I'd like more people to know and use this. It works beautifully for any situation where you have multiple lines of code that must stay together, but which have to remain separate - e.g. an API that requires you to call "manager.Begin();" ... then your own code, then ... "manager.End();"
Unity3D
My simple OpenOffice spreadsheet for tracking Unity Asset Store revenues per-asset. http://t-machine.org/wp-content/uploads/UnityAssetStoreRevenues-Template.ods Usage/setup instructions included on the first page (scroll down). To fill in the data, I use a script that scrapes the Unity publisher portal. But for short periods of time, you can easily fill this in by hand. […]
Unity Terrain is a good Terrain renderer, but the API’s behind it are famously badly documented and rather clunky (most of the documentation still hasn’t been written, almost 10 years after it was launched). At Unite this year they were showing-off some of the “new Terrain” features/tools, all of which […]
One of Unity3D’s greatest successes has been the Asset Store. Bursting to life 9 years ago, initially sounding a lot like an optimistic clone of Apple’s 2-year-old App Store (and boasting the same 70%/30% revenue share), it turned out to be so much more. But Unity still struggles to figure […]
This once-obscure method, that – I guess – is the low-level call used by most of the new Unity GUI … is now the only way of drawing meshes in GUIs. The previous options have been removed, with brief comments telling you to use .SetMesh instead. Half of the DrawMesh […]
Shawn asked on Twitter: If there were one internal class/method/field in the UnityEditor namespace you would want exposed properly, what would it be? #unity3d — Shawn White (@ShawnWhite) June 29, 2016 We only get to pick ONE? :). How do we decide? There’s two ways to slice this. There’s “private […]
Current features commit 26eafb7865965fd5ef5ee3ad4863f00acf8d10a2 Generates hexes landscapes, with heights (Civ5 bored me by being flat-McFlat-in-flatland) Every hex is selectable, using custom fix for Unity’s broken mouse-click handler (see below) Any object sitting on landscape is selectable (ditto) Selected units move if you click any of the adjacent hexes (shown using […]
Unity is still the only major game-engine with an effective, established Asset Store. This is an enormous benefit to game developers – but do you feel you’re making full use of it? I’ve bought and used hundreds of Unity plugins, models, scripts, etc from 3rd parties. I’ve found some amazing […]
A modest desire The red pyramid in this image is a custom handle (3D) that you can grab, drag, and move around the screen. When it touches another GameObject, it finds any Sockets on that object, and attempts to rotate + move + scale the first object so that they […]
Some screenshots from today’s improvements. I’m moving gradually towards releasing version 2. Shortlist of changes/improvements below… From this mess … to this: Building some odd machines to test it works: Features and fixes recently added Use shaded, materialed meshes for in-editor handles, instead of flat ugly rectangles and tris Click/tap […]
I periodically write massive long documents detailing all the bugs in Unity that I know, have memorized, and have to workaround on a day-to-day / hour-to-hour basis. But it makes me so angry and frustrated – so much terrible coding, so little technology-leadership at the company – that I end […]
A new version of Unity is now out – https://unity3d.com/unity/whats-new/unity-5.2 – and it’s a doozy. I don’t normally blog a blow-by-blow account, but this set is particularly interesting. It suggests the tech team has been focussed on fixing many “critical but un-sexy” problems. That is a noticeable change in direction […]
There’s tonnes of blogs out there, so I only talk about the bits that other people have missed, or were too polite or inexperienced to cover. Often that means I’m the one pointing out the flaws (most people don’t want to write bad things. Screw that; ignoring the bad points […]
Unity3D has a great core architecture – it’s easy to understand and use. However, it has some significant flaws. One of the recurring problems I run into is that Unity requirs you to have precisely one “Scene” at any one time, but often you need to have multiple scenes at […]
One of my hobby projects is a testament to the Ultima and Elder Scrolls games – a massive open-world, where everything you do impacts the world around you. This has long been promised by commercial games – and it sucks from a gameplay perspective; it’s just not fun. But a […]
One of Unity’s dirty secrets is that (out of the box) it’s plain awful as a prototyping tool. You can fix that, but it requires quite a lot of work. I’m going to start publishing my fixes one by one. Here’s the first: a test-bed for making custom meshes.
If you do any non-trivial customization of Unity Editor, you’ll almost certainly extend EditorWindow. But Unity (to date) refuses to tell anyone how to do this legally, or what the contracts you’re being held to are. Without that, many plugins on the Unity Asset Store are wrong and buggy, and […]
In Unity, you create new scripts many times per day, and folders but there’s no keyboard shortcuts. I fixed this, and made the popup rather more intelligent than Unity’s built-in one. I’ve decided to make the basic version available for free here: UPDATE: there’s a bug in the 1.0 version […]
Six months ago I tweeted a handful of obvious ways that you could make the Unity Asset Store greatly more profitable. One of the Unity folk reached out to me, claimed that Unity was highly invested in improving this and asked for specific suggestions. So I wrote longer, detailed versions […]
Slides from my talk last night at Unity Brighton. Three parts: First: introduction / overview of Entity Systems, and why you care (as a “person who makes games”) Second: Progress so far: screenshots of the Unity Editor with explanation of the new features I’ve added Third: Challenges and solutions I’ve […]