So whats everyone been up to?

[tomsamson]

Unity to me is a little like the old days of Flash; when you start out you do everything as code on MCs on a stage, and then you start instantiating everything and trying to make your code cleaner.

Yeah, i totally agree, it feels a lot like that. In a way though even if one does it the more designer manner way of placing stuff in the scene one can still get to more reusable stuff though thanks to the components setup where one can add several scripts onto a single game object and that way reuse scripts (even any where one hasn´t defined it as class etc since then for js files it basically treadts it like a class internally) and when turning the whole thing into a prefab then also reuse the gameObjects etc.
That side to me feels like a more implied class and (flash) component setup.
It still isn´t perfect by any means of course, for example it doesn´t have support for nested prefabs yet (but that should come with one of the next dot upgrades), but yeah, i see it as nice advancement on such fronts.

Playing around with features I'd have only read about in magazines, like Beast Lightmapping, Occlusion Culling and all the post processing fx is so much fun.

Yeah, totally =)

The HTML5 stuff I'm not enjoying so much. I can't help feeling it's like a new band being hyped in the NME, people are willing it to succeed before it's time.

Couldn´t agree more. I like it for websites when its used for things where it can replace flash while retaining nice functionality and running well accross most browsers, but as soon as there´s more complex interaction/skinning with videos or audio stuff or 3D stuff etc involved, well, demos like those you linked to are quite cool but they of course don´t work in most browsers =(

.hooligan, I started off using Unity with JS and it was very straightforward but I made the decision a little while back to switch to C# and I haven't looked back. C# is very new to me, and I'm still getting my head round some of it, but I'm enjoying it loads.

yup, started with doing js in unity, too and then switched over to C# for most stuff for a while, now i´m back to js again for some stuff and using C# for some projects but not that much in (mobile) cross platform ones anymore.
I like coding in C# quite a bit but performancewise there´s not a noticable difference from my experience in unity whether one codes in js (but with #pragma strict tag, so still strict data typing) or C#.
The main reason i´m doing more JS stuff now again though is that doing C# lead me to do more and more things which are kinda risky or no good idea to do when deploying to iOS devices.
(Long story but as example in short iOS device deploy enforces AOT (Ahead of time compilation, so no jit compilation etc permitted) and some things one can joyfully do in C# like some generics stuff then leads to crashes on iOS device since it would use jit compilation. Unity js meanwhile supports doing some generics stuff, too but not the full range and yeah, has more restrictions on other ends compared to coding in C#, which is annoying and could be skipped when deploying to other platforms but is in the sense i explained actually a good thing in many cases when deploying to iOS.. weird world =) )

As I said above though, it's just so much fun having all that power!

Yeah, exactly =) I was already initially attracted to unity of course seeing at how much better performance comparable stuff ran on the same device when made in it, even no matter which language one used, but that was while i was mostly working on mobile games using it or web stuff, so in both cases having to optimize for (way) less powerful machines than a newer more powerful desktop.
I´m just getting to work on a game now for the first time which is targetted at more powerful machines and man is it fun to finally be able to go all out with it =)

And yeah, will also be interesting to see how much (or not) all the talk we did on unity now will hold true for flash when the molehill stuff gets finalized.

Tom, not bad thanks, what are you up to these days?

doing ok, too =)
Got a bunch of games out on some of the mobile devices, next to some web stuff, still working lots, in between looking after my baby nephew when he is brought to my place and well, attending gdc europe for the first time in a few days (next to gamescom afterwards), that should be fun =)

What you said about Unity is spot on, I really wish they'd bought that ScaleForm tech (http://www.scaleform.com/) before Autodesk did, it would have been the perfect solution to UI in Unity.

Yeah, i would have prefered UT to license Scaleform rather than buying them as i prefer such companies to stay independent (as that often turns out better for all involved in the long run instead of just for the swallower ) but yeah, if a company gets bought its of course also important which other one buys it and in that case i´d have much prefered the unity fellas than Autodesk doing it, too.

Autodesk has a bit of a history of swallowing up all sorts of other companies and then progress on the produtcs often not going on as nicely and fast and affordable for users as it used to in the future, so yeah, i hope it goes better this time round.
At least they seem to have some interesting concepts for what to make with all the aquisitions judging on the last few things i´ve seen from them, so let´s see =)