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Notice: The Dublin Unity3D Development Discussion is full with 35 attendees and 13 people currently on the waiting list.
Unity is a fantastic tool/engine for game development, but what’s not obvious when developing it is the best methods for developing the game code.
Coming from a programming background, Unity can be quiet confusing. The idea of attaching components to objects in order to add functionality is easy to grasp and makes creating small games fast any easy, but what about larger and more complex games?
The Dublin Unity3D Development Discussion is an event where attendees will get the opportunity to do a talk on the development methods (including, if they wish, the project management techniques/software that they use) and design patterns that they use to develop games. These presentations can take any form and involve any kind of media (a game, code examples, slides, handouts). Those giving talks are welcome to demonstrate their game(s), whatever state they are in.
Doing a presentation/talk is completely optional. They are also informal, there’s no list to sign up to, just come along with any material/media you’d like to use (if any).
After the presentations there will be a discussion on development in Unity.
Some of the things we’ll be discussing are:
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[*:8cac6e3e36]Using design patterns in Unity to structure code:
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[*:8cac6e3e36]Singleton – For instantiating a single Scene Manager
[*:8cac6e3e36]State – For GameStates which encapsulate logic/code for each scene
[*:8cac6e3e36]Observer – Having components/classes subscribe to event notices
[*:8cac6e3e36]Object Pool – Limiting instantiations of GameObjects to reduce garbage collection (improve performance)
[*:8cac6e3e36]Adapter/Wrapper – Used for integrating Jitter Physics and maybe managing GameObjects
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[*:8cac6e3e36]Project management (in relation to managing issues and code)
[/list:u:8cac6e3e36]Everyone’s welcome to attend, however the topics covered will require some understanding of C# (or a similar language).
Where and when?
Thursday 26th January at 6:30pm, at TOG.How do I book a place?
Book now on Eventbrite. Booking is free.About Me
My name is Mark Aherne.Over the past year I’ve been developing and refining my own methods of managing and structuring a game in Unity using C#. I’d love the opportunity to share these with others and discuss their solutions to these problems. By pooling our experience and knowledge we can help to improve the quality of our code and, by extension, our games.
I’ve also integrated the Lidgren Network Library and Jitter Physics with Unity for my game development, to give me greater control over the networking and physics (for multiplayer simulation). I’d be happy to discuss these too.
That’s not to suggest that everything I do is the best way of doing it, this will be an opportunity for everyone attending to learn even better ways of doing things.
You can find me on Twitter @WiredMark.
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Sweet! Ought to be a good nite :D
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Sounds cool, being knocking round the idea of trying to start a Unity user group of some sort, maybe this could be the start of it, if it expanded to more of a gerneral Unity tips and tricks more so than focusing on progamming.
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That sounds like a very good idea.
I’m concentrating on programming (specifically patterns and methods) at this point because it’s one of the least covered areas in tutorials and documentation, and it’s one that interests me greatly.
Honestly though I’d prefer to have a Game Dev (User?) Group which covers Unity as well as other topics, especially development/testing processes. Game development covers a multitude of topics and great as Unity is it isn’t the be-all and end-all, it’s good to keep up with a variety of technologies/engines.
There is a lot of expertise around Dublin that we can draw on, there are a lot of experienced individuals who are open to sharing their knowledge.
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I’m really interested in learing more about the patterns and methods stuff because I feel that I’m weak on thoes subjects and I really want to get better. Nothing can improve a skill better than actually USING it! Or talking about it!
But I’d like to think that I’m pretty handy at general Unity stuff like its editor and scripting etc. I’m up for answering peoples questions about that kind of area in Unity if it helps!?!?!
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Yeah it’s a casual meet, not really a workshop.
We’ll pool our knowledge and expertise, people can demonstrate their games/projects/products and/or talk about the methods they are using/used.
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Sounds good to me! I’m always interested in trying to improve!
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Nice one, and very much needed, I’ve been messing with AngryAnt Behave and some generic AI stuff, I’ll try share some of that too.
Sergio.
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Excellent, I’m looking forward to that.
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Good idea. I’ll definitely try to get it in for this, just need to figure out what my schedule’s like around that time.
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Excellent, the more people involved the better the discussion.
I want to increase awareness of different ways of doing things, to help to bring structure to projects.
I’m getting good mileage out of my methods, but I’m always looking out for better ways of doing things.
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If possible it would be awesome to try out union(if its in a Playable state)- really interested since seeing it on reddit!!!
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It isn’t in a playable state yet I’m afraid, but I’ll certainly show you what I have and the source too.
I wrote an initial version of the networked physics system for ships (flight). I was thinking about duplicating some of that code for the other physics objects (missiles, stations etc) but that’s messy so I’m writing a better system which encompasses all physics objects. It’s more work now but it’ll save a lot of effort in the future. Hopefully that’ll be done for the meet.
I’m very excited about the project.
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Any suggestions on where to hold this event?
Also, any suggestions on where else to post about this event (spread the word)?
Thanks,
Mark
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Also, any suggestions on where else to post about this event (spread the word)?
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[/quote:c2f3bf04b8]Boards.ie maybe?
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Yeah I was thinking Boards.ie, their Game Editing forum is fairly dead but it couldn’t hurt.
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eventsden is pretty good too http://eventsden.com/
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Forgot about this site, popped up in my Google Reader: http://techevents.ie/.
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I wouldn’t mind getting in on this as i am studying computer science in college etc and have an interest in games.
Dunno where you could host it though… also anyone tried creating a meetup(dot)com group for this kind of thing?
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We now have nine attendees, including developers from three game development studios:
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[*:8aa83c1cf6]BatCat Games
[*:8aa83c1cf6]BitSmith Games
[*:8aa83c1cf6]Simple Lifeforms
[/list:u:8aa83c1cf6]Also, I forgot to mention in the original post that attendees do not have to take part in the discussion, people are welcome to attend and listen.
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I’ve updated the original post with a format for the event, this is to add some structure and to give people a better idea of what the event is.
Suggestions of changes/additions to the format are welcome.
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Hey guys.
I’m off to TOG (the Dublin Hackerspace) this evening to discuss holding the event there, it’s looking good.
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The meeting with TOG went well.
They have a process to follow for events, which will take a week, so I’ll confirm the venue then. I doubt there’ll be any issue though.
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Good thinking, the TOG spot is a cool hang out and can service this even space wise quite well. Theres limited seating is the only thing, any idea of numbers so far?
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We have 14 registered so far, including myself.
I think that a few more will register before the date but the likelyhood is that we won’t get more than 14 on the day.
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What kind of time frame do you currently have? Be finishing about 9 or so? Just curious, have to be up early the next morning :-(
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I’ve set the end time as 10:30pm, but that’s to facilitate extended discussion, which from experience could go on all night if allowed.
By 9pm the talks will be finished and we’ll be well into the discussion.
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Thats grand, by all accounts it shaping up to be a great nite, cant wait!
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We lost Andrew and Andrea of BatCat Games today, they’ll be out of the country at the time. On a related note be sure to check out their newly release XBOX Live Indie Game P3.
That left us at 13 attending, but after a flurry of activity we’re up to 18 now.
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Hi all,
The Dublin Unity3d Developers Discussion is being held at http://www.tog.ie/
We have 24 registered to attend so it should be a great night.
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Should be a fun night, and I can finally find out about this TOG place ive heared so much about :D
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I’ll make sure pics are taken. :)
We have 29 attendees registered now, I’ve increased the limit to 35 but that’s TOG’s absolute limit.
Really looking forward to it.
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Ive passed these details onto our students also, you might get a couple more.
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Myself and my girlfriend were going but then she realised it was mostly programming stuff.
I put in the refund request for one ticket so theres one more going.
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Thanks for that overtone, I really appreciate you taking the time to make the space available.
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Hey guys,
#DUDD was last night, and we had a good attendance. I’d say around 22 people in all. I didn’t get a chance to take pics, but one of the attendees recorded it.
It got off shaky start. I’ve had interviews this week and so didn’t have time to fully prepare, and we had to find a laptop with a vga connection and install everything on it, but I think it went well over all.
I’ll be doing up a separate post over the weekend containing notes on the night and links to relevant materials.
I didn’t distribute the source for the sample game on the night as it still needs some work (fixing some minor bugs and fully commenting the code). It should be ready for later next week.
I’d be interested in hearing people’s comments.
Thanks,
Mark
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Hi,
I’m new to Unity and game dev and attended last night not knowing what to expect, but thought it was really interesting (despite a hiccupy start javascript:emoticon(‘:wink:’)). I’m studying C# at the moment, so I thought the idea of having regular workshops sounded great.
Good work guys, especially Mark. Look forward to info on future stuff happening.
Cheers,
Fiachra :wink: -
Hey Fiachra,
Thank you very much for the use of your laptop, much appreciated.
The talk format was grand as an introduction the concepts, but getting your hands dirty is a much better way to learn.
I’d like to keep the momentum going so I’d be interested in doing a workshop in two weeks, 10th of February, or the week after if it suited people better.
In the workshop we would create, from scratch, some of the systems that I spoke about in the talk.
A big thanks to Sergio for doing his talk on Path and Steering behaviours, as well as the Behave behaviour tree, all of which I’d love to delve deeper into at some stage.
Mark
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Hey,
I was there last night, it was cool to be able to meet up and talk about Unity with likeminded people. Especially in Tog!
Having said that however, I would have a couple of suggestions. The night dragged on too long for me and a few others, especially considering public transport 10:30 really should be the absolute latest to end an evening I think. 45mins is about the length of most peoples attention span without a break. I think future meetings would benefit from a fixed, shorter length per topic or subject just to keep things fresh.
If this becomes a regular thing, particularly in Tog, I would be more inclined to become a full member rather than my current roaming status there in case the group needed someone with access/permission for the meets.
There was the implication, I felt, that there would be a sort of sequential teaching (working through a project, basic concepts etc?). Maybe I’m reading too much into that, but in any case,if that were to be the situation, I would rather that not be the main intent of the meetings. I would much prefer a more adhoc situation where people could come in with problems and discuss them with the group, and get suggestions etc. rather than try to "teach" unity since theres already an Internet full of tutorials.
It would be nice if we could get going a sort of show & tell, share our projects, show off the stuff we’ve made etc.
Not many people have full licenses, I would presume. Having a "Unity Users Group" such as this would be a nice way to get each other to do a little bit of user testing on platforms not available if some are willing. I have a full pro license on Win/Mac, iOS and Android (and probably flash in the future), so could probably make builds of apps for people who would not otherwise be able to test their games/apps on those platforms.
Oh and subversion? please avoid subversion, it’s evil. Git is by far the superior solution. Some folks might also want to look into Assembla as a project hosting solution, we did a pretty extensive review in my last place of work and it offered the best/most easy to understand feature set out of the lot. Again, mostly for teams. There are more/better non-free services like beanstalk however. A free AWS account can be set up also for source control management (thats what I use).
– Sean
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Hey,
Oh and subversion? please avoid subversion, it’s evil. Git is by far the superior solution. Some folks might also want to look into Assembla as a project hosting solution, we did a pretty extensive review in my last place of work and it offered the best/most easy to understand feature set out of the lot. Again, mostly for teams. There are more/better non-free services like beanstalk however. A free AWS account can be set up also for source control management (thats what I use).
– Sean[/quote:43dded46e5]
Thats pretty subjective. Its all down to personal preference. Personally I find GIT to be better on solo projects and SVN to be better on group collaborated projects.
I do agree with some of the other points though.
Never the less. Great night. Nice to meet up with Sergio again and well done to Mark for organizing it.
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Thats pretty subjective. Its all down to personal preference. Personally I find GIT to be better on solo projects and SVN to be better on group collaborated projects. [/quote:976148e82c]
I wouldn’t say it’s subjective at all. I’m not about to start a religious war over it, but git has some substantial advantages over subversion. I wont go into all the different reasons, but it’s worth taking a look at http://whygitisbetterthanx.com/I’ve had too many projects use SVN and it turn into a nightmare to manage to ever go back.
If you’re on windows and absolutely must use GUI clients then yes, I’ll say subversion is probably the better solution, simply for the fact that git GUI’s and installable web interfaces are few and far between.
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Thought the night was really good, nice to know there is a bit of a Unity scene in Dublin, picked up some nice techniques on organising big projects. As I said earlier in the post I definitely would like it to go more in the direction of a Unity User group, where everyone just brings their laptops and work on their own projects in a nice productive environment, and people will be fit to help each other out as needed, and then maybe every now people can give talks or workshops on particular subjects that most people are interested in.
Really looking forward to getting the sample project to dig into the code.
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Thanks to everyone for your feedback.
I organised this event wanting to start a community discussion on Unity, but really not knowing what to expect.
I had hoped that there would be more people willing to go up and talk about what they were doing and how they were doing it. It’s ok that there weren’t, but because of that I had to talk about more of my own work (and I wasn’t fully prepared for that). I’d have preferred to do 45 mins of my own stuff, but then after Sergio’s talk that would have been all there was for the night.
Still, I’m happy enough with how it went. It’s something to build on in the future.
I agree with pretty much everything that’s been said. My idea behind running the workshop(s) first was to help to bring everyone up to a certain level, to give them a better grounding in coding for Unity. That will, hopefully, give them more confidence to share and discuss their projects and ideas at any regular meetings.
A workshop is very different from following an online tutorial. The attendees literally create games in parallel, and though they may all be similar everyone is encouraged to make theirs unique – trying different things to see how it turns out.
When I run a workshop I don’t bring a plan or a complete project, we aim for something and work towards it. It’s more natural and interesting that way.
I don’t think it’d be worth running a workshop and a meet in the same week and attendance would be split, instead I’d like to do a workshop one week and the meeting the next.
I was planning to switch to Git myself; then I found out that Unity3d will, sometime in the near future, have an integrated SVN client. Due to that, and TortoiseSVN making the whole process very simple for newcomers, I decided to hold off on Git for a while.
I’ll be working on the sample project this coming week, adding an events manager (observer) to decouple systems and adding comments to the code. I expect it to be ready by next weekend.
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