“The World is moving to HTML 5″

This poignant, yet immediately dated and tautological quote is supposedly from Steve Jobs, as reported by Wired. The article speaks of HTML 5 being used to create sophisticated web pages, and I wholeheartedly agree. If you are building web pages, HTML and JavaScript are almost always the right technologies to use, but we went beyond solely building web pages many years ago. Web pages are not the only type of internet destination, even though the ever vocal standardistas seem to think that’s what everyone wants. I say get your head out of the sand, it’s nice out.

Types of Web Content

We can break down web content into four main categories:

Pages

Pages were once the only type of content to be found in a web browser, primarily there for information display with very little user interaction, they are designed to provide the desired content as fast as possible, as such they tend to use text as the primary method of communication, they work very well with search engines, and they date just as fast as anything else (Microsoft’s first web presence).

Dynamic Pages

We have in this category the semi-interactive stuff that AJAX has found a home with, adding dynamism to an otherwise static page, and it does this stuff very well indeed. In short, it’s all very direct and to the point, it works outstandingly well. If you had to wait for an intro to play before you found out the price of the avocado you want to buy from your online supermarket you’d go elsewhere.

Experience and Brands

Then again, if you’re a 14 year old boy who loves watching Top Gear and you’re being delivered a loud, visceral and engaging experience for a super-car brand, this is the 21st century equivalent of that Ferrari F40 poster on your wall, that aspirational experience now even more compelling; one day you’ll drive that car. It may be interesting to some people to scroll through a highly efficient search engine friendly static page to see this kind of thing, but it’s really very boring for most people. There is a world of purely enjoyable content out there; don’t paint it grey. If you’re trying to build a brand, you have to tell a story.

Applications and Games

This is really a big part of what the web is today. Web-deployed applications and games have proven their worth. Open to wide audiences across multiple platforms, secure, immediately updateable, cheap to develop, and getting ever more sophisticated. If you look at these examples all done in Flash, I’d ask you what else you’d use that ticks all those boxes:

• Aviary - everything from bitmap and vector editors, texture generator to an audio editor, truly incredible.
• Hobnox audio tool - emulates in real time, hardware instruments for creating electronic music.
• Big and Small - Content for kids, it has to be fun and interactive to compete with TV.
• Google Street View - The reality is, the transitions and interaction that make it so impressive, require Flash, and we know Google are pretty much the best in the business at AJAX.

I wouldn’t underestimate the shift to web-based applications, IMHO nearly all applications will be web-based in the next 5 years; applications that include office suites, image and video editors, casual and hardcore games, music production software, and of course the most ubiquitous, social networking and media sharing. All of these are equally deserving of being available to users of a web browser, all of these requiring the most cutting edge technology available in order to stand out from the crowd and avoid being locked into the glacial flow of web standards progression.

Plugins

Plugins drive things forward by letting non-techies bolt on new functionality. Director, Flash, Unity all did or still do their part. Zoom forward 5 years and let us visit a perfect world where all the major browser vendors, including the behemoth Microsoft, have agreed on the various parts of “HTML 5″. Miraculously IE supports the same Canvas abilities and video codecs as the iPhone, Android and Nokia browsers, Mozilla (Firefox) has conceded to paying h264 royalty fees, sites with video content have conceded to paying h264 broadcast fees, everything is gonna be allllright. The issue now is that things are looking a bit dated, the browser can now natively do what Flash applications were doing 5 years ago. This is a never ending game of cat and mouse, no-one can argue one is better than the other when nothing is standing still.

And so what now? What about new technologies, where’s the now ubiquitous multitouch we’re used to seeing since Flash 10.1, since iPhone and Android devices dominated the markets. Maybe that’s in the HTML 6 spec, maybe just in Firefox, how many more years after we start using it does it become standard. Along with multi-touch there will be many more features missing, we will still need plugins. Flash has added a myriad new features that game programmers and web developers are using to create a whole new level of experience that has obliterated the console and desktop software markets. HTML 5 is starting to look a lot like HTML 4 used to. Long in the tooth.

HTML 5

If we come back to today, I think it’s important to clear up just what this HTML 5 really means. It’s more than a spec, in general the term is used to refer to the many sub-technologies involved, including new HTML markup, the Canvas tag for 2D (and possibly in future 3D) static and dynamically scripted graphics, fast JavaScript VM’s like Tamarin (donated by Adobe), a video tag for playing back a choice of video files, and possibly WebGL which aims to bring OpenGL 3D graphics to the web on par with Unity3D perhaps. I need to make it clear that I really want this to happen, no matter how open to feedback Adobe are, no matter how open the SWF format is, it does not sit well with me that one vendor controls what will and will not go in to the runtime, and it’s still a plugin, no matter how easy and fast it installs, something doesn’t quite feel right about it.

But I live in the real world, it’s mainly this technology that I’ve used to pay my way since I was 16, and that doesn’t show any signs of slowing. I am 100% willing to use HTML 5 if it suits the job. I’m not sitting around either, trust me. No flash developers are tied in to using it. But there are too many things stopping me from switching. Let’s take the hot topic of the day, the <video> tag; it doesn’t even replace what you could do with Flash 8 or 9 let alone some of the cool things you can do *right now* (no waiting)…

Video

Flash is not video. The Flash Player was installed on over 90% of internet connected computers before YouTube, when Flash video was limited to the early Sorenson Spark codec, optimised for small files that performed really badly at anything larger than 320x240, and 8 years ago when performance was so bad with Flash video we were using postage stamp sized video, but it was the immediacy of the playback that made it successful over more powerful plugins like Quicktime, WMV or Real Player. Either way, Flash video clearly changed the web, no more picking a plugin, picking your bandwidth, looking at truly ugly system chrome, so let’s look at what we need to see from HTML 5 video for it to displace Flash as the most efficient, cost effective and flexible solution:

• DRM - Boo, evil. Whatever your personal view on DRM, broadcast corporations want it.
• True multi-bitrate streaming - Efficient live feeds across the globe that alters bitrate to suit current bandwidth, multicast (Flash Player 10 also supports a P2P UDP to take pressure off the server, or provide much faster messaging in games).
• Internet Explorer - The truth of the matter is that it has to work with IE. If you’re using Flash as a fallback, as suggested by ALL current HTML 5 video player supporters, why are you making more work for yourself? For a simple video player fine, but a lot of video is increasingly interactive. YouTube for example overlay recommendations, annotations, detected music, and even live commenting, you really want to do this twice?

If >this< is the cream of the crop right now, and it doesn’t even work in Firefox or Internet Explorer (percentages?), what is there to shout about?

Yeah but Flash eats 100% of my CPU

In a sentence: so do the most basic HTML 5 experiments (link).

An empty SWF consumes ~0% of my CPU, funnily enough the same amount as an empty web page. When something eats 100% of the CPU, it’s because is is doing something computationally expensive, possibly animating high quality 32-bit images whilst applying real time bitmap effects so that you can see just how that logo will look on this crumpled T-Shirt before you send it off to be printed. The CPU usage is not automatically higher with Flash, it’s down to the design and programmer to figure out what they want to achieve, and optimise it to whatever they find acceptable for their intended audience. JavaScript can and does use 100% CPU in some of the best apps out there, we just don’t see many apps that are up to the level of the Flash apps linked to earlier in this post. Video acceleration is a fair point until you consider video is also a display object in the Flash Player that can have these filters, transformations and so on applied in real time, that comes at a cost, however with Flash Player 10.1 hardware acceleration is starting to come into play, a truly impressive feat for such a small cross platform runtime.

If we kill Flash, we kill annoying banner ads

It’s also the case that displacing Flash will not get rid of annoying banner ads, agencies will just use <canvas> and <video>, don’t kid yourself, it’ll be those same Flash developers making it, they would simply re-tool and utilise their existing experience to produce infuriating ads in whatever makes the biggest impact. The internet is only less annoying with things like FlashBlock because only a tiny drop in the ocean of internet users use Flash block so they scoot under the radar. They are excluding themselves from the mainstream for this small benefit and more power to you for doing that, it’s up to you.

Browser integration

This is a major sorepoint for me as my primary job has been developing ever more complex Flash applications that are deployed on the web and on the desktop (indeed to replace existing desktop apps). You can communicate in real time between JavaScript and Flash, passing simple and complex data types between them, but it’s still a black box on the page. This is a really tough nut to crack, if you spend just 10 minutes asking yourself how you could get a native desktop application that you’ve embedded in a page to play well with the HTML around it, you’ll see why it simply doesn’t make sense, we shouldn’t try to shoe-horn these things.

The Semantic Web and Accessibility

Another gotcha. I can absolutely agree these things are so very important, depending on the content. What on earth is the point of making accessible a site where the entire aim is to build a burger out of people dressed up as beef, buns and lettuce, running and jumping on one another in a video montage. You may think the site should not exist anyway, but who are we to dictate what kind of content can be put online. Some idiots love this stuff and clearly so did Burger King! What about a game like Dofus? Semantics and accessibility don’t apply to everything. You can build Flash sites to be accessible, you can build them on top of a CMS like Drupal to make sure you get the best of both worlds. In summary, use the right tool for the job.

Mobile

This one is very important to me. Hand on heart, devices that we now consider mobile: phones and tablets; these are going to be how 90% of people use computers, period. There’s simply no need for bulky laptops and desktops for non-professionals. Wireless TV connections let you get that big screen experience when you need it, but the redundancy in devices will be huge. This became clear in my own circle of entirely non-geek friends already, almost exclusively using mobile devices for everything, and this at the very beginning of the full-on shift to web-apps.

It became quite clear to me in 2007 (link) that Flash was never going to do well on mobile until it was the same runtime as the one we were using on the web, especially when it was licensed per handset. Funnily enough I called that convergent version “Flash X", and it turns out “X", by pure coincident, was right, in a roman numerals kinda way. Flash 10.1 has been optimised to run on lower powered CPUs like ARM chips found in iPhones and Android devices.

Hating Adobe

The animosity directed at Adobe is unusual. They simply invest in whatever proves popular in order to generate revenue, and they’ve had a lot of popular HTML/JS editing tools, even demoing Canvas support in the next Dreamweaver IDE. When Director started to die, occasionally being used for the odd online 3D game, and Flash took off, they invested time and money into creating what they like to call the Flash Platform. A range of commercial and open source tools, open-spec file formats for rich media, binary data transfer and a video container, a runtime, and a few free and commercial serverside offerings. They are not forcing anyone to use this stuff, if we stop using it they will move on like they have in the past, investing in whatever it is people do want to code in. In my opinion, Adobe will be the second big player, after Apple, to fully embrace HTML 5 in their software, with Microsoft lagging behind a very long way.

Conclusion

To everyone shouting support for HTML 5 as the flash killer, if that were really possible don’t you think Flash developers would already be doing it? We are a thriving community positively chomping at the bit to try out new stuff, I’m presenting on Android at a Flash user group shortly, we don’t hang around. We weren’t born knowing ActionScript 1, 2 or 3 and we have to live in the real world, we may even be right next to you Indeed many Flash developers are also HTML/JS developers and may practice a serverside language in smaller companies. It just leads to frustration when we hear “use HTML 5″ when it is not supported even across desktop browsers. What version of IE should we be targeting before we can start building the rich compelling experiences we’re used to.

The world will move to HTML X when Flash X is not needed, it is a non-argument, no amount of insane zealous preaching from within the idealist world of either side will make this happen in the real world. The market will use whatever tools provide the best solutions for the best return on investment.

I can’t wait till we get through this next transitionary period, with web designers having to spend twice the effort providing Flash fallbacks to video, companies encoding and hosting their videos twice for Firefox, licenses and royalties for h264, this will be another messy, frustrating time for web users and progress may slow, but I can’t see a way around it.

In my brief career as a programmer, I’ve dabbled with DirectX, starting with version 7. I found it incredibly cryptic as a mid-teen but by this time just about all console games had gone 3D, so I wanted to know how all of this worked. I never really touched OpenGL, it seemed like some sort of abandoned standard at the time, all the cool kids were off building stuff in DirectX, but I was to later realise this was just plain FUD.

More recently I’ve spent some evenings dabbling in Android and OpenGL ES. This is one of those things that if I don’t get on top of soon, I will totally be kicking myself in future; my perpetual bleeting about how big Android will be is not a well kept secret. Of course Android devices supports OpenGL ES, specifically 1.1 and in the newer devices 2.0. It’s a bit of a misnomer that OpenGL isn’t as powerful as DirectX, certainly John Carmack of id software, creators of the ongoing Doom and Quake series doesn’t think so. It’s true that most PC and XBox games use DirectX, and even that DirectX supports more advanced features, but it’s important to consider that the PS3 uses OpenGL ES (PSGL) as well as many, many devices…

This, when combined with the rapid acceleration of mobile GPUs, could be the most important shift in the 10 year battle between SGI’s OpenGL and Microsoft’s DirectX. In a nutshell, devices tend to exclusively support OpenGl ES. iPhones and Android powered handsets are multiplying; these are quickly spawning countless new games, from studios old and new, big and small, all coding for OpenGL ES. So could it be that this is the unexpected trojan horse, or was this outcome built into the very DNA of an open standard like OpenGL?

Another interesting rumour is Microsoft’s XBox live going mobile, which we can only presume will run exclusively on Win Mobile devices, and that would mean DirectX (?). Yet another twist in the tale is the ethereal WebGL, which when solidified promises to bring 3D to the web once and for all, and in doing so, bring it to all manner of platforms. So all in all the future is looking quite good for OpenGL, but there’s still plenty to play for.

As further food for thought, you may find this article on “Why you should use OpenGL over DirectX” of interest which was posted just recently.

So the Nexus One, possibly erroneously construed as the “Google Phone", when in reality Google have already sold two Android dev phones. The N1 is more like the first of many in a Google Phone shop, which if you ask me is pretty much like Phones 4 U. A way of purchasing a sim-free or network contracted phone from a broker.

I was a little hesitant about this phone, it was invariably going to be compared to the iPhone due to the way it was positioned, the capabilities, the Android market and the form factor (albeit slimmer). So with that on with the review…

Hardware

It has the usual “superphone” (more on that another time) credentials; a large capacitive touchscreen (albeit a much improved OLED), sensors galore, but the most standout feature is probably the 1GHz Snapdragon CPU. It’s a huge risk to put such a beast in a small device with current battery technology. This thing has the potential to drink a lithium ion like a student with a beer bong. The Acer A1 (which I had very briefly) suffers from this, it just cannot tame the CPU to satisfy the tiny battery. It’s not just the CPU burning through electrons, Android itself is architected to be a multi-tasking, never-quit-an-app OS. But I’m pleased to say N1 deals with this well without resorting to task-killer apps. The battery is large enough (but if a 2000mAh came out of course I’d get it), and it managed memory hyper effectively through Android 2.1 and a couple of power management chips on the motherboard.

It’s fair to continue to make comparisons to the iPhone 3GS, there are a few things the iPhone wins out on, which considering it’s an older device is still encouraging, but on the whole the N1 is equally polished, with a super hard yet soft to the touch Teflon coating, it’s what the iPhone might look like if aesthetics weren’t so highly weighted in the design (that’s not a dig, it’s a design philosphy that makes Apple products so desirable). Every lesson and trick learned from building and using the iPhone has been considered by HTC.

The N1 comes with 512Mb of RAM (yep!), but only 4Gb of space on the SD card in order to reduce the purchase cost. The point it it’s a removable micro-SD card, these things already cost peanuts, come in up to 32Gb (for the iPhone comparison), and will continue to fall in price as the sizes go up this year.

The camera is a good 5MP shooter, with intelligent focus, LED flash, and a good lense. I think the one to look out for in this department will be the Sony Ericsson X10, which has all their camera know-how surrounding an 8MP ready to blitz the competition. Without going onto talking about Android itself just yet, suffice to say your immediate sharing options are impressive.

There are plenty of little touches which make it pleasant to use. The myriad sensors; proximity to dim the screen and prevent accidental touches, compass to support immersive augmented reality, trackball which if you ask me provides that essential accuracy required for some tasks which touch-screens can really let you down on, and doubles up as a tri-color indicator for notifications. The combination of these sensors and powerful CPU really starts to make sense when you try applications like Google Goggles. This is a visual search app, you point the camera, shoot, it scans the image for text and details, and will recognise and bring up results for books, barcodes, media, paintings, scan business cards and plenty more. The thing is, it’s so fast, the scan takes several seconds on the Acer, on the N1 it does it in one swipe, and on the N1 it also adjusts the flash brighter and dimmer until it gets a good image.

I had heard of it’s secondary mic, used for noise cancellation, but I didn’t expect to have someone remark on the quality of the call the first time I made one, comparable to a good quality land-line.

Software

Perhaps a killer feature of Android is Google’s role on the net. If you are a Google user, you will get a shockingly good setup experience. I entered my email address and password, it downloaded my calendars, gmail, contacts (with photos and maps) and that was it, setup was 1 click. Even more scary, it also populated my Gallery with live images from my Picasa account, which I use as a backup for Flickr, but I may switch over now.

Android is through and through a web OS. You really get a feeling for interconnectivity between apps and services on Android. Not only does it allow developers to write any app they desire with no approval required, you can write background services, fullscreen apps, widgets or live wallpapers. The OS itself it built on top of a system of notifications and intents that allow these things to communicate and interact in a secure manner. So when you open a photo you get sharing options for all the apps that registered as such, Picasa, Flickr, Email, SMS, from built-in to 3rd party and back again.

For the developers reading this, you can write in Java (optionally using XML layouts), Webkit (HTML/JS/CSS) or native C using the ADT plugin for Eclipse and supplied emulator. However the way it has been built allows you to leverage all the layers below, so you can write an app in JavaScript using Webkit, and embed a Java or native C class exposed as a javascript function, for real number crunching power.

The OS itself is responsive and polished, but it doesn’t do anything to sacrifice what is so important in devices you rely on when you need something done fast, devices such as phones and cars. When designing a touch-screen devices it’s easy to lose speed and efficiency amongst gloss and animation, that’s why the N1 has a Car Home app that provides instant voice enabled access to navigation, search and calling (I’ve heard this app can be launched whenever you put it in a car docking cradle). On top of that every text input is voice enabled, you can speak your search input or SMS messages. This can be a complete joke on some devices, but Google does this on a server, a server that has been learning from millions of Google Voice transcripts the last couple of years, this makes it very accurate indeed.

App-Store vs. Android Market

I can’t believe those professional journalists saying that there’s no competition because the App-Store has ~120k apps, and Android Market only has ~20k… Surely that’s a given because of how long these devices have been out, the Android Market targets a much much wider range of devices from several manufacturers from phones to tablets and TVs, and dare I say a great deal more potential customers than the App-Store. It’s just a matter of months.

The purchase experience is definitely better than the App-Store in 2.1. The Market app (screenshot) itself is much like the App-Store app, full-screen image previews, top free/paid, and purchase is a single click with instant download and install. Apple have the edge on how it looks, but with Market you can purchase a paid app and refund it within 24 hours, this gets around approval/testing because if it doesn’t work on a brand new handset yet you can just refund it, it also means you don’t always need a trial version (however that can be a good marketing technique).

You can of course also purchase direct from developers because you do not have to use Google’s own Market, or you can use some 3rd party markets that have sprung up, in particular for adult content.

So that’s it, a pretty positive review so far. I’ll update if anything changes. HTC are one to watch in 2010 that’s a given. Something that I’ve taken away from this is that we are finally getting to where us mobile-fanatics have been wanting to get to for some time. That was the promise that your mobile would be your primary device, not your laptop or desktop. IMHO, laptops and desktops will be the exclusive domain of software developers.

Unfortunately having used 3DS Max, Maya and Blender myself, it’s very clear Blender has always suffered from a desperately unforgiving user interface. By that I mean you really need some help learning the basics, there are so many things that it simply expects you to know the shortcut key for due to the minimal interface, but this has improved significantly just recently.

Of course this ties in nicely to the book review, which is of course the perfect thing to bridge that gap between initial bewilderment, and zen guru-like control of Blender.

Blender 3D 2.49 Incredible Machines written by Allan Brito is suitable for people who already have basic knowledge of Blender, but not necessarily loads. I recommend you follow the intro tutorials before diving in.

The books theme, if you hadn’t guessed, is beautiful mechanical creatures, machines, spacecraft and weapons. The theme could have been anything, but this one nicely captures the imagination, and deals heavily with polygonal modeling especially suitable for game assets.

I’ve mentioned poly(gonal) modeleling, in fact that’s the first technique encountered, you can model almost anything using this process, starting with a crude plane or cube, extruding, splitting and rotating faces until you end up with a boxy looking figure which can be further refined or smoothed to the required finish and detail. The weapon chosen, a rifle, provides most of the usual stumbling blocks you’d encounter and neatly explains the tools and techniques required to complete the model.

The next subject is the Yafray rendering engine, which can provide ultra realistic ray traced graphics, suitable for motion graphics, FMVs or stills. Of course this chapter also covers applying materials to the models and setting up light sources to set the scene and add realism.

We then move on to more advanced modelling, this time a steampunk spacecraft. This section is much more difficult, I learned some new techniques such as extruding bezier curves along a path and then twisting the solid 3D result in order to form some twisted cables. Finally UV mapping is covered, unfolding the entire model to apply texture details to all the panels and surfaces. This is increasingly relevant for other Flash developers, using engines like Away3D and Papervision, you will no doubt have to use these techniques along the way (along with texture baking of course).

Now something all geeks love, particles. Blender has a fully customisable built in particle engine in this case used to produce the spacecraft exhaust.

The book then moves on to even more advanced techniques, used to create a robot. These include some of the built in modifiers (something I always found very accessible in 3DS Max, but less so in Blender). The author uses LuxRender to apply some bling in the highly reflective metallic textures. In fact here’s a great video that shows the end result…

Finally we complete the project with animation, using pivots and curves, this pretty much covers the majority of what you’d want to do in Blender (unless you are using the game engine).

This book immediately gets my vote because quite simply, imho, when getting to grips with Blender you can do with as much help as possible. It’s a truly amazing application but getting tips and techniques like these from the experienced guys is great.

You can buy the book from Packt as PDF or hardcopy.

So when I need to look at the files my app’s store in the applicationStorageDirectory I often find myself googling for the file-system paths on Windows, particularly Windows Vista and 7. Here’s a list of the paths for your and my reference:

• Windows XP: c:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Application Data\APP_NAME
• Win Vista/7: c:\users\USERNAME\appdata\roaming\APP_NAME
• OSX: /Users/USERNAME/Library/Preferences/APP_NAME
• Linux (ubuntu): /Users/USERNAME/.appdata/

Also worth remembering that when running with adl/Flash Builder the storage folder will be named simply “APP_NAME", but when installed as an application the folder would append a publisher ID for AIR 1.5.2 apps (e.g."APP_NAME.1234567.8″), however from AIR 1.5.3 apps this is no longer true, it will maintain the simple “APP_NAME” folder name. (See AIR 1.5.3 release notes).

If you are using the migration strategy (adding <publisherid></publisherid> to your app manifest) for AIR 1.5.2 -> 1.5.3 your app storage folder will keep this publisher ID so files are still readable from AIR 1.5.3. Please correct me in the comments if any of this is wrong.

Unity (website) is an integrated development environment for Windows and Mac designed to allow hobbyists and professionals alike to create fully-featured games that can be deployed on the web, on the desktop (Mac and PC) and a growing number of consoles and devices including iPhone, Wii and soon XBox 360 (I’d be stunned if Android isn’t in the pipeline). It now comes in two flavours, free and pro. The free edition has some limitations such as a splash screen logo and certain advanced rendering techniques are not available (more info here). It supports a wide variety of file formats for models, textures and sounds, and games can be scripted in either JavaScript or C#, or indeed both.

In a nutshell, this book takes the reader through the basic concepts associated with building games in Unity, from manipulating objects in 3D space, importing assets, collision detection and scripting events, all the way through to putting it all together in an island-themed game which is built up of several mini games. Those of you who know Unity know that the Tropical Island Demo that really blows other web-ready 3D plugins out of the water.

Introducing the various elements in these mini-games is a nice way to introduce the various layers of features Unity provides, and it fits in well with how Unity is built, which allows novices to import and customise pre-made components through simple inspectors, but also allows professionals to create and script entirely custom elements. This makes for a gentler learning curve and plenty of play along the way, which should keep you from getting bogged down with too many new things too soon.

Having read through all of the bundled online documentation before, it’s clear to see this book manages to strike a good balance between being a reference and a guided tutorial, which makes it a much friendlier read without sacrificing important detail. It’s always tricky to pick up a new tool that has so much to it because you’re faced with a wall of many new terms. What’s a “RigidBody", a “Collider", a “Material” compared to a “Texture". I found the book gave very good short summaries of all of these things as we encountered them, and this greatly speeds up learning because you can quickly refer back to these pages whilst they set in.

To give you an idea of just what is covered in the book, here’s a list of the main topics:

• The concepts and terms used in Unity and 3D games in general.
• Setting up a level, terrain and an environment/world.
• Adding controllable players.
• Scripting interactions between objects and players.
• Creating re-usable assets and dynamically instantiating them.
• Using the physics engine (to make a coconut shy game!)
• Using the particle systems.
• Designing a menu and GUI interaction.
• Packaging it all up for web, desktop and dashboard widget.

This is a very brief summary of what’s included, of course there’s plenty more around this. I enjoyed reading this, so I can imagine Will enjoyed writing it. I would be happy to recommend this to any level of reader, although you’ll clearly have a far easier time if you already know a programming language, particularly if you already know ActionScript or JavaScript (there are a few Flash analogies given). So if you have some spare time coming up over the holidays this is a great way to expand your skills whilst having fun with particle emitters and explosions.

You can buy the book at Packt Publishing as a hard-copy or eBook, and you can find Will at http://learnunity3d.com/.

They are kindly sending a copy so I’ll have a review on here shortly, but for now there’s a sample chapter PDF download here.

Conditional Compilation

Just for some background, the Flex compiler supports what is known as conditional compilation. This allows you to set one or more constants via a compiler flag which is then made accessible from anywhere in your code. This may be a boolean, a string, a number and so on. Within your code you can read this value and switch between using certain methods, or execute blocks of code depending on the value it contains.