T-machine.org

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

https://new.t-machine.org/index.php/2021/04/04/how-to-use-assemblydefinitions-with-dlls-in-unity-2019-through-2021/

I'd like more people to know and use this. It works beautifully for any situation where you have multiple lines of code that must stay together, but which have to remain separate - e.g. an API th...

https://new.t-machine.org/index.php/2021/01/28/advanced-c-unity-trick-reduce-boilerplate-code-by-using-using/

To save myself an hour next time I need to install JupyterLab (the latest 2020 version of Jupyter) here's a step-by-step install from scratch on self-hosted AWS, warts-and-all. Key points: We ...

https://new.t-machine.org/index.php/2020/12/14/2020-installing-jupyter-for-private-notebooks-labs/

I’ve always found ContentSizeFitter a source of great hope … and bitter disappointment: often it’s the only way to “solve” a problem in UnityUI, but half the time when you try it messes...

https://new.t-machine.org/index.php/2020/04/08/unity-ui-making-scrollview-work-perfectly-without-contentsizefitter/

My simple OpenOffice spreadsheet for tracking Unity Asset Store revenues per-asset. http://t-machine.org/wp-content/uploads/UnityAssetStoreRevenues-Template.ods Usage/setup instructions included ...

https://new.t-machine.org/index.php/2020/01/13/simple-template-for-asset-store-revenues/

Unity Terrain is a good Terrain renderer, but the API’s behind it are famously badly documented and rather clunky (most of the documentation still hasn’t been written, almost 10 years after i...

https://new.t-machine.org/index.php/2019/12/07/speed-up-unity2019-terrains-by-a-factor-of-20x-using-buffer-blockcopy/

One of Unity3D’s greatest successes has been the Asset Store. Bursting to life 9 years ago, initially sounding a lot like an optimistic clone of Apple’s 2-year-old App Store (and boasting the...

https://new.t-machine.org/index.php/2019/11/26/improving-the-unity-assetstore-what-id-like-to-see-in-2020/

I witnessed three basic flaws in latest Android this week – all of them redolent of bad UX design on Google’s part – and surprising in an almost 10 years old OS (none of them are new featur...

https://new.t-machine.org/index.php/2019/09/30/googles-struggles-with-ux-design-2019-edition/

So … you may notice the site disappeared for some time, and now it’s back all images are missing. This is down to three things: MariaDB’s supporters put a nasty little poison-pill into the ...

https://new.t-machine.org/index.php/2018/10/04/brief-update-for-2018/

This once-obscure method, that – I guess – is the low-level call used by most of the new Unity GUI … is now the only way of drawing meshes in GUIs. The previous options have been removed, w...

https://new.t-machine.org/index.php/2016/07/09/unity3d-missingdocs-canvasrenderer-setmesh-making-it-work-mostly/

Shawn asked on Twitter: If there were one internal class/method/field in the UnityEditor namespace you would want exposed properly, what would it be? #unity3d — Shawn White (@ShawnWhite) June 2...

https://new.t-machine.org/index.php/2016/06/30/3873/

WordPress had a critical update recently, and I got tonnes of emails (one from each blog I run) demanding I upgrade NOW. So I did, and upgraded Apache to latest while I was at it. Oh dear. All si...

https://new.t-machine.org/index.php/2016/06/24/how-to-fix-upgrading-apache-to-2-4-php-7-breaks-wordpress/

Instructions: Copy/paste this into your functions.php (TODO: convert it to a standalone php file, and make it into a plygin you can activte/deactivate) Create a new menu item of type “custom UR...

https://new.t-machine.org/index.php/2016/05/19/wordpress-plugin-insert-link-to-latest-post-in-category-on-your-menu/

Master of Mana was a great game – much better than Civ5, and from what we’ve seen of Civ6, Firaxis is still playing catch-up in a few areas :). The author has disappeared, and his website has...

https://new.t-machine.org/index.php/2016/05/14/better-than-civ6-bookmarkable-links-for-civ4-mod-master-of-mana-sources/

Centers of tiles Edges of tiles Pros and cons Centers gives you STRAIGHT things (on a hex grid, it’s the only way to get straights!) Roman Roads Canals Large rivers Edges gives you meandering t...

https://new.t-machine.org/index.php/2016/04/18/the-age-old-question-of-civ-games-roads-and-rivers-in-center-of-tiles-or-edges/

Warnings are very, very important in any compiled language: they tell you that the computer has checked your code and realised you “probably” created a bug; they even tell you something about...

https://new.t-machine.org/index.php/2016/04/16/unity3d-remove-yellow-warnings-you-dont-need-unitytips/

Current features commit 26eafb7865965fd5ef5ee3ad4863f00acf8d10a2 Generates hexes landscapes, with heights (Civ5 bored me by being flat-McFlat-in-flatland) Every hex is selectable, using custom fi...

https://new.t-machine.org/index.php/2016/04/11/simple-civ5-clone-in-unity-hexes-movement-unit-selection/

Every week, I have to use six different Office Software Suites: At school: Microsoft Office 2013 At university: Microsoft Office 365 At work: OpenOffice At home: LibreOffice Everywhere: Apple Key...

https://new.t-machine.org/index.php/2016/04/10/office-suites-word-excel-apple-google-in-2016-power-user-experience/

Unity is still the only major game-engine with an effective, established Asset Store. This is an enormous benefit to game developers – but do you feel you’re making full use of it? I’ve bou...

https://new.t-machine.org/index.php/2016/04/07/what-makes-a-great-unity3d-asset-which-do-you-recommend/

A few months ago I ran a survey to find out which programming-languages people were using with Entity Systems: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/18JF6uCHI0nZ1-Yel76uZzL1UfFMI21QvDlcnXSGXSHo/viewfor...

https://new.t-machine.org/index.php/2016/03/25/which-languages-need-entity-systems-libraries-right-now/

TL;DR: experienced CEO/CTO/TechDirector with long background in programming, sales, and business management (Corporate, iPhone/Android, Games, Education) looking for strategic roles in USA, UK, a...

https://new.t-machine.org/index.php/2016/03/25/lfg-im-looking-for-ctotechdirectorhead-of-mobileconsulting-roles-in-ca-tx-london-and-asia/

A modest desire The red pyramid in this image is a custom handle (3D) that you can grab, drag, and move around the screen. When it touches another GameObject, it finds any Sockets on that object,...

https://new.t-machine.org/index.php/2016/03/13/trying-to-paint-a-mesh-in-unity3d-so-hard-it-makes-you-hate-unity/

Some screenshots from today’s improvements. I’m moving gradually towards releasing version 2. Shortlist of changes/improvements below… From this mess … to this: Building some odd machines...

https://new.t-machine.org/index.php/2016/03/12/improved-interactive-gui-for-snap-and-plug-gluevertex-snapping-for-complex-objects-in-unity3d-screenshotsaturday/

In case you weren’t aware, in a nutshell: Dev writes game, gets share of profits when sold Publisher manufactures game ($10 loss) Publisher sells game to retailer at $30 ($20 profit) Retailer s...

https://new.t-machine.org/index.php/2016/02/25/an-easy-solution-to-the-pre-owned-games-problem-thats-destroying-gamedev/

In the FPS roguelike I’ve been working on, a core feature is that each ability modifies how you interact with the world – you see things differently, you move differently, etc. Night Vision I...

https://new.t-machine.org/index.php/2016/01/19/making-a-night-vision-shader-for-animals-in-unity3d/

A lot of us have been looking at alternative engines recently, and for me the biggest challenge is that the intersection between “game engine I can use easily” and “programming language I a...

https://new.t-machine.org/index.php/2016/01/18/survey-which-languages-do-you-use-along-with-an-entitysystem-in-gamedev/

I love researching and writing about Entity Systems, but it takes me days or weeks to make a single article. I’ve written almost nothing for the past 18 months because on my current salary I ca...

https://new.t-machine.org/index.php/2015/12/12/support-me-on-patreon-for-early-access-to-new-entity-systems-articles/

Civilization was one of the best games ever designed and shipped. Civ5 is tragic. It’s one thing to launch a AAA title full of nerfed gameplay and obvious, in-your-face bugs, but quite another ...

https://new.t-machine.org/index.php/2015/11/15/brief-look-at-obvious-ux-mistakes-in-civilization-5-and-why-you-should-never-buy-another-firaxis-game/

I periodically write massive long documents detailing all the bugs in Unity that I know, have memorized, and have to workaround on a day-to-day / hour-to-hour basis. But it makes me so angry and ...

https://new.t-machine.org/index.php/2015/10/14/simple-unity3d-bugs-and-flaws-fixed-by-entity-systems-number-1/

New prototype I’ve been playing around with…

https://new.t-machine.org/index.php/2015/10/10/blobblobblob-screenshots/

There’s only a few tag-cloud plugins that still work – most of them have stopped being supported. The best one I found has super-awesome-multi-colour mode. But by default it’s disabled, and...

https://new.t-machine.org/index.php/2015/10/06/how-to-get-an-awesome-tag-cloud-for-wordpress/

A new version of Unity is now out – https://unity3d.com/unity/whats-new/unity-5.2 – and it’s a doozy. I don’t normally blog a blow-by-blow account, but this set is particularly interestin...

https://new.t-machine.org/index.php/2015/09/16/unity-the-real-version-5-just-released-unity3d-5-2-fixes-many-severe-issues/

There’s tonnes of blogs out there, so I only talk about the bits that other people have missed, or were too polite or inexperienced to cover. Often that means I’m the one pointing out the fla...

https://new.t-machine.org/index.php/2015/09/02/unity3d-hardware-usage-implications-summer-2015/

Unity3D has a great core architecture – it’s easy to understand and use. However, it has some significant flaws. One of the recurring problems I run into is that Unity requirs you to have pre...

https://new.t-machine.org/index.php/2015/07/26/new-unity3d-feature-virtual-scenes/

One of my hobby projects is a testament to the Ultima and Elder Scrolls games – a massive open-world, where everything you do impacts the world around you. This has long been promised by commer...

https://new.t-machine.org/index.php/2015/07/20/writing-a-unity3d-mini-game-to-help-you-design-a-aaa-game/

One of Unity’s dirty secrets is that (out of the box) it’s plain awful as a prototyping tool. You can fix that, but it requires quite a lot of work. I’m going to start publishing my fixes o...

https://new.t-machine.org/index.php/2015/07/17/template-for-unity3d-to-test-custom-procedural-game-meshes/

If you do any non-trivial customization of Unity Editor, you’ll almost certainly extend EditorWindow. But Unity (to date) refuses to tell anyone how to do this legally, or what the contracts yo...

https://new.t-machine.org/index.php/2015/06/25/unity3d-missing-docs-editorwindow-lifecycle/

How do you make good UX / GUI to present information to a mass-market audience with widely varying levels of education and attention-span? This is a problem faced all the time by game designers a...

https://new.t-machine.org/index.php/2015/06/13/ux-conveying-critical-info-to-public-via-number-rating-food-hygiene-stickers/

In Unity, you create new scripts many times per day, and folders but there’s no keyboard shortcuts. I fixed this, and made the popup rather more intelligent than Unity’s built-in one. I’ve ...

https://new.t-machine.org/index.php/2015/06/09/use-ctrl-shift-n-to-create-new-scripts-in-unity-project-window-fast/

This has come up a few times, and I ended up replying on Twitter: @t_machine_org any thoughts of using 128bit guids for entity-ids? too big? — Richard Kogelnig (@RichardKogelnig) June 9, 2015 B...

https://new.t-machine.org/index.php/2015/06/09/entity-ids-how-big-using-uuids-or-not-why-etc/

Six months ago I tweeted a handful of obvious ways that you could make the Unity Asset Store greatly more profitable. One of the Unity folk reached out to me, claimed that Unity was highly invest...

https://new.t-machine.org/index.php/2015/06/09/6-ways-to-massively-improve-the-unity3d-assetstore-for-gamedevs/

Experimenting with shorter Entity Systems articles This post is an experiment: rather than write massive, heavily-edited articles, I’m writing “shallow” versions first, which takes me only ...

https://new.t-machine.org/index.php/2015/06/07/journalling-for-entitysystems-unity3d-corrupted-my-scene-ive-built-a-debugger-for-unity/

Slides from my talk last night at Unity Brighton. Three parts: First: introduction / overview of Entity Systems, and why you care (as a “person who makes games”) Second: Progress so far: scre...

https://new.t-machine.org/index.php/2015/05/28/2015-talk-progress-on-an-entity-system-for-unity3d/

Recap: previous posts on Unity3D and designing an efficient Entity Systems add-on library, using structs to store data in C#. But … C# doesn’t allow you to efficiently use structs nor objects...

https://new.t-machine.org/index.php/2015/05/13/unity3d-entity-systems-zero-copy-data-storage-revisited/

This week I’m paralysed on some of my simplest decisions while happily making complex decisions quickly, and being incisive and highly effective on others. This problem occasionally crops up in...

https://new.t-machine.org/index.php/2015/05/08/self-deception-of-the-startup-founder-paralysed-decisions/

(One of a series of posts about converting Unity3D into a 1st-class Entity Component System. Read others here) It’s a year and a half since I wrote about choosing Data Structures for high-perfo...

https://new.t-machine.org/index.php/2015/05/02/data-structures-for-entity-systems-multi-threading-and-networking/

(One of a series of posts about converting Unity3D into a 1st-class Entity Component System. Read others here) How to store game data: GameObject? MonoBehaviour? ScriptableObject? Those three pil...

https://new.t-machine.org/index.php/2015/04/29/replacing-unity3ds-core-architecture-structs/

A first-class Entity System for Unity3D Unity is a great 3D engine and a good editor – but the programming environment is 10-15 years behind the curve. Entity Systems are a much better way of w...

https://new.t-machine.org/index.php/2015/04/26/kickstarting-entity-systems-in-unity3d-what-to-include/

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about how a high-quality ECS would appear / present itself within Unity, how it would interact with standard Unity3d game-code at the API level, how it would a...

https://new.t-machine.org/index.php/2015/04/25/ecs-for-unity-design-notes-next-prototype/

In Unity, hundreds of times a day you do “new (folder)” or “new (C# script)” etc. But Unity makes this ridiculously hard: you have to hunt and peck a tiny button and then hunt-peck a tiny...

https://new.t-machine.org/index.php/2015/04/07/intelligent-new-thing-control-for-unity3d/