Unity 3d 2d project

I continued working on my 2d project today.  I was able to get some other npc characters to animate.  I added one of the pre-made killzone objects to them so if my character touches them the game restarts.

I was also able to add mobile controls and build an apk and play it on my phone.  It is really hard to play with the pre-made controls and default settings.  The character moves really fast.  It has all been very easy to do so far.

I watched part of a video about sprites and animators to help get started.

Unity 3d exploration

I tried playing around with Unity 3d today.  This was the second time I have played with it.  Last time I made a 3d project and played around with some of the assets we have.  It was pretty cool and pretty easy to get a car setup that I could drive around.  

This time I tried a 2d project.  It was even easier.  They have some sample assets that let you build a game with a little robot guy that can jump on platforms.   I will hopefully be able to create a whole game sometime.

Maybe someday I'll actually finish one of these things I keep posting about.

Progress on Replacing iAds with Admob

I was able to get the first app working with Admob.  It was like I mentioned in the previous post, I had to create the adunit in code.  I was able to find a simple example on Stack Overflow and mostly just use it as is.  I had to create a header file to go along with the example file that was provided and then call that in my viewDidSomethingSomething function.  I don't have it open right now so I can't remember what that is called.

I had it all in place and everything would build and run, but then I was getting an exception.  It turned out I had messed something up by trying to drag things around in some area of XCode where you can graphically see your app.  I reverted a mainwindow.xib file back to what I had started with and everything started working.

I have to do a little more testing to see how it looks in the different simulators and make sure I have my adunit id correct but then I think it is finished.  Then we just have to submit it and get it re-approved by Apple.  That is always a fun process.

Removing iAds from apps

I have several apps published on the Apple Appstore.  Four of them are using iAds and that service is going to be discontinued soon.  I am going to switch them all to use Admob.

I started working on the first one.  It is a pretty basic game that was built for us by a contracted developer.  It has been a few years since it was originally created.  I don't know if it was built poorly or the recommended ways of doing things have just changed since then, but it is not built in a way that works with the basic admob examples.  They suggest that your app use a storyboard and this one does not.

It looks like I will have to create the adunit in code and add it to the view.  I found a few examples of this on Stack Overflow but I haven't had time to try it yet.

I don't have the source code for 2 of the other apps yet, someone is going to send it to me, and the fourth one was built with a framework called Moai.  That last one is going to take some time to get fixed.  I have to setup a development environment for that framework and the framework isn't officially supported anymore from what I can tell.

I'll post more about all this soon I hope.

Service worker offline cache

I continued my exploration of service workers today.  I looked at offline caching  mostly.  Actually a lot of my time was spent messing with some example code that seems incorrect or out of date. I'm going back to my working code now.  I'll just have to slowly modify it to do what I want.

My goal is to have some simple options that I can pass into my framework that would allow turning on an offline cache for a site.  This would include a list of pages and a way to specify other pages that would be dynamically cached.

Just now I had another thought.  I should think about what it would take to make an offline cache of changes to a dynamic site. Then sync those changes when you come back online.

Service Worker Framework

I have started working on my service worker framework or module.  I don't know if it will ever be useful to anyone but me, but I am learning a lot.

I created a base service worker that can be included in the one on my site.  I played around with passing an options object to the service worker using postMessage.  It is pretty interesting playing around with this stuff at this stage of the development.  There seem to be a lot of odd things that can happen.  You see a lot of messages and errors in the console.  I haven't gotten it all sorted out yet.

I am using Chrome for testing this.  You can easily see if you service worker has been registered in the Resources area of the dev tools.  Then you can delete it so it can be re-registered.  I'll try to keep posting more as I continue to work on this.