Unity 2.5 is finally released. In summary:

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.

Ok, I don’t exactly like Windows Vista. But I just spent 6 months using Vista as my primary OS at work… because everyone else was using XP, and someone had to make sure everything works on Vista as well. So it was me.

In summary, Vista is not that bad.

Once you get used to changes in Explorer, different skin and so on - it’s actually usable. I think they have made some real improvements in the underlying technology, too bad they managed to “compensate” for all of that by inconsistencies and lack of polish in user interface.

At this point it’s minor quirks in UI that annoy me, but apart from that, Vista is okay. Look:

Who implemented blending of icon overlays and do they still have a job? No sir, that shield icon is not properly blended here!

Who thought it’s a good idea to make the Burn icon bright red? In 6 months, I never used it. Why is it the brightest thing in the whole Explorer window?

Try going one folder up without resorting to this drop down menu. Utilities is the current folder here. And no, there’s no keyboard shortcut for “go up” either (there was in XP, which was perfect).

And of course, the awesome shutdown menu. The two buttons - never used them. What I always use is “Shut Down” from the menu. And let’s not even talk about all the choices in the menu (no, more choices is not always better).

So yeah. It’s not stellar, it has tons of small annoyances (and some large ones - try developing web plugins with UAC on…), but it’s usable. I might have gotten used to it by now, actually.

It’s funny how one’s view on things change over time.

Back in 2002, I wrote something that would be roughly translated like “C++ amazes me more and more”. In a positive sense! And I was talking about what is Boost.Spirit now.

A reply on local game development forums I wrote today (again, rough translation): “C++ is very hard and quite a horrible language, maybe you should not use it unless there are no alternatives”.

That’s quite a change in attitude we have here!

I feel like much of C++ horrors are a consequence of “it just somehow happened” (the whole template metaprogramming thing) or as a backwards compatibility with C requirement. Or maybe not, but I do agree with what ryg says here. Let’s play the internet memes:

So LTGameJam 2009 is over. I’ve been there as part organizer, part participant, so my views are both biased and incomplete (being an organizer means you have to run around a bit, instead of just focusing on making the game).

The theme for the games was “as long as we have each other, we will never run out of problems”. Additionally, games had to be short (5 minutes of play or less), and somehow incorporate one of “affectionate”, “patriotic” or “missing” words.

I worked on a Missing Peace game. It’s nothing really fancy, does not quite follow the idea and incorporates the above mentioned words in a cheap way (“just stick it into a title! haha!”). It was probably the most polished game from all games made there though (for some definition of polish)… too bad it’s not actually fun to play :)

Oh well. I just did not have any interesting ideas, and wasn’t particularly inspired, so there is the result. Probably burnout of trying to finish Unity 2.5 at work had it’s toll as well.

Overall, the good parts about this game jam:

• It was fun (hey, that’s the whole idea)

• Some very positive progress, compared to LTGameJams 2002/2003: more people (20-25, up from 10-15), much better proportion of artists (about 30%, up from almost zero), more people who don’t know each other, more games made by folks outside of nesnausk! group :)

• Some of the ideas that were brainstormed have interesting bits.

• Did I mention it was fun?

On the downside, I get the feeling that the games made this time were not crazy enough. GameJams are meant to generate totally whacky, crazy and amazing ideas; however this time most of the games were known game mechanics, pretty safe idea and so on. Have to improve on that the next time.

So that’s about it!

Off to local Global Game Jam!