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!

Unite 2013 Training Day

While Day #1 of Unite 2013 kicked off yesterday in Vancouver, Tuesday was the Training Day and it was fantastic! The session was run by two of the guys from the Learn team: Ben Pitt & Will Goldstone. To start you off you were handed a nice 8GB USB key (with the Unity logo on it) that contained the installers for Unity 4.2 (required for the Training Day, which was nice as I had 4.1.5 installed) and then all the content needed to follow along with the tutorial and create a game.

There was A LOT of content covered in the course, so I apologize of parts of this post are vague.

The session started off with an introduction to the Unity Editor which took you through all the components of the Editor and customization options such as changing the colour of the Editor when in Play mode.To do this, follow these steps: 

1. Launch Unity then click on "Edit > Preferences".

2. Click on the "Colors" tab on the left-hand side and you will see the "Playmode tint" option under the "General" heading.

3. Click on the colour bar (in green above) and you will be presented with the colour picker. You can either pick your colour, or type in the RGB code.

4. Once done, click the "X" in the top right hand corner of the box, then click the "Play" button in the Editor to check your change.



After the Editor Refresher came some instruction on Adding Assets and then Level Prototyping. The Level Prototyping took us through how to quickly build up some floor spaces and using the Duplicate tools.The floor space we laid out was the start of a castle that was the game play area for what we were creating.

Then it was on to Editor Scripting. A handy script surrounded the floor with the provided walls and towers and we were good to go. Below is a screenshot of the finished castle that was provided.

Another handy part of the training was that the team provided us with pre-built scenes so if anything went horribly wrong, or we were struggling to keep up, then we could just load the relevant scene.



Once the walls were created we moved on to lighting and using sky boxes before a break.

The session started again with physics and creating a basic 3D capsule that was used as the basis for our main character, with some controls added. Boxes were added to the scene, and also had physics applied so that the player could knock them over.

After this came cameras and we attached a camera to the model to follow around the player. This camera was later replace by a more advance camera that chased the player and had collision detection so that it would avoid walls, etc.

Then we made some Coin objects that the player could pick up, and prefabs were introduced to take care of this. Then a basic GUI was created to display the amount o coins remaining to be collected. The coin collection was then expanded upon by creating a particle effect that would display once the coin was collected.

Once this was complete it was time for lunch!

We returned to talk about Character Animation and the (now integrated) Mecanim features were shown off. It was amazing to see that animations could be imported into Unity, and then applied to models. This is a great time-saver as you do not have to create the same animations on all your characters when you create them, but just import the animation into Unity and then apply the one animation to all your characters. This is backed by State Machines so you can state which animations feed into each other.

You can also layer in animations so that if you want a player to be able to complete 2 actions at one (for example: run and throw) then you can layer the 2 animations so that they can still play at the same time. You do this by selecting which parts of the character you want to exclude from the animation, for example: if you are using a throw animation (like we did) then you will layer the throw action over whatever other animation is playing, but to display both the animations then you would only want to display the parts of the body that are affected by the throw action, such as the head, torso and the arm that is doing the throwing.

Here's more on animation.

Oh, and there's also Blend Trees for animation too!

To complete the animation portion we replaced our sphere with the Ethan character that was provided (this was simple to do) and then apply the animations.

After that it was the introduction of Hazards. The ability to tag components in Unity really comes handy here as you can script your character so that if they come in contact with anything tagged "Hazard" then the character will die. So we added this script and added in a call to the Die animation, then respawn the player.

Then it was on to Enemies and Projectiles and we were done! Phew! As I wrote earlier, it was a LOT of content. There were no hold-ups as everyone in the room kept up (there were also multiple "helpers" around the floor to help people out where needed), but the instructors were rushed to get us finished in time.

We were given a link to the training slides, I wasn't told we couldn't give out that link so here it is! I apologize to the Unity team if we weren't supposed to share it, but let me know and I'll take down the link. Also, for readers I cannot say how long the content will be available.