So I’ve been forced to use OS X a lot these days, what with an iOS project and teaching programming to kids (see Jono’s post). I’ve tried on a few occasions to get comfortable in OS X, and even own an old early G4-based macbook. Well, that is to say, I bought it from my sister for $50 and used it for a few months freshman year before lending it to a friend… long story short it was a nice little reliable laptop which I could carry around with me, check e-mail, browse the web, etc. Basically I used it as a netbook before netbooks were cool.

Continue reading ‘Adding preview to (C#) source files in OS X’

Just a quick update here with a Unity subtlety that tripped me up recently.  I was recently creating a “character controller to rule them all” which involved coordinating various versions of character control, almost exclusively picked from the Unity Standard Assets package.  This means that most of them were Javascript while one or two of the MonoBehaviours involved was a C# script I wrote myself.

The “character master” behavior was a C# script whose job is basically to enable/disable the various MonoBehaviours attached to the character (and camera) object to switch between various move/look schemas.  However, when I was writing this script, none of the controller types were being recognized by MonoDevelop or Unity.  I figured this was just some problem with Javascript scripts not being added to the right namespace, so I did a check and created a test MonoBehaviour type Foo.js and sure enough, I couldn’t create a Foo variable.  I thought “screw it” and just added them all as MonoBehaviours until I came across the need to access specific members of these controllers.  I could swear that I’d used Javascript-described classes in C# before…

Continue reading ‘Standard Assets (Mobile) is not Standard Assets!’

Do it. It’ll change your life.

In rewriting the folderlist for AssetCloud, I came across the need to generate quite a bit of HTML elements via JavaScript, and what I think is a pretty nifty way to do it.  Here’s the backstory:

The AC folderlist, at time of writing, is generated as most PHP pages are, a server-side PHP script which spits out an HTML string based on data from the database.  This works great for most content, since access to the database is very quick, and string data is pretty cheap in terms of bandwidth.  However, a sufficently complex project will have a lot of assets, which will create a folderlist described by a lot of html.  At time of writing, the Platformer folderlist comes in at around 3.2MB (this is just HTML, mind you, no images or anything), and the master folder list (which will crash Chrome if you don’t wait for it) is 5.82MB.  To put those numbers in context, the Platformer list takes 3 full seconds to download, and the master list (for whatever reason) takes a whopping 1.6 minutes to download!  That’s pretty unacceptable by pretty much everyone’s standards.  Read more to see my solution.

Continue reading ‘A nifty way to create HTML from JavaScript’

Howdy folks,

Schoen here, representing the hard-core software branch of the company, here to rant about a recent trial of mine.  I feel this deserves a post because, frankly, I read a few articles/posts which almost-but-not-quite got me all the way there, which I will cite below.  As a disclaimer, and this may be showing too much of my hand, but this is pretty much the first Python I’ve written.  If I’ve committed any faux pas, please correct me in my ways.  If you need to send binary data of HTTP with Python, here’s how (after the jump):

Defective Devblog online, huzzah!  At last, a place for Defective to share with the world their mad science exploits, their starving artist urges, their bleary-eyed prophecies… yeah.  Starting tomorrow.  This little dev is sleepy.

Continue reading ‘Devblog lives, good news in DefectiveLand, happiness for all!’