3D causes something else in the browser not work.
• “A-ha!” moment: tell Direct3D to not change floating point precision (via a create flag). Voilà, everything works!

I don’t know how I actually came up with the idea of testing floating point precision flag. Maybe I remembered some related problems we had a while ago, where Direct3D would cause timing calculations be “off”, if the user’s machine was not rebooted for a couple of weeks or more. That time around we properly changed our timing code to use 64 bit integers, but left Direct3D precision setting intact.

Side note: Intel x86 floating point unit (FPU) can operate in various precision modes, usually 32, 64 or 80 bit. By default Direct3D 9 sets FPU precision to 32 bit (i.e. single precision). Telling D3D to not change FPU settings could lower performance somewhat, but in my tests it did not have any noticeable impact.

So there it was. A debugging session, one line of change in the code, and fancy javascript webpage animations work on Windows in Firefox and Safari. This is coming out in Unity 2.0.2 update soon.

The moral? Something in one place can affect seemingly completely unrelated things in another place!

Ever wondered what takes up space in the programs you write? I certainly did on a number of occasions.

For some reason though, I could not find a decent tool that would look at a Visual Studio compiled executable or a DLL, and report an overview of how large are the functions, classes, object files and whatnot. .kkrunchy executable packer does have a very nice size report, but it’s not exactly suitable for large executables…

Anyway, ryg of farbrausch fame was kind enough to donate the size reporting code, I did some modifications, and here it is: Sizer – executable symbol size reporting utility.

Enjoy. Oh, and the source code looks messy mostly because ryg and I use different indentation, and I never cared to format everything with a single style. Noone cares about the source code anyway, as long as it works. I’m not claiming that this code works, of course!

…I flew to Copenhagen and started working at Unity Technologies (OTEE back then). Here’s the famous last blog entry; and indeed with day work that is actually interesting there’s little time to spam the forums or the blogosphere.

It’s been an amazing ride so far. I’m working with amazing people, we have (mostly :)) amazing customers, we’ve done three major releases and five minor ones, I’ve seen sales grow from ridiculously low amount to feels good levels, I’ve seen the team expansion, and I took svn revision number 10000 for myself (that happened half a year ago):

> Wohoo! Congratulations on the 10,000th commit Aras! You have won a warm cup of freshly brewed coffee when you come to work! :)

You don’t know the whole exciting story behind this… :)

I had two tiny “cleanups” to two files – removing unused variable from each. Now, I’d so something on my Mac, start compiling, and while it’s compiling I’d check svn log on the windows machine.

As soon as Valdemar checked in revision number 9998, I knew what I had to do. Two trivial svn commits!

Some serious work, as you can see. Oh, some of my work also ended up being actually released, I’m not just sitting there claiming svn revisions for myself. Honestly!

I’ve moving back to Lithuania now, continuing to work on Unity from home. Gonna miss some of the office fun, but oh well. Tradeoffs have to be made.

Let’s see what the coming years will bring. Rock on.