Ever felt foreseeing, but failed at being trusted ? ...

News & General Discussion
1

I mean important things … And this stuff you foresaw did happen ? :?

I can’t know a more frustrating feeling, really.

These happened 2 big times in my life, mainly.

First was back in the 2002-2003, I was a graphist freelancer, internet was just a niche. But it was obvious to me that every single shop, enterprise, restaurant, would have their own website.

So I went for contract hunting, in different places of different cities, presenting them how cool would it be to have their websites, showing them satisfied previous client references I could use.
And seriously, of all the ones I prospected, 99% were telling me something like :

  • “Oh the internet ? yeah I’ve heard of it, thanks but no I don’t feel like the necessity to have a site”.
    The other 1% was like “Ok, this sounds interesting, but I don’t want to cut a budget for that yet.”

We know the end of the story : nowadays, every single freaking shop, enterprise, restaurant do have their own websites. And the most depressing thing is when I now look at this www URL under those very same front doors I opened back in '02.

Another one was in my dayjob, turning from “LOL Uni-what ??” in December 08, to “Hello, could you please make an internal game demo with Unity ?” one year later.

Well I won’t turn this post into www.nicelife.com anyway, and sorry for those first-person statements all over the place :lol:

But have you even foreseen something game changing, which nobody would believe at that time, and which became a reality later ?

Actually, I’m living the story again with Adobe Flash. I’m feeling that with 3D becoming more and more important, Flash will be less and less used because of its lack of such a tech, its poor performance and Adobe’s sofware catalog bad management. Flash is my dayjob, and when I expose this opinion to my colleagues, advising to explore other engines for job’s safety, It’s just turning into a flame fest.

Sheesh … :roll:

2

Guess that depends on your location too. In my mind, the time that the internet was ‘niche’, I’d consider pre 92- 94. With 96 - 02 being the boom. By 02 -03 the big guys were busting out and all the little guys pretty much had websites already. Wasn’t it like 99 or 00 that practically every single superbowl commercial was a .com?

I mean, I guess today you need some sort of a web presence, regardless of the type of business. Though for most companies it’s nothing more than an ‘About Us’ and a ‘Contacts’ page.

3

With Apple not having it’s devices support Flash, I could see the movement away from Flash happening.

In the end, businesses want their content seen. If a lot of people have internet devices that don’t support Flash, then they may choose something like HTML5 instead. Or Silverlight.

4

Yes, by '00 you had every stupid idea imaginable on the web already. '02/'03 is awfully late to the party as far as the internet goes, considering '01 was the whole .com bubble collapse thing.

–Eric

5

Personally, I don’t think Apple not supporting Flash is going to do much of anything to influence its demise. It will probably just frustrate some of their users.

That aside, while I do feel that there will be a place for Flash long into the foreseen future, I definitely believe that Unity VERY much has an opportunity to steal the lion’s share of online interactive content away from Flash. If Unity can do pretty much all that Flash can do, but with the choice of 2d or 3d, who wouldn’t choose to use Unity instead?

We’ll have to see how the Unity team steers things into the future, but I think right now they’re right on track to overtake Flash in many areas. All things heading the way they currently are, I say within the next 5-7 years Unity will be pulling ahead. That is if they don’t sell out to a large corporation. I’ve seen that happen and ruin things. Hopefully they’ll keep going and stay true to their vision. :wink:

6

There couldn’t have been a dot-com fueled recession that almost took out NASDAQ at the end of Clinton’s presidency, if the internet were only a niche until the mid 2000’s.

I agree with your sentiment, but your timing is off by a decade or so. I was trying to convince my employers they needed leverage the internet back in 92-93. However it wasn’t to hawk products, rather to use as a replacement for arcane and incredibly expensive mission critical functions such as EDT.

Obviously that was difficult, as not only the business in question but all of it’s customers would need to replace their old Bisynch modems with internet access.

7

Yes, my bad !

More like '00 :wink:
(far far away memories are far far away)
Seems like France had a big delay then. But it wouldn’t surprise me…

Also, it should once again depend on location, but I experienced some cool demands here that would go beyond simple contacts/infos page, like building a videogame front public shop + an administrative stock/price manager in the same site package, with the same login interface. I was surprised that this kind of online shop interface didn’t spread more than that.

And overall, I’m very surprised that so much enterprises all over the world put their site away from core business management, sticking with contact/infos dumb template.

I can imagine … Nearly impossible toconvince investors I guess.

Makes me think that software convergence like the one we’re seeing with Apple tablet (“forbid this, allow that”) is better for such ideas credibility.
Investors will be more open to innovation propositions if there is less compatibility/visibility disparities.

That’s it. I really feel that the time when 3D engine providers would have enough of waiting for Adobe to move their ass is not so far away.
3D is the new market locomotive now, not 2D anymore. Flash already saturated it.
So as creators and users will slowly move to 3D engines, they will still feel the need to author 2D content. But why should we bother hoping for Adobe to optimize their slow squicky machine while we can just cheer up 10x more dynamic enterprises like Unity to implement 2D ?
Even if Flash is my bill solver, I’m not hesitating one more second to jump on 3D evangelizing.

8

I find WebGL particularly intriguing in thinking about what the future holds. Pluginless unlike Flash or Unity. New but emerging and gaining steam with browser providers including Apple.

9

I figure that x86 CPUs will eventually lose favor in the consumer electronics market as ARM processors with superior battery life cut out a market in the netbook-- and later on, notebook-- sector.

This basically means that the most relevant technologies on the market are:
HTML5 (canvas 2D, video, audio, datastore, websockets)
WebGL / O3D
JavaScript will be huge, as it runs on everything, and is relatively fast
Cloud platforms such as App Engine

Shaders are here to stay (OpenGL ES 2.0), but I’m not entirely sure of mobile cGPU.

I wrote about this about six months ago…
http://devops.net/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=22

Anyway, we’ll see how it turns out, a lot of this technology comes to a head this year, with the release of the iPad and OS 4.0, Android 3.0, and-- perhaps most importantly-- Chrome OS. And, of course, the accompanying smartbooks.

Since Unity has ARM support in a very meaningful way, they might be in a unique position to lead the way in the endeavor to leave x86 behind, and move to more efficient platforms.

10

Pretty interesting forseeing :slight_smile:

To be honest, I’m quite worried about this WebGL thing.

As you mentioned, it won’t require any more plugin (like our beloved Unity).

And future is indeed more inclined to use pluginless solutions. I hope Unity will do something good with it.

(Yes, fanboy inside ^^)

11

One problem with WebGL (and also to an extent, O3D) is that a great deal of the computation is still done through JavaScript. This gives you a lot of control, but serious implementations of games will be problematic for all but the most talented and professional of software engineers or those brilliant outlier genius coders. (at least, this is what I tell myself :wink: )

Another problem is that, although this isn’t so bad in O3D, basic things such as the scenegraph and matrix math are things you have to implement yourself. I doubt the majority of Unity users have ever had to worry too much about the ins and outs of quaternions, frustums, and occlusion culling / BSP trees.

And, of course, it goes without saying that there is no editor. This is fine usually, as it’s quick enough to refresh your view and find where objects are. Still, Unity offers a great deal more than just object and world placement… It’s the whole package, and that’s great.

Finally, there’s a lot of great compatibility code in Unity, it is highly optimized, and it is FAST. Of course, it still uses JavaScript, however, this is a whole other kind of fast.

What Unity will do is just release a generic ARM port (with Android support, of course), and hopefully this will be usable across Apple 3GS (A8 ), iPad A4 (perhaps ARM A9?), and the new Snapdragon and Tegra 2 cores, which many are very excited about, including me, of course. :slight_smile:

12

I suspect matrix operations would be impossibly slow in javascript.

13

You have no idea. Even for simple primitives, you get a 60FPS refresh rate. However, this WebGL, mind you. The scope of O3D and WebGL appear to be very different, but I haven’t seen much recent news on the development of either. Unity devs need not be concerned about these packages / standards for quite some time. Also, O3D is a plugin, just like Unity.