iPhone Mocap 📱, Moon Studios Netcode 🎮, Haversine GPS 📍
🎭 Creative Tech & Animation
Turn Your iPhone Into a Facial Mocap Camera With Mimiq Capture
Mimiq Capture is a new, free early-access tool from Monster Puppet Corporation that turns any Face ID iPhone or compatible iPad Pro into a facial animation camera. It tracks detailed facial motion and streams the data over a local network straight into Maya. Supporting blendshapes, joints, and any rig type, it’s aimed at character TDs, animators, and game-tech teams. Everything runs locally, avoiding cloud processing and extra hardware costs.
From Ori to Wicked: Moon’s Custom Netcode, Streaming, and Painterly Style
Moon Studios details how they rebuilt their entire pipeline to create No Rest for the Wicked: a systemic ARPG with deterministic co-op on top of a heavily modified Unity. The team explains using Photon Quantum, custom chunk-based level streaming, debug-heavy workflows, and an internal timeline tool to keep iteration fast for a fully remote team. On the art side, a tool-agnostic, hand-painted pipeline and Caravaggio-inspired lighting define the game’s non-PBR aesthetic. The result is a Souls-adjacent ARPG with town-building, housing, and painterly flair.
🧠 AI, Code & Clever Algorithms
Zero Code to Live Multiplayer Game in 7 Months with AI
This interview follows Jonathan Bjerk, a full-time accountant who built Curve Clash, a real-time multiplayer Snake-meets-Battle-Royale game, entirely with AI tools. He reveals how LLMs handled architecture, cross-platform Flutter/Firebase setup, and rapid iteration, while he focused on design, feel, and player feedback. Bjerk shares hard lessons about debugging real-time multiplayer, warns new creators not to start with online play, and predicts AI will empower solo devs to compete with traditional studios.
How Far Is That, Really? Computing GPS Distance with Haversine
When you treat latitude and longitude like x/y coordinates, distance calculations quickly fall apart at larger scales. This tutorial explains how the haversine formula correctly measures great-circle distances on a sphere, why it’s numerically safer than the raw spherical law of cosines, and how to implement it cleanly in JavaScript. It breaks down the geometry, shows where flat equirectangular projections are “good enough,” and quantifies haversine’s error versus real ellipsoidal Earth models. The result is a clear toolkit for robust geospatial distance calculations.