Vol. 1 No. 1 Monthly 3D ENGINES IN iOS DEVELOPMENT How To Use Unity 3D, SIO2 and ShiVa 3D? How To Develop Applications For iOS Using PhoneGap? Issue 01/2012 (1) January What’s Going On The Game Development Market? Interesting feature HOW TO TAKE FULL ADVANTAGE OF MOBILE LOCATION FOCUSED APPLICATIONS? What Should You Know About Component Based Programming And Flex SDK? Editor’s Note Happy New Year! The January issue of Codersky Magazine features great articles about current trends in Mobile Development. Let’s see, what 2012 will bring for us! In the first article Anton Trubianov and Maxim Kershengolts talk about 3D engines for iOS Development. It’s a great opportunity for you to find out, what are the advantages and disadvantages of using Unity 3D, SIO2 and ShiVa3D. The article includes some good pieces of advice and technical descriptions from the developers’ point of view, which may be very useful for your own 3D Development projects. The second article, authored by Stefan Horochovec focuses on Developing for iOS using PhoneGap. Thanks to this tutorial, you can easily start using PhoneGap for mobile development. If you are a fan of Flex, you can check the article written by Gábor Csomák. The author shows us that Flex project can target Flash Player and Adobe AIR as well, therefore you can run a project on Android, iOS, BBX, Windows, Mac and Linux. Matt Sheehan’s article concentrates on location focused mobile apps. The topics are really refreshing! Find out more about location based services (LBS) and geographic information systems (GIS). Managing Editor: Judyta Leputa [email protected] Proofreadres: Kimberly Voll, Shola Sadiku, James Alabi, Duncan Keir Betatesters: Kimberly Voll, Francesco Consiglio, Marco Carranza, Pawel Brzek, Dzmitry Rusak, John C. Bland II, Blake Shearer Art Director: Anna Wojtarowicz DTP: Anna Wojtarowicz Webmaster: Jakub Tschierse [email protected] Technical Manager: Andrzej Kuca [email protected] Managing Director: Ewa Dudzic [email protected] Marketing Director: Grzegorz Tabaka [email protected] Publisher: Software Media Sp. z o.o. SK 02-682 Warszawa, ul. Bokserska 1 www.codersky.com If you are interested in Game Development, you will also find some very interesting articles. The article, authored by Aleksander Lyskovsky, will surprise you with the variety of solutions created for games. The mysterious Embrace the Abstraction by Richard Terrell talks about gaining perspective on game design choices by examining the source of creativity and the process of communicating through a medium. Whilst every effort has been made to ensure the high quality of the magazine, the editors make no warranty, express or implied, concerning the results of content usage. All trade marks presented in the magazine were used only for informative purposes. All rights to trade marks presented in the magazine are reserved by the companies which own them. All articles are very interesting and they need to be marked as Need to be Read! The techniques described in our articles may only be used in private, local networks. The editors hold no responsibility for misuse of the presented techniques or consequent data loss. DISCLAIMER! Enjoy reading! Judyta Leputa & Codersky Team 4 01/2012 Table Of Content 06 Using of 3D Engines in iOS Development By Anton Trubianov and Maxim Kershengolts Which 3D engine to select? In this overview we will try to give a brief description of several 3D engines that we have examined while solving such a question. The task was to implement an application which loads a 3D model with skeletal animation and allows us to switch among several animations during different events such as: user interaction, geolocation updates, camera and accelerometer events, etc. 12 Developing for iOS using PhoneGap By Stefan Horochovec The PhoneGap provides a lot of resources in it’s API, with it you will have access to: Accelerometer, Camera, Capture, Compass Connection, Contacts, Device Events, File, Geolocation, Media, Notification, Storage. All this using just HTML + JavaScript for development. If you are already familiar with the web environment, you can easily start using PhoneGap for mobile development. 18 Why should you use Flex? By Gábor Csomák Flex is a powerful application framework based on Adobe ActionScript. A Flex project can be exported as Adobe Flash (.swf) object, for a website, or as an Adobe Integrated Runtime (.air) program, to run as application on OS X, Windows, iOS, and Android. Would you like to develop multi-platform RIA and enterprise apps like never before? 26 32 Games as products and services By Aleksander Lyskovsky We can speak upon the new casual games, leaving the hardcore realm for the corresponding specialists to discuss. Casual 2.0 incorporated the best of online and offline approaches. The casual 2.0 business lines include Smartphone, pad, social network, console, MMO, traditional PC casual downloadable and future PC casual games. Most of the casual market is growing now thanks in part to the mobile segment that should reach 10 billion in 2013, according to analytics. 40 Embrace the Abstraction By Richard Terrell Though some games simulate real life objects and interactions with great detail, most video games fall somewhere in the middle of the extremes of the purely abstract and simulation. This middle ground is an abstraction, a key concept in the foundation of game design. Abstraction. Stylization. Simplification. These are terms that describe the act of creating a representation with some, but not all, aspects of the existing subject. Review of Games as products and services by Aleksander Lyskovsky First, and most importantly, this is a really interesting article! “Surely enough, this requires a serious rethinking of the whole game process, not just to port it to a new engine.” This is such a huge point, I would even add a bit to it. I think you’ve hit the nail on the head with a lot of the problems of porting; not recognizing the need for a comprehensive look at the platform for which you are now developing and how that relates to the dynamics (and mechanics, even), as well as the user experience and expected user experience, etc. Kimberly Voll Mobile location focused Applications By Matt Sheehan This article discusses location focused mobile apps and applications which take advantage of the built in GPS on most mobile devices. In particular we will consider location based services (LBS) and geographic information systems (GIS). With GPS now so common on mobile devices, so called geo-location can be used to provide a slew of new services. codersky.com Review of 3D Engines in iOS Development by Anton Trubianov and Maxim Kershengolts The article is pretty interesting. The structure is classical for this kind of presentations, no arguments about it. It is a niche article, which is really appreciated and the pros and cons after each paragraphs are great and will attract a lot of readers. Francesco Consiglio 5 Using of 3D Engines in iOS Development 3D Engines for iOS Overview Which 3D engine to select? This is the first question that appears in front of a developer when it comes to the development of a 3D graphics application or game for iOS/Android. In this overview we will try to give a brief description of several 3D engines that we’ve examined while solving such a question. The task was to implement an application which loads a 3D model with skeletal animation and allows us to switch among several animations during different events such as: user interaction, geolocation updates, camera and accelerometer events, and so on. The main criterions for selection were: multi-platform support (i.e. an ability to redistribute the developed code and/ or scene among iOS and Android platforms), and full support of all OpenGL ES 2.0 features. Unity 3 Unity is more like a 3D game development tool than a simple 3D engine. In fact you can’t even use it like most other 3D engines, including it in your Xcode project. Unity provides its own development environment which handles all stages of development, from creating 3D models and scenes, to building an application binary (Figure 1). Such an approach makes Unity a great tool for developing ordinary 3D games. But when you need some extended features in your 3D application, you may lack an ability to write your code in Objective C. For example, if you need to scan QR-codes into your application, zxing is a great open-source library for that, but you can’t just include it in your Unity project. Unity allows us to build a plugin with Xcode and then to use it within our application. To note, you have to purchase Figure 1: Bootcamp.unity 6 01/2012 Using of 3d Engines in iOS Development Unity first in order to be able to use plugins within it. Thus, if you are only gauging to see if Unity fits your goals, there’s no way for you to try building your own plugin for testing. Advantages: • • • Really cool game development environment which makes building 3D games an easy and visual experience Full support of all the latest graphics technologies. Great base for learning: documentation, tutorials, examples, community, etc. Disadvantage: • A developer is limited, able to only use the Unity game editor, and unable to use Xcode and write his own Objective C code. SIO2 SIO2 is positioned as an in-expensive, but fully functional 3D engine. It encourages developers to use Blender as a 3D modelling tool and provides all necessary tools for exporting scenes from Blender to SIO2. However you can convert scenes to SIO2 from any 3D editor you like via the use of converting scripts. ShiVa3D ShiVa3D is a 3D engine with a modelling environment, but unlike Unity it is able to export projects to Xcode and other development tools (depends on platform). It is very useful because with it you can first develop your game scene and logics in ShiVa3D editor, and then continue project development in Xcode using native iOS frameworks. The only negative aspect is that ShiVa3D editor tool only exists for the Windows OS. ShiVa3D is also very useful in that you only have to pay for a license when you want to publish your application onto the AppStore. Before this step you are able to test all of the engine’s features for free. A great feature of this engine is its Authoring Tool. This function solidifies ShiVa3D as the most fully cross-platform compatible engine in the world. The Authoring Tool compiles a project generated by ShiVa into an executable application for the following device platforms: Windows, Linux, Mac, IPhone, IPad, Android, Palm and Wii. may be implemented with SIO2. ShiVa uses the Lua script language for programing. Lua is very simple, taking only a few minutes to get a grasp of if you have C++ or Java experience. After building a project for some specified platform, all scripts are converted into C++, ensuring solid performance. You will find a lot of very useful information about this script at: http://www.stonetrip.com. The site includes a large developer forum, and is the perfect place to have specific questions and/ or concerns answered. A weak point of SIO2 is that it’s still pretty raw as for a commercial product. Some features like loading a MD5 format and playing skeletal animations will sometimes not work, freezing a device or crashing it with BAD_ ACCESS without throwing any exceptions suitable for efficient debugging. Additionally, ShiVa has a great API. It is well documented, giving examples for each function and the like. The API includes support of many types of hardware as well, including: accelerometers, microphones, joysticks, touch detection for touch displays, and etc (Figure 2). On the engine’s web-resource, http://sio2interactive. com, you can find examples for almost any task that Additionally, Android support is quite new to SIO2, and as so it’s also fairly raw, sometimes refusing to run on various devices without explanation. Advantages: • • • May be easily included within a Xcode project. Full license includes source codes. Good examples for almost any task on SIO2 web-resource. Disadvantages: • • Engine is still in a fairly raw state, especially considering Android support. Poor support service; unable to help solve serious problems with engine usage effectively. codersky.com Advantages: • • • Useful game development environment with the possibility of exporting projects to Xcode and continue developing in Objective C. Fully supports all the latest graphics technologies. License required only for publishing, otherwise usage is free. Disadvantage: • Editor tool available only for Windows OS. Moving forward, we would like to tell you about platforms where you can develop applications with the assistance of ShiVa 3D. The engine can successfully launch products onto Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android, Palm OS, and Web OS, despite the fact that ShiVa itself exists solely in a Windows OS version. 7 Figure 2: ShiVa Editor 1.9.0.1 The aforementioned Authoring Tool is a software product that accompanies ShiVa 3D for further application development and subsequent launch onto a specific platform. It exists in two variants; one for Windows and one for Mac. Creating applications on any platform with this engine is a three step process (Figure 3): 1. Download initial files exported from ShiVa, 2. Enter information regarding the app name, provision file, and bundle depending on platform. 3. Define folders where the application would be saved and specify certain graphics settings, for instance the use of OpenGL. All these actions take roughly 3 minutes. We’d like to say a few words about importing resources to ShiVa. First of all ShiVa can import 3D models in DAE format. In order to do that, you’ll need to download the Collada DAE plug-in -- it installs onto and works with the most popular 3D graphics packages, including 3ds Max and Maya. QrCode contains the link to a website where a more detailed 8 description of the Collada DAE format is provided. To note, while working in this format we were confronted with certain difficulties while importing our model into ShiVa 3D. When saving 3D model textures, they remained in the same folders where they were initially located and subsequently opened by the program for modeling. Since a file in DAE format represents a XML file, paths to textures are in the same way. This means that if its transferred to another computer, the user will encounter path conflicts. As a result, only models without textures are able to be imported. After some time with the engine we’ve found 2 possible solutions to this problem. The first solution is to correct manually texture paths within the DAE file itself. The second solution is to convert textures to a TGA format and import them into ShiVa separately from the model. It’s important to also note that the size of textures should be aliquot to an n-power of two. This same requirement applies when creating iOS applications as well, and relates heavily to overall operational optimization and application speed. Regarding sounds: ShiVa accepts different sound resources in MP3 and WAV formats. 01/2012 Using of 3d Engines in iOS Development Figure 3: ShiVa 3D Authoring Tool1. Discussing the graphic interface which ShiVa allows you to create: On the ShiVa website -- in the section for developers -- we will find graphic files where all native elements of Android and iOS apps are displayed. Elements such as: Scroll-bars, Buttons, and etc. This enables you to fully reconstruct the GUI of necessary platforms. We carried out experiments creating buttons using ShiVa, as well as the usual iPhone buttons that are located over a 3D scene. Our results showed 1-0 in ShiVa’s benefit. Our FPS counter showed a difference of 5 fps with ShiVa implementation. Support for different fonts also exists; in certain cases this feature greatly simplifies tasks at hand. The ability to add animated textures is another a very useful feature. It allows us to create beautiful effects when developing menus and the like. Another serious advantage of ShiVa is the fact that it enables you to add different resources such as music and textures during run-time, into fully realized projects for certain platforms with the help of several script lines. Stepping back, we ought to outline some more general opportunities ShiVa 3D provides. As noted, tits script language is Lua, which is a script with C-type and is not unusual, and makes your work much easier and more fluid overall. You won’t have to puzzle over learning its syntax as long as you are on of the 99% of developers experienced in Java or C+. Lua is a very simple, codersky.com laconic, and intuitively understandable language. A brief guide is provided on ShiVa’s website in the API section. While creating the project for any platform, all scripts you’ve developed will be converted into C++ code. This secures their immediate performance and legibility. Special wrappers with the wide set of functions that allow you to call your script event agents are provided as well. There are many wrappers, but in our experience the C function could be utilized to call any scripts we required. Importantly, both OpenGL - 1.0 and OpenGL 2.0 - are used in ShiVa 3D. While ShiVa itself doesn’t provide an opportunity to program shaders or program on OpenGL, it controls their usage in in projects for maximum optimization and in no way influences final quality. ShiVa’s API provides numerous advantages as well, encapsulated via the following features • • • • Microphone support. Multitouch Support. Support for working with accelerometers. Functions to work with XML. This is by no means a small bonus. It frees you from needing to program on the iPhone as you are able to build your application right in ShiVa, solve issues, and 9 resolve the problem of developing different interfaces via scripts that work with the above mentioned hardware, namely multi-touch screens and accelerometers. You can review a step-by-step example of how a fully featured game was built using ShiVa 3D by visiting http://www.stonetrip.com/developer/242-the-huntthe-making-of. The game itself is a casual 3D shooter created more-so as a tool to raise awareness for the ShiVa 3D engine than anything else. This game, titled The Hunt, is also helpful to prospective developers interested in using ShiVa 3D, as they can utilize completed portions of code used to make this game in their own projects. Conclusion Overall, ShiVa API includes several categories of lessons, such as lessons from developers and users. A number of instructional videos on YouTube are available as well, and despite the fact that they last only 60 seconds each, contain plenty of useful information. e, the basic version of ShiVa costs roughly 160 Euro, with a Pro version which costs 1500 Euro. That said, a free version which inprints a travelling line in the bottom part of your application explaining that the app was developed by means of ShiVa Free is available as an economic alternative as well. Buying a full license allows you to develop apps on the plenty of machines, ultimately producing the app in full. ShiVa appeared relatively recently but has already gained a considerable client base, including multiple notable ones. Currently, there have been over nine thousand applications developed via the use of ShiVa. Listing 1: Sample of ocean dynamics local hScene = application. getCurrentUserScene ( ) local hObject = this.getObject ( ) local x, y, z = object.getTranslation ( hObject, object.kGlobalSpace ) -- Update the translation of the buoy, according to the height of the ocean at the buoy position object.setTranslation( hObject, x, scene.getOceanHeight ( hScene, x, z ), z, object.kGlobalSpace ) -- Update the rotation of the buoy, according to the normal of the ocean at the buoy position local nx, ny, nz = scene. getOceanNormal ( hScene, x, z ) local rx = math.asin ( nx ) local rz = math.asin ( nz ) object.setRotation ( hObject, rx, 0, -rz, object.kGlobalSpace ) Listing 2: Sample of camera swap -- [...] if ( nNum == 1 ) then tag = "Flash1" time = 0.8 end -- [...] Authors: Anton Trubianov, iPhone developer, 2 years, application.setCurrentUserActiveCamera ( cam ) Maxim Kershengolts, Team Lead, 6 years, this.postEvent ( time, "onSetFlash", nNum + 1 ) C/C++, Objective C, Shiva3D C/C++, Objective C (both employed at Intersog). 10 local cam = application. getCurrentUserSceneTaggedObject ( tag ) end 01/2012 Developing for iOS using PhoneGap Hello everybody! This is my first article in Codersky Magazine, and I want to use this article to talk with you about developing applications for iOS using the HTML T oday there are several platforms in the mobile world and each one with a specific language, so that there is a high cost to port the same application for all platforms, the high cost of development projects ended up creating a barrier too great for small businesses to take advantage of this environment that grows exponentially each day. However it is entirely possible you create an application using HTML as a programming language and run it natively within the environment iOS. This condition is valid for both, iPhone and iPad. To make this possible, we use a framework called PhoneGap. The PhoneGap provides a lot of resources in its API, with it you will have access to: Accelerometer, Camera, Capture, Compass Connection, Contacts, Device Events, File, Geolocation, Media, Notification, Storage. All this using just HTML + JavaScript for development. If you are already familiar with the web environment, you easily start using PhoneGap for mobile development. Figure 1 12 01/2012 Developing for iOS using PhoneGap Figure 2 Figure 3 codersky.com 13 Development For this tutorial, you will needs to do two downloads. The first is XCode, available for download from the Apple Store (http://developer.apple.com/ xcode/) and PhoneGap, available at the PhoneGap website (http://phonegap.com/). Figure 4 This tutorial assumes that you already have XCode installed on your Mac, and that has the iOS SDK. Once you download of PhoneGap through its website, you must unzip the file and copy the directory iOS to your Mac. This directory contains a file called PhoneGap-1.2.0.pkg. This file is an extension Figure 5 Figure 6 14 01/2012 Developing for iOS using PhoneGap Figure 7 to XCode, which will facilitate the creation of projects that will be distributed with PhoneGap. After running the PhoneGap-1.2.0.pkg, you can start your XCode and start creating a project for iOS format PhoneGap-based Application, as the image below: After this step, you must define some options for your project, as the name of your application and an identifier. For the identifier, it is suggested that you enter the domain of your company, in my case, I will use the domain (in reverse) in my blog in Portuguese: br.com.horochovec, and another identifier, in this case, .phoneGap, as the image below: After this stage, XCode will open your project, enabling it to coding. Note that you do not need any coding in Objective-C, and also do not need to change anything in the settings generated by XCode for our project. codersky.com Now, you must first run our project. For this, you must select a platform that will build the project, in my case, I’m opting for iPhone Simulator 5.0, and run the project (click on “Run”). This operation will be completed successfully, the build project do not have errors, the emulator is started and the application will be installed, but when it is opened in the simulator, an error will be displayed saying that the file index. html was not found in the www folder. This error occurs that is deliberate. What happens is that when you create a project of type PhoneGap, it does not automatically add this folder with this content on your project. You must do this manually, what happens is that the content is generated only when you try to run your first project within the emulator. That is, you end up being “forced” to generate this error so that the content is generated by the plugin’s PhoneGap. After that, you can stop the emulator project through the “Stop” button. After stopping the project, you should go to the folder where your 15 project was created, in my case, it was created on my Desktop. You will find a new folder was created, called “www”. This folder “www” should be added to your project. To do so, drag it into your project in XCode. When you drop the folder “www” in the root folder of your project, a confirmation screen will appear. Select the “Create folder references for any added folders” and click Finish. Inside the folder “www”, we will find two files. The first, the file index.html, has a small example of an Alert. Basically the file is to import the file PhoneGap-1.2.0.js and prints an Alert in a Listener added on the event “deviceready”. The EventListener method was added in onload () of <body> as image below: After these steps, just run your project again and have the following response from the emulator: In the next opportunity, I want to address a little more PhoneGap demonstrating some of their specific APIs. Until next time! Stefan Horochovec Stefan Horochovec is a Software Engineer, founder of MediaGlobe (http://www.mediaglobe.com.br), a company specializing in the development of RIAs and Mobile solutions. ([email protected]) Figure 8 16 01/2012 Why Should You Try Flex? Develop multi-platform RIA and enterprise apps like never before! Desktop, mobile and web development fast and easy with component based model! What is Flex? Flex is a powerful application framework based on Adobe ActionScript. It had changed a lot in the past few years, so as the Adobe Flash Platform. Adobe had recently donated Flex to the Apache Foundation, so the roadmap is not in Adobe’s hands any more, but Flash Builder will still be part of Adobe’s Creative Suite. In the next few pages, I will reveal the future of Flash, introduce you to component based programming and the awesome Flex SDK. A Flex project can be exported as Adobe Flash (.swf) object, for a website, or as an Adobe Integrated Runtime (.air) program, to run as application on OS X, Windows, iOS, and Android. But Flash is the devil’s tool, isn’t it? Not a bit. The public media often criticize the Adobe Flash Platform, some of them already talking about a funeral, and how HTML5 is winning the war. Obsequies are always sad, especially one who is to be buried is alive. Why am I saying this? Flash had never aimed to replace HTML, but to make the web better, inspire, and help prototyping. Flash is the innovation. A few years ago, if you saw an animated menu on a website, you knew it must be Flash. Then it became a standard with JavaScript and HTML. Flash was used to develop many cool products, like video players, and so on, which are implemented now in HTML5. But that is no problem for the Flash community, because there are many areas where Flash still excels HTML5, like massive 3D support. The key is to know when to use Flash and when to use HTML. Unfortunately people are thrilled with the canvas tag of HTML5 more than what should really matter. For example the local storage tag. Imagine, if Gmail would only download the application when it updates, and would only download the new letters. It would be faster, and available offline. I’m sure, you think something like this: “yes, you’ve got a point, but Flash is slow”. That’s because the classic Flash is a designer tool. And designers sadly think that you want to see the banner they’re working on shiny, 18 with lots of bitmap filters. If you ever used Photoshop, you know that applying a Filter takes a few seconds. These ‚clever’ designers apply multiple filters to a banner, so Flash Player has a hard time calculating all the filters in runtime, for every frame, meaning 24 times a second. It sure uses a lot of CPU. If somebody would put an endless loop in a .Net program, I didn’t blame Microsoft, for the slowness of .Net, but the programmer for being stupid. Did you know, that when Prezi started to make the iOS version, they tried it with HTML5, but it was so slow, that in the end they rather made it with openGL? Now think of the good stuff made with Flash: prezi. com, YouTube, logmein, join, me, tweetdeck, Google Analytics, Photoshop Touch, Picknick, games, showcases, websites, and so on. The future of Flash Well, I don’t want to be an oracle, but in my opinion Flash is here to stay for years. Currently Flash is available on 99% of internet enabled desktop computers, and on all of the medium and high category Android devices, and with AIR you can package for iOS as well. Yes, Flash on iOS is not a myth, the best known example is the AppStore #1 paid in December: Machinarium. HTML5’s feature list is now closed, but Flash is improving with every new version. With Flash Player 11’s 3D API, you can run Unreal Engine in the browser, or even on iOS with Adobe AIR. This will cause a new golden age for Flash games. If you write a Flash program, you can code once, and deploy it to Android, iOS, Mac, Win, Linux, and with a bit of modification, you can target the classic Flash Player in any browser. The sharedboard.net app I wrote is complied from one program project to all platforms. Flash will still be the default video player on the web, because the browsers couldn’t agree on a codec, 01/2012 Why Should You Try Flex? so now half of them support WebM, and the others H.264, and for example Safari on Windows supports none. Flash supports both. Serving Flash videos are also easier on the servers. The other reason for it, is that you can’t full-screen the HTML5 videos, only if you fullscreen the browser as well. The other proof of Flash will be alive, is that it can be exported to HTML5. Both Adobe and Google developed a tool, to convert swf files to HTML5. With Adobe’s Wallaby, you can convert animations to HTML5 canvas + JavaScript animations, and the instance names will remain the same, making it easy to code afterwards. With Google’s Swiffy you can convert ActionScript 2 as well to HTML5+JavaScript. Flex Rocks! Flex is an SDK, similar to .Net, and Qt. It is the Flash in the coder’s hands. A Flex project can target Flash Player and Adobe AIR as well, therefore you can run a project on Android, iOS, BBX, Windows, Mac and Linux. Sadly Bada and Windows Phone stands out, but it’s still a massive target area, and saves a lot of rewriting code. Flex stands of the open source framework, what stands of components, ActionScript 3 libraries, and MXML coding language. The MXML is a declarative user-interface definition language, what is used to define components’ views. The business logic of a component can be defined in ActionScript, within the <fx:Script> tag, of course within CDATA section, to ensure the XML’s validity. Flex also stands of the SDK, what includes the compiler, and the debugger, what is also open-source since it’s become an Apache program. A framework is powerful with a good environment, and that is what Flash Builder is for. Flash Builder still remains commercial, and in hands of Adobe. Flash Builder helps coding, monitors network, has emulators, and on-device, interactive debuggers. The Builder is an Eclipse-based program, and also has a visual design interface, data access wizards (which are really impressive), and memory and performance profiles (only in premium version). Flex is a coder-friendly developer environment. You don’t even need to close lines with semicolons (;) in most cases, you can have in-line functions and definitions, local variables and all the goodies are allowed. Since Flash Builder is an Eclipse based environment, you can of course use the code-completion to get you code faster, and many plug-ins, such as Perforce, to get you the most productive environment you’ve ever worked with. Both Flash Builder and Flex is updated and developed continuously, making the framework always upto-date keeping the pace with the technology. The debugging is very easy with Flex and Flash Builder. With the trace() method you can easily write debug strings to the console, and if you need serious codersky.com debugging, the Eclipse-based debugger allows stepby-step debugging as expected, and the variable browser is perfect for finding what you need. If an array has thousands of items in it, it will group them for you for easier access. Furthermore, the next version of Flash Builder will support reverse debugging. This means two things: if you click a variable in debug mode, you can see its history, the changes it went through, and the code lines what caused them. The other feature will allow not only to step forward a line, but to step backwards, even before the breakpoint! This is a huge thing, it will save lots of engineering hours, so working with Flex will pay off in time and money. All in all, it’s a modern, high-level framework, most suitable for RIA (rich internet application) development, and also the quickest solution for business application development. Component based programming Nowadays you mostly use MVC programming architecture, and you can use Flex with MVC as well, but Flex’s power comes out, when you start programming in Component/Module based architecture. What does that mean? Basically, the Model and the View are put together in a component. A component has attributes, functions, and visuals as well. A component can be a whole program, a window, or even a button or a text box. Components stand of more, smaller components. By default, every component in Flex has a data attribute (it can be any type of object), and by convention, it should describe everything in the model, therefore in the view. For example, if I’m designing a video player module, the data object will be the video’s URL, or the video file itself. The view will be some buttons, and the video; the model will be the state of the video. There can be also public functions, like play() and pause(), etc. This approach saves time, and it is easier to develop. Furthermore, you can reuse components in other products far more likely, because a component is dependent on only one variable (which can be an instance of a very big class as well). Flash Builder gives you the opportunity to edit the component in a view-based editor as well as the code itself. What makes Flex very useful is the data binding, and item renderers. With Databinding you can connect a variable to a component, for example you can bind the message variable to a text-input. If the message changes, the text-input will also change, and will show the new message from them. What is even more fantastic, is the two-way databinding. If you bind the same example than before, but in two-way, the variable will follow the changes made in the text-input as well. Another example, if you bind an array of variable’s, which has 19 data and text attributes, for a list, you can use the text attributes to display in the list, and use the data, when an event occurred. Item renders are also exciting stuff. If you use a list or a DataGrid (table) you can specify the rendering of the rows and cells. This means, you can fill a table, and render the needed cells as components, even with ActionScript in them. For example, if you create a list of tweets, for a Twitter application, you pass the item’s data as the whole tweet node of the API (with not only the text, but the link of pictures, profile name, etc.) In it, you can make the item renderer to display the avatar from the image’s url, and the tweet itself in text, and add custom events to the tweets. 24 FPS out of the box. It may only be my opinion, but I think the 24 frames per second programming will become a standard in years. If your application has a tween, or a video in it, or the data is changing constantly, it should be shown at 24 frames per second, because the less seems rend, but the more will not make a difference in user experience, but take more processing time. Flex is 24 fps and has double buffering by default. Thanks to the Flash grounds, it handles the frame changes very efficiently. Only redraws when needed, and only, where needed. If you make lots of changes between two frames, the next frame will only show the Listing 1: Example of a flex component <?xml version=”1.0” encoding=”utf-8”?> <s:Panel xmlns:fx=”http://ns.adobe.com/ mxml/2009” xmlns:s=”library://ns.adobe.com/flex/spark” width=”300” height=”95” backgroundColor=”0x464646” title=”chat sending panel”> <fx:Script> <![CDATA[ import mx.core.FlexGlobals import mx.events.FlexEvent import mx.managers.PopUpManager protected function chatSend_clickHan dler(event:MouseEvent):void { FlexGlobals.topLevelApplication. sendChatMessage(chatInput.text) } ]]> </fx:Script> <s:TextInput id=”chatInput” left=”10” right=”77” top=”10” bottom=”10”/> <s:Button id=”chatSend” right=”10” top=”10” bottom=”10” width=”59” label=”send” click=”chatSend_clickHandler(event)”/> </s:Panel> 20 latest one, saving lots of processing time. If you look at other applications, they are likely to tween with all of the cpu’s and gpu’s power, leading to 60 fps’s, what are unnecessary in most cases. You may think, that if nothing changes, displaying 24 fps is the processing overhead, but for one, you can control that within code, and for the other - as I said – it is optimized, and well made enough not to make noticeable overhead (Listing 1). This is the chat window from my sharedboard.net application. I’ve underlined what I had to fill in while writing the component. The others was generated by the view-based editor. The component describes a text-input, and a button, and a function called with the text-input’s value, when the keyboard’s enter or the button is hit. The id of a component is the variable’s (instance’s) name. Mobile programming simplified If you create a mobile application with Flex, you only have to write the code once, and deploy it on the major platforms. You can simulate devices on the desktop, as well as try the app on a connected device. You can develop iOS apps under Windows (unfortunately to debug on device, you need a Mac). Sadly not all Android devices are capable of AIR, but the medium and highend phones will have no problem running your app. The others will struggle with running the phone app itself. (Not kidding, I have a low end Android device, and sometimes have to wait minutes before I can call anybody.) All in all, this means that you don’t have to write the same code in Objective-C and Java, only in Flex. If Flex somehow doesn’t satisfy your needs, you can create and call native extensions as well, so you only have to write these platform specifically. Also, you can reuse the majority of the mobile program’s code for a desktop application as well, you will only need to rewrite the view specific components. If you create a Flex mobile component, the SDK’s default components will translate into the mobile, touch optimized version, so a list will scroll on swipe, and a TextInput will bring up the keyboard, and so on. It really works like it should. A Flex mobile project helps you with the development as well. You can choose to create a tabbed, or a view-based application besides the classic project. The tab-based adds a tab bar – like on iOS- to the bottom of the program, and the view-based project adds you a view navigator stack. It is a very cool feature, if you enter a new view, you push() it in the viewstack, to be displayed, and if you want to return to the previous screen, you just pop() the screen you don’t need anymore. The Android’s native menu is not part of the SDK, but you can use lots one of the templates on the Internet. 01/2012 Why Should You Try Flex? By default, the applications will look like a Flex application, and none like a native app on the phone. You can make your application like native with native calls, and also with E-skimo.com, a 3rd party library providing native control patterns to Flex. Flex is open-source Flex has been open-source since version 3, and this open-source does not only mean that you can see the code. It means, that anyone can contribute. In fact, Adobe had proposed Flex to the Apache foundation in December, and Apache accepted it to its incubator program. The roadmap won’t depend on the profit of a company, but only on the needs of the developers. Although Flex is now Apache Flex, it still depends on Adobe Flash Player and AIR, and Adobe will still be contributing and working on Flex, and Adobe Flash Builder will still be the best tool to develop Flex. Real life examples The first example is a simple the chat window from my sharedboard.net application. I’ve underlined what I had to fill in while writing the component. The others was generated by the view-based editor. The component describes a text-input, and a button, and a function called with the text-input’s value, when the keyboard’s enter or the button is hit. The id of a component is the variable’s (instance’s) name. The output will look like Figure 1 The second example will be a bit more complicated. It will allow you to search YouTube, and display the results thumbs and ratings as well. If you will click on a result, it will open it in your browser. Of course you could display it in the application as well, but it is a good example for now. The output of the example will be something like Image 2. Please keep in mind, that this article is not a tutorial, but I wanted to show you a bigger example. Don’t be afraid of the length of the code, because more than half of it is generated automatically, and other part is edited in the view-based editor, and the Eclipse based environment also helps a lot, so all together the code you actually write is really short. In Listing 2, you can see the main class. The resultVideos variable is applied with the [Bindable] tag, because we will bind it to a chart. The onResult function catches YouTube’s JSON based search API (that’s why it is a bit messy), and create a variable for all the results, to store it in the resultVideos collection. You can see the VideoDescriptor class in Listing 3. If the API connection failed, the onFault function gets called, what displays an error popup to notify users. The button1_clickhandler gets called when we click on the button. It starts the search based on what is written in the textfield. The dataGrid datagrid1_selectionChangeHandler gets called when we click on a row. After the script tag, you see a declarations tag. It is used for declaring services, like the HTTPService in this example. The query of the service will be the text of the text-input, and we sign up for the result and fault events here. This is the call for the YouTube API. After the end of the declarations, I’ve placed the visual components, like the text-input, the search button, and the chart, where the results will be displayed. In the data grid, (what is the chart), we have to define the dataProvider (the resultVideos collection), and the columns. Each column will display the attribute of the data described with the dataField tag, and by default it will show it as a Label, but I’ve changed that with itemrenderer classes, described in Listings 4-6. So instead of displaying the thumbnail’s url as string, the thumbRenderer (Listing 4) will show an image instead. (Figure 2) Listing 2: Youtube searcher Figure 1: The ouptut of Listing 1 Figure 2: The ouptut of Listing 2 codersky.com <?xml version=”1.0” encoding=”utf-8”?> <s:WindowedApplication xmlns:fx=”http://ns.adobe. com/mxml/2009” xmlns:s=”library://ns.adobe.com/ flex/spark” xmlns:mx=”library://ns.adobe.com/ flex/mx”> <fx:Script> <![CDATA[ import com.adobe. serialization.json.JSONDecoder; import mx.collections. ArrayCollection; import mx.controls.Alert; import mx.core.FlexGlobals; import mx.managers. CursorManager; import mx.rpc.events.*; 21 import spark.events.GridSelectionEvent; [Bindable] private var resultVideos:ArrayCollection = new ArrayCollection() protected function onResult(event:ResultEvent):void { var feed:JSONDecoder = new JSONDecoder(event.result as String, true) var feedres:Object=feed.getValue().feed; var vids:Array = new Array(feedres.entry); for ( var i:uint=0;i<vids[0].length;i++ ) { var desc:VideoDescriptor=new VideoDescriptor; desc.title=vids[0][i].title.$t desc.lengthInSeconds=vids[0][i].media$group.yt$duration.seconds desc.ratingAvg=vids[0][i].gd$rating.average desc.theid=vids[0][i].id.$t desc.url=vids[0][i].link[0].href desc.thumbUrl=vids[0][i].media$group.media$thumbnail[0].url desc.playerUrl=vids[0][i].playerURL resultVideos.addItem(desc) } } protected function onFault(event:FaultEvent):void { Alert.show(„Fault: „ + event.fault.faultString,”Fault”); } protected function button1_clickHandler(event:Event):void { youTubeService.send() } protected function datagrid1_selectionChangeHandler(event:GridSelectionEvent):void { navigateToURL(new URLRequest(dataGrid.selectedItem.url)); } ]]> </fx:Script> <fx:Declarations> <s:HTTPService id=”youTubeService” url=”http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos” resultFormat=”text” result=”onResult(event)” fault=”onFault(event)”> <s:request> <q>{searchTxt.text}</q> <alt>json</alt> </s:request> </s:HTTPService> </fx:Declarations> <s:DataGrid id=”dataGrid” selectionChange=”datagrid1_selectionChangeHandler(event)” left=”10” right=”10” top=”40” bottom=”10” requestedRowCount=”4” dataProvider=”{resultVideos}” > <s:columns> <s:ArrayList> <s:GridColumn itemRenderer=”thumbRenderer” dataField=”thumbUrl” headerText=”Thumb”/> <s:GridColumn dataField=”title” headerText=”Title”/> <s:GridColumn itemRenderer=”lengthRenderer” dataField=”lengthInSeconds” headerText=”Length”/> <s:GridColumn itemRenderer=”ratingRenderer” dataField=”ratingAvg” headerText=”Rating”/> </s:ArrayList> 22 01/2012 Why Should You Try Flex? </s:columns> </s:DataGrid> <s:TextInput enter=”button1_clickHandler(event)” id=”searchTxt” left=”10” right=”88” top=”10”/> <s:Button click=”button1_clickHandler(event)” right=”10” top=”10” label=”Szimat”/> </s:WindowedApplication> Listing 3: The VideoDescriptor class: helper class to store search results as objects. package { public class VideoDescriptor { public var title:String; public var lengthInSeconds:Number; public var ratingAvg:Number; public var url:String; public var thumbUrl:String; public var playerUrl:String; public var theid:String; public function VideoDescriptor() { } } } Listing 4: ThumbRenderer class: renders images from the input url. <?xml version=”1.0” encoding=”utf-8”?> <s:GridItemRenderer xmlns:fx=”http://ns.adobe.com/mxml/2009” xmlns:s=”library://ns.adobe.com/flex/spark” xmlns:mx=”library://ns.adobe.com/flex/mx” clipAndEnableScrolling=”true”> <fx:Script> <![CDATA[ override public function prepare(hasBeenRecycled:Boolean):void { img.source = data[column.dataField] } ]]> </fx:Script> <s:Image id=”img” height=”{480/4}” width=”{360/4}” /> </s:GridItemRenderer> Listing 5: ratingRenderer class: renders filled stars according to the rating. <?xml version=”1.0” encoding=”utf-8”?> <s:GridItemRenderer xmlns:fx=”http://ns.adobe.com/mxml/2009” xmlns:s=”library://ns.adobe.com/flex/spark” xmlns:mx=”library://ns.adobe.com/flex/mx” clipAndEnableScrolling=”true”> <fx:Script> <![CDATA[ protected var rating:Number; override public function prepare(hasBeenRecycled:Boolean):void { rating = data[column.dataField] if(rating<4.5 && rating>4) img5.source=”ico/star_half.png” if(rating<4){ if(rating>3.5) img4.source=”ico/star_half.png” img5.source=”ico/star_empty.png” } if(rating<3){ codersky.com 23 if(rating>2.5) img3.source=”ico/star_half.png” img4.source=”ico/star_empty.png” } if(rating<2){ if(rating>1.5) img2.source=”ico/star_half.png” img3.source=”ico/star_empty.png” } if(rating<1) img2.source=”ico/star_empty.png” } ]]> </fx:Script> <mx:HBox> <s:Image id=”img1” source=”ico/star.png” /> <s:Image id=”img2” source=”ico/star.png” /> <s:Image id=”img3” source=”ico/star.png” /> <s:Image id=”img4” source=”ico/star.png” /> <s:Image id=”img5” source=”ico/star.png” /> </mx:HBox> </s:GridItemRenderer> Listing 6: The lengthRenderer class renders the number to time formatted string. <?xml version=”1.0” encoding=”utf-8”?> <s:GridItemRenderer xmlns:fx=”http://ns.adobe.com/mxml/2009” xmlns:s=”library://ns.adobe.com/flex/spark” xmlns:mx=”library://ns.adobe.com/flex/mx” clipAndEnableScrolling=”true”> <fx:Script> <![CDATA[ override public function prepare(hasBeenRecycled:Boolean):void { var mp:int=data[column.dataField] var a:int=mp/60, b:int=mp-int(mp/60)*60 var bele:String=”” if(b<10) bele=”0” lblData.text = a+”:”+bele+b } ]]> </fx:Script> <s:Label id=”lblData” top=”9” left=”7”/> </s:GridItemRenderer> Where to go from here? If I have successfully got your interest in Flex, you should start with downloading Flash Builder 60 day trial from adobe.com. If you are a student, or unemployed, to get a free key, go to freeriatools.adobe.com! While it downloads, check out Lee Brimelow’s Introduction to Flex series at http://gotoandlearn.com/, and check out the free ebook Getting Started with Flex 3 ( http:// www.adobe.com/content/dam/Adobe/en/devnet/ flex/pdfs/getting_started_with_Flex3.pdf ). After that, go ahead, and connect an Android or iOS device, to see mobile development in action. If you don’t believe Air is running on iOS, try http://flex.org/flexgame/ ! The most interesting things are item-renderers and databinding, what you should definitely learn from Flex. Don’t be afraid to google, if you need help, and you’ll soon understand why Flex is awesome! 24 Gábor Csomák 22 years old, Student at Budapest University of Technology and Economics. Initial Committer for Apache Flex. Works for LogMeIn, on the join. Me project. He is also the developer of sharedboard.net, a multiplatform instant draw-messaging client. In his free-time he plays rugby, and listens to ska music. 01/2012 Mobile Location Focused Applications Life is never boring as a mobile application developer. Looking back at 2011, there were both opportunities and challenges. The maturing of HTML5, release of cross platform development solutions such as Adobe Flex Mobile, and opening of the Android market have dramatically improved the life of mobile developers. T his article will discuss location focused mobile apps, or applications which take advantage of the built in GPS on most mobile devices. In particular we will consider location based services (LBS) and geographic information systems (GIS). The Mobile Market in 2011 The year started with the dominance of the Apple iOS mobile platform. This maintained the demand for Objective-C developers; the native language of iOS. The steady growth in popularity of devices running the Android platform over the year, saw more demand for Java mobile apps. Apple continued to throw their weight around, maintaining their stance on preventing third party plug-ins to be included in any iOS browser. Effectively stymieing Adobe’s Flash Player and Microsoft’s Silverlight. The growth of mobile cross browser solutions has been one of the biggest changes this year. For installed applications, Adobe put their weight behind Flex Mobile. On the Web HTML5/Javascript seems the emerging favored choice. Indeed at their end of the year MAX show, Adobe hinted at refocusing the company (one can speculate in part due to the Apple plug-in decision). They even went as far as to buy PhoneGap, a technology to convert a web HTML5 mobile app to one which is installable. Then to maintain the open source status of the product, under the Apache license. We are a long way from seeing the end of PC’s, but should that day come so ends the Flash Player. Some of the Adobes end of the year decisions makes one wonder whether they have seen the writing on the wall. 26 Mobile Application Developer Challenges in 2011 There were plenty of challenges for mobile developers in 2011, these included: 1. Project issues – changes in spec/scope creep, incomplete specs, and app complexity. 2. Distribution & update issues – the challenges of multiple markets (Apple, Android, Blackberry), submission policy too long (particularly Apple’s), painful certificate process (again particularly applicable to Apple), expensive and long distribution. 3. Other issues – security, back-end integration, mobile web is a different beast to PC web must design accordingly (UI/work flow). Debate continued over the benefits of native installed apps, such as Objective-C, over the newer hybrid cross platform apps. Adobe recently released Native Extensions, to help hybrid Flex Mobile apps bridge this gap. But overall we ended 2011 with native installed apps dominating the apps stores. Those developers involved in B-to-C mobile development were busy in 2011. Social networking and check-in type apps were very popular. On the B-to-B side, spending was less. As in the early days of the Internet, business adoption has been slow. This should change in 2012. 01/2012 Mobile Location Focused Applications Geo-location and Mobile Apps With GPS now so common on mobile devices, so called geo-location (the identification of the realworld geographic location of an object) can be used to provide a slew of new services. Mobile users can now ask what or who is near them. They can update, edit and collect data at a specific location. These new mobile applications can provide answers beyond what is currently available on a PC. Key areas include: • Visualization – Users can now use mobile map viewers to see their surrounding area. Imagine a civil engineer on site, wondering where the underground pipes run. He can now overlay a pipe layer over a base map and see exactly what is under his feet. One wonders about the future of companies like Tom Tom when users can now use apps on any mobile device to plan travel, and get updated info on traffic and routing. • Query and Search – One can conduct simple or complex spatial queries and searches relating to the current location. In the field, forest managers can search for trees by species, and relate these results to soil type and slope. • Data Collection – Many workers need to record information at a particular location. Today much of this is done with pen and paper. This will soon change; resulting in greater accuracy, saved time and richer data. Surveyors in the field can now use a mobile app to gather data at a location, including text, images, voice even video. • Updating and Editing – Often data sources need updating. Again using geo-location, mobile apps will become indispensable tools. Agricultural workers in California, for example, can now update a central server, maybe a GIS, using their mobile with new crop type, acreage planted, and pest control in real time. • Offline & Online – There remain many areas where Wi-Fi coverage is limited. Mobiles can now store much data locally. • Management and Coordination – Knowing workers locations, optimizing their travel, viewing data gathered in real time, coordinating their activity in the field will lead to big savings and increased efficiency in many industries. To illustrate how mobile apps can take advantage of geo-location, we will look at its potential use in the field of politics, and within the facility management industry. codersky.com Mobile Location Focused Apps in Politics Politics revolves around organization. The increasing popularity of mobiles; iPhones, IP Ads and Android devices will revolutionize political organization and campaigning. It is now possible to provide field workers with mobile applications which will allow better organization and coordination of campaigns. Further, these applications will let users dynamically collect and upload data from the field. Campaigns and unit committees will be able to access this centralized data in real time. Improving both the speed and the accuracy of the decision making process. Data collection and access is one thing, visualizing this data is quite another. The ability to search, query and tabulate this data is huge. But maps provide a very intuitive way to view this type of data. Mobile Political Campaigning & Voter Data Management Much in the world of political campaigning is centered on canvassing, phone banks and walk lists. Walk lists are for campaign field workers, essentially their voter contact list. Mobile applications running on smartphones can provide canvassers their walk list. Maybe on maps as optimized, or most efficient, routes. In addition, canvassers can interview voters and capture responses dynamically on their smartphones; tie the data to that location and upload it to a central database. Historically, spreadsheets have been the mainstay of political campaign organizing. Those days will soon be gone. New software applications will become available for use on traditional PC’s and mobile devices which will tap into the central campaign data source and allow questions to be answered or viewed quickly; the concentrations of likely voters or supporters for more efficient targeting, identifying locations for events, planning and moving collateral, generating and viewing walk-lists, and plotting sign locations. Interactive maps will prove important in visualizing much of this data. Field Directors will be able to almost instantly see the progress of sign placement operations, volunteer recruitment, and literature distribution. They will also be able to see the location of field workers while they are interacting with voters and view responses in real time. Mobile GIS Maps & Politics Mobile devices, as we have said, will be increasingly more important to political campaigns. Viewing maps, boundaries, and voter locations on a smartphone or mobile tablet will be crucial to field workers. As will recording data while in the field. We have already mentioned a few, but we can imagine a 27 range of different questions we want answered and displayed on a map: • Show me an optimized route of my walk list Systems (GIS) offer tools which will help manage, organize, search, query and display campaign data. MapQuest offers both PC focused and mobile optimized tools ideal for political campaigns. • Display registered voter data on a map by definable region The Use of GIS in Politics • Search and display by a set of criteria - Show all 2008 Primary Voters • Search, filter and display - Show 2008 Primary Voters who voted in the last 3 elections or show only hard Democratic voters • Spatial query - Selecting a group of voters, by drawing a square on the map, will provide a voter summary. Maybe the number of voters selected, average distance between voters, total number of Republicans or Conservatives in this group, and number of perfect voters There are many options and tools which can be used for maps in politics. Geographic Information We have discussed the querying and display of campaign data. Often, at least in a GIS, this would involve either shapefiles or GIS endpoints. These are both spatial data sources which contain features (voters and their point location), and attributes (a voter party allegiance for example). Rendering or displaying a shapefile or GIS endpoint adds a layer to the map. Thus we can add points to the map which represent voters. Click on a point and the attributes of that voter are displayed. Querying is also possible against these spatial data sources; show me all hard Republican voters in a certain postcode. This discussion can be extended to data editing and updating. Thus it is quite possible to update our spatial data sources using a mobile device. Maybe a voter has switched allegiances and is no longer Figure 1: A cross platform mobile ArcGIS viewer 28 01/2012 Mobile Location Focused Applications Existing Political Software Systems and the New Mobile Paradigm Existing, let’s call them legacy, political software systems are slow and clunky. Mapping capabilities are limited. As already mentioned, decisions are still often made with the help of spreadsheets. Field workers rely on printed sheets, phones and notepads for organization and data gathering. In short, current software applications used for political campaigns are inadequate. Current systems can be dramatically improved. Centralising data and extending, maybe rewriting, existing software applications to allow easier management, querying and visualisation of this data will be crucial. Mobile applications in politics will provide both access to the data while in the field (no more pens, papers and printed maps), and the ability to edit and add new data. Mobiles provide up to date information dynamically. Maybe, querying by voter attributes using a fixed distance from your current location. Canvassing could then be planned around these dynamic queries. Mobile Politics Application Development Figure 2: Accessing basemaps and shapefiles on an offline smartphone a democrat; update that voters attributes on your smartphone which updates the central data store. Maybe a new area of homes has been built and voters here need to add to the data store. Again this can all be done by field workers using their mobile devices. ESRI is the largest provider of GIS software in the world. Their flagship ArcGIS product offers a complete GIS solution, both for desktop and networked GIS. Mobile ArcGIS has become increasingly important. Figure 1 shows GeoMobile for ArcGIS, a sample map viewer available for free in the app stores, which demonstrates some of the mobile functionality of ArcGIS. Open source mobile GIS options are also available. Openlayers, OpenScales and GeoServer are excellent examples. Finally offline mobile use may be required, in areas where Wi-Fi is not available. We can now store basemap tiles, routes and field data on the devices itself (Figure 2). codersky.com So how would you build such a system? There are a number of proprietary and open source content management and constituent relationship management solutions. Joomla and CivicCRM are two excellent open source options. These can serve as the central system. PC based work can utilise the modules available in these types of frameworks. The key mobile and mapping portions of this picture will need custom development. These would be integrated into the central system. So whether it be leveraging the power of MapQuest or a full GIS, these could be integrated into the PC based system, and custom built for mobile. Mobile Location Focused Apps for Mobile Workers Another example of a location focused mobile app is the check-in. This has become very popular in marketing and advertising. To date this has been a consumer focused phenomena. But enterprises are now looking at the potential use of the check-in. Facility management companies, surveyors, multilevel marketing, insurance claims, pipeline companies, water utilities; all have field workers who would benefit from this type of mobile application. Not only checking in to work sites, but keeping a record of the work done; notes, pictures, video, even voice records. Figure 3 shows the home screen of a mobile application built using the new MapQuest Flash mobile API targeting the facilities management sector. 29 Figure 3: Enterprise Mobile Check-In Application Home Screen Figure 5: Directions and Local Search Not only does the application include check-in and data collection, but routing, local search and a geo-coder. Functionality of the application is tied to either a point of interest or GPS location. The application allows a field worker to start the day by viewing an optimized route of the day’s calls. On arrival at each call, the user can use the check-in/out screen to register job location and provide data relating to the call, see Figure 4. Related Information Check-In Application Demo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5R Uh5ZcxQ8&feature=player_embedded Free GeoMobile for ArcGIS app http://www.webmapsolutions.com/wpadmin/post.php?action=edit&post=3389 Mobile Data Collection http://www.webmapsolutions.com/ipadgis-android-gis-mobile-data-collection Figure 4: Check-In/Out Screen 30 01/2012 The local search and geocoder provide additional tools for discovering who or what is nearby and address search capabilities respectively (Figure 5). Using the tools provided by MapQuest, these types of applications have many potential mobile worker applications. Summary There are exciting times ahead for mobile developers. We may be on the verge of a revolution as impactful as the Internet. Mobiles have the potential to change both the way we work and the way we live. Geo-location will be at the core of many of the new mobile apps released. Consumer focused apps including those for social networking, check-in, and coupons continue to be very popular. Enterprises are now looking at mobile adoption. Companies and individuals providing mobile software solutions have a bright future. Viva la revolution! Matt Sheehan Matt Sheehan is a Principal and Senior Developer at WebMapSolutions. The company is focused on mobile application development, with a particular emphasis on location based services (LBS), mobile Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and maps. Feel free to contact Matt: [email protected] Games as Products and Services by Aleksander Lyskovsky Chairman of the Board of Directors, Alawar Entertainment The history of games The first electronic games appeared in the middle of the 1960s. The major games for the consoles of this time period were simple arcades with short game sessions. In 1966, Sega created one of the first electronic games entitled Periscope. A few years later, the first modernday game consoles emerged. In 1983, the first game console for home use, Nintendo Family Computer, or Nintendo Entertainment System, was released. The low performance of consoles, coupled with low cartridge capacities determined the genres of possible games. Simple, short arcades, similar to those used in earlier periods were the only options for games due to the lack of available technology. Updates were not supported on either the games or the consoles. After an electronic game or cartridge was released, it was nearly impossible to introduce any changes. In the event of a serious flaw or error, the withdrawal of the series as a whole was necessary, and would have serious repercussions for the studio releasing the title. The potential to change a computer game after it was published appeared in the 1970s. It is worth Figure 1:   Battle citygame screen shot 32 mentioning that the first games were mainly distributed by programmers and the game’s authors themselves via computer magazines, such as Creative Computing, in the form of the original code. Later on, map editors and modifiers appeared that were sometimes delivered along with the boxed version. This contributed to the longer lifespan of the game. In the 1990s, when PCs began to appear in almost every household, CDs ruled the industry. Since bugs and imperfect gameplay caused the sales to decrease and withdrawing an entire series was a difficult prospect, developers began creating patches and updates for players to download from the official game sites. Unfortunately, not everything can be patched, so the publishers placed their best on producing the perfect game. This meant that they sought to minimize bugs from the very beginning. They also sought to refine the game further, including its storyline, gameplay and overall concept. Even though many publishers are not prepared to wait for the desired perfection of a game (meaning when all bugs have been fixed, etc.), the time spent on polishing a game was and still is growing. In 2001, casual games and the first examples of digital distribution appeared. While the term “casual” was Figure 2: Duke Nukem Forever game 01/2012 Games as Products and Services not yet familiar to those in the game development sector, the term “PC shareware” was. That was when the digital distribution appeared on the developer sites, which were used to sell these games. Even though it may just have been a catalog of games and software, the developer still controlled the hosting. He could thus easily change the distribution as needed. The “barrier” between users and developers became thin as game creators and the end users started to communicate (Figure 2). Portals then appeared, which united products from various developers: BigFish, RealArcade and others. The user-developer communication began to breakdown helping to solidify this time frame as the “box” era. The portals were interested in the quantity of games rather than in expanding a game’s sales cycle. The business model for portals could be summed up as the following: the user buys the game, plays it, forgets about it and buys the next one. According to our stats, the average casual games player buys 3 to 5 new games per month, so new games must keep flowing, and all marketing activity must aim to increase the number of purchases and not to expand the time of his interest in a particular product. At the same time casual games were gaining traction, the Java Micro Edition platform, J2ME, appeared, allowing the first fully featured games to appear on mobile phones. In 2002, the first phones supporting J2ME appeared. For example, in Europe the Nokia 3410 and Siemens M50 were released. In these early models, the J2ME games were downloaded from portals via WAP; such slow connection obviously did not allow for the downloading patches or updates, diminishing the ability for publishers to keep extending the users engagement. Online Another reality developed alongside all of this: the online reality. At first, its share was pretty small, but the very technologies at its base could enchant users. A sense of place within the global network, the invisible presence of the game’s author who could add some new and fascinating features to the game at anytime lured the gamers en masse (Figure 3). After all, the first online game experiments (text adventures that started at the end of 70s), PC games Figure 3: Farm Frenzy game screen shot codersky.com 33 Figure 4: Quake 2 game screen shot 34 01/2012 Games as Products and Services started to include a multiplayer mode via the local server (as in a computer club) or via dial-up. Even though the CD game still could not be completely updated, the game process now included one more important element: another player who could make the game more fun (Figure 4). The appearance of the first browser MMOs became a major milestone in online development. In this variation, 99% of the game was on the developer’s side and only 1% (the browser itself) – on the user’s side. The oldest browser MMO was Earth: 2025, developed in 1996, but a subsequent and extremely popular such MMO was the Utopia strategy game that appeared in 1999. What enticed that many people to play a game with such an extreme minimum of gameplay? All they were equipped with was statistics and by pushing one key a calculation would begin that then produced a short message of “You won/lost”! The reason was and is still the same: people like to feel the camaraderie and see the unexpected changes in the game process, making the old familiar gameplay attractive once again. A striking example of this type of genre is Mafia Wars. The initial offering of the game contained no traditional multiplayer component; it was implemented by virality. The social networks format determined the genres and ways of game consumption: 5 minutes a day (Figure 5). The first fully featured client ММО was Ultima Online, the alpha version of which was published on April 2, 1996. Since the game’s birth, 2 sequels, 10 add-ons and 4 clients have been published. An add-on is not just a patch that changes part of the game. Such add-ons provide new locations, characters, game and battle options, etc. The first add-on appeared a year after the final version release, in 1998. This constant enrichment of the game world and gameplay has allowed the developers to retain the users’ interest in their game for 14 years already. The cardinal change in online gaming was introduced by digital distribution. It became available for large games too, as the average Internet connection speed increased. The largest and most successful platform was Steam, developed by Valve, which accepted other publishers’ products for distribution in 2005. Once there, the user can download purchased games from Steam servers using any computer supporting their client. The fans of multiplayer hits could play them on Steam supported servers that performed better than many amateur and even professional counterparts did. Casual 2.0 Figure 5: Mafia Wars screen shot Nowadays Internet is such an immanent part of our life that it is no longer correct to divide games into online and offline. We should discuss hardcore and casual gamers, though some projects erase this boundary. [Since Alawar’s expertise lies in casual games] we can speak upon the new casual games, leaving the hardcore realm for the corresponding specialists to discuss. Casual 2.0 is not the casual that was meant earlier, speaking of the casual era and the portals. Casual 2.0 incorporated the best of online and offline approaches. First, the traditional PC casual downloadable provided short game sessions, simple tutorials and understandable gameplay, just like in good old arcade electronic games and consoles. Offline also contributed the notion of achievements, offering up various trophies, stars, coins and other ways to motivate the gamer. Figure 6: Treasures of Montezuma game screen shot codersky.com Online provided casual 2.0 with fully featured digital distribution implying product development and support along with the way of delivery. The presence of an online connection also lead to the “socialization” of the games. It is casual 2.0 (especially the mobile niche) that revived the regular updates model, providing the “long selling tail” for each game (Figure 6). 35 The casual 2.0 business lines include smartphone, tablet, social network, console, MMO, as well as traditional PC casual downloadable content and future PC casual games. Most of the casual market is growing now thanks in part to the mobile segment that should reach 10 billion in 2013, according to analytics. The social network segment has also increased the casual 2.0 market volume by approximately 3 billion, but has slowed down recently. As for the classic PC casual downloadable market, alas, the growth slowed down. Thus, nowadays continuing with PC casual downloadable without porting the game to at least mobile platforms seems to me, at the very least, strange. Yet market changes should also force the developers to change their approach to developing and supporting products (Figure 7). to port their products to other platforms. That is why, for them, until now, entering new markets meant leaving the comfort zone and plunging into the unknown. As a result, such a PC casual team would produce 2 HOPAs or 2 time managers per year. These two products are developed using the familiar slot system: the team finishes one project and immediately turns to the next one. Developers Work with a number of platforms. Port your successful PC titles to Mac, iOS, Android, social networks, MMO. Surely enough, this requires a serious rethinking of the whole game process, not just to port it to a new engine. This is why a team should invite new people that are experienced in other realms. Let us examine the experience of the most successful teams in the market today: ZeptoLab, for example, incorporates ex-mobile development experts; so too does Rovia; Game Insight is made up of ex-MMO developers. In Alawar, we strive to gather people who worked in J2ME development, So who are our PC casual developers? 40% of them live and work in the big cities of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, but most likely not in Moscow. Teams of 5-15 people cooperate with a publisher or they use the advance payment from a distributor. There is no strict division of roles, which means that the whole team specializes in PC development and will not hire specialists from the mobile or social niches in order At the moment, most PC casual teams have trouble growing. They still make good products, sell them for a good price, but they have noticed that the games no longer attract the interest they used to, meaning a decrease in income. This is predictable as the market has changed, and not all teams have managed to adapt to the new reality and the new gamer needs. It is high time to pay attention to the after-sales. Figure 7:   Shake Spears game screen shot 36 01/2012 Games as Products and Services created social networks and MMOs. They continue to do this now. We have united our efforts in order to create successful products that can be released to all platforms at once. Ideally, in the future, our user will not choose a game for a specific device, but rather he will pick a title that interests him, assured that the version for his device has already been released. Change the approach to development. The drawback of the slot system is that once the developer is done with his tasks for one project, he must switch to another project very quickly. I am convinced that the project should have a team specifically dealing with updates. The goal is to expand each project’s lifespan, not chase after quantity. Moreover, in case of a successful project, perhaps the whole team should concentrate on supporting it even by means of putting the release of new games on hold. QA, QA and QA. Both hardcore and casual developers polish their products to perfection now. Those who published games, say, for consoles, are aware of the importance of even the smallest of details relating to the game’s quality. Therefore, the fossil developers should better divide their projects into stages and monitor the quality of each level in order not to have to deal with a bunch of bugs the day prior to release. That’s right, proper QA requires documentation and one must not be lazy in doing so. Take heed of the deadlines, meet them and discipline yourselves. Remember: bugcaused updates are of utmost importance to the developer and publisher. Users notice even the most minor of bugs. This will then lower the game’s ratings in stores and causes negative feedback. The game’s quality and timely correction of bugs should be offered as complimentary service to the gamer who downloaded your product. Do have a clean scheme of updates before the release? Of course, updating is not just about the bugs. It is also about adding new features to retain your audience, such as new outfits for the characters, additional locations, themed “gifts” for the holidays – anything you can think of. Release is not the end of development; it is only half of the battle (and speaking of freemium, it’s only 20%)! The game should be updated in order to retain the gamer. Increase monetization by including new traffic retention tools and arranging the sales promotions. Advise? Analyze your feedback. Read comments, count stars, draw download diagrams. Do not wait for an email with acknowledgments or curses: register with Twitter and Facebook, let your players communicate and leave feedback. codersky.com Portals Suppose we have ideal developer teams. They create great games for many platforms, release updates with new content regularly. How do they sell their wonderful games? How are PC casual portals doing? As always, the games are flowing. A hit game’s popularity peak typically spans from 4 to 5 weeks, but this is only true for the hits. The lifespan of the rest of the games is even shorter. This is why distributor portals continue to pursue lots of games at once. Such portals do not support micro transactions and this is why only premium versions of games are published there. All the developers and publishers can do in these portals is to allow the players to play a trial version of the game. Updating is also a sad business since approval takes too long. The great thing is that distributors perform the testing and QA from their side. This takes 1 to 6 weeks of their precious time, but at least players may rest assured that the quality of their downloaded games has not suffered. Leading distributors, such as Big Fish Games, Real Arcade, Alawar and others have become interested in MMOs and mobile games. They are experimenting with various genres to find new audiences. Unfortunately, this process is slow because it means leaving their comfort zone. An ideal portal should be multiplatform and support the saving of the history of cross-platform portal dialogs. Ideally, a portal should save the game’s progress regardless of the initial device used to play.. What a player has achieved in a game on his Mac, should be able to be accessed and continued on his iPad, all from the same exact spot he left off.. Of course, all portals should support the freemium distribution model. This game-selling model has already proved popular in mobile games, so it should be implemented into PC casual downloadable! We can experiment with our good old premium, too. For example, we can provide a free trial for 10 minutes every day, so that a user who is not yet ready to pay can get attached to the character and gameplay, eventually reaching the conclusion to purchase the game. People like free stuff. This allows us additional opportunities in terms of initial contact. Later on people will buy something in addition to the games they have already tried and got to know. Alawar’s experience proves that people not only want as much free content as possible, but in certain cases are also ready to pay for special and premium content. Fans are prepared to pay a lot for such things as, i.e., a more expensive Collector’s Edition of the title. Players like communicating with each other, so portals should consider introducing various social services. 37 Let us recall the Steam’s experience of creating its own gaming community; a large social network that people sometimes visit even more frequently than their Facebook accounts. The players want to share their achievements and opinions with their friends. The MMO experience taught us that the most addictive games are those that turn the gaming process into a form of communication with new, virtual friends. social network. Players may already use this section to leave feedback and to see what was downloaded by others at what time. Case study New game In November, Alawar launched the Russian version of new portal, Alawar.ru. We are trying to implement all the aforementioned. We have only implemented a small portion of our ideas thus far, but with time, we will add more nice features to the site, thus increasing its functionality. You will be able to find games for several platforms all in one place: for Windows, Mac, Android and iPhone/iPad. The Alawar portal will support a wide variety of business models. We do our best to provide our visitors with a choice between game versions to play: premium or freemium. Each registered user will have their own “member’s area” that can be accessed through their social network accounts. In the future, this “members’ area” will become a page of the game’s The new version of the portal is running in test mode and available in Russian only for the time being, but in the near future it will be translated into 30+ languages, just like the previous version (Figure 8). We have ideal, sophisticated developer teams and modern portals. What should the game be like then? The game should certainly be one of high quality. Specialized developers and QA specialists participate in its creation. This is why the development of a game can take anywhere from 9 to 14 months (not more than that because the market is constantly changing) and the budget is approximately USD 500,000. A game will contain blitz game sessions and there should be several versions including freemium and premium (depending on the platform and distribution channel) and a Collector’s Edition for bestsellers. Figure 8: www.alawar.ru new website 38 01/2012 Alawar has already started developing these new types of games including Farm Frenzy – 4 (to be released by the end of 2012), The Treasure of Montezuma – 4 and two not yet announced super hits. I also believe that after all of our projects and goals become a reality, our players will be happy. Our future successes lie in pleasing our customers. We must listen to them and treat them with care so that they will frequently return to their accounts on the game distribution portal, as they do with their Facebook pages, to happily purchase their new favorite, high-quality game. Aleksander Lyskovsky is a Chairman of the Board of Directors, Alawar Entertainment. Founded in 1999, Alawar Entertainment specializes in the development, publication and distribution of casual games, reaching players in over 60 countries. The company is the leading distributor of casual titles in Eastern Europe and has published more than 200 casual PC games globally, including leading downloadable brands like Farm Frenzy, Stray Souls and The Treasures of Montezuma. Alawar games are now available for the Mac, iPhone, iPad, Android, PlayStation 3, Nintendo DS, bada, BlackBerry and other platforms. The company also releases entertainment products for social networks and MMO audiences. For more information, visit www.alawar.com. codersky.com Embrace The Abstraction Gaining perspective on game design choices by examining the source of creativity and the process of communicating through a medium. C onsider the purpose of the creative arts; to manifest or express one’s creativity. Every book, film, play, painting, commercial, joke, and video game is the direct result of at least one creator. At the core of all of these mediums of expression is the idea of creation. We know that the individual parts of a creative work do not need to be unique inventions in themselves. Rather it’s the bigger picture that we examine for its creativity. By taking bits and pieces from the world, creators filter their experiences and memories down to unique representations. And when we play video games, we’re not actually controlling real characters and objects, but merely the creator’s virtual representations. Though some games simulate real life objects and interactions with great detail, most video games fall somewhere in the middle of the extremes of the purely abstract and simulation. This middle ground is an abstraction, a key concept in the foundation of game design. Abstraction. Stylization. Simplification. These are terms that describe the act of creating a representation with some, but not all, aspects of the existing subject. Abstraction is an important part of the creative arts. How abstraction fits into game design can best be explained in a three part direction: creator, medium, and audience. be thrown into a completely foreign environment and, one trial at a time, come to some kind of profound understanding. Video games test and engage us in more ways than any non-interactive medium can. For these reasons, video games have a unique way of communicating ideas and conveying experiences, which are intangibles worth playing and making video games for. It’s easy to think of gaming as an activity very far removed from reality. Gamers naturally draw a clear line between real life and the virtual, fantasy, and abstract game worlds of video games. When I shoot a red exploding barrel (can they be any other color?) I’m not releasing hazardous chemicals into the air. When I steal from a local shop, I’m not disrupting an actual economy. And when I clear a line in Tetris, I’m not defying the conversation of energy (Figure 1). On the other hand, though the game worlds are virtual, human players and creators bring a very personal and a very real element into the mix. Art, in this case video games, reflects the creator who reflects the world. The creators use their thoughts and feelings to create interactive experiences, and the player interacts The Creator Why do you make video games? You could be in it for the money or the fame. Working in the game industry may just be a job for you. But even if you feel this way, you should understand the motivation behind the game designers you work with. Personally, I make games because there are certain ideas and experiences I want to convey that are only possible in an interactive medium. As a writer, artist, and musician I have options. So I don’t feel pressured to create experiences in a video game that are incompatible with the medium. To understand what kinds of experiences are compatible for video games you have to understand that video games are learning systems. Using the same learning methods we’ve used since childhood, gamers can explore ideas in video games by interacting and observing the causes and effects of actions within the system. We can 40 Figure 1: Stealing in The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening 01/2012 Embrace The Abstraction with the creator’s ideas. Thinking about game creation this way, it’s clear that along with the creator’s thoughts and opinions comes the creator’s biases. And it is because of these biases and personal views that we must embrace the abstraction within creative works like video games. Embracing the abstraction is not about blindly agreeing with others. It’s not about making compromises to what you like or what you value most in a video game. It’s not necessarily about expanding the range of genres and features that you appreciate. Embracing the abstraction is a willingness to take that critical first step of opening your mind to, at the very least, consider points of view other than your own. It’s about encountering something different in a creative work, something unexpected perhaps, and considering its purpose and the good that can come of it before dismissing it. We have to realize that everyone sees things differently and value things differently. Embrace the abstraction by seeing first, understanding second, and only judging if you have enough energy left. “Lend your ears to music, open your eyes to painting, and… stop thinking! Just ask yourself whether the work has enabled you to walk about into a hitherto unknown world. If the answer is yes, what more do you want?” Wassily Kandinsky, a master of abstract painting. Creative arts have little to do with presenting accurate to life representations or merely reminding us of things that already exist. Rather, creativity is better understood as the remixing of known elements to present the unique perspective of the creator. Video games are almost entirely fake, abstracted representations. The player is real. Player actions and consequences are real. The math that powers the system is real. But everything else is an abstraction. It’s all an artifice designed to present a consistent system of familiar elements. So it makes sense for us to focus on how gamers relate to game elements rather than dwell on how realistic they are. Once you understand this fundamental level of abstraction in video games, you’ll understand what it truly means to design. To design is to create a specific kind of bridge for a specific audience. Good design involves knowing what you have (the medium), what your options are (the decisions and elements you pick), and how these things will affect the end user. Now we have to consider the medium that contains our abstractions. The Medium The hardest part about being creators or game designers is getting an outside perspective on our own perspective. As much as we refine our craft, our blind spots remain out of sight. Some use theory to compensate. Others use feedback from their audience or their co-creators and adjust accordingly. Ultimately creators want to know if their ideas are coming across like they codersky.com think they are. We want to know if the medium is successfully transferring their ideas. The tricky part is there is no one way or right way to to get the job done. Embracing abstraction, the core of creativity, in video games requires understanding that there are no standards or universal feature sets that all game creators work toward. There are no standards for video games because there are no standards for people. In the same way that one designer can prefer turn-based gameplay over real-time gameplay, or shooting games over puzzle games, one can have a preference for any style or feature in a video game. Nothing is out of bounds here. Nothing is behind the times, obsolete, or antiquated. For example, the Japanese development studio Treasure is known for creating shoot-em-ups that feature slowdown. While many consider slowdown as an unwanted relic of the hardware limitations of our past, not everyone shares this opinion. If eliminating slowdown was a standard for video games, we would never have games like Bangai-O Spirits on the Nintendo DS. This game features a sort of smart-slowdown that is contextual to the intensity of the gameplay. The more missiles, enemies, and explosions on screen the slower the game moves. Because the slowdown is always proportional to the chaos of the gameplay, players are able to keep up with massive amounts of action rather than having it all overwhelm their senses. There may be no one way to create a video game, but many developers feel pressure from another source; technology. As a game designer you should take care to separate the aims and demands of technology from the personal expressivity and abstraction that is the creative arts. Video games are a unique medium. Never before has an art form been so closely tied to a rapidly increasing wave of development and innovation. Moore’s law states the number of transistors that can be placed affordably on a circuit doubles every two years or so. This means that we don’t have to wait long before there will be a newer, flashier, more powerful system to run our games on. Since the retro days of the NES, I’ve witnessed that colors have gotten brighter. Graphics have gotten sharper. Control devices have been upgraded with higher ranges of sensitivity. And enemies have gotten more numerous and intelligent. Any hardware limitation we face today will likely be a non issue in two years time. The hardware limitations a game developer works with may set the technical limitations on the types of interactions, graphics, sound, and other features, but it doesn’t necessarily limit the ideas and execution of the final product. Just because Super Mario Bros was made on the NES doesn’t make it inferior to every Mario game released since. After studying it or years, I can confidently say that the design and execution of Super Mario Brothers is still well beyond the quality of 41 Figure 2: A Random Battle in Pokemon HeartGold many modern games. Regardless of the hardware that games are made on, at the end of the day great developers refine and tune their games into a high quality product. All creative arts are made under limitations of one kind or another. Time, money, people, space, and other resources are not unlimited. It is up to the creator to understand the medium including its limitations and the limitations of the current circumstances to put together a product that expresses their ideas. This is an easy concept to understand, but your reaction to the following examples may reveal your true feelings. Random battles (also known as random encounters). In 2D and 3D role-playing games (RPGs) random battles are a feature that randomly pulls the player into a battle without warning. The Pokemon RPG series, one of the most successful long running RPG series, features random battles when players walk through tall grass, caves, and other areas. Pokemon is one of the few examples of a highly successful modern RPG with random battles. I must add that there are plenty of quality downloadable and indie titles with random battles like Serious Sam: The Random Encounter. Concerning the design feature, many have expressed that there is no reason for random battles in any modern video game. Arguments against random battles claim that no matter the platform there should be enough processing power to render enemies on the overworld so the player can engage or avoid them at will. Put simply, technology is not a governing factor of design, merely a limiter of its technical upper boundary. For random battles, like any creative decision, there are pros and cons. The pros of random battles are its simplicity and sense of surprise. If you think about it random battles are the abstraction of a confrontation that’s suddenly thrust onto the player. Random battles only focus on a few features of the enemy encounter; the surprise and the battle (Figure 2). You don’t know exactly what happens in the transition between the overworld and the battle scene. You’re not sure why the background looks different or where the characters are. You can’t say exactly where the enemy came from or where it goes after you defeat it. But you can imagine what happens, a type of engagement possible because of the lack of specificity. This invitation for interpretation can also be viewed as a con. Maybe you’re the kind of player who doesn’t want to use your imagination to fill in the gaps. That’s fine. Just know that filling in the gaps, coming up with theories, and pondering about events is what humans do naturally to recognize patterns and bring order to their lives. And because we do this in our everyday lives, we also do it with the books, films, and video games we consume. So even if you don’t like random battles don’t assume that all players and developers are like you in this regard. And certainly don’t think that random battles are inferior in every way to enemies that are visible on the overworld. To make this point clear, let’s consider the opposite of random battles. Figure 3: Enemy visible on the overworld in Final Fantasy 13 In Pokemon, by whisking the player randomly off to a special battle space, the game play is compartmentalized, specialized, and focused all of which make the game play easier to develop than a large, seamless game play experience. Notice how this abstraction invites a certain level of imagination or filling in the blanks on the player end. 42 Figure 4: Enemy battle in Final Fantasy 13 01/2012 Embrace The Abstraction Figure 5: Dialog from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time Visible overworld enemies are much harder to implement into an RPG development-wise than random battles. With visible overworld enemies as a designer you have to worry about enemy size, animation, vision cones, AI, model collision, and other factors. Without a doubt these additional features complicate the development (Figure 3, Figure 4). Of course, a developer doesn’t have to implement all of these features into their visible overworld enemy design. In general, the more features one does add to their game to decrease the amount of abstraction, the harder it is to execute a highly polished product. If any component of visible overworld enemy design is designed poorly, the entire feature can lose its believability and its impact. If you’ve ever seen an overworld enemy walk endlessly against a wall completely unaware of what it’s doing, you know that poor AI design can make an enemy smart enough to be stupid. If you are unfamiliar with the RPG tropes discussed above then consider this example of text based dialog versus voice acted dialog. It’s not hard to find a gamer or critic who confidently believes that almost every piece of dialog in a video game should be voiced. To these gamers texts are a relic of the past that we don’t have to live with anymore. Why read when the game can read to us? The counter argument is simple. Because reading is unique and interesting in its own way, and there are pros and cons to every creative decision. There is no standard of features that all games are measured by. codersky.com Figure 6: Dialog from The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword Consider the following pros and cons of text versus voiced dialog. Text takes up less storage space and processing power. Text can easily be edited. Text can be easily entered by the player using virtual keyboards. Text leaves the experience open for the player to assign voices and their own sense of delivery to the dialog. Text lets the player experience the dialog at their own pace, which may include some rereading. Text doesn’t clutter the soundscape of a game. Text can draw upon a wealth of literary techniques that have been refined for hundreds of years. Unfortunately, getting more out of text dialog or writing in general requires good writers and good reading comprehension of the players, two things which may be very difficult to come by (Figure 5, Figure 6). 43 Voiced speech allows the creator to deliver powerful performances to the player via voice acting. All the interesting inflections, tones, and accents of an actor can be captured in a video game voice performance. The voiced speech also frees the player’s eyes so they can focus on other parts of the screen. Aside from higher production and technical costs, voiced speech takes over the pacing and delivery of lines. When playing, if a character talks too quickly for you to keep up, tough luck. If the delivery is too slow, you may be stuck with it. With voice acting it’s tricky to skip ahead or slow down the verbal information. It can be difficult to understand voice performances because of accents or audio balance. I have the hardest time understanding radio chatter in shooters because the gunfire and the explosions often crowd the soundscape. And like with visible overworld enemies, there are more components of voice performances that must all work together to maintain its effectiveness. With a powerful, lively voice performance in a video game, if the story, tone, graphical style, or the character animations don’t match the voice performance, the result can be somewhat dissonant. It’s up to the game designers to figure out if a feature is a good fit for the experience they want to create. There are a lot of options out there. Knowing what options are available and how they stress a game’s design requires a deep understanding of different fields, tends, and concepts. Learning what the video game medium can sustain is essential for understanding how video games work. And by “work” I mean, how the gamer fits into the equation. Figure 7: World 1-1 from Super Mario Bros The Audience Playing video games take a lot of player participation because games are interactive. Interactivity stresses many skills that the passive entertainment cannot. Such skill includes knowledge and adaptation skills in addition to dexterity, reflex, and timing skills for real-time gameplay. Building up one’s skills is a rich and engaging process that game designers should never underestimate. Every abstraction and idea the creator wants to convey passes through the medium before the player can experience it. From here the player must observe, analyze, and possibly memorize the concept. This takes much time and effort. To significantly aid the learning process of the player most games are designed using familiar objects and actions. I call these familiar representations “forms.” So when we see Mario in the NES game Super Mario Brothers, we quickly understand that Mario is a man, which means he’s a solid object capable of 44 Figure 8: Invert Y-axis controls on the bottom screen of Star Fox 64 3DS 01/2012 Embrace The Abstraction moving and other actions. His jump may be superhuman (hence the name), but it is still similar enough to real life jumping. What goes up must come down. Likewise, we can assume that Mario can’t move through solid objects and gets hurt when he touches fire. Such is the power of using forms and other elements the player can recognize. Beware. While abstractions can simplify the gameplay experience for the player, they can also arbitrarily work against the player by making the familiar seem foreign (Figure 7). By recognizing forms players can quickly create frameworks of intuited rules and expectations to support their learning process. In other words, we anticipate how gameplay interactions work based on how objects and actions look. Overall the goal of intuitive game design is to line up with the intuition of your target audience as much as possible. This is an extremely important goal to keep in mind. As a designer, know that if you abstract too much or alter the right combinations of features of the thing you’re representing, you can make the learning experience very difficult for the player. If you have ever played two games in the same genre that have different control schemes, you know how difficult it can be to adjust to small differences. For in general, it’s difficult to learn something, and even more difficult to unlearn what has been learned. I think of intuitive design as a great boost to the quality of a game, but not necessarily a drawback when absent. Think about it this way. In the same way that there isn’t a standard for video games, there isn’t a standard of intuitive rules. To illustrate, consider the long running invertednot-inverted debate. For first person shooters and some shoot-em-ups like Star Fox 64, it’s possible to play with with the y-axis aiming controls inverted or not-inverted. For a long time people have tried to explain why one is more intuitive than the other. The non-inverted camp reason that the inverted gamers come from a background of PC flight simulators where the y-axis is inverted just like in real aircrafts (Figure 8). Therefore, non-inverted is the normal type of control. The inverted camp explains that to invert is to control the back of one’s virtual head. But the heart of the matter is, any of these reasons can be true for any person. Some gamers actually are used to flight simulators, some gamers prefer non-inverted controls, and some gamers just adjust to the default settings which vary from game to game. Zooming in on the issue, it’s clear that your preference just depends on what you think you’re controlling. If you think you’re controlling the aiming reticule on the screen, you probably prefer noninverted controls so that moving the D-pad, stick, codersky.com or mouse up moves the reticule up. If a player visualizes controlling the rotation of an aircraft or the pivoting action of a gun in an FPS, then they probably prefer their controls inverted. There is no right or wrong way to visualize interfacing with a virtual system. Another reason why it’s not worth critiquing a game’s design on a lack of intuitiveness in most cases is even if you work hard making your game play as intuitive as possible to real life, other games and activities may train players to the contrary. In the end, how quickly and comfortably a player is able to learn and adapt to the particular complexities of a video game is more of an issue of difficulty design and conveyance, both of which are topics for other articles. Conclusion When you understand game design including the limitations of the medium, you can understand how the concepts of the creators are transferred to the player through interactive experiences. When you consider that nearly everything you put in a video game is a simplification or abstraction designed to focus the experience around what matters most, you’re free to design across the entire range of abstraction. When you understand how far you can abstract, you have the power to create more effective games that are easier to develop. For my final example, consider the difference in the end result between the following two ways of modeling bullet ballistics in a shooting game. Starting on the simulation end, you can spend large amounts of time and development resources developing bullets that are affected by the wind physics, temperature, and gravity as they travel through the air. Unless you’re designing a military combat simulator, such a complex design is probably unnecessary. Most gamers do not understand ballistics to this fine of a degree to appreciate such a design. So, it would be good to consider a more abstract design. Hit scan is a simplification of projectile weaponry that registers a hit on targets in the cross hairs the instant the trigger is pressed. There is no travel time calculated for the bullet. So, you never have to lead your shots ahead of targets with hit scan weapons. Such a design is easier to program as well because it takes into account less variables. Some weapons in Halo: Combat Evolved and Halo Reach use hit scan design. The sniper rifle in particular registers an instant hit when fired no matter the distance between rifle and target. Hit scan ballistic design makes sense to players because it’s so simple. If the target is within aim when the player pulls the trigger, the target is hit. Because what you see is what you get, this abstraction of bullet physics may feel more accurate and realistic to players. 45 As designers and players we should embrace the abstraction within video games. Being open to different points of views, styles, and interpretations of systems, objects, and interactive elements will only allow us to enjoy more games and design better games. Embracing the different ways designers can communicate ideas through these relatable yet, in some ways, simplified representations is also a way to gain clarity and perspective on one’s own thoughts and ideas. Be proud of video games and such abstractions. Richard Terrell (KirbyKid) Richard Terrell (KirbyKid) is an indie game developer, video game consultant, tournament organizer, competitor, writer, musician, artist, and teacher. He has worked as a tester for a video game QA company and a software tester/designer for a law firm. Richard’s main writing focus is his blog Critical-Gaming. After four years of writing, the blog is now over 1.5k pages. A gamer since the age of three, Richard has put his years of passion and experience behind his words. His English degree along with strong academic interests in every subject allows Richard to approach the multi-faceted medium of video games from a wide angle. Figure 9:   Cover image by Richard Terrell 46 01/2012 Vol. 1 No. 1 Monthly In the Upcoming Issue of Codersky Magazine... HTML, XHTML and CSS th Available to download on February 20 SOON IN CODERSKY MAGAZINE! •CSS Techniques •HTML5 apps for iOS •Web Development essentials •Practical Applications and more... If you would like to contact Codersky Team, just send an email to [email protected] or [email protected]. We will reply a.s.a.p.
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