No demo submissions, but I did a seminar presentation about developing graphics technology for small games (PDF slides). Mostly on hardware statistics, GPU features, testing and stability:

View on Vimeo.

However, the awesome talk was given by ReJ: low level iPhone (pre-3GS) rendering details (PDF slides). Inner workings of iPhone’s GPU, OpenGL ES drivers, command buffers, VFP assembly and so on. Bringing assembly back to the Assembly, yeah!

View on Vimeo.

If you’re going to watch some demos from Assembly 2009, make sure to see:

• Frameranger (1st place demo). Rocked the big screen! Seems somewhat unfinished though.
• The Golden Path (3rd place demo) – for something fresh. Also, a good way to disprove the saying that “the winners don’t take drugs” :)
• Muon Baryon (1st place 4 kilobyte intro) – that’s what kids do with sphere marching on the GPU these days.

Here’s what’s new. Here’s the download page.

My 11th Unity release since I joined 3+ years ago. This is quite a crazy release that involved almost complete editor tools rewrite and lots of other juggling. Was not exactly a walk in the park, but it’s done now. Meet me at GDC in San Francisco next week and I’ll tell you the war stories (Unity booth is 5110 NH).

Here’s the obligatory source code commits graph:

18 people involved in source code, 5315 commits, 18501 file changes. Of course, svn commits do not mean anything… I’m just fascinated by graphs and numbers.

We showed a glimpse of Unity editor for Windows at the keynote, so it is public now – yes, we are working on Windows toolchain. About the time! This is the major area I’m spending time these days – Windows, Windows, Windows. Learning WinAPI as I cruise along :) Before Unity 2.1 I spent months fixing tons of small issues, now I’m spending months doing tons of small Windows related things. Someday I’ll get back to doing tons of small things on the rendering side.

Here’s a couple of random photos that I stoleborrowed from Mantas:

Keynote in front of a Sentinel from The Matrix.

Presenters talking.

People listening!

I don’t know that guy in the center. Probably some stupid outsider. Really!

It’s been in active development for about a year (though some of 2.0 features were in development for much longer), with source control commits graph looking roughly like this. We pretty much spent the summer doing 800 svn commits/month with about four major code monkeys :) Now that the release is done I fully expect the graph to drop off to low values again (is it called “burnout”?).

Last week there was the first Unity conference, and it was a blast. It was like, oh my, it’s full of people and all about unity! In other words, really really cool.

The night before the conference was spent in the hotel, doing last tweaks to the website and launch demos. If the presenters during keynote talk looked confused or exhausted, that’s a combination of trans-Atlantic flight and this last night of work. In fact, the very last fixes to the website were done during the keynote… oh well, Murphy’s law for the win.

Now what? Time to start working on Unity 2.x release :)

Amsterdam airport:

Officer: You speak English sir?
Me: Yeah.
O (takes a look at my passport): Ah, you speak Russian of course!
M: No, not really.
O: But your language is very similar to Russian, right?
M: Hm…

Well, here we know who gets the Linguist of the Year award.

Seattle-Tahoma airport, lady at checkin: “what kind of passport is that?“. It also takes 5 times to enter my last name properly, from the printed letters in the passport. Each time trying to persuade me that I did change the ticket date of course!

Seattle-Tahoma airport, security: “sir, you have been selected for additional screening“. Do they randomly select people for that quite involved process? Why this “selection” happens immediately after they take a look at my passport?

Random quotes:

Ten minutes walk is a long distance! Ten minutes of walking distance in the States is a very good reason to buy a car. At least SUV; preferably a Hummer.

DirectX SDK is the source of all sorts of high frequency goodness.

Sony is always good at announcements.

No? Rumours on the internet? Shock! Horror!