Thursday, December 8, 2011

Unity3D iPhone Player and JIRA Connect Integration

We've been using JIRA internally for our project management and bug tracking for a couple of years now and we've found it to be excellent. Recently Atlassian (the developers of JIRA) released a JIRA Connect library for the iPad/iPhone family.

If you are developing an iPad or iPhone application this library gives you application bug and error reporting, which integrates with JIRA for very little effort.

Using JIRA Connect with Unity3D iPhone together in order to provide a nice way of automatically delivering crash reports and user feedback to your Unity application. For Unity users targeting the iPad/iPhone this quick little boon works for us to. Here is how to do it.

At this point of this post I'm assuming you're familiar somewhat with JIRA and have a working JIRA instance, or are perhaps using the hosted JIRA solution offered by Atlassian (we much prefer to host our own - because we like control like that).

In your JIRA instance; enable the JIRA Connect plugin, the JIRA Connect user and get your API Key from the Administration panel.

Go and download the JIRA Connect source from here.

To get this integration working for Unity iPad/iPhone builds we're going to patch the Unity player source code that gets spat out
by Unity when you make a Unity iPad/iPhone build.

To have a starting position; make a Unity iPad/iPhone build now. Typically, if I have a project directory "ProjectName" I output my iPad/iPhone player build to "ProjectName_build". Generate this now.

Unpack the JIRA Connect source code you have downloaded.

At this point my directory looks like something like (I'm using OSX Lion)



leberkaese: chriskruger$ ls
atlassian-jiraconnect-ios-tip
ProjectName
ProjectName_build
leberkaese: chriskruger$



Open the Xcode project file in your ProjectName_build directory in Xcode. I am using Xcode 4 btw.

We are now going to make some changes to the project that Unity has spat out for us, in order to make use of JIRA Connect. We're basically following the instructions from here.

So the steps as I see them for Xcode 4.


  1. Add the JMCClasses directory to your Unity-iPhone/Classes group. Right click on the Classes group and choose to Add Files to Unity-iPhone. Browse to the atlassian-jiraconnect-ios-tip/JIRAConnect and choose the JMCClasses directory. Select to "make groups for any added folders" and press Add

  2. Select the Unity-iPhone project root in the project explorer, select the Unity-iPhone target and the Summary tab. Scroll down to the Linked Frameworks and Libraries. Add the following libraries for linking, CFNetwork, SystemConfiguration, MobileCoreServices, CoreGraphics, AVFoundation, CoreLocation, libsqlite





Choose the AppController.mm file in the Classes directory. We're going to edit this to integrate JIRA Connect.

Near the top of AppController.mm we'll add the import statement



Now move down further in the AppController.mm file and find the ApplicationDidFinishLaunching method. We're going to add the follow code in order to activate the library code when our application starts. Note that you'll need to alter this code from my example code in order for JIRA Connect to work with your JIRA instance. Specifically you'll need you JIRA instance's web address and it's API key. You might also want to change the configurations options to suit.

When done applicationDidFinishLaunching will look something like this.


- (void) applicationDidFinishLaunching:(UIApplication*)application
{
printf_console("-> applicationDidFinishLaunching()\n");

JMCOptions* options = [JMCOptions optionsWithUrl:@"https://project.jira.com/"
project:@"PK"
apiKey:@"XXXXXXX-XXXXX-XXXX-XXX-XXXXXXXXXX"
photos:NO
voice:NO
location:NO
crashreporting:YES
customFields:nil];

[[JMC instance] configureWithOptions:options];


if ([UIDevice currentDevice].generatesDeviceOrientationNotifications == NO)
[[UIDevice currentDevice] beginGeneratingDeviceOrientationNotifications];

[self startUnity:application];
}


We were particularly interested in the crash reporting, so for the most part that's all we setup.

So if you've done this. Check it all compiles and your Unity application still runs.

If it all works we're now in a good position to generate some patches that we'll use to automatically update our Unity build from each time we make a build in Unity.

Create another build outputting it to somewhere like ProjectName_build_vanilla.

Create a some patches using diff.


diff -ru ProjectName_build_vanilla/Unity-iPhone.xcodeproj/project.pbxproj ProjectName_build/Unity-iPhone.xcodeproj/project.pbxproj > xcode.patch

diff -ru ProjectName_build_vanilla/Classes/AppController.mm ProjectName_build/Classes/AppController.mm > AppController.patch


Move these patches to ProjectName/Assets/Editor where they can easily be accessed during the Unity build process.

Now we're going to modify the Unity build post process to apply our patches every time we make a build. So, if it doesn't already exist we will create a file called ProjectName/Assets/Editor/PostprocessBuildPlayer. This file is the standard way Unity permits modifications to the build pipeline.

The contents of our PostprocessBuildPlayer file looks like.



#!/bin/bash

DIR=${0%/*}
INSTALLPATH=${1}
TARGET=${2}
OPT=${3}
COMPANY=${4}
PRODUCT=${5}
LOG=postprocess.txt

echo "Postprocess Start" > ${LOG}
echo "TARGET = ${TARGET}, PRODUCT = ${PRODUCT}" >> ${LOG}
echo "INSTALLPATH = ${INSTALLPATH}" >> ${LOG}

if [ $PRODUCT == "ProductName" ]
then

if [ "${TARGET}" == "iPhone" ]
then
echo "Applying patches for AppController and Xcode" >> ${LOG}
(cd ${INSTALLPATH}; patch -N -p1 < ${DIR}/AppController.patch)
(cd ${INSTALLPATH}; patch -N -p1 < ${DIR}/xcode.patch)
fi

fi


It is just a quick and dirty bash script that applies our patches to the Unity iPad/iPhone player build every time we do a build. Once you've got this working you're now got JIRA Connect integrated into your Unity application.

If you have trouble getting the JIRA Connect library working, define "DEBUG" in the build and the JIRA Connect library will log more information (to the Xcode console) about that it is trying to do when the application starts. This will help you work out what is wrong.

Hope this works for you and please do lets us know if this guide needs updating/error correcting.

Thursday, October 20, 2011

Unity 3D (Pro): View matrix (separately) for CG shaders

As Unity's shader support is largely based on Open GL, there isn't, by default design, access to separate model and view matrices in shader code. Occasionally you might want access to this and to use it you'll need to pass this information in yourself.

Just a quick summary of what Unity does provide in Shader code.


  • UNITY_MATRIX_MVP - Current model * view * project matrix

  • UNITY_MATRIX_MV - Current mode * view matrix

  • UNITY_MATRIX_P - Current project matrix

  • _Object2World - Current model matrix

  • _World2Object - Inverse of current world matrix



Very occasionally I wish there was a UNITY_MATRIX_M and UNITY_MATRIX_V but there isn't - at least - not yet. (Same limitation in GLSL)

In C# we can get the view matrix from Camera.mainCamera.worldToCameraMatrix and for GameObjects the model matrix can be generated by using Matrix4x4.TRS( transform.position, transform.rotation, transform.localScale).

If we wanted to pass in our own modelView matrix we could do


Matrix4x4 modelViewMatrix = Camera.mainCamera.worldToCameraMatrix * Matrix4x4.TRS( transform.position, transform.rotation, transform.localScale);



Then at the appropriate point we can do


material.SetMatrix("modelView", modelViewMatrix);



To pass this model view matrix into our shader.

In our shader, presumably in the vertex shader we can then use this value like so


v2f vert(appdata_base v) 
{
v2f o;
o.pos = mul( mul(UNITY_MATRIX_P, modelView), v.vertex );
return o;
}



The result of the above code is exactly the same as


o.pos = mul( UNITY_MATRIX_MVP, v.vertex );



So now knowing this you can manipulate and/or use the model and view matrices separately in your shaders if you so choose, by first passing them in from script code.

Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Moving iPhone Developer Credentials from one Mac to another

Update: So apparently in Xcode 4 (at least) there is an official way to do this... outlined here

I recently reinstalled OSX on my Mac and upgraded to Lion. Of course I forgot to transfer my iPhone developer credentials before I did it. I had to go back to the provisioning portal and setup my new certificate and get a new developer profile. While it wasn't a huge time waste I should have transferred my certificates and profile to save myself some time.

This is what I should have done.


  • Open Xcode

  • Window->Organizer
  • DEVELOPMENT -> Provisioning Profiles

  • Choose your Provisioning profile, right click and "Reveal in Finder"

  • Save the resulting file

  • Open Keychain Access

  • Export your private and public certificates to files and save them

  • Transfer all the file to your new system

  • Drag and drop Provisioning Profile into Xcode's Organiser on your new system

  • Import the certificates file you exported into Keychain Access on your new system



NOTE: There is a very annoying bug in Keychain Access that means you need to re-import your certificates at the command line. Attempting to you import you certificates using the Keychain Access GUI yields "An error has occurred. Unable to import an item. The contents of this item cannot be retrieved". This is just a blatant bug in Keychain Access you can import the files into Keychain Access at the command line with the following commands.

security import priv_key.p12 -k ~/Library/Keychains/login.keychain
security import pub_key.pem -k ~/Library/Keychains/login.keychain

Thursday, August 4, 2011

Xcode 3.2.6 and OSX Lion (10.7) - Make it install

Today I enthusiastically installed OSX Lion on my development system. I was probably stupidly naive to think it would be a straightforward upgrade.

Attempting to install Xcode 3.2.6, the version I currently prefer, it seemed to silently fail. I wasn't sure why. I did notice running the installation wizard; that at the point of selecting Installation Components the Xcode Tool Set component (Usually compulsory) was greyed out and marked as skip.



After some research, It seems support for Xcode 3.2.6 on Lion is somewhat neglected as Xcode 4.x is the future. Long story short I needed to use 3.2.6. It can be motivated to install on Lion.

After mounting the developer tools dmg you can open a terminal and issue the following commands to successfully install Xcode 3.2.6 on OSX Lion (10.7)

export COMMAND_LINE_INSTALL=1
open "/Volumes/Xcode and iOS SDK/Xcode and iOS SDK.mpkg"

Unity3D Asset Server: Best Practice Workflow - Initial Checkout

Using Unity in teams one is often stuck using Unity asset server. While it certainly lacks features one has grown accustomed to in many other source control systems the fact remains that it is the solution that most seamlessly works with Unity.

I think part of making the process of working with Unity Asset Server more enjoyable (apart form having experience with it) is to stick with some simple best practices.

Checking out a Unity project for the first time



  • Find out what the project is called. You can do this looking looking at the server via another project.

  • When opening Unity - choose to "Create new project". Give it the same name as the project is know by in asset server.

  • Open this new project and connect to the server (ALT-0 or CMD-0 depending on operating system)

  • Identify the project you are checking out and connect to it

  • Choose to Update

  • You'll be asked to make a decision about conflicting assets. Make sure you discard all existing files in the new project ("Discard My Changes"). This seems a little unintuitive but it makes sure you won't clutter your project or accidentally suck in unwanted files.

Thursday, July 21, 2011

Tell (automake) configure to use specific architecture on Mac OSX

Where we want to build 32 bit binary on OSX, and we know the codebase has a mix of C and C++ code.

ARCHFLAGS="-arch i386" CFLAGS="-arch i386" CPPFLAGS="-arch i386" LDFLAGS="-arch i386" ./configure

Monday, June 20, 2011

Xcode: iPhone or iPad application code sign error

This morning on a re-imaged OSX machine I attempted to compile an ipad application and I was rewarded with the error below.

codesign error: code signing identity 'iphone developer' does not match any code-signing certificate in your keychain. once added to the keychain, touch a file or clean the project to continue.

I was puzzled. I'd already made a developer certificate request to Apple, had it signed and installed it in my Keychain Access, I'd also downloaded and installed the Apple Worldwide Developer Relations Certification Authority certificate. I'd installed the required development profile that matched my ipad device Unique Identifier, my personal developer certificate and the application I am developing but still, every time I hit build it gave me a code sign error. I didn't get it.

At some point it a suspicion formed. In my Keychain Access I noticed my certificates where installed in the System keychain. I'm not even sure why they got installed there, I don't think I did it explicitly.

I moved my certificates to the login keychain which I assume belongs to the logged in user on OSX (i.e. myself). Attempting to re-compile the source code of my ipad project yield a positive result. Moving the certificates to the login keychain seemed to work! So I post my small solution here today in the hope that somebody else might benefit.

Thursday, June 16, 2011

Oh Magic Mouse! How do I hate thee.

While Apple have, over the years, had many design wins, there have also been some unfortunate design failures. The design failure that happens to torment me on a daily basis is Apple's Magic Mouse. Admittedly this bluetooth mouse is quite responsive and accurate as a pointing device, but it's the mouse's more esoteric features which are pimped as a unique selling point that really irk me. Namely the "multi touch surface", especially when used for scrolling.

The multi touch surface is just far too sensitive and easily triggered when you're just using the mouse to move the pointer. As a coder I spend most of my day in text editors. I'm always accidentally scrolling the text window up and down; even worse - when using the command key and accidentally scrolling, the most common behaviour is to zoom. Not helpful. Give me an old fashioned scroll wheel any day. Likewise in a 3D modelling package I often find myself accidentally zooming.

It's back to the simple $20 mouse for me. On a similar note I have a theory about the efficacy of mice based on price. The sweet spot on mouse functionality is definitely around the $20 mark. Pay more and "features" get in the way. Pay less and accuracy, reliability and that comforting solid hand weight quality possessed by a good mouse are absent.

Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Schedule Mac OSX Update(s) for Offpeak Download using launchd

In order to schedule you Mac OSX software update to run in Offpeak time you can use the launchd system scheduler in order to to accomplish this. On most Unix systems (including cousins and derivates like Mac OSX) you would use cron. While cron is still available on Mac OSX, Apple have provided an Apple centric way of doing the same the work in the form of launchd.

Launchd has a command line control interface that goes by the name of launchctl, which will be using in conjuction with our xml editing skills to achieve this goal.

The software update tool normally accessible via the Apple Menu (Apple->Software Update to be exact) has a command line parallel "softwareupdate". We can use this command line version to run the update in the background at suitably early hour of the morning.

First of all lets construct a launchd configuration file to setup this job for us. In the common Mac OSX fashion this is achieved via the use of a property list file. Essentially an XML file with the information we want in it. A suitable .plist file for this work is listed below. Save this text into a file name like com.krugerheavyindustries.SoftwareUpdate.plist


<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN""http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
    <key>Label</key>
    <string>com.krugerheavyindustries.SoftwareUpdate</string>
    <key>ProgramArguments</key>
    <array>
        <string>/usr/sbin/softwareupdate</string>
        <string>--download</string>
        <string>--all</string>
    </array>
    <key>StartCalendarInterval</key>
    <dict>
        <key>Hour</key>
        <integer>2</integer>
        <key>Minute</key>
        <integer>00</integer>
    </dict>
    <key>StandardErrorPath</key>
    <string>/var/log/software-update.log</string>
    <key>StandardOutPath</key>
    <string>/var/log/software-update.log</string>
</dict>
</plist>


This particular property list configuration file schedules the software update to run at 2 am every morning.

Now because this task is a system related task we need it to be run by the superuser in order to have sufficient privileges for this to happen. As this is the case I'd be storing this configuration file in /Library/LaunchDaemon

Next we load the configuration file in order to schedule it. We can accomplish this with superuser privileges by the doing the following:

sudo launchctrl load /Library/LaunchDaemon/com.krugerheavyindustries.SoftwareUpdate.plist

We can view the task is loaded and ready to roll by issuing:

sudo launchctl list | grep SoftwareUpdate

You should see the task there, if not, you might have a problem.

The task will run every period you specified until you unload it (or reboot - we did not specify it should load itself).

You can unload the task using the command:

sudo launchctl unload /Library/LaunchDaemon/com.krugerheavyindustries.SoftwareUpdate.plist

On a typically configured Mac, it will be setup to go to sleep if left on for a period of time. Obviously this will affect the running of your scheduled task. In order to make sure you schedule task will run I would schedule your machine to wakeup 5 minutes before the scheduled task is due to run. In this case at 1:55 AM. This just gives subsystems like WiFi time to reconnect to the wireless router.

Sleep scheduling for wake up is done via Apple->System Preferences->Energy Saver->Schedule->Start or Wakeup

When you come back to your system in the morning you should find your software updates ready to install. Replacing the keyword "--download" with "--install" in the property list file above you can get your updates to install (not just download) overnight also.

Thursday, January 27, 2011

Games Development: A poster child for learning maths at school?

I catch the train to work most mornings. I get so much screen time every day I often like to zone out on the way to work. Driving, avoiding pedestrians and other cars cuts into my zone out time. The train works for me. I don't have to concentrate. I can look out the window, watch people and occasionally eavesdrops on some conversations people are having on the train. Yes, I'm kind of a sticky beak.

The other morning I was largely alone in my section of the train. I was joined at the next stop by half-a-dozen teenage guys in school uniform on their way to school. In fairly typical teenage boy fashion they were talking loud, all pumped in the presence of their mates and talking about people they went to school with.

After several topic changes which I couldn't follow (I don't think I'm across even half of what is 'street' these days) they settled on a conversation about how much maths sucks.

Bigfoot zitty kid : "Maths is so lame. You never use that crap. Like algebra.. what are you going to ever use that for?"

Sporty kid : "Yeah my dad reckons he's never used maths since he learned it, it's stupid - why do they even teach stuff like calculus. When the hell would you ever use that?"

Nods of agreement all around.

I didn't find it particularly surprising. In fact, I'm pretty sure I had a conversation just like that around the age of 15.

What I did find ironic was the next topic of the conversation I was sneaky beaking on. They started talking about video games, and how cool it would be to make them. It struck me as ironic, because right there in front of them was a profession that actually used maths, and potentially quite heavily, to actually do things that are interesting to this demographic. It occurred to me right then - that Games Development is quite possibly the perfect poster child career for demonstrating to kids what value you might actually get from learning maths.

Modern games are using plenty of math. Every interaction on the screen is a cascade of vectors, linear algebra and geometry. You've often got some Newtonian Physics thrown in there for good measure too.

I wanted to interject, but I resisted. I didn't want to blow my cover as the zoned out guy in the corner, I wanted to hear about what games they enjoyed playing.

Chris K.

Eets: Hunger it's Emotional - Released for Macintosh OSX

Somewhat belatedly we're pleased to announce the release of Eets: Hunger it's Emotional for OSX! It was released on Steam last December, and you can check it out here

Whew. That was quite an effort for a small team like ours. It was a labour of love. While it's not the only thing we've worked on this past year, we've certainly taken our time when getting it done.

While it is a port (for us) and the game content had already been completed since the release of the PC version it was still not a jobn for the faint of heart.

Klei Entertainment when originally developing the game had not envisaged that the title would be destined for several other platforms. As such it was written largely in native windows APIs such as DirectX, Direct sound, windows threading and so on. There was little abtraction in the graphics, sound and IO layers.

So we added all of that. We abstracted the graphics layer and put into place an OpenGL driver for the OSX port, we went through a similar process for sound support making use of OpenAL. For threading we just used pthreads for the most part. Perhaps we should have abstracted but we didn't in that case. The shaders were written in DirectX style assembly language and to move them over to OpenGL they were ported into HLSL.

Everytime we finish a title we're reminded of what it takes to actually finish a game.

You feel like your done, when it's feature complete; the graphics and sound are working, the control system is squared away and yet - you're really just half way.
We admit we felt like we'd finished when we reached this feature complete stage; we knew better intellectually but emotionally we fell for it all over again.

At feature complete, you start the gruelling bug fixing stage. It's amazing how many bugs a few good testers can find. We had hundreds, many pretty small but it adds mountains of time to completion. After bug fixing, you then have to package and prep for distribution, this is also suprisingly time consuming. Sorting out distribution platforms quirks, further testing, prepping marking art, liasing with the publishers, partners, testers, reviewers and so on - and we had a lot of help.

Nothing really beats the feeling of finish a title though. At least from our point of view. There is something deeply satisfying about it. I guess that's why we're in this business.

We hope you enjoy Eets for OSX! We certainly enjoyed getting it out there.