a Pollock via iPhone and Pollock via Pollock by matt ditton (AKA polymonkey)

Tomorrow is Saturday and it’s really my last day of holiday. Sunday I’m getting a tour of the TOKYO GEIJUTSU DAIGAKU new media department from my old processing buddy Saito. I get the plane home on Monday, touchdown Tuesday and stand up in fronts of the first class of the year on Wednesday. I’m already damn tired and I’ve got a backlog of 40GB and growing of photos and video to get through. I’m leaving the photos for the plane.

Just one thing though. Visually this country is exhausting, Tokyo specifically. I’m good with iconography and body language so I’ve had no problems getting places or talking to people, just no existential topics. But I can’t read the language so I’m constantly searching for english in any signage. And the sheer number of fonts is driving me insane. How do people stand it here? After a day walking around I’m happy for any small part of familiar grounding. It did make me smile when I thought I saw comic sans at DisneyLand.

Guess what they sell ? by matt ditton (AKA polymonkey)

We’ve been here a day and it’s raining. Which is better than the snow that was falling when we first got here. If you follow the link above, I’ve started a flicker set with all the photos. Off to get some lunch and avoid the cold.

050908_01_Tori_gates by matt ditton (AKA polymonkey)

From Saturday the 13th to March the 2nd I’m on holiday. I’m heading to Tokyo and camping in a hotel room for 2 weeks. Urban touristing. The sights I see will be the concrete and kitsch of the Tokyo MegaCity. I’ll be posting photos and a few posts no doubt. And I still have to finish my experimental gamplay entry for the month. So I’ll be doing stuff. But nothing serious. To kick that off there is another photo after the jump (click the post to see).

050909_01_Choco_Collon by matt ditton (AKA polymonkey)

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Right click and save this file -> save_me_some_frames

Really that paragraph has everything. Timing Pulses. Wave Trains. Phase Reversal. Tensor Fields Passing Through Zero. Seriously it’s amazingly cool. I can barely comprehend what it’s on about, and that’s just from the introduction. But it just emits a level of sci-fi geekery that you rarely find. Just one of the daily gems I get from twitter. Specifically from Nick Porcino (Meshula), go follow him.

I now have to go make something where a tensor field passes through zero.

theFIELD by matt ditton (AKA polymonkey)

This is my entry in the Jan 2010 comp running over at experimentalgameplay.com. The theme was 100 things. You can play it at the link below.

theFIELD

The game is called theFIELD. And it’s quiet meditation on cube collection. Turn the lights down, breath, relax and push some cubes.
Controls are UP DOWN LEFT RIGHT and SPACE. Hopefully their use will be obvious.

So far it’s taken about 5 days to get it to this point. I got the gameplay nailed down in the first day and then it’s been tweak this, tweak that for 4. I even spent half a day on a possibly pretentious title screen (but there are 100 letters in the title). The music is by the wicked Joel (JiveMaster) Bird

I must give a big “dude your awesome” to Shawn Eustace, who when I asked for comments gave me a page of things I didn’t even see.

Comments and criticism are warmly encouraged.

visits from odd groups by matt ditton (AKA polymonkey)

On the day I was uploading a LOT of very old images to flickr I got a LOT of visits from a yahoo group called “ladies in costume”. They were very focused on a few images that I had of Jamie who wore the TY mascot back in 2002. Well that makes sense really, that is what their group is into.

The creepy part about it was back in 2002 when I was the spotter for that costume at E3, I had my first run in with a furry. There was a guy who kept coming around to the booth, not interested in the game but taking a lot of photos of the suit. I popped over, said hi and started the creepiest conversation ever.

He told me about his hobby (I was innocent at the time). He asked about the TY suit. The girl in the suit. How long she could stay in the suit. He boasted about how long he could stay in his suit, and then proceeded to show off a large number of photos of his suit. He even had a badge photo of it. And then his friends suits. And him in his suit. And him with his friends in their suits with him in his suit. And then I think I got rescued and had to walk away.

I don’t think this situation is like that situation. But some memories you just can’t repress enough.

frame-0141 by matt ditton (AKA polymonkey)

2010 is going to be a big year. On Monday I start a new job. I’m going to be looking after this. I have no idea why there is a ninja on that page. But it sets an interesting tone.

To mark this special occasion I am gutting www.polymonkey.com. Over the next week it will be changed. I bought a new domain www.thequietvoid.com and the polymonkey_code blog will be moving over there. The polymonkey domain is going to shift to be the one thing I never got around to making. A portfolio site.

So with that I’m drawing a line under polymonkey_code. All previous posts and all future posts will live over on the quiet void. In the coming days a redirect will be turned on to move all the traffic over to there.

Always the monkey, MattD

POST EDIT: welcome to the quiet void.

In which we try a second method of showing Unity work on a wordpress blog. This one wasn’t hard at all.

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This version is using ShadowBox.js as a method of showing the unity piece. So no embedding, it’s just linking to another page. It’s actually the exported page from a unity web build. Well I changed the background to black and got rid of the text. But apart from that it’s untouched.

So without further ado the pendulum (click the image) when you’re done click the x in the bottom right.

In which I test the uploading of a Unity Scene. How hard can it be?

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Please view the full post to see the Unity content.

Getting this working took 4 hours. Not the scene. Just the posting to the web part. I’m not getting that time back.

But for all who come after, know this. thequietvoid is hosted through godaddy.com and at current they do not support the .unity3d file type as a known file. So after following the instructions from the Unity site. Installing the WP_UnityObject plugin. Making the changes to the functions.php that would allow .unity3d file uploads. Still nothing worked. The advice I found was to change the web.config file so that .unity3d is an allowed mim type on the server.

But web.config in the root has been hijacked by wordpress, so everytime I changed the xml the site stopped working. Sigh.

So how does it work at the moment you may ask ? Well, and don’t try this at home kids. I renamed the .unity3d file to .jpg. Made the change to src tag in WP_UnityObject and viola, the HACK IS ALIVE.

But it’s not right and I’m sure it’s going to break things if the scene try’s to access the browser. So now I have to go through the process of getting this fixed.

Bugger.

UPDATE: later that night

Ok, now it works. I had a nap. Thought on it. Fixed it. The trick is I just had to add a unique web.config file into the wordpress upload folder allowing the webserver to serve out the file. There now it works correctly. Before I forget this is the secret ingredient. Adding this to a file called web.config in the wordpress upload directory fixes the last of the problems.