Tag: #unity

Tools for game assets, improved export for Unreal, Unity, Godot

Shader creation and other game dev tips and tricks in Unity and Unreal. My opinions are my own and do not represent the positions of my employer. Ben Cloward has been a game dev for over 20 years and has been creating shaders since 2003. He was a co-creator of ShaderFX, a plugin (originally for 3ds Max) that allows artists to create real-time shaders using a node-based interface. ShaderFX is now built in to Max and Maya as the main way that real-time shaders are created. Ben was the original author of the Uber shader used in Maya's viewport. In 2007, Ben joined Bioware in Austin, Texas as a Cg Supervisor focused on graphics, performance, and shaders - on titles such as Star Wars The Old Republic, and Anthem. Ben now works for Unity on the Shader Graph team. Ben has given numerous talks at industry events such as Siggraph, and GDC. He loves to share what he has learned.

This article by Richard Meredith details a technique for basic multithreading in Unity to optimize the flow field algorithm in "Bad North." By moving the costly flow update to a separate thread, the main thread's processing time was significantly reduced. The author explains the challenges of thread synchronization and data sharing, ultimately proposing a solution that involves restructuring data into separate sets for results, pending changes, and working data. This approach ensures threads operate on their own data, preventing conflicts and achieving thread safety. While this method introduces a one-frame delay and copy overhead, it offers a clean and simple way to offload background tasks in Unity.

This text is from the Unity Asset Store, showcasing a free asset called "2000+ FACES" by Unruly Games. The asset is an extension type, released on February 25, 2019, and is compatible with Unity version 2017.4.21. The Unity Asset Store highlights its vast collection of over 11,000 five-star assets, trusted by over 85,000 customers and supported by a large community. The page also includes navigation for various asset categories, sales, and options for selling assets on the platform.

This playlist titled "Game Performance Optimization" by Ben Cloward is an educational series for game developers focusing on techniques to improve game performance across engines like Unity and Unreal. It covers foundational principles such as analyzing bottlenecks before optimizing, and delves into technical topics like the graphics pipeline, forward vs. deferred rendering, and specific methods like occlusion culling, batching, and shader optimization. The series emphasizes that performance is the top priority in game development and aims to equip both artists and engineers with the skills to make games run faster and more smoothly.

In Unity game development, knowing how to communicate between scripts is essential for building clean, scalable projects. This tutorial explores the evolution of script bindings—from Unity’s built-in Find and GetComponent methods to advanced techniques like Binding objects, Object Resolvers, and full Dependency Injection (DI). You’ll discover how to get references efficiently, avoid common pitfalls of Singletons, and pass dependencies safely across your game architecture. We also cover industry tools like Zenject and VContainer, showing how they simplify DI. Whether for prototypes or commercial titles, this guide helps you build maintainable, testable, and high-performance Unity projects.

Talo is a free, open-source game backend service offering leaderboards, player authentication, multiplayer, and more. It integrates easily with Godot and Unity via plugins and an API, simplifying game development. Talo provides a dashboard for managing game data, player accounts, and feedback, along with robust analytics and Steamworks integration. The service handles hosting and infrastructure, ensuring data continuity even with network issues. Data export is available, and the platform is open for community contributions.

Creating buildings in games can be challenging but it's a key part of environment art. From hand-placing modular assets to using full procedural generation, developers employ various methods to layout their levels. So, in this video, I'm going to walk you through how we can use Unity’s Spline Tools to layout wall and window meshes, and procedurally generate the shell of a building for us to use in our level design.