Finally after many years of dreaming I made it to SIGGRAPH! And not only that, I also did a talk/course with ReJ for 1.5 hours. This was the first time Unity had real presence at SIGGRAPH and I hope we’ll be more active & visible next time around.

Here it is, 100+ slides with notes: Fast Mobile Shaders (17MB pdf). This isn’t strictly about shaders; there’s info about mobile GPU architectures, general performance, hidden surface removal and so on. Also, graphs with logarithmic scales; can’t go wrong with that!

Almost four years ago I wrote how we test rendering code at Unity. Did it stand the test of time and more importantly, growing the company from less than 10 people to more than 100 people?

I’m happy to say it did! That’s it, move on to read the rest of the internets.

The earlier post was more focused on hardware compatibility area (differences between platforms, GPUs, driver versions, driver bugs and their workarounds etc.). In addition to that, we do regression tests on a bunch of actual Unity made games. All that is good and works, let’s talk about what tests the rendering team at Unity is using in the daily lives instead.

Graphics Feature & Regression Testing

In daily life of a graphics programmer, you care about two things related to testing:

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Recently a discussion on Twitter about folks using 2048 textures on a pair of dice spawned this post. How do artists know if the textures are too high or too low resolution? Here’s what we do in Unity, which may or may not work elsewhere.

When you have a game scene that, for example, looks like this:

We provide a “mipmaps” visualization mode that renders it like this:

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At work we switched to Mercurial almost two months ago. Like Richard says, it was time to stop using Subversion. Here are my impressions so far.

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During development of Unity 3.0, I was not-so-pleasantly surprised to see that our cross-compiled shaders run slow on iPhone 3Gs. And by “slow”, I mean SLOW; at the speeds of “stop the presses, we can not ship brand new OpenGL ES 2.0 support with THAT performance”.

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Over a year ago I had a thought that “Shaders must die” (part 1, part 2, part 3).

And what do you know – turns out we’re trying to pull this off in upcoming Unity 3. We call this Surface Shaders cause I’ve a suspicion “shaders must die” as a feature name wouldn’t have flied very far.

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Realtime shader languages these days have settled down into two camps: HLSL (or Cg, which for all practical reasons is the same) and GLSL (or GLSL ES, which is sufficiently similar). HLSL/Cg is used by Direct3D and the big consoles (Xbox 360, PS3). GLSL/ES is used by OpenGL and pretty much all modern mobile platforms (iPhone, Android, …).

Since shaders are more or less “assets”, having two different languages to deal with is not very nice. What, I’m supposed to write my shader twice just to support both (for example) D3D and iPad? You would think in 2010, almost a decade since high level realtime shader languages have appeared, this problem would be solved… but it isn’t!

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Just returned from exciting (and exhausting) trip to Game Developers Conference 2010. Random notes:

Unity

It seems that everyone is talking about Unity this year. At GDC 2009 some people have heard about us, some others were “where the f*** this came from?!”, and some had no idea what Unity is. This year it’s hard to find anyone who hasn’t heard about Unity. I was surprised by number of AAA developers who are playing around with Unity internally (for prototyping, mobile & whatnot) and/or are big fans of Unity. I like!

We had a cool booth that was very busy at all times. As a bonus, the Unity chairs could be used as weapons!

Awesome quote: CEO of censored (competing middleware company) said: “yeah, Unity is going up, we are going down”. This is taken completely out of context of course.

We were busy demoing upcoming Unity 3 which I think will be quite awesome. Three days before the conference were spent crunching on the demos for GDC :)

Cool Stuff

Only managed to go to two sessions :(

Stephen Hill‘s “Rendering Tools and Techniques of Splinter Cell: Conviction” had interesting bits & pieces of stuff. Nice work on hierarchical Z occlusion and ambient occlusion fields! (probably first time I see AO fields used in actual game production)

Mike Acton‘s “Three Big Lies: Typical Design Failures in Game Programming” was entertaining. Content wise I pretty much knew what to expect. If you aren’t following Mike – do it now! Talk slides are at Insomniac’s site.

RAD‘s Telemetry profiler looks totally sweet. I think they acquired this one and improved it. Some very good UI ideas in there. On a related note, Scaleform’s new profiler looks… kinda inspired by Unity’s (comparison: Scaleform on the left, Unity on the right).

Fun Stuff

Managed to sneak in some fun (dare I say “social”?) stuff.

Rendering folks dinner (thanks Johan!) was awesome, even if it made me feel kinda small & stupid among those super smart guys & gals. Shadow algorithms on receipts FTW! Middleware Meetup (thanks Dan!) was full of friendly competitors :) #gdcdrink tweetup (thanks Mike!) had lots of war stories, PS3 talk and how to do fluid simulation on 360′s pixel shaders.

…I took a plane to Copenhagen. Oh, this sounds familiar…

Well ok, it all started a bit before: (more…)

A tweet by Michael Hutchinson on C#/Mono usage in games caused me to do a couple of short replies (one, two). But then I started thinking a bit more, and here’s a longer post on what is needed for C# (and more specifically Mono) to be used in games more.

In Unity we use Mono to do game code (well, Unity users are doing that, not us). Overall it’s great; it has tons of advantages, loads of awesome and a flying ninja here and there. But no technology is perfect, right?

Edit: Miguel rightly points out in the comments that Mono team is solving or has already solved some of these issues already. In some areas they are moving so fast that we at Unity can’t keep up!

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