Unite 2013 Day 3

*** The following are notes on the sessions I attended and do not represent the full schedule of events at Unite 2013 ***

The final day of Unite :(

Level Up with the Unity Asset Store
This session concentrated on Unity's Asset Store and all the content available on there. The ssest Store does no contain just models, etc., but also contains useful tools like nGUI, shaders, AI, etc., etc. The presenter told us a great story (great for us, not so great for her to go through) on how she was a failed Indie game developer, but how she now has an understanding of what is needed to create games and has developed a passion for game assets as a result.
The presenters also explained that some art assets provided on the Asset Store are created by people working as artists in the games industry, sometime for AAA studios. This is evident in the pure quality of the content itself.
If you want to check out the Asset Store yourself, then it is here.
There were also talks by a couple of people who were selling content on the store. It's funny to hear how one of the speakers built a game, but has made more money from the Asset Store selling a plug-in for Unity that he developed for that game, than he has made off the game itself!

Feedback and Q&A: The Future of 2D and GUI in Unity
This was a bit of a dry session and slow to start. The panel started out by asking the floor for questions, but questions were slow in coming out. The panel then demonstrated some of the 2D and GUI features for Unity and the questions started to flow. There was some confusion on the floor between items in the 2D component and items in the GUI tools. I think this session would have been much better if it had started with a re-cap of the new toolset before starting the Q&A session.
Also, the question of release for the GUI component (the 2D component is coming in 4.3) was raised again but the panel either did not know, or were not allowed to tell (it was hard to determine which) when those release versions or dates would be.

Wrangling OnGUI
This was a great, in-depth, look at the current GUI system built into Unity: OnGUI. Current challenges/bugs were identified and described and a demonstration of OnGUI was also given. Not a very exciting or engaging presentation, but useful nonetheless.

Internal Unity Tips and Tricks
This was the final session I attended and gave some great advice on debugging your Unity game. The PRO version of Unity comes with performance analysis tools built in, but the presenter also recommended:

Visual Studio 2012 Graphics Debuggers
Intel GPA
Pix for Windows (part of the DirectX SDK)

The End

And it really was. I'd saved visiting the exhibitors there until Friday as it was a much slower day and finished at 4pm rather than 6pm. So I thought I'd have 2 hours to go around all the exhibitors during that time. Well, I'm glad I didn't wait until the end to do this as I had planned originally as they were all either packing up or packed up completely.
There were still people at the Hands On Labs, but I think my brain was in overload so I would not have got much out of them.

Anyway, here's a round up of the Exhibitors and my impressions of them:

The Exhibitors of Unite 2013 Vancouver

The Good (in no particular order)
The Foundry - awesome guys and all of them were willing to chat, give live demos, etc. Their passion for Modo was plain to see, and it was great to see that level of passion and excitement about their product.

Game Anlytics - super helpful, easy to talk with and willing to show you anything they could about their product.

Reallusion - In a word: fantastic! Another group excited and passionate about their product and willing to make sure I left with a clear view of what they did and how their product would help me realize my game creating dreams. They also gave me a discount voucher and trial disk, and made me feel valued as a potential customer.

Simplygon - another bunch of guys willing and able to explain the hows and whys of their product. And free t-shirts! :) Great, friendly team!

Nintendo - the representative I spoke to was very friendly and knowledgeable on the Nintendo Store. He took the time to answer my questions, made sure I had all the info they could give me, showed me a development console, the works. I liked what I heard so much that I started the developer reistration process while waiting for my next session to begin.


The Bad
Autodesk - the Autodesk presentation was fantastic, but the booth not so much. The guys there were good to talk to and I think, in all fairness, they may have been "conventioned out". Also it could have been me as the coffee hadn't kicked in yet. But they did answer questions and the guy demonstrating Scale Form was nice enough to give a quick demo. Maybe I'm being harsh on Autodesk, but they weren't that engaging.

The Ugly
NVIDIA - I was excited to see NVIDIA there with the Shield as I've been wanting to get my hads on one of those. Their booth was simply a table with a tiny NVIDIA sign, one guy (maybe 2???) and 2 NVIDIA Shields. When I went over, I got a glance and the guy ignored me and talked to someone else. It was hard to tell if the other person was an attendee or just a friend or fellow exhibitor as he occupied the seat next to the guy. It would have been nice for some engagement there, or just something and not left to just stand there like an idiot!

There were other exhibitors there that I just did not get to talk to:

Unity Asset Store
Houdini
Immersion
Sony
Unity Studios
Leonardo 3D
Oculus VR (the queue was massive for them and people seemed blown away)
ARM
Photon Server
UnityVS
Qualcomm
Blackberry

All in all I had a great time and hope they repeat their world tour next year. Thank you Unity!