Ottawa unity user_group_feb13_2015
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The document presents a talk by the Ottawa Unity User Group discussing tips and tricks for Unity game development based on their experiences. It covers topics including custom tools for asset management, the implementation of an asset pipeline, and recommendations for useful asset store plugins. Ultimately, it emphasizes the importance of investing in custom tools and asset store plugins to streamline workflow and enhance project efficiency.
Ottawa unity user_group_feb13_2015
- 1. Ottawa Unity User Group Jon Keon – Karman Interactive http://karmaninteractive.com @jonkeon @KarmanLtd Feb 13, 2015
- 2. Format • Share Tips, Tricks, Experiences with Unity over the last 3 years. • = Good things • = Bad things • These are not laws, many ways to do things, this is what has worked for us. Challenge it, question it, we’re happy to discuss.
- 3. Format • About Us • Tips/Tricks/Experiences • Asset Store Plugins • Q&A
- 4. About Us
- 5. About Us - Based in Ottawa and Toronto - Small company (2 full time + small team of highly trusted contractors) - Mobile and Web, games and experiences - Love to play with experimental and obscure technologies - Experiment driven, Client supported - Experiments keep us ahead of the curve - Client work keeps us sharp and pays the bills
- 10. Library Switching – Big project with tons of textures? iOS/Android importer takes FOREVER. Don’t have the Asset Server license – Check out this one simple trick
- 12. Library Switching – Close Unity – Rename Library folder – Open Unity again to create a new Library folder for the new Platform (happens once) or rename previous Library folders back to just Library. – Asset imported only imports the Deltas. Much faster than regular switch platforms
- 13. Custom Tools - Nudge – Designer gives you a PSD to match. – You need to pixel perfect match it. Dragging is inaccurate, manually entering x and y coordinates is tedious.
- 14. Custom Tools - Nudge
- 15. Custom Tools - Nudge – Invest in writing a custom editor tool. – For us, H, U, J, K are keyboard shortcuts for nudging any Transform or Transforms by a configurable amount of units. – Y is a keyboard shortcut to toggle whether a GameObject or GameObjects are visible. Matching comps is now a 5 second process.
- 16. Asset Management – Difference between Author Time and Run Time Author Time Run Time Need to visually layout assets in a Prefab or Scene Only want the assets needed for the specific platform and specific size. Need to switch between 1X, 2X and 4X assets to ensure consistency Build size is limited! (50mb Google Play, 100mb iOS) Need to update assets/prefabs/scenes frequently Need all assets locally
- 17. Asset Management – Prefabs • Create a different prefab for each permutation? • iOS 1X, Android 2X, etc. • Solves pretty much all the issues but… Makes your life hell. Change a button in one of them, now you need to make the exact same change in all the rest.
- 18. Asset Management – Prefabs • Have just one prefab and dynamically swap the assets? • Getting closer, but… All of those assets are now referenced by the prefab so they get included in the build. You’re going to have two sets of assets in most of your builds with one set you never use.
- 19. Asset Management – Prefabs • Invest in custom editor tool?
- 20. Asset Management – Karman Asset Pipeline (1/3) • Build Prefabs with assets normally. (Author Prefabs) • Anytime you hit play, save the scene or save the project, our script runs. • Detects all Author Prefabs with a different hash (to detect changes). • Duplicates all Author Prefabs and stores them in a different folder. (Runtime Prefabs) Removes all references to the assets on those prefabs and instead writes a metadata script to the GameObject instead.
- 21. Asset Management – Karman Asset Pipeline (2/3) • Assets that changed are built to Asset Bundles for each platform and each size automatically. (iOS 1X, 2X, 4X, Android 1X, 2X, 4X etc) • New Runtime Prefabs are included in the build. Old Author Prefabs are not included, so no assets are included. • Asset Bundles can be specified to be External or Internal so that you can fill up as much of the 50MB(Android) or 100MB(iOS) limit as you want and let the rest be downloaded from a Server.
- 22. Asset Management – Karman Asset Pipeline (3/3) • At Runtime, Asset Manager checks platform and screens-size. • Downloads required Asset Bundles if we don’t have them already. • Whenever a Runtime Prefab is Instantiated, metadata script pulls the correct asset from the bundle and sets it. Runtime Prefab now looks exactly the same as the Author Prefab but with the correct size of Assets.
- 23. Asset Management – Author Prefab on left, Runtime Prefab on right
- 24. Asset Management – Karman Asset Pipeline Post Mortem • Large initial investment to build. • Return in robustness and workflow worth it. – Benefits Never forget, automatically happens during a Save or when pressing Play in the editor. Build in the editor with the actual assets. (Like you’d expect to) Have full control over all permutations of assets and whether they are internal or external.
- 25. WWW Class The WWW class has limitations. Basically allows for sending simple GET or POST requests. Consider writing a wrapper to handle retries, timeouts, cache-busting etc. – Headers Look to List of HTTP header fields (Wikipedia) for what headers can be sent and received. Access by passing request headers to WWW constructor and check WWW.responseHeaders when it returns.
- 26. WWW Class – Example: • Grabs the Status Code being returned. Far more useful for debugging than looking just at the WWW.error property.
- 27. Launch From Any Scene – You have a Main Scene that starts your game. You press play and the game loads normally and you play. – You’re now working in the Level 6 scene. You make some changes and press play and everything errors because it can’t find the player etc. – That’s because the Player gets set in the Main scene and you just skipped all that. You have to save your Level 6 scene, switch to Main scene, play and the switch back.
- 28. Launch From Any Scene – Create a script that lives in every scene. When it starts, it destroys everything else in the scene and loads the Main Scene.
- 29. Launch From Any Scene – But the scene I launched from threw a bunch of errors to the console before we launched the Main Scene!
- 30. Launch From Any Scene – Now you can work in any scene and press play to go to your main scene. – You guarantee consistency in the launch flow so there are less bugs. – When you’re done testing, you go right back to the scene you were working in. Time saved.
- 32. Asset Store Plugins – 2D Toolkit • http://2dtoolkit.com/ Sprite Atlas creation is easy and has great features like: – Custom Anchor points per sprite – Ability to dice your sprite into smaller images so they take up less space – Remove duplicates (works really well with dicing) Handles 9-sliced sprites nicely Operates in 3D space so easy to merge 2D and 3D content.
- 33. Asset Store Plugins – Text Mesh Pro • http://digitalnativestudios.com/ Bitmap Fonts work well for one size and can be large textures depending on how many characters. Text Mesh Pro uses Signed Distance Fields to render the text crisply at any size. Textures are often smaller too. Also has many other features for auto-sizing text, formatting etc. If you build anything multi-lingual this plugin is a necessity.
- 34. Asset Store Plugins – DOTween • http://dotween.demigiant.com/ Successor to HOTween. Handles making things move… nicely. Even in beta, it’s the best tween engine we’ve seen for features, performance and API.
- 35. Conclusions – Spend the money to explore Asset Store plugins. • Odds are high that the cost to purchase is far lower than the time it would take you to create it. • It will also have been bug tested and used by many others in live projects. – If an Asset Store Plugin doesn’t exist, invest the time to create your own tools. • Pick your biggest pain point and solve that first. • Test on a live project to find the pitfalls and actual use- cases. Give yourself time.
- 36. • Concerns and Comments are also acceptable and encouraged. Questions? THANKS!
Editor's Notes
- #33: We may replace with Unity’s new UI system. Still evaluating at this point.