Our life as a programmer will never be the same.

Remembering twenty-four years ago — back in 1976 — the first time I get in touch with what I will call a computer; it was a Texas Instrument TI-57, a calculator equipped with a simple numeric display and a maximum of 50 programmable instructions. It was right after xmas, at school, a friend of mine showed me the calculator, saying something like: "look at that!" and while pressing a strange "RUN" key, the TI to display this incredible thing: 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2 and 1! This automatic count down somewhat blew up my brain!

This event triggered the beginning of my interest in computing at-large. But at that time, I was miles away to imagine from what one could achieve, years after years. And even the most anticipating fiction never matched what actually appeared years afters.

My first mobile phone was purchased in 1996, ten years ago; I was then completing my first PC, Saturn and PlayStation project in Paris. The handset was small enough to make people in the streets stop by and stare at me when I was passing a call.
I understood at that time that one day, people would use their mobile phone to play, connected each others to a gigantic MMO game via the air. But I thought it would take tens of years to come up.

Once again, things arrived more rapidly than expected: only ten years after, the industry is about to reach 1 billion of new handsets sold this year. How it comes? Innovation. Building new markets thanks to new products or technologies.

That's fine.

But what's really cool, is that I am in the place trying to push the envelope one step further, participating to this course, spreading new ideas or usages. New technologies.

But what could be new technologies if they are not streamlined enough and not really made for casual users? While the world of the mobile industry was already fast paced, there wasn't that much innovation since the appearing of 3G/3G+ network. Same ideas were simply recycling again and again.

By chance, the promising 3 billion users market definitively attracted new entrants. Once again, Apple came up with a great design along with well defined features with its iPhone, and simply redefined almost everything in the industry. Amazing.

But how does this is likely change our programmer's life? Well, where others simply put Java ME (90% of the market) or Symbian (5%) or even Windows Mobile on their devices, Apple did choose not to sacrifice the performance and homogeneity; they simply embedded their own system - Leopard - and did provide the Xcode environment. But more importantly, they came up with an unique and incredible simple distribution scheme: developers choose the price for their app, and Apple take care of everything via iTunes - distribution and payment - for a mere 30% of the revenu.

Nice!

Sdl, Paris

Written in June 2006, last updated in march 2008.

The main character of the game was an angel therefore most of the animation was difficult to capture:

A great deal of imagination was involved and we used a lot of tricks to achieve the capture: for instance, when we captured the take off:

Eight optical infrared cameras system

You can see two out of eight infrared cameras that enable the system to capture the trajectory of the balls glued on the actor:

Acting

This character was supposed to float in the air. You can see me shaking a base on which the actor is sitting.

Fighting

The actor is ready for a strike.

By the way, one can see on the rear, two cameras as well as the super computer starting capturing the movement.

During the development of Commando I had to make a one week demo of Asterix for a pre-sale project for Infogrames Entertainment, back in 1997.

This project was targeting PCs and PlayStation One, so I took advantage of the engine I was developing: I plugged some artworks I have been made by an external studio in Paris and made use of motion captured animation from my former project Angel Quest.

I programmed an RTC (Real Time Camera) intro for the game, featuring a night and day management cycle, for which I also programmed a realtime fire effect.

I included some sound effects and in a couple of days I completed a short demo, where you were able to wander in the small village.

Look at the following screen shots:

During the development of Commando and the one week demo of Asterix for Infogrames Entertainment, back in 1997, I spent one weekends and over the night work sessions to port the game engine to the PC.

WarStation™: First port, en route to Windows

I started with a port to Windows in C and DirectX, converting all the PlayStations libs (including sodlib, libGPU, etc.) and achieved the port in late 1998.

I ran Commando with no issue with great speed performances.

WarStation SdlImage: Second port, en route to Java

Seven years later, I ported the whole game engine to Java J2ME and succeeded to run it on the iMac Power PC and the Macbook 12” at incredible high performances performance.

I dropped DirectX of course, and ported the 3D code to openGL.

And during the July 2005 summer holiday I’ve had completed the port and ran the Asterix demo I wrote 8 years before for the PlayStation.

This demo became one of the unit test for my SdlImage™ video game visual booster technology.

Look at the following screen shots of Asterix/Java:

• Volume I, issue 1 : January 1995
• Volume I, issue 2 : February 27th 1995
• Volume II, issue 1 : March 8th 1995
• Volume III, issue 1 : May 29th 1995