Finally today we uploaded our new game for iPhone and iPod Touch. The name is Kitty Scratch and is a simple and funny 2D game in which you have to help a cat to scratch every furniture inside a home. The graphic is done by Elisa Cristantielli, a skilled artist, and the music is composed by me.
I got a proposal to work on a software as project manager. Actually, for obvious reasons, I can’t write about the software and the agency. I can only say that I should manage the development of a cool iOS (iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch) and Android based application.
The committee is a software house with some offices in Italy, and I’m really happy about this proposal. It’s a long time that I work at PlaySys, and a new project for a direct customer is really exciting.
Plus this new experience can make my skills stronger in software development direction.
I’ll be back soon with some news about this position.
Sensazionale: due bambole sono state sorprese mentre giocavano a TheDreamers sul loro Nintendo DS rosa!
Per leggere l’intero reportage e vedere altri scatti clicca sulla foto qui sotto. 
È finalmente disponibile per il download gratuito la nostra App per Honeywell. Sebbene si tratti di un’App molto semplice e specifica è sempre entusiasmante terminare un progetto con successo.
L’App è molto tecnica poiché si tratta di una Utility per i tecnici Honeywell, quindi non aspettarti la cosa più interattiva e divertente del momento 😉
Se vuoi provarla scaricala gratuitamente cliccando sull’immagine (pesa solo 900 Kb)
IMPORTANT: WE CAN WRITE A CUSTOM STEP-BY-STEP TUTORIAL, RECORD A DETAILED VIDEO OR HELP YOU REMOTELY TROUGHT THE iPHONE DEVELOPMENT PROCESS.
CONTACT US FROM THE AGENCY WEBSITE: www.playsys.it
I would like to write something about my experience as iPhone developer, because it was an interesting and useful experience.
I (or we, because it was a team work at PlaySys) spent about 30% of the development time to become registered Apple Developers, then we spent 20% to practically develop the App and then we finished with a long 50% to compile & upload it on App Store. 
Yes, these were the timings, and it’s not a joke. I don’t want to say that Apple is wrong, it’s not great or other things like this, I want only to write about my experience, maybe it can help someone else.
Before starting I would like to thank two key people that made the development of this App possible: Andrea Benedetti and Valentina Oggioni. 
The ingredients of the recipe to obtain an iPhone App are:
– a customer
– clear ideas of the final result
– clear idea on what you’ll have to modify at the end of the project
– a skilled and motivated team (programmers+graphician)
– lot of motivation
– knowledge between Objective-C and Photoshop (not so much, the team will manage them, but to manage it you should know a bit of everything)
– XCode, iPhone SDK, Snow Leopard, a Mac and so on…
– a sad life to spend in a office, behind a monitor 
The first thing to do is to become a registered Apple Developer, so you have to apply to be recognized by them. In this phase you have to prepare some legal/economical information about your agency, and have to prepare your bank account. This phase requested us about 2 weeks or maybe a little more because a little misunderstanding with Apple. 
After this step you’ll have a new account to access at the registered developer area. You’ll find some good stuff there inside:
– iPhone SDK
– XCode
– Utilities
– lot of step-by-step guides and videos
– references, tech manuals and discussion areas 
I suggest to read the more as possible about the process of development. It’s a bit different from Windows, were you download your copy of Visual Studio Express and the .NET framework, you develop and post your executable online somewhere. 
Now with XCode you only limit is your imagination, and of course your budget and your knowledge. In my specific case I can do more with a piece of rope. Helpfully Andrea helped us a lot, writing the 99.9 % of the code; the remaining part was completed by me with some //copyright information 🙂
Now some questions:
Q- Do I need some coding knowledge to develop this kind of App?
A- Of course a lot OOP knowledge is required.
Q- Do I need to know a lot about Photoshop or other graphic program? A- No. There is the Interface Builder that can visually help you to place in the canvas your elements. If you are planning to develop a videogame the answer would be completely different.
Q- Do I need an iPhone to develop my App?
A- No, at least at the beginning of the development. The device could be necessary depending on the App you are developing. For a simple calculator you can manage everything without an hw device. Remember that you can use an iPod Touch to develop App for the iPhone, at least if you don’t use the phone, the microphone, the camera and the 3G connectivity. 
It’s important to know that there are 2 different kind of certificates: Development and Distribution. The Distribution one is split again in 2: AppStore and Ad hoc. Remember that you don’t need only the certificates, you will need Provisioning file too. 
Working on this I understood this relation:
Certificates <–> OSX
Provisioning <–> XCode
and of course there is a connection between XCode and OSX 🙂 
So start opening your Keychain and request a new certificate from Authority. This creates 2 keys, a private and a public. Choose a 2048 bit RSA encryption and save it on your desktop. Login on your apple developer page and go in the certificates area. Here you can create your first Provisioning certificate. Simply go in this section of the site, choose to create a new certificate, upload your request and everything will be done automatically.
Now you can save your certificate for provisioning. Do the same thing for the Distribution one. For the first time you need a simple in-house distribution: a distribution file that manage the connection between your device and the XCode project, so you can deploy the project on the physical hardware instead of the simulator. 
Back offline add the certificate inside the keychain and the connection file insider XCode (or iTunes).
You’ll need to setup XCode for the “local” distribution, it’s not difficult and Apple has a nice step-by-step tutorial on the site.
Remember to create at least 2 icons for you App: a 57×57 and a 512×512. These will be very necessary to publish your app on the AppStore.
When you finished your development the troubles will arrive 😉 
I really dunno why, but we encountered lot of terrible problems in the last part of the development. It was really frustrating and we loose lot of time: Apple’s automatic system rejected our zipped App, saying it was not signed with a proper certificate. Searching online I found hundred and hundred post about lot of developers that encountered our same troubles. Of course the certificates were valid, we were sure about this, like the other developers were sure about theirs. 
As said I don’t know what happened: someone solved this reinstalling XCode and the SDK, someone create a new project and pasted inside the main work and we, after 7 hours of desperate things solved in this way:
– we inserted a jpg image in Interface Builder
– we compiled the project
– we removed the jpg
– we recompiled again
– worked! 😀 
I think there is an unknown bug inside the website App validation, something that sometime works and sometime not.
We tried with the jpg because watching inside the compiled App we noticed some png files were damaged during the compile process.
This was a simple App, but we are planning a new one in these days and I hope not to encounter these frustrating bugs.
Enjoy App development, it’s really fun and interesting! 
CONTACT US FROM THE AGENCY WEBSITE: www.playsys.it
Yes! we are online with a new website, social network, documents and mobile version.
Main Web Site
The new payoff is clear and direct: The wire between virtual and real. What are these “wire”, “virtual” and “real”?
It’s simple: the wire is a link, a connection, a “bridge” that keeps constrained the virtuality and reality. The virtual is everything is done with the computer or every idea inside your head and the real…it’s Matrix 😉
Our work is to take your real idea and to construct a virtual project. At the same time, you can consider your idea a virtual concept, not yet realized…we can help you to make it real!
The web site is hosted on our www.play-sys.com. We have a index.php, that contains a device recognition and relative redirection to the proper html page. This is useful because iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch devices have some troubles with flash player.
The main page is constructed with Adobe Flash (player version 8 + Action Script 2). Our swf is inserted in the page, using Adobe Dreamweaver…simple, quick, cool.
The graphical idea behind the site is something clear, with little text, big renders and images. The site is English language only: who works in this business should speak it, and it sounds better than Italian.
We activated some extra sections:
PlaySys Tech
is a series of simple html pages that explains some technical things behind our work. Actually it’s in Italian because I started these pages some months ago, when we had the previous website version (the actual one is 5.3). Dunno if I’ll translate them, Italian language is better when speaking technical facts to Italian customers.
http://www.play-sys.com/playsystech/index.html
PlaySys Legal
This is really important, it’s the work done by our lawyer staff (that costed lot of money) and that guarantee our legal shield in the case of stolen data, pictures grabbing, pdf sharing, images extraction, watermark removal and so on.
http://www.play-sys.com/legal/playsyslegal_index.html
Facebook Page
We created a Facebook page to connect all our friends and customers, and to let them discuss about us. This raise our “transparency” that is one of our most important aspects.
http://tinyurl.com/playsys-facebook
Youtube Channel
Of course a Youtube Channel is important to explain our projects, and to explain what we can do with CG. A video explains things better than thousand words.
http://www.youtube.com/user/playsysstudio
PDF
Each section of our web site has a downloadable PDF file, that contains lot of images, descriptions and so on. Image extraction and PDF disassembly is strictly forbidden: they must be used for personal reference and for PlaySys future references.
http://www.play-sys.com/downloads/PlaySys_3D_Portfolio.pdf
http://www.play-sys.com/downloads/PlaySys_Publishing_Portfolio.pdf
http://www.play-sys.com/downloads/PlaySys_Development.pdf
Finally, after a long development period we are near to the end 🙂
I’m speaking about our new internal renderer, based on a hybrid CPG+GPU technology. Our system can manage complex scenes with a scalable quality, based on your hardware configuration and on your quality/timing needings.
The engine is based on a triple core (realtime, raytrace and unibiased) and innovative solutions for the “recycle” of precomputed data. The last one was the most difficult part, in fact we had to define a way to reuse the information obtained by a previous computation. One smart thing is the emission power, that is always equal to the sum of all the energies variation in the scene.
The realtime engine is still not stable and is the most raw thing in the entire software. We are spending lot of time in the translation of material parameters between realtime and offline.
We have no direct link between 3ds Max and the engine, at the moment we are working with some obj files. 
Mi sto riferendo ovviamente al nostro nuovo renderizzatore interno, basato su tecnologia ibrida CPU+GPU, in grado di elaborare scene complesse con una grandissima rapidità. Oltre alle normali caratteristiche, il motore vanta di un triplo core (realtime, raytrace e unibiased) e innovative soluzioni per il “riciclo” delle scene già elaborate. Il passaggio più complesso è stato ottenere una serie di dati riutilizzabili dall’engine. In pratica il motore frammenta la scena e suddivide il numero di poligoni, rendendoli conformi alla risoluzione dello schermo. Successivamente viene calcolata l’emissione di energia da ogni singola fonte luminosa e il dato finale equivale sempre alla sommatoria delle emissioni. In questo modo possiamo modificare i parametri dopo aver eseguito il render.
Per quanto riguarda l’engine realtime stiamo facendo diversi passaggi per consentire l’interpretazione ed elaborazione degli shader. Attualmente si tratta del modulo più grezzo del software e la stabilità è ancora molto bassa.
Infine manca completamente un esportatore diretto da 3ds Max. Per il momento stiamo elaborando file in formato obj.
This is the implementation of the shader I developed two weeks ago. It’s a complex node system, obtained in Autodesk 3ds Max, mental ray and Slate ME. The original image measures 28.347 x 21.261 pixels (603 Megapixels) and required less than a day to be rendered on one of PlaySys’s dual Xeon E5345 @2.33 Ghz machine. The image has been resized a little, but you can still appreciate it’s details (and a small error, try to search it ;)) 
There are really complex and really useful scripts, like TexTools, SolidRocks, RappaTools, SnowFlow, Batch Camera Render and lot other, and there are sometime
simple scripts that can do a single operation, apparently stupid, in short time.
This is the case of P.UV.E. a simple/stupid 200 kb script I wrote yesterday
and that let me save lot of time (or at least, lot of click).
The script simply extract a 2048×2048 UV texture from a selected object, it
does nothing more and nothing less. It’s force is in the simplicity and in the
quick accessibility. It is fired from a button on my UI and permits me to save
an UV in 1 click respect the traditional method that requires 7 clicks. You can
say that I’m lazy, and sometime it’s right, but when I have to manage about 250
UV per day, this become a useful thing.
probably this is one of the most stupid thing I developed in the latest
months, but I think I’ll use it more than other things I did in the past(except DMRB) 🙂
