next »

[sswift]

Hi guys,

I assume this is game development related enough to post here.

Seamless Texture Generator is an application I wrote back in 2006 after inventing a new algorithm to seamlessly blend two images together. It worked so well that the first time I ran it on a test image I had to check twice to make sure I was actually looking at where the seam should be!

I knew I had a winner, and when I began selling it I was making $500-$600 a month. Almost nine years on, and with no paid advertising, the application is still pulling in $200 a month on average without any effort on my part.

Keep in mind, I haven't updated the application since I released it. And it is sorely in need of an update. I will give you the full source code in BlitzPlus, which is a structured language similar to Visual Basic and C. It's fully commented and easy to follow, but you'll probably want to scrap 90% of it, redo the GUI in a more modern style, and just use the algorithms for removing perspective, making the images seamless, sharpening without halos, and removing shadows and highlights. Porting the code alone should boost sales as it will greatly speed up the application and make it work with today's larger images, and adding a few features like color and brightness adjustment couldn't hurt either.

I suspect if you were to put in a little effort you could increase sales to $500 a month again in no time, and if you put in a lot of effort promoting it and adding support for normal maps you could get sales up to $1K a month. Another thing which would drive a lot of people to the website and purchase the software is if you were to offer textures for download on the website. That would improve its search ranking a lot, but I never got around to this since my interests long ago turned to electronics.

The website itself has been getting 2000 visitors a month on average, and occasionally it makes it into the first page of search results on Google and sales increase dramatically for a month or two.

I am offering this website and the software to you for $7,500. The website makes around $2,500 a year as-is, so even if you do nothing at all to enhance sales, you'd begin making a profit in three year's time. Sales are mostly through Share*It, and you'll need to set up your own account with them if you wish to take orders that way, but setting up a modern shopping cart system and taking credit card orders directly might also help improve sales.

In summary, if you choose to purchase this business you will get the domain name, html and images, and the software application and source code, to do with as you wish.

And why am I selling it now instead of updating the application and promoting it myself? My interests were always more about making games than applications, and several years ago I got out of making games altogether and turned to electronics. So I'm selling the business because I need money to invest in my new electronics business.

If interested, you can get in touch with me at [email protected]

[Zorg]

Interesting! Could you briefly elaborate on main benefits of your software compared to free alternatives?

[sswift]

The website describes the benefits and has example textures. 

If you are familiar with making textures you'll know there's a few methods everyone uses to automate it and none of them work particularly well.  You can mirror the image, but that's obvious when tiled.  You can overlap the images slightly and do an alpha blend but that too can be seen as repeating bands of low contrast and it halves the size of the texture making repetition more obvious and it just looks wrong for many surfaces.  The same is true of methods which just try to splat copies of the image at random and create a result that looks synthetic.

The method my application uses is one I invented which works on the image at multiple resolutions.  The final texture is the same size as the original, but if it was bright on the left side and dark on the right side, with a click of a button the two sides will match up.  And not only will they match up at the large scale, but as you approach the edge of the image it will match up on progressively smaller and smaller scales  And it does this without resulting in reduced contrast in those regions.

The application also has the ability to remove perspective from photos of buildings just by dragging the corners of a quad to the corners of the building, and it can remove bright and dark spots in the image, and it has a sharpening algorithm that doesn't create halos around things like unsharp masking will.