After a steaming pile of poo that is Windows Vista, looks like Windows 7 will be something that is done right.

Ok, to be fair, Vista has lots of new features and improvements under the hood. Now, I haven’t used them, but transactional file system, exposed low level APIs to get detailed memory/IO stats, etc. etc. sound like cool & useful stuff. The problem with Vista is that all those core improvements are out-weighted by inconsistent & slow UI and some stupid blunders.

Now, Windows 7 seems to be taking on two things: 1) performance and 2) consistency. Building on all the low level improvements done in Vista, and getting the part that is visible to the user right. Yay if Microsoft can pull this off. We’ll see.

Yesterday’s experience catching up with Unity forums, as I remember it:

Take a quick look at zillions of new posts.

Answer about five questions with “what’s the value of your camera’s near plane?”.

There should be some way to automate all of this. For every 20th question, reply with “increase your near plane!”, or something.

Spent last week at our conference, Unite 2008. Lots of people, lots of stuff and goodness, tired as hell, but almost recovered already.

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!

For the sake of the nation,
this operator must die!

Seriously. Suppose there is some class, let’s say ColorRGBAf. That has four floats inside. Now, someone at some point decided to add this operator to it:

operator float* () { /* */ }
operator const float* () const { /* */ }

Probably because it’s easier to pass color to OpenGL this way, or something like that.

This is evil. Like, really evil. Especially if that class did not have comparison operators defined, and some totally unrelated code four years later does:

if (color != oldColor) { /* ... */ }

Ouch! Sounds like someone will spend four hours debugging something that looks like an event routing issue that only happens on Windows and only with optimizations on (yes, I just did that…).

What happens here? The compiler takes pointers to two colors and compares the pointers. If for some reason both colors are temporary objects, then it can even happen that both get folded into the same variable/register/whatnot. The pointers are the same. Ouch!

Implicit “nice” operators are just disguised evil. Remove that operator, add something like GetPointer() to class if someone really wants to use that, and better even make the comparison operators private and without implementations. Yes. Much better.

I’m quoting awesome post by Charles Hinshaw from Unity forums:

I vote that we complain enough that they don’t share plans until everything is 200% done - I personally don’t want to know about a new version of Unity until after I have already shipped at least one game built with that version.

Alternately, UT could issue press releases that lack any information that might set expectations and/or require approval from third parties:

Unity Technologies ApS, announced today that they may be releasing an update to their popular game development software at an undisclosed future time.

From their offices in Copenhagen, Unity Technologies CEO and co-founder, David Helgason, said “We’re pretty excited not to announce anything specific about this potential upcoming release as we think that many of our users may be pleased by the addition of some number of features that may not have been present in previous versions of the software.”

Tom Higgins, Product Evangelist, added “The features in this software are making it possible for a number of undisclosed companies to work on various projects that may be released in the future. I think all of our users might be inspired by the things that may currently be under development with this future version of Unity.”

edit: Uhm, based on the replies that follow, apparently it wasn’t obvious that I am not seriously requesting this.

Way to go! :)