Note to self: be very careful with Unity3d and threads.

What’s funny, Screen.width and Screen.height accessed from a separate thread return random results.

One of my company’s latest works. Giant multi-touch wall for Vertu.

Vertu Constellation Launch Event from InteractiveLab on Vimeo.

Flash is still worth something.

P.S. follow us on Vimeo, Facebook or Twitter.

“An interview for a large company is always a free career advice.”

There is a lot of information over the internet about how to prepare for a technical interview, what one should know and how one should behave. But this knowledge is TOO abstract. It’s like… imagine if you had to learn every university subject before an exam because you don’t know what exam it was.

What’s more valuable are real stories and experience of people passed these examsinterviews. Was it Google or Microsoft, or maybe Zynga. What questions were asked (and what questions were not), what was the overall atmosphere of an interview, how long it was.

In this post I want to tell you about Zynga recruiting event in Moscow, about my personal experience, mistakes and what I learned.

This interview gave me a lot of experience, made me think about who I am and where I am going. No article about how to pass an interview can substitute real experience of going to an interview.

Here’s an image to keep you interested.

Following the last post I actually wanted to say more about recent FWA Site of the Month awards.

A year ago or so browsing recent submissions and SOTD winners I started comparing them with oldschool sites. The ones from 2000-2004. It looked like to win an FWA you needed a lot of video and 3d. Nobody cares how much a site “weighs” these days. I remember how we invented different tricks to overcome numerous limitations, how we coded realtime effects and used vector animation. Today whoever has more videos and prerendered 3d wins.

I remember we had preloaders, people waited minutes(!) while the site was loading. I remember I made a 6Mb site and had to listen to people complaining that it was too big. Many visitors failed to wait that long for the site to load. Now let’s check FWA Site of the Month winners once again. Initial size is the size in megabytes of whatever had to be loaded before I could proceed. Total size is how much megabytes the site downloaded while I was browsing it a bit. I tried not to view videos and other media content (on sites which are not interactive videos by design).

• January, Lego Star Wars — initial: 8.53Mb, total: 34.6Mb. I liked this one. Good art, animations and navigation.
• February, Die Hipster — initial: 31.21Mb, total: 33Mb. Didn’t get what to do so I closed the game. Looks like it preloaded almost everything just to start.
• March, Greenpeace – A New Warrior —initial: 28.75Mb, total: 41.45Mb. Good site, but the video during loading and total 28.75Mb of data just to show main interface is disturbing.
• April, Wall of Fame —  initial: 15.06Mb, total: 126Mb. What the hell do they have in these 15 megabytes? But at least they got it right and don’t load the whole map at once.
• May, Pleasure Hunt — initial: 43.69Mb, total: 43.69Mb. This site just has to be fully preloaded because it’s a straight forward experience. But 43 megabytes…
• June, 3 Dreams of Black — initial: 43.49Mb, total: 73.85Mb. This one might be a great WebGL demo (as in demoscene) but 73 megabytes is nowhere near.
• July, The Museum of Me — initial: 46.11Mb, total: 61.5Mb. All right, a dynamic video has to be big.
• August, Sexy Fingers — initial: -Mb, total: -Mb. This is total sh*t and doesn’t load on my PC. I blame Flashblock.
• September, The Planet Zero — initial: 2.19Mb, total: 5.75Mb. Now THIS is an oldschool site. It’s really great! Checked every corner of the tiny little planet and only 6 megabytes downloaded.
• October, Being Henry — initial: 20.05Mb, total: 214Mb. Allright, that’s what I was talking about. Just make a huge video and win a SOTM award. But I actually liked it.
• November, The Honda Experiment — initial: 4.44Mb, total: 9.56Mb. I don’t get it. The idea with multi-windowed interface was around since 2000. Everyone hated it because of the reflex to close small pop-up windows.
• December, Androp Bell — initial: 41.98Mb, total: 46.48Mb. An interactive music game, I wonder how long I would have to wait with my 256kbit connection.

Once upon a time there was a small site — favouritewebsiteawards.com/. Years 2000 – 2004 were the golden age of Flash sites. They were interactive, colorful and heavy. At that time I had a blog at valyard.ru with daily links to the coolest sites and games. I bet it had been one of FWA’s link sources for a while.

Since then FWA has grown into a well-known and respected award in the industry of  Flash sites, my resource has well been forgotten.

But recently (a couple of years ago) favouritewebsiteawards transformed into favouriteeverythingawards featuring really everything on the net and some offline stuff. How can you compare a heavy interactive informative site with great UI and lot’s of videos with a WebGL experiment, or a music video, or an offline installation? Let’s examine this year’s Sites of the Month:

• January, Lego Star Wars — Half game (which is supposed to be multi-player, but I was alone ther), half site with great graphics and animation.
• February, Die Hipster — Looks like a game where I don’t gave a clue what I am supposed to do, so I don’t like it q:
• March, Greenpeace – A New Warrior — This is a typical multi-media content site which is well-done, contains a lot of data and serves some real purpose.
• April, Wall of Fame —  Great multi-user experience. A site with user-generated content which actually has it (the content). I voted for it in Peoples Choice Award.
• May, Pleasure Hunt — Another half game, half site. Entertaining way to present a brand.
• June, 3 Dreams of Black — WebGL experiment/interactive music video. Great demonstration of the technology.
• July, The Museum of Me — This is actually just a music video, not even interactive. But the idea behind it is brilliant.
• August, Sexy Fingers — This site doesn’t load on my machine, but I checked on a colleague’s PC and it looks like complete crap. Seems to be a bunch of sex-related games which are totally not work-safe.
• September, The Planet Zero — This one is awesome! The third half game, half site but uses pre-molehill software 3d rendering engine. ROXIK is the greatest!
• October, Being Henry — Really well-done interactive video.
• November, The Honda Experiment — Some kind of HTML “The Incredible Machines” game made with pop-up windows.
• December, Androp Bell — That’s just an awesome game. Great idea and really well-done.

Unity3D is great for indie developers. We have yet to build a large Unity project, but we’ve built a couple of small projects so far but during this process we did see Unity3D from the ugly side. It seems that the engine can do some things blazingly fast and easy but some other ones were clearly neglected during development. But that’s another post.

So, I’ve tried to find out how big teams work on large Unity projects if even we are struggling. But no luck.

Ones were mumbling about source control, separating control over scenes editing etc. That’s kind of obvious and shows that those people don’t have any experience at all.

But recently I watched all the videos from Unite 11 conference. I really wish I could visit it and talk to Unity gurus. But anyway, here are the videos I found useful. Videos where speakers share their experience on working in Unity3D as a team. The information which is practical and useful:

Some time ago the videos from Unite 11 conference were uploaded to video.unity3d.com. Among of those you can find 2 about Unity3d to Flash publishing. Pretty interesting stuff. Answers some questions, creates others.

http://video.unity3d.com/video/3787045/unite11-flash-day-talk-part-1
http://video.unity3d.com/video/3728433/unite-11-flash-day-talk-part-2

It’s still not late to mention that we (Interactive Lab) got featured at video.unity3d.com.

A good explanation of the Expression Problem in Computer Science.

http://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2010/10/01/solving-the-expression-problem/

Oh… now I understand what this ugly Visitor pattern is needed for.

Greg Wilson – What We Actually Know About Software Development, and Why We Believe It’s True from CUSEC on Vimeo.

The talk is rather long but is definitely worth watching.

The author talks about:

• Studies and references of “well-known” information concerning software development. Which are lacking.
• Time estimates and that all techniques and applications to calculate time needed for specific tasks are worthless.
• When refactoring is useless.
• How software complexity increases with adding more features.
• Code metrics don’t work.
• And how we need to ask for the sources of information we get.