Changed my mind on this statement. I guess I was just really hoping that they would publish a SDK and have an AppStore… but they have still not released one for the current AppleTV Puck..  but I was wondering what if they don’t for a year or so after releasing the mythical AppleTV?

Apple make ~30% either way – So they may not really care if content providers sell content through iTunes or some custom store-front…  but.. what if the SDK does not come for a long while and nobody else can build a store-front and publish it as an App?

If Apple ever release a TV and release it without a SDK, (like they did the iPhone) and it becomes the hot ‘must be on’ platform, it could result in a sudden consolidation of content on existing Apple TV store-fronts  Netflix, iTunes, Hulu and maybe iTunes/Vimeo (once they get their pay per view features released).

Apple seems to have maintained a constant 15-20% share of the smartphone market since launch of the iPhone. I’m extrapolating from this.

The iPhone went from 0 to a significant market share in 12 months but I don’t know if it’s possible to replicate that with AppleTV given that TV’s are upgraded on a much longer time-scale compared to phones.

We don’t know what the delay would be between the release and the SDK.  For the iPhone it was 6 months.

This could be good for store-front developers  if some big players, reacting to the hype generated by the AppleTV release want to rapidly go to everything else but Apple because ‘everything else’ will still have a bigger market share than Apple.

The downside for store-front developers is that it may also force a lot of content providers into iTunes/YouTube, and they may get to like it.

At this point my gut feeling and some back of the napkin calculations are that if Apple launched a TV it would take them 3 years to reach 15% – unless they released something so revolutionary and ‘highly affordable’ that nothing else made sense to buy.

The features in any Smart  TV are obsoleted by a $200 STB within 2 years – the screen is what matters and the incoming 4k and H.265 standards have put a nail in the coffin of the current generation of Smart TVs.

A technology that competes on screen and features at a 5-10 year cycle can’t keep up with a device that competes only on features at fraction of the price.

Apple are going to have to put a 4k screen in and a very very future proof set of features (fast CPU, not a mobile phone engine, but a PC or console engine) – so I think it’s a no-brainer that if the guts of the AppleTV are any good , it is not going to be ‘highly affordable’.

My opinion is that Apple would be stupid to make a Smart TV and should make an affordable dumb 4k screen with some clever embedded sensors and an upgraded AppleTV puck with a PVR and get people to upgrade the puck every few years.

But Apple will probably want to do something amazing. Maybe they will make it desirable to upgrade your TV every 2 years?  An upgradable motherboard slot for the TV? Upgrade via a puck? Maybe something ‘different’.

My guess is that they are aiming with one product to expand into the game console market and try and take over the IPTV PVR market too.

Also.. the new Xbox720 is rumoured to have HDMI pass-through which is a clear indicator that they are going for  ‘always on’ and control of whatever is passed through the XBox.  I see funky Kinect augmented interfaces in our future.

Apple vs Microsoft war for the lounge room  – here we come.

In my last post I mentioned that there was a problem in X/Y translations of hexagon ‘bitmaps’.

I was a little worried when in the middle of this I realised the hexagon substrate mapping and rendering method has been chosen on instinct, for efficiency. It was this packing/rendering method that was making the complication in X.Y translations. I’m not unpacking rectangular bitmaps into a regular space, but a zig/zaggy serpentine one.

If there was a good reason to opt for a different rendering method then I really wanted to know about it now so I could simply things all the way down now, before I built on-top of it. 

So my firsts step was to prove that the rendering method was better than the alternative. In the end I managed to come up with a nice little ‘proof’ (to myself) and could move on.

Seems it uses 15% less effort by the GPU and the code is simpler because it is susceptible to come cool logic tricks.

So all is now good – We have some consistent translations at least for this test case.

Compare this to what was in my previous post.

Tomorrow I will create some more tests and see if this is a complete fix.

Once this is verified, Turtle Time!

First issue with bitmaps, distortion introduced by displacement transformation errors.  A 6×4 bitmap will not render the same if it is on an odd X boundary. There is a whole class of these issues depending on the type of hexagon tessellation you are dealing with (flat or pointy). I have the added complexity that I am dropping between dimensions from smaller to larger tessellations and need to translate coordinates between dimensions.

One of these things is not like the other.

So it was to the hexagon graph paper to work out the general scheme.

Hence my curious tweet.

Ships See Each Other

Fire!

Aftermath!

Mining from the ‘Youroid’ and gathering resources.

Building A Spaceport and building a SpaceShip.

We have been doing some design in the background on and off over the last few months,

Here are some images from our designs.

Hexagons For Building Space Vehicles

Hexagons For Building On A Planet

I’ve kind-of been in a daze since I got back and I’ve really only caught up on everything this week.

Lost of news but I’ll put the detail in another post some time.

In the last few months you will have not seen many updates unless you are following me on Twitter.

Here are the highlights since our last post.

15th September

Working On Game Mode Designs

Galaxy Mode

3rd September

Transcribing Our Designs into Adobe illustrator

18th August

Teaching Mr11 how to convert coordinate systems to convert world to screen coordinates

12 June

Almost have a general equation for nested hexagons

Working on a general algorithm for nested hexagons

Working on a general algorithm for nested hexagons

Working on a general algorithm for nested hexagons

9th June

Tonight Mr11 and I worked on our hex drawing algorithm.

Using Moo Burger drawing paper with Mr11 to get equations for second level hex squares

Also testing out light box for making our UI paper animations.

Making good progress on the cross-platform framework. The proof of concept shell now runs on Sony Vita, XBox360, PC, Pac, Android and Windows.

And Mr 11 has been modelling some gameplay in Little Big Planet

We have been reading this….

…and we are following the process as close as possible, so we are now up to the “High Concept Document” which we will share soon.

Decided that to document some of the user interface nuances we needed some kind of stop motion capture system. Back in the day when I was more hands-on in UI/UX I had a lot of success prototyping with paper animations and with Mr10 raring to go we turned this into a fun project.

So I took a pair of polystyrene containers, joined them together…

.. and we carved up a stop motion studio. Access from two sides and a secure mounting point for the camera on top. When we were finished I used a soldering iron to hot-knife and seal the edges so that we didn’t get polystyrene beads throughout the house.

Combined with some pins and some transparent plastic we can build layers of interface and animate them in real time with video or with stop-motion.

We started by creating paper mock-ups for the start-up sequence,

The company logo …

The engine logo … Mr10 had some wonderful ideas as to how this should animate, and a new way of erasing ink

The part of our flow was the login screen. The start-up sequence is modeled on Minecraft. You need a login to play so before the main menu, we have a gateway to pass. We also wanted the name of the game in Hex behind this. This is the point where we want to have UI elements and we want to really play with the Hex theme in the UI as well.

We thought about some ideas as to using the hex overlay grid for the UI elements.

Borders using Hex

Alternate layouts for widgets,

Fonts using Hex

The joys of Hex

We took the Hex theme to the extreme and ended up with deciding on three layers of related Hex, one generated from the next that will give us borders different levels of detail and we hope, when it comes together, something in keeping with the theme of the game.

Next week we will use this layout as the basis to design the UI for the game. This week I need to create a generator that will create a PDF template for us,

I have resurrected my decades old physics engine. See these videos. (1 , 2, 3)

I have been comparing various game development frameworks, at this point MonoGame is looking like the platform of choice. I have working code on PC, Mac, iOS and Android. Path looks clear for XBox-360 and possibly even the  PS3, Wii and Vita based on the gossip on the internets.

I want everything (within reason) in the game to be a plugin. I have managed to build a plugin engine and get downloadable plugins in MonoGame working on PC, Mac and iOS. I’ve modeled this on the way that Minecraft starts up and downloads content and updates. I want users to download a single small executable that can then pull everything down it needs and patch itself transparently.  Unlike Minecraft I want plugins to be officially supported and available in an Eclipse/apt/Drupal/Pear style system of official and unofficial plugin repositories, or even just downloading from a URL.

Plugins for Android seems to be giving me trouble but at this point I’m not aiming for plugins to work completely on Phones and tablets. Working plugins under iOS is a cool win but I need to carefully re-read the Apple Store policy on downloadable code. I know they are particular about some scenarios and I have a hunch what I want to do may be frowned upon.

We have started the story-boarding and design of the game. Mr10 just loves the creative imagination and play that comes with this phase of defining not just the game, but the universe and back-story.

I have a plugin and download manager developed and I have the intro/logo screens running as plugins. See this video.

I’m easing myself into MonoGame learning all the basics with the intro screens before I dive into porting my engine from C++/GL, to MonoGame/XNA

Mr10 has been putting his Photoshop skills to work. He has actually had lessons in the most recent CS Photoshop and plays with it for so he is full of good advice and knows how to use it better than I do.

Here he is with a near final version of our ‘company’ logo for the game,

Next step is to map out the scenarios on how we can construct things in the game.

We have made some hex tokens we can use to try out some paper prototype scenarios.

I’m working on a template for each of the blocks that will explain how they work and more importantly the rules for the cellular automata that will define how they interact together.

Over the next few Sunday afternoons we should have a firmer idea as to most enjoyable and intuitive way for people to be able to construct ships and mines.