Learning Unity a Beginner's Prespective

First I should probably give everyone a little background. I'm a Programmer by trade not an artist so I approach things from a programming standpoint. Me and a friend of mine recently decided that we would like to make an attempt at producing an indie game title.

After some of the ground work had been established we decided that it's would be an appropriate time to take a look at some toolkits. The Unity Game Engine has been recieving a lot of praise from the indie crowd recently. I felt it was appropriate to at least give it a fair evaluation.

Arriving from a programmer's background the first thing one would notice is that Unity is built somewhere in between the artist and programmer tools. Although I would place unity more heavily towards the artist side of the game development. The first hurdle a programmer will find is that a lot of the terminology is geared towards the artist so it may be hard to figure out what "bones" are or the concept of a "scene" is.

Once you get beyond that and start your own project you find another lacking area of Unity the tutorials seem to span. "This is the UI" and "Here's an advanced tutorial that we expect you to know how to use the toolkit well" but nothing in between. What I was looking for as a coder is "this is your first unity level" but there really wasn't any tutorial that ran you through creating a box with the player in it and giving it some basic lighting.

In this area unit could be improved upon. If the tutorial exists then it really wasn't made that clear where you could go and find it.

As a programmer game development for us works as follows. Build Rough Game Mechanic concept --> Make ugly place holder graphics --> Test game concepts --> Refine and acquire final art assets. Unity however doesn't work this way. Any object you want to put into Unity must be first drawn in your 3D modeller package. Unity does not include any form of "primatives" you can just drop in. This basic disconnect forces people used to the programming model to adhere to the unity work flow model of: Build rough art assets --> Drop into unity --> Attach scripts --> Test gameplay --> Refine models.

Admittedly to non artists this model can seem Alien often times we use code to compensate for the fact that we don't understand how to use all the features of the complex 3D modelling packages such as rigging, bones, mesh deformation, and particle effects.

Overall though for a first look Unity may seem baffling at first but I can definitely see signs that once you get a hold of how to appropriately utilize the tools unity definitely seems to speed up the "concept / code / test" cycle we are used to. I only caution the programmers about to be introduced to this tool to be cautious and be aware that when they first start they will be baffled in what appears to be a tool designed for artists.

Flash programmers would be well aware of this concept that the editor doesn't assist the coders instead it's somewhat expected the coders use their own coding environments to get the job done.

Mass Exodus of Facebook

It's interesting from a long ago Facebook quitter to observe this new mass exodus that is now occurring. 4 Months ago me and my group of friends discussed privacy concerns over Facebook and since then deactivated our accounts.

It would seem that the world is catching up to our tech savvy movement. Recently in the last few weeks the Internet has been in an uproar about privacy concerns over Facebook. Facebook has introduced a service that allows you to be logged in to share data over various services. Once again like all Facebook introductions everything is defaulted to public for their entire network.

As the patterns build up it seems to all point to what me and my friends assumed 4 months ago. Facebook it would appear doesn't really care about privacy and will never learn from their mistakes. The act of opening all your personal information to the public is not a mistake so much as a conscious business strategy. It is very much to Facebook's benefit to make all your information public. As such they will continue to try and open up every last piece of data you put on it until you finally delete your account.

Best RC I've seen today

Ok it might not fly well but I love it anyways.

And here's a star fighter from my child hood video game "descent" the Pyro GX

This one is impressively detailed (can't tell if it's the same one) but hats off to the builder he really made this one shine