Posts by Nicholas Francis

So, a bunch of us are busy getting everything ready for Unite – check out this people of guys who’s responsible for doing the conference visuals. It’s a pretty sweet setup (and this is just whatever gear they could fit in their hand luggage).

The projection image on the wall is the final result of camera input and the presenter slides which will get liveedited to a separate machine. They’re mixing everything in realtime using modul8 vj software.

We’ll also be color-keying in the conference visuals with our slides. Cool stuff – I just hope it doesn’t crash…

Hi guys & gals.

I’m giving a talk about the inner workings of immediate-mode GUIs at GDC Europe tomorrow (in Cologne). Looking forward to doing it – it’s been my main Unity development area for the past 2 years, so I guess I somehow ended up being an expert on that subject It’s Monday at 2:10 – 3:00 PM

If any of you are there, I hope you come – and if you want to meet up in Cologne, drop me a mail or a PM on our forum, and I’ll try to squeeze you in.

Hi guys. 

I was just going through some old folders sitting in a dusty corner on my hard drive, when I found a backup copy of images I posted to a Danish gamedev forum in the first years of Unity. Thought I should share these:

Unity 0.2 (or thereabouts)

This is Unity running in what I believe to be OS X 10.0 – it’s a game Joachim and I made together over a weekend when I visited him while he was still living with his parents. The funny thing is both seeing how much has changed, but also how little: we got ShaderLab in bottom left, Hierarchy view, Project (called Library back then) and the inspector top-right. What did we actually do during all those years? (and yes, that is python gamecode scripts you can see in the Library – this was before we switched to Mono)

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With 2.5 out the door, I finally got some time to work on new features. I love that part – to me new features are so nice – the first couple of weeks always feels like you’re the world’s fastest coder (after that, reality sets in and you actually have to make it work in real life – even for corner cases).
Rune and I are busy on the new animation timeline. (Actually, I’m stealing his thunder – he’s doing the real work while I’m just mocking up in Photoshop and spreading general confusion) We’re basically going for a complete rewrite that gives you control over all curves with key editing, tangent dragging, the works. – have a look at what we’re thinking:

Upcoming 2.6 timeline WIP

I’m really excited about this. I’m thinking that it should be able to require a lot less scripting work for a bunch of stuff. It will also support material animation (so you can actually just make some curves for a UV scroll – instead of having to code the thing from scratch).

Semitransparent GUI is all the rage these days. This is usually not a good idea. Here, I’ll go into some of the details why transparency (mostly) sucks.

Transparency creates visual noise – our eyes are very good at edge detection, and having transparent stuff increases the number of edges that we have to process. Also, a lot of GUI has some sort of layering effect – either through shading, coloring or by using floating windows. Using transparency breaks this layering (in nature, very few things are partially transparent).

Who got the idea that having a large 50% transparent panel was a good idea? – you can neither see the panel nor the text beneath.Now, I said at the top that semitransparent GUI is ususaly not a good idea – let’s take a look at where it does work: (more…)

A request I’ve gotten from quite a few new users is to have some indicator axes in the Scene View showing you what is up and what is down. There is a reason why they are not there, and it ties into the core of my Job here at UT: GUI design. I’ve wanted to comment a bit on this.

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