Today marked the end of an almost 1 year period in which the Israeli Unity developers community didn’t have a proper meetup. This post summarizes what we had in the event for those who missed it (Hint: Unity, beer & pizzas). A special thanks goes to the organizers: Oded Sharon and Oren (De-Panther), and to the sponsors – JellyBtn and Soomla (for getting beers!)
The Meetup
Most of the Israeli Unity developer community hangs around this Facebook group that consists of 897 members as of this moment; we also randomly get together for a beer (or in game related conferences in Israel). The last Unity-focused meetup took place over a year ago. Despite the bad weather, today’s attendance was OK (about 30-50 people) and it was really nice to meet a few “old-timers” as well as seeing some new faces.
The meetup had 2 sessions, where each speaker also spoke briefly about asset store plugins he recommends (seems to be a pain point for many?).
Lessons Learned building a 3M DAP game
The first talk was a full 1-hour session given by Ron Rejwan, CTO of Jelly Button (who also sponsored the pizzas in the event, thanks, I had 3 slices !). Ron talked about the challenges they faced while developing their game Pirate Kings, scaling it up to 3M DAP (daily active players). The talk was at a fairly high level, allowing non ‘techy’ people to get everything, and also contained good tips of what to do/not to do when developing in Unity. The slides are available here: Slides
Ron recommended Best HTTP as a complete replacement for Unity’s WWW class, which is said to be “many times faster and more efficient”.
TSTableView
The second (short) talk by Noam Gat of Tacticsoft introduced TSTableView – a new, open source, high performing UI component for creating tables in Unity. The component is based on the new UI framework in Unity 4.6, and provides a similar API to UITableView in iOS (for those familiar). It also uses pooling to efficiently recycle objects to make the table scroll and behave as smoothly as possible. Noam showed a few demos of using TSTableView, and shared the BitBucket repository for it, urging us to clone it, fork it, and fix his bugs while we’re at it 🙂
Noam recommended the following plugins from the asset store:
- Best HTTP – same as Ron (above). Replacement for the WWW class.
- xARM – simplifies checking what a scene looks like across many different devices/aspect ratios
- Ultimate Mobile – a complete and cross-platform solution for many mobile concerns (billing, push notifications, etc).
Summary & Photos
I personally had a great time, hearing others’ experiences, seeing what they’re working on and sharing professional tips. Looking forward to having the next meetup; leaving you with some photos from the event.