Tuesday, April 28, 2015

First experiments with Unity

I'll deviate briefly from my usual topic of maps, GIS, and web-GIS, to something different...

I started playing with the game engine Unity. I wanted to do something after work that felt creative, and completely different than anything I've done before. And video games using Unity, sure fits that: no authentication and scrubbing user input, no SQL databases, no rendering PNG tiles. Rather, a empty world with gravity and solidity, and objects that have intelligence. Neat stuff, very educational.

My first project is a spinoff of the classic Unity tutorial, Roll-a-Ball. Being myself, I couldn't just follow instructions and I had to takre it off in my own more complex direction. I added a concept of the board tilting to screw with gravity, added a behavior that when you get all targets it creates more and increases the tilting, and so on.

It's not a million-dollar idea, just experiments. So I thought I'd share with other Unity newbs.
https://github.com/gregallensworth/DrunkBubble

Sunday, April 12, 2015

New Leaflet Control: L.Control.BasemapBar

Some time back I created a basemap-selection control for use with Leaflet, which is quite nice. It can switch between standard XYZ L.TileLayer basemaps, Google basemap choices, and Bing basemap choices provided you load the APIs and layer plugins.

Check out this screenshot, then check it out on Github:



So today I polished it up a bit, removing the requirement for FontAwesome and adding some documentation, and released it on GreenInfo's Github page. We think it's a really nice tool forr switching between basemap options. It's functional, it's attractive but not gaudy, and it's flexible to handle all of our basemap needs.

Enjoy!