Browsing articles from "November, 2011"

Looking for (many) Unity3D & NodeJS developers

Nov 21, 2011   //   by Tuomas Artman   //  2 Comments

Shanghai U-Baby is looking for a Unity3D developers, Unity3D trainees and NodeJS platform developers to join our ever growing team of talented game developers. Shanghai U-Baby is a, Shanghai based (go figure) gaming company focusing on online games development and publishing for kids and youngsters and is backed by top-tier Chinese and Silicon Valley venture capitalists. Our group of companies employs more than 200 people and our games have reached almost 30 million users in China.

To apply, send an informal application, CV and contact information to tuomas-at-52vali.com, outlining why you would be a good candidate for the position.

Unity3D developer

Required experience and skills

  • Prior experience in Game development with Unity3D in either C# or JavaScript
  • Familiarity with Studio3D Max or Maya and Unity art/development pipeline
  • Good eye for design
  • Experience with extending the Unity editor
  • Basic knowledge of network development
  • Must have shipped at least one project with Unity
  • Interest in games

Optional skills

  • Experience with NodeJS / JavaScript a big plus
  • Experience with other web development languages
  • SCRUM master
  • Flash and ActionScript proficiency
  • Knowledge in SVN / Git
  • Good spoken / written Mandarin

Unity3D developer trainee

Not yet a experienced Unity developer, but always wanted tyo be?

Required experience and skills

  • Prior experience in any of the following languages: ActionScript, JavaScript, C#
  • Prior experience in Game development using any tool or programming language
  • Eagerness to learn Unity3D
  • Good eye for design
  • Interest in games

Optional skills

  • Experience with NodeJS / JavaScript a big plus
  • Experience with other web development languages
  • Flash and ActionScript proficiency
  • Knowledge in SVN / Git
  • Good spoken / written Mandarin

Games Platform developer

U-Baby is working on a unified Games Platform / Framework to power all of our future games using multiple clients and a NodeJS/MongoDB-based back-end.

Required experience and skills

  • Experience in developing with NodeJS OR experience building generic games platforms
  • Experience with either Flash or Unity3D
  • Experience with Database design & ORM
  • Professional knowledge of developing network applications
  • Interest in games

Optional skills

  • Flash and ActionScript proficiency
  • Experience with MongoDB
  • Experience with Git and creating deployment scenarios
  • Good spoken / written Mandarin

2 Comments

  • Very nice Yu Yuan pic. How much did you pay to artist/photographer to use it for corporate reasons? Or did you steal it?

    • Interesting point. I didn’t pay anything, neither did I ask the author, you (in hindsight, maybe I should have). However, It’s hard to argue that this is copyright infringment or stealing as the image still resides on Flickr, is publicly visible and it actually links back to your page.

      From your comment I take that you don’t want me to link back to it, do I removed the image. Sorry for any badwill caused.

      But this indeed raises the interesting question on when and under what circumstances inline linking of images is ok. I don’t think there has been a case of this in the western courts yet, has there?

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I’ve seen the future, and it’s a 4k WebGL browser intro

Nov 17, 2011   //   by Tuomas Artman   //  No Comments

Have a look at this. That’s the source code for one of the first (cool) 4k WebGL browser intros. For those unworthy, 4k stands for under 4 kilobytes. That’s like, well, about as much as a animated gif smiley-face in Skype takes.

Now look at the result (with Chrome).

Oh wow. Good 4k’s used to be the last bastion that of desktop applications that were hard, if not impossible, to create using JavaScript. Check out the post-mortem here.

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Flash was never alive, so it can’t be dead

Nov 13, 2011   //   by Tuomas Artman   //  8 Comments

update: apple didn't kill flash, html5 did.It’s been one and a half years since I posted my take on the debacle between Flash devs vs. HTML5 enthusiasts. Now, for obvious reasons, there’s a lot of this bullshit flying through the wires of the internets once again.

First off, let me congratulate most of the tech journalists for once again showing that they really don’t know what they are writing about. “Adobe kills Flash for mobile”, “Flash is dead”, “Flash for mobile devices killed”, just to quote some of the headlines. I think there’s a great leap from “We’re going to stop development of the Flash Player for the *browser* of mobile devices” to “Flash is dead”, right?

I’ve always, and will always use the best technology to suit each service, game or campaign I built. The “best technology” for a job can be defined in a simple formula: impact multiplied by reach. If you are able to create impact without reach, you have nothing. So I would rather say that Flash for the mobile web (to spell it out: on a mobile device’s web browser) was never even alive. Sure, we had a few funny Android devices that could play back Flash content embedded on web pages, but have you ever thought of telling your client (or boss) to build a solution with a technology that has about 5% penetration? I sure hope not.

Given the weak penetration of the Flash Player for the mobile web, exactly what has changed after Adobe announced FP’s mobile browser development discontinuation? That’s right, absolutely nothing.

So please tell me, disregarding Adobe’s announcement, why exactly  do you think Flash is once again dead?

8 Comments

  • It’s not so much that Adobe have just stopped development of the Mobile player. Its more the case of whats happened slowly since the launch of the IPad.
    It’s been a slow move away from flash in general. Why because the Agency’s which used to commission flash, now don’t because they want things to work on an IPad.

    The logic goes:
    We want something to do this, but it must work on an IPad.
    We can’t do that with Javascript.

    1)
    Well what can you do.
    This.
    Ok then that will have to do.

    Or 2)
    Ok then can we do it as an App.
    Sure.
    Ok then do that.

    If its 2) then great build it using Air.

    • With every leap in technology you have to take a few steps back. in 1996 I used to work for a company that did multimedia CD-Roms. The media was fantastic; you could create very expressive content with lots of graphics, video, audio, etc. The only big problem was reach. You had to physically distribute the CD’s to people to be able to enjoy your content. The internet solved that, but it did come with a price. No more video, audio, animations. It took about 5 years for the internet to evolve (with the help of Flash) into a media that would be as expressive as the CD ROM used to be.

      You could argue that in the past three or four years we’ve hade the same thing with the mobile internet (less bandwidth, slower CPU’s, little screen real-estate). However, the fact that we now can reach a big audience while they are away from their home or workplace outweights all of these shortcomings.

  • To stay in the lead… Flash devs aren’t angry because they have to learn something new. They’re angry because they must adapt to something currently inferior, and messy stacks of JS libraries, mostly hacking & not to mention all the Inconsistencies of HTML/CSS being rendered on different browsers. (who Came up with the name “Standards” to these technologies, do they even know what it means?)

    From my end – If you’re going to force us developers to use HTML5 (cause every browser reads it, differently). The Web Dev community is Still in search for an HTML5 framework to develop “Flex Apps”.

    Yeah, Flex Applications, with the ease of extending & skinning.

    • I’m definitely not saying that Android has only 5% market share. I’m saying that Flash runs on 5% (wild guess) of all mobile browsers. Flash doesn’t run on all Android devices. People have feature phones.

  • Joseph is soooo right!

    It’s really sad how marketing buzz can change the game to the worse. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_HTML5_and_Flash#Apple%20and%20Flash )

    Now let’s kick some ass with Stage3D to show the advance and further potential of Flash, especially at gaming! The impact on users could be comparable to the ‘video impact’: Online video didn’t really take off until a de-facto web video standard was established – the Flash player. For online gaming with top-notch graphics this _matured_ platform with a broad dev community, reach and _efficient_ development times (language, tooling, powerful APIs!) could become the leading technology.

  • Just forgot: And thanks for the good article, good and true point!

  • Great article! One of the things that trouble me is on the video front, which is one of the biggest uses of Flash. Now video sites, who used to be able to encode to FLV and forget it, now has to supply MPEG 4 and either OGG or WebM formats. From this point forward that isn’t a big problem, but what about video sites that have been around for a few years and have tens of thousands of videos? Now they have to go back and encode everything to the new formats, plus retain FLV for those people who are still using browsers that don’t support HTML5 video (more than 1/2 of IE users as of October 2011).

    Given the browser shares that support WebM over MPEG 4, something I would love to see is a push to have sites support WebM only. If some larger sites did that, then it would only be a matter of time before IE and Safari had to bite the bullet and support it. Take for example the release of Amazon’s Fire. Apple is already concerned about that. Now imagine adding to it “hey you can watch YouTube on it or XXX other video sites that you can’t view on your iPad”. It would only be a matter of time before Apple and Microsoft bites the bullet and makes the switch. It’s business and they would have no option.

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