18 months of game programming interviews postmortem

One of the best posts in r/gamedev. Three-year old, but became even more relevant due to the global remote work trend, so more and more people got the chance to work in AAA companies.

https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/9n847g/18_months_of_game_programming_interviews/

#interview #career

How bad are small triangles on GPU and why?

Small triangles are bad for performance. Kinda old post, but still holds true. Keep in mind the vertex density when creating LODs for your meshes, most likely you don't need a lot of different LODs wasting memory and reducing performance. And of course don't forget about imposters for distant objects.

https://www.g-truc.net/post-0662.html

#gpu #rendering #performance

An open source mesh slicer framework for Unity3D Game Engine. Written in C#.

Slice any convex Mesh using a Plane

https://github.com/DavidArayan/ezy-slice

#meshcutter #slicer

Impossible Geometry with Stencils in Unity URP

I have recently discovered a game called Moncage, that heavily uses this technique. For me it looked really interesting and innovative, but maybe I just play too little puzzles. Good breakdown of the effect anyway.

https://danielilett.com/2022-01-05-tut5-22-impossible-geom-stencils/

#stencil #rendering

Unity package to track a hand in realtime. 60 FPS hand detection. 3D Bones world detection

Requires an iPhone with Lidar support. Looks pretty awesome, not so long ago there was stuff like Leap Motion to detect hands and it had even lower accuracy, now it is available to a lot bigger audience.

https://github.com/ogoguel/realtimehand

#xr #ar #tracking

Profiler Extensibility.

Gives the ability to extend the Unity Profiler with custom data and visualisation in order to better measure the performance characteristics of your app. Profiler counters allow you to track the key metrics of an app and make them visible in the Unity Profiler or in other code. This is useful if you want to track performance changes in your application, and it speeds up the investigation of performance issues.
Looks like it could make automatic performance analysis easier with custom tools.

https://forum.unity.com/threads/profiler-extensibility.1119613/#post-7768908

#editortool #profiler

Breakdown of the impact frame effect

A high-level breakdown of the effect. Can be used as a starting point if you want to implement it in your game. Or if you learn shaders, it is a good task to figure out yourself given all the keywords to search step-by-step.

https://twitter.com/Raph_iuk/status/1490762063722995718

#vfx #shader #impactvfx

Shader tips and tricks

https://interplayoflight.wordpress.com/2022/01/22/shader-tips-and-tricks/

#shader #tips

Custom Hierarchy for Unity editor

Looks like can be helpful for big hierarchies, especially during a prototype phase when you can make a lot of changes in your scenes rapidly. Everyone had this issue many times when you miss the game object when reparenting manually. But carefully consider the performance. I used to have tools that looked awesome on a sample project, but significantly loaded the editor when working with big ones. I believe the stuttering editor is a lot worse than having no plugins at all.

https://www.febucci.com/2020/10/custom-hierarchy-for-unity/

#editortool #treeview

Behind the Pretty Frames: God of War

Research of rendering in God of War, including snow deformation and post processing. Also a good list of related videos and readings in the end if you would like to dive into it even more.

www.mamoniem.com/behind-the-pretty-frames-god-of-war/

#rendering #deformation

NativeMemoryArray — A library that takes full advantage of the .NET 6 API to handle huge data of over 2GB

Also supports .NET Standard 2.0/2.1, so can be used in Unity

https://neuecc.medium.com/nativememoryarray-a-library-that-takes-full-advantage-of-the-net-31a2fa61b01

#native #memory #array

Tool that lets you design your own procedural dungeons, with only 5 objects, and it's free.

Video: https://www.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/comments/spens7/ive_made_a_tool_that_lets_you_design_your_own/

Asset store: https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/slug/213225

#pcg #procedural #generation #dungeon

Stencil Portal in Unity — VFX Breakdown

Portal effect using stencil buffer. A render texture can be used for similar effect, but the author claims stencil variant is faster.

https://shahriyarshahrabi.medium.com/stencil-portal-in-unity-vfx-breakdown-3dd76b60ad07

Repo: https://github.com/IRCSS/Unity-Stencil-Portal

#stencil #shader #vfx #portal

The safest way to use DOTS in your MonoBehaviour project

https://coffeebraingames.wordpress.com/2021/11/23/the-safest-way-to-use-dots-in-your-monobehaviour-project/

#dots #burst #jobs #jobsystem

It begins with light: The definitive guide to the High Definition Render Pipeline

https://blog.unity.com/technology/it-begins-with-light-the-definitive-guide-to-the-high-definition-render-pipeline

#hdrp #rendering

Tutorial How To Make An Interactive Grass Shader In Unity

This tutorial is the step-by-step guide on how to add interactivity to the grass shader. It is the extension of the geometry grass shader tutorial by Roystan.
In this blog post I tried to show an iterative approach to getting the desired effect and I hope it will help you to start learning shaders and begin from other simple effects breaking it down in the similar way.

https://gamedev.center/tutorial-how-to-make-an-interactive-grass-shader-in-unity/

Repo: https://github.com/AlexMerzlikin/Unity-GrassShader

#shader #effect #grass

Stencil Buffers | Ronja's tutorials

Follow-up for recent posts with stencil buffer effects, basics of working with stencil buffer.

https://www.ronja-tutorials.com/post/022-stencil-buffers/

#stencil #shader

Triangle.Net-for-Unity

Triangulation lib wrapper for Unity. Triangle.NET generates 2D (constrained) Delaunay triangulations and high-quality meshes of point sets or planar straight line graphs. I guess you already knew about it, if you were interested in mesh generation. If not, then if you ever stumble upon triangulation in Unity, you should know there is the lib available for doing it.

https://github.com/Nox7atra/Triangle.Net-for-Unity

#triangulation #mesh

Unity VFX Graph - Stylized laser beam tutorial

https://youtu.be/_SaBXY-Ejqo

#vfx #shadergraph #vfxgraph #beam #laser

UI with rectangles? Don't use null as a source!
Create a 1x1 square image and add it to your sprite atlas. That way all rectangles will be drawn together with the images. You can reduce several draw calls per frame!
When using a null reference in an Image field: "None (Sprite)", Unity actually puts a UnityWhite texture in there that causes the GPU to make an additional draw call.

https://twitter.com/HetiDev/status/1493317817688629252

#ui #optimization #tips