Lucas Meijer

Remember the message window that Director has? Very useful if you just want to quickly try out something. Do it while your game is running or not running, it’s all good.
It’s one of the few Director features that I’ve missed in Unity for a while. When Miguel de Icaza announced an interactive c# program, [...]

I frequently get emails along the lines of “hey, what do you think is a best for my project. director or unity”. The answer to that question totally depens on what kind of project you’re making. Let’s do a quick featurelist:
Unity3D

superb 3D engine
crap 2D support. No layered psd import, no 2d layout functionality
wii support
iPhone [...]

I was happily surprised to see that both Tom Higgins (from UnityTech) and Allen Partridge (from Directorteam @ Adobe) have taken the time to comment on my previous post on webplayer strategies.
Allen made some comments describing his view on the payloads that the shockwave installer carries. (If you’re new here, the shockwaveplayer has an opt [...]

Hey,
This thursday, Paul Tondeur and Vincent Verweij are hosting the first dutch Unity3D user gathering.
It takes place in Amsterdam. I’ll be doing a crashcourse on realtime 3d graphics, and my colleague Bas Smit will be talking about custom shaders, why you would want them (or not) etc.
This is the program:
19.30 – Arrival
20.00 – [...]

As I move from Director towards Unity for most of my development, I notice a lot of differences between the approaches both companies have towards their product. There’s a lot to be said about these differences. This post is about their approaches to their webplayers, and why this matters for developers like you and me.
Both [...]

In my last post, I discussed various ways to have some objects refer to other objects in an automated way at editortime. One of the suggestions I made was:

public class MyTextureAnimation : MonoBehaviour
{
[AutoPopulate("Assets/animations/fire/*"]
public Texture2D[] textures;
}

Having thought about it longer, I don’t really like this approach as much because:

the MonoBehaviour itself should [...]

In my Director days, I used to refer to all my assets by name. I’ve always found this very comfortable, and it was one of my biggest complaints / annoyances when I started using Unity.

firetextures = []
repeat with i=0 to the maxinteger
hTex = m3D.texture(”fireanimation_”&i)
if voidP(hTex) then exit [...]

Update: An improved version of this post, that works for Unity2.5, can be found here.
I make no secret of the fact that I’m a very big Visual Studio fan. In fact, I like it so much that whenever I’m chatting with a fellow developer, I often encourage them to start using Visual Studio, since it [...]

In Unity2.1 there are two different types of dealing with assets. Either you refer to them directly:

public class MyGun : MonoBehaviour
{
public GameObject projectile;
}

and drag your projectile prefab onto your MyGun component in the Unity editor.
Or you can stuff a bunch of assets in an asset bundle, which you can then load in at [...]

Mono is the software that powers the scripting functionality in Unity3D.
Why this is so exciting? Mono is a free, open source implementation of:

A C# compiler
A .NET CIL Virtual Machine
The .NET class libraries.

Why is that so exciting?
C# is a great language. I think it has a great mix of flexibility, static typing and managing my memory.
C# [...]