It actually crossed my mind, but man, would that be lame if it were true. A curved backplate designed for strength is patentable? Every structural engineer on the planet learns this in his first year statics course (or probably in high school). I hope to high hell it isn't patented, even though I like my HTC One, because I'd just have to cry. Prior art includes soda and beer cans.

A quick search turned up no obvious hits, but I certainly could have missed it. Every time I searched, I got a lot of hits for Apple's patents on curved rectangles and curved batteries, etc.

I'm a game developer, and they're claiming their engine to be suitable for game development, so I'm just evaluating it on that basis. If it works well in other domains, good for them, but I know nothing about those industries. However, game engines have a lot of *very specific* requirements in order to make them practical. At the moment, generating game assets by 3D scanning objects is simply a non-starter for all but a very specific set of games.

Polygonal-based tools and pipelines are deeply entrenched in the industry right now, and I suspect anyone who cuts against the grain is going to make it pretty hard on themselves for a very minimal visual payoff. That tends to happens to pioneering technologies, even if they later become mainstream. Just my opinion, obviously, because we haven't seen anything more than static renderings so far.

I was recently pondering whether my game engine (written in C++) should have it's native OSX back-end / interop written in Swift or Objective-C. From what I can see, for what I need to do, Objective-C remains the clear choice, at least for now. There's a lot of good documentation on Objective-C / Cocoa, as well as lots of examples for how to interop between Objective-C and C++. I haven't even been able to determine if this is possible with Swift after searching around a bit on the net. Interop with Objective-C, yes, but that's pointless for me. I don't see Apple obsoleting or depreciating Objective-C in the near future. There's a heck of a lot of legacy code in that language, and like you mentioned, it seems like Swift wouldn't even be a proper replacement at this point for everything Objective-C can currently do.

As with pretty much any other language-choice debate, you really first need to know what someone plans to do with it before you can make a worthwhile recommendation. All languages have strengths and weaknesses, so it's foolish to point to one without even knowing what you'll be doing. The OP first wants to know about "quick and easy" for which I'd probably recommend Swift, but then wants "portability", for which I'd recommend C (for him, since he knows that - personally I use C++) with carefully walled off interfaces to the GUI frontend, but *only* if the complexity merits such treatment rather than a simple port in native code for each version. Without any more info, I can't make a better recommendation than that really.

Also, make sure there there's a safe way to remove the headset without killing the player due to a high-powered radiation burst, which a brilliant but psychotic game developer has devised in order to trap players inside his revolutionary virtual online game world until they can track him down and defeat him, thus allowing everyone to finally escape and re-join the real world.

Or at least, that's what I've learned from anime.

This company with it's impressive-looking but completely static scenes shows up every few years. Honestly, I didn't see anything that couldn't be done in that video with any modern engine targeting high-end video hardware. It's a bit of a cheat if you only have to show the terrain. I'll be more impressed when I see a demo with physics, animation, and dynamic lighting, because that's where things tend to get tricky. They mentioned in the video that they do have animation working - I'll be curious to see how it looks in the next video.

This company seems to be trying to solve the problem of how to accurately capture and reproduce the real world, but how many games actually want to capture real-world data? If you're in the business of creating fantasy worlds of any sort - and that's precisely what most games are - there's nothing in the real world for you to scan. There's a reason no one else is working this way, I think. As far as the game industry goes, I'm guessing it will probably remain a very niche product, if it's viable at all. I just don't see them throwing away 15 year's worth of maturing polygon-based tools and technologies anytime soon.

I've noticed my HTC One - which has an aluminum frame - has a distinctly curved back to it. From the photo's I've seen, the iPhone looks like it has a fairly flat back, correct? I just tried flexing my phone a bit, and it didn't seem to give much at all. I wouldn't be too surprised if that shape was deliberately chosen to give the HTC phone extra structural rigidity?

I guess I'm not too surprised to see some issues like that with the race to make these devices lighter, thinner, AND bigger.

No, we've got compost bins already in the Seattle area, in addition to garbage and recycling bins. Generally speaking, the council is trying to reduce the amount of food waste sent to landfills by passing this law. Anything in compost bins is essentially recyclable material, so it's not considered "waste" in the broader sense.

I still say this is a ridiculous law, but it's not about discarding food - it's just about sorting it properly.

This is pretty typical of Seattle politics. It's about image rather than substance. This is the Seattle council wagging their fingers at us.

On the other hand, we have the mayor of Seattle refusing to consider declaring regions of the city as "no panhandling" zones. A man who runs a local hotel is pushing the idea after being assaulted by a homeless man for the *second* time. The mayor flatly refused, saying instead that they should instead do more to enforce existing laws - which of course, they don't.

So people continue to be harassed or even assaulted on the streets of Seattle by vagrants, but by the earth goddess, you'd better not be putting too much food waste in your trash bin!

Yep, fortunately a major cancellation has only happened once to me. There were a couple other prospective titles I spent a few months on in a "demo" stage at all that never went anywhere as well, but those were fairly minor blips in a career shipping quite a few titles. I actually knew a poor soul unlucky enough to have worked for many years on Duke Nukem Forever, and ended up leaving the company with very little to show other than some minor resume filler material.

As far as showing non-published or proprietary material, I've generally not found it to be a problem, as long as you're not foolish enough to post that material online where your former employers can find it. In any case, my advice to game developers is to build a portfolio of your own work that you can feel free to post online if you wish. If a prospective employer wants to see actual production code or assets, then you can discretely send off a selection of those in private.

Everyone involved in the process generally understands that portfolio art and demo code is to be treated as confidential material - and in any case, no one would have any incentive in blabbing about it to your former employer. So long as you're somewhat judicious in your selection of material and how you distribute it, I don't really see any problem with it.

I can tell you from my own experience, having had a nearly-complete game cancelled on me once during my career.

Game source material tends to be highly game-specific, and even more so for MMOs. It's saved forever in archives, of course, in case someone wants to pilfer something, but as technology marches on and tools are updated, it becomes harder to keep the game in a working state - especially for MMOs, who have extremely complex building and deployment requirements.

In terms of game code (not engine code, which is designed to be reusable, of course), there are two basic approaches to starting a new game. If you're working on a sequel or have a similar game in the company library, you can branch an existing game and start stripping it down - this let's you start with a working game, and then you can swap out systems on the fly with whatever needs to change. If the game is distinct enough and wouldn't benefit from this techinque, you can start clean, working on top of whatever shared engine and libraries you have, but still may copy over specific subsystems, or use them as a starting point for new systems. This obviously occurs if it's your first game, but also if it's the first game within a new genre that wouldn't benefit from the copy-and-modify approach. For instance, when I worked on a turn-based strategy game and most of the company's previous games were 3rd person adventure games, it would have been pointless to start from one of those games' source code.

For artwork, it really depends. Sounds, textures, and music are easily reused in many cases. Models and animations are a bit more of a question mark. Animations typically are matched to a specific rig and a specific set of game code that utilizes them. More often than not, all the game art tends to be too game-specific to be re-used for anything but a direct sequel, and often by then the assets aren't appropriate for the current state-of-the-art technology.

So, in short, it's archived away somewhere and most likely, only parts of the source code will be reused as a launching point for a new product. Most of the art assets will probably never be reused, unless they're fairly generic environmental textures, sound effects, or music that happen to match a new product's genre and style.

Don't worry. This technology seems really great for entertainment, but I fail to see a real use for it in most workplaces. How exactly is typing a letter or filling in data in a spreadsheet enhanced by VR? If anything, augmented reality would be more helpful, allowing contextual data to be displayed on-demand.

Besides which... hell, Windows 8 was too radical for the corporate world. And remember the furor over MS changing the Office interface? You really think they're going to start strapping VR headsets on people anytime in the near future?

Encryption is only enabled during transmission, but not at rest. The default backup program doesn't currently support the S3 server-side or client-side encryption protocols. If you really need to secure your data and can't trust S3's basic security, then this solution may not work for you.

There are 3rd party backup apps that do client-side encryption, but they use their own cloud services, not S3, so you'll probably pay a bit more for it. You may be able to use a standard Linux backup application, but there are no guarantees there, and you'd have to be comfortable enough to do a bit of tinkering under the hood to set it up manually.

Yep, I saw that and considered switching, but at the moment, there are a lot of handy S3 browsing and transfer tools, and not so much for Glacier (at least when I last looked - maybe that's changed). If I needed to, I wanted to be able to view or even retrieve my data with a simple Firefox plugin. Also, of course, there's almost zero financial incentive for me since I'm transferring such small amounts. Since I currently have a relatively slow DSL connection, backing up large amounts of data isn't all that practical anyhow.

For those with a lot of data to push up (photos, videos, etc), I absolutely agree. A weekly backup to Glacier makes a ton of sense, as it's designed specifically for backup scenarios.

Yeah, well, of course "writing code" is easy, just like typing coherent sentences in English is rather easy. It doesn't mean it's easy to write a novel any more than it means "programming is easy". The difficulty scales along with the scope and complexity of what you're trying to accomplish, as with most things in life.

Honestly, I was trying to exit the topic of conversation gracefully, because it didn't sound like he was open to any sort of reasonable discussion, and feels more like a trolling attempt than a conversation at this point - calling me "delusional", and implying I'm in denial, fearful of losing my job, and that a child could likely replace me at work. That doesn't seem like a conversation worth salvaging, but thanks for your reply.

I happen to have written large-scale commercial videogames in C++ for most of my career. I've worked with lots of people, many smarter than me, and I don't recall anyone talking about how their programming work was "ridiculously easy". I'm glad everything is so simple for you, but apparently we're not all so fortunate.