Utah Unity Users Group Meeting – Feb 2016
Posted by Rampant Coyote on February 19, 2016
The quarterly meeting of the Utah Unity Users Group Meeting began with the usual Monty Python jokes about the “UUUG” acronym in a classroom at Salt Lake Community College. Then we launched into pizza, networking, and a word from our sponsors. In particular, we heard from KForce Staffing & Solutions, the bringers of the pizza. 🙂
I had a good chance to hang out with old friends, including Mike Rubin. If you are a loooooong-time reader of this blog (from the Blogspot days), you may recall a project Rubin was working on called Vespers 3D. It is still in development, but he’s switching engines over to Unity.
After the opening remarks, Chris Crabtree, developer of Gnomium. He explained several techniques he used in the development of Gnomium. One was tweening, in particular from the LeanTween library. He also showed us how he used these with extension methods, so that Unity GameObjects could gain new functions like “Move()” which took advantage of tweening.
He also explained a technique for spawning off a threaded function in Unity / C#. This is handy in Gnomium (particularly in an experimental new mode he’s working on) to prevent any kind of pauses in gameplay while the game searches for potential word matches in the dictionary.
After this, Josh Jones gave a short presentation on lessons he’s learned about Unity working on tiny but highly varied projects. He shared some of his experiences working with transforms in 3D space, and making calls to web services inside a game.
After these presentations, we continued the informal get-together chatting, showing bits from our projects, and playing around with GearVR. A lot of the discussion of the evening seemed to revolve around VR … at least in developers’ minds, this seems to be The Big Thing.
All-in-all, it was both educational and a great way to connect with folks. Some of it was familiar, but some of the Unity topics were in areas I hadn’t really delved into before. Cool stuff!
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