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A Software Engineer’s Guide to Unity and AR/VR Development – Part 1

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Re: A Software Engineer’s Guide to Unity and AR/VR Development – Part 1

#21

Post by AdieuToLogic »

DoctorMemory wrote: post #19

This looks like a pretty decent tutorial for it's target audience. However, as someone who works with Unity on AR and VR the biggest bit of advice I can give is learn how Unity WANTS you to work with it! Currently we are re-writing an AR/VR test suite because the original version was written by programmers with little or no Unity experience. This means they re-wrote scene loading, cameras, and other parts that were a…

  Currently we are re-writing an AR/VR test
  suite ...
The Unity Test Tools[0] asset may be something which could assist in the test suite(s) your team is re-writing. One tip in using it is that the TestComponent's in an integration test scene are run in lexicographical order. So I enforce sequencing when needed by prefixing with "1 - ", "2 - ", etc.

HTH

0 - https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/13802

Re: A Software Engineer’s Guide to Unity and AR/VR Development – Part 1

#22

Post by BatFastard »

analognoise wrote: post #9

All I want is to put on my GearVR, and have a set of floating terminal windows and various editors.

That is going to be a long time coming! First of all consider what resolution you want your terminal to be at. The phone's screen will have to be at LEAST double that. Then there seems to be a lose of resolution in general when going 3D, just because the lenses are not perfectly aligned.

But I share your desire! 5 more years?

Re: A Software Engineer’s Guide to Unity and AR/VR Development – Part 1

#23

Post by gfodor »

This book is really good:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B014DIV1IO/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...

I've been using Unity for the last 3 years and that book covers a good chunk of what it takes to make a performant game with it. Good books on Unity are hard to come by. Also highly recommend this book if you are just learning about game and simulation engines:

https://www.amazon.com/Engine-Architecture-Second-Jason-Greg...

Re: A Software Engineer’s Guide to Unity and AR/VR Development – Part 1

#24

Post by zerr »

andybak wrote: post #2

I've recently started exploring the world of Unity and the weirdest thing about it is that it's 90%/10% in favour of video tutorials - even for the purely code-based aspects. Even Unity's own official tutorials are all in video form.

I guess it's because Unity is more designer's tool rather than programmer's - 90% of the time you just click and drag mouse around the UI.

Re: A Software Engineer’s Guide to Unity and AR/VR Development – Part 1

#25

Post by zerr »

vvanders wrote: post #3
andybak wrote: post #2

I've recently started exploring the world of Unity and the weirdest thing about it is that it's 90%/10% in favour of video tutorials - even for the purely code-based aspects. Even Unity's own official tutorials are all in video form.

That's just the nature of gamedev. It's a mix of code + tools to leverage the team composition of a development studio. Usually the composition is something like 10:70 in terms of dev:art/design/audio/etc, videos are a much easier way to communicate information in that domain.

Depends on the tool - e.g. LibGDX, MonoGame, Cocos2D-x - are more programmer-friendly, i.e. code-oriented approach. Unity, Atomic, Godot - these are designer's tools.

Re: A Software Engineer’s Guide to Unity and AR/VR Development – Part 1

#26

Post by zero_shift »

Impossible wrote: post #14

I hate to be that guy on HN but this article set me off as a Unity VR developer. I understand this is an introduction for people coming from a web development or other more traditional software engineering background, and the code is purely demonstrative, but it's full of Unity performance anti-patterns. Specifically... 1) Resource.Load and GameObject.Instantiate during a runtime loop. Both of these are very expensiv…

> "This code is ok if you don't care at all about performance, but in a VR or AR app you can quickly add milliseconds frame time and make yourself sick writing relatively simple code in this style."

---

This point needs to be made more often. It's fine to neglect performance when you're writing a CRUD web app, or a non-critical mobile app - the worst that will happen is the user will get annoyed. But in a VR environment dropping frames can make people physically sick.

Re: A Software Engineer’s Guide to Unity and AR/VR Development – Part 1

#27

Post by andybak »

zerr wrote: post #24
andybak wrote: post #2

I've recently started exploring the world of Unity and the weirdest thing about it is that it's 90%/10% in favour of video tutorials - even for the purely code-based aspects. Even Unity's own official tutorials are all in video form.

I guess it's because Unity is more designer's tool rather than programmer's - 90% of the time you just click and drag mouse around the UI.

See my answer below. Video and audio is still sub optimal even for GUI tutorials. It's the fact the Unity also involves significant amounts of coding that pushes this from "sub optimal" to "gob-smackingly awful".

Re: A Software Engineer’s Guide to Unity and AR/VR Development – Part 1

#28

Post by [deleted] »

Impossible wrote: post #14

I hate to be that guy on HN but this article set me off as a Unity VR developer. I understand this is an introduction for people coming from a web development or other more traditional software engineering background, and the code is purely demonstrative, but it's full of Unity performance anti-patterns. Specifically... 1) Resource.Load and GameObject.Instantiate during a runtime loop. Both of these are very expensiv…

[deleted]

Re: A Software Engineer’s Guide to Unity and AR/VR Development – Part 1

#29

Post by abemishler »

ryandrake wrote: post #11
andybak wrote: post #2

I've recently started exploring the world of Unity and the weirdest thing about it is that it's 90%/10% in favour of video tutorials - even for the purely code-based aspects. Even Unity's own official tutorials are all in video form.

I'm seeing this more and more for other things, programming and non-programming, like "How to do XYZ with a Raspberry Pi". I'll generally try to skip the videos because they are almost always awful in terms of time efficiency. Instead of what should be a single page of text with 8 written steps, we now have all these 5 minute videos that start with a 20 second spinning logo intro, then a blank desktop and someone say…

I remember buying books to learn a piece of software (whether COTS or a development library) and inevitably things would go off the rails and not work for some reason. Since then I have learned to be skeptical of written tutorials and prefer the video approach whenever possible. With video I can see the exact steps and don't have to worry as much that I'll get stuck. So I consider efficiency a little differently. I don't mind scrubbing a video if I have to. In the end, I get more value from sources that demonstrably work and reliably teach rather than wasting time on an n step tutorial only to find that step m doesn't work the way the author claims and having to thrash around for the real solution.

Re: A Software Engineer’s Guide to Unity and AR/VR Development – Part 1

#30

Post by KurtMueller »

Impossible wrote: post #14

I hate to be that guy on HN but this article set me off as a Unity VR developer. I understand this is an introduction for people coming from a web development or other more traditional software engineering background, and the code is purely demonstrative, but it's full of Unity performance anti-patterns. Specifically... 1) Resource.Load and GameObject.Instantiate during a runtime loop. Both of these are very expensiv…

Do you have any recommendations on guides/resources we should review?
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