We were recently asked if any of our company activities had a sustainability element, and initially it did not seem so. We don't plant trees or stop the burning of oil, in fact with the advent of printers and more powerful devices, we were consuming more trees for paper and using more electricity to keep everything running. Not terribly sustaining. Then we remembered the amazing advances over the last few decades thanks to computers. More people can work and study from home now, meaning less time driving back and forth, reducing pollution and the wasteful use of an increasingly valuable resource. Devices are getting smaller and using fewer watts of power to do the same job. Printing and sending letters have given way to email and even shorter tweets and posts.

As an industry, we are at the forefront of pioneering sustainability, so give yourself a pat on the back. For a while at least, you can breathe in the unprecedented clean air unburdened by cars and planes, and reflect that you're doing your part to make our tiny blue green planet a nicer place to live ?

As you may know we are the developers behind the UK’s #1 app for the driving theory test – Driving Test Success 4in1 Kit.  We launched a new app for learner drivers just before the Covid-19 lockdown – timing eh! But now that driving lessons and theory tests are re-starting, we are hoping to gain traction with learner drivers who want extra help with the practical side of learning to drive with the Practical Driving Test UK 2020 app.

The Practical Driving Test UK 2020 app is no substitute for getting real driving experience with an Approved Driving Instructor; but our app helps reinforce and refresh the learning in between driving lessons.

The app features 360 degree videos and takes you inside the vehicle for an all-round close up view - no need for a VR headset!  Filmed from every angle, it’s like having your very own driving instructor with you! It’s the ONLY app with over 160 practical driving lesson video tutorials to help fully prepare the learner driver for their Practical Driving Test, plus it features driving help and guidance, quizzes and personalised reminders.

Enough of the sales spiel! The reason we tell you all this - it’s written in AppGameKit ?

This month we meet Matthew Hart and his VR Speed cubing application

Tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got into coding and using AppGameKit...

I started programming back in the early 90s as a kid by typing in BASIC commands from a microcomputer magazine. I think the first game featured an ASCII jet that could move up and down and fire a bullet at incoming jets. Eventually moved onto QBASIC and got to grips with writing to the pixel buffer directly for rendering graphics. Windows 3.1 enabled game creation programs like Klik & Play and The Games Factory so I tried these for many years but WYSIWYG editors didn't suit me. I found myself using workarounds more often than direct solutions. When QBASIC was eventually discontinued I found FreeBASIC which reignited my appetite for coding games. In 2010 I released a game called Boondog which was bought by Gimme5Games and ported to ActionScript for their Adobe Flash games website. It is an unforgiving puzzle platformer!

Then I discovered AppGameKit with its Tier 1 and Tier 2 options about 3 years ago. It has a good blend of ease-of-use (Tier 1) and full control (Tier 2) in a familiar syntax. I've been very happy so far with my experience using AppGameKit. It can handle almost anything I throw at it and I don't feel like I am always "working around" the issues.

What inspired you to create a Rubik's Cube VR project?

I got interested in VR right when the Vive was released. I got the Oculus Rift when it was on sale and haven't looked back. In April 2019 I received a (very bad) knockoff Rubik's Cube as a gift. I also bought AppGameKit VR but at that time I hadn't put the two together. I've been solving cubes for just over a year now and I'm completely hooked (personal record is 17.68s #bragmuch). I now see VR as potentially a great way to introduce gamers to Cubing and to enable training methods that are otherwise impossible to do in reality. To be able to instantly set a cube to a particular state allows me to repeatedly drill an algorithm (a set of moves that perform a swap or cycle of pieces), or practice various stages of a solve more conveniently.

How have you found the process of coding the project in AppGameKit?

This project is Tier 1 and coding with AppGameKit is easy. Being able to compile apps for multiple devices and broadcast to them are fantastic features. However, I do miss operators such as ++ and += and the associative arrays of scripting languages like JavaScript and PHP.

Were there any challenges that you had to overcome? If so, how did you solve them?

I suppose developing in VR is its own challenge. I created a debug console panel on my left wrist so that I don't have to check the monitor while in VR. Having to put on the HMD over and over again to test things takes extra time, but the biggest challenge in this project has to be the cube math. Transforming a cube programmatically turned out to be a lot more complicated than I had anticipated! It is an ocean of jumbled indices, modulos and remappings that I'd rather not have to revisit! Shaders are a new endeavour for this project and I am very much enjoying that topic.

Are you planning on releasing the project soon?

I have no deadline on this project, it is still in the very early stages. It would be super to add multiplayer to play casually or competitively with a friend. It will be released when it is bug-free, fun and easy to play for everyone. So probably never ;)

Matthew posts updates to his projects in the AppGameKit Facebook Group. If you want to follow his progress please sign up to the group.