Quatis Project: Biodiversity and digital learning

I mentioned, a few weeks ago on my semester's preview, my participation on a UFMG (a brazilian University) project for the development of an ecologic educational game about Mangabeiras Park. And as promised, here's a post with a little more about the game.

Formed by an ICB (Instituto de Ciências Biológicas, Biological Sciences Institute in english) studies group from UFMG, the project's main objective is to teach the population about the variety and fragility of the species that live in Mangabeiras Park, a natural park with a green area of approximately 337 hectares. Through events, long range campaigns and research about the behavior of the creatures that inhabit the park, the group has acted to educate and guarantee the balance of the huge ecosystem that is the park.

Changes

First of all I would like to appologize about the recent irregularity on the posts of the blog. The last weeks were extremely busy, with results that will echo through many of my upcoming posts.

This text will be a little more personal than usual, serving as a summary, preview and reason for the events that will occur on the next weeks.

One thing at a time.

Xbox 360 Joystick Controller + Unity

A few weeks ago I acquired a Xbox 360 joystick controller for Windows and, although my initial objective was to play with it (something I did, of course), my developer's mind did not allow the controller to remain in my desk without becoming part of my studies/experiments with Unity.

I configured Bitz to work with the joystick besides the keyboard and mouse. And with some quick changes I adapted Unity's script, MouseOrbit.js to take the the controller's input. The result can be seen in the video below:

So here's a short explanation of how to set Unity to receive the Xbox 360 controller for Windows.

Frame by Frame: exporting animations made in Unity

Playing with some resources and inspired by some sessions I watched on Unite, I developed a small Unity plugin to export animations. The algorithm, available by the end of this post, allows the definition of parameters like frame per second, image quality, name and directory.

The classes that derive from the Editor class (EditorWindow, EditorApplication) are simple to implement and extremely flexible, allowing the creation of add-ons without any big difficulty to fulfill almost any need.

Unite 12, a little about the experience

Alternative title: "How spending a week in Amsterdam made me fall even more in love with Unity".

Last saturday, after spending 13 hours of my day inside a plane, I finally stepped in my home town again. And although I was absolutely tired and affected by the jet lag, I was (and still am), equally satisfied.

The week was occupied with sessions, round tables, workshops and cocktails of incredible content not only about Unity but about development and the industry. I had acess to tools and resources yet to be launched and talked to developers with more than 20 years of career. And all of that contributed to make my opinion
about the future of the game scene even more positive.

Unite 12

Next week, from day 21, I will be in Amstedam attending Unite 12, the annual Unity Developer's conference.

The event, that happens since 2007, gathers developers from all over the world in four days of talks, workshops and debates with Unity's creative team and studios that use the tool.

It's my first time attending to an event that big and, in case I don't post about it during the week, I will sure write a post as soon as I come back. It's a fantastic opportunity to learn and know people who share my passion for Unity.

Everyday of the conference (except the first one), there are 3 different sessions and a workshop happening at the same time. All of them are equaly interesting, but that's what I've got planned for me:

• Tuesday: Unity Training Day - From 13h00 to 16h00
• Wednesday:
• Special Guest Keynote Peter Molyneux - From 10h00 to 11h30
• Performance Optimization Tips and Tricks for Unity - From 12h00 to 12h30
• Road Map & Wish List - From 14h00 to 15h00
• Using the New GUI System - From 15h30 to 16h00
• Creating Retargetable Animation Assets with Mecanim in Unity 4.0 - From 17h00 to 17h30
• Thursday:
• The Power of the Crowd - From 10h00 to 10h30
• Unity, Network Code, and You - From 11h30 to 12h00
• GameDraw: Editor customization techniques and challenges - From 14h00 to 14h30
• How to Benefit From Unity's Substance Integration Without Paying a Dime - From 14h30 to 15h00
• Transcending Unity's Frontiers: From game development tool to cross-media platform - From 15h30 to 16h00
• The Unity Rendering Pipeline - From 17h00 to 17h30
• Fryday:
• Advanced Editor Scripting - From 10h00 to 11h00
• Union: The Places Your Game Will Go! - From 11h30 to 12h00
• Creating Interactive Installations with Unity - From 14h00 to 14h30
• Creating the Universe with Unity - From 14h30 to 15h00
• Linux and Flash Publishing with Unity 4.0 - From 15h30 to 16h00

Like I said, I will write a detailed post about the conference when I come bacj. I am sure it will be a fantastic experience to meet new people and learn abou the market. :)

A preview of my semester

With college classes starting again the geometric progression of negative common ratio that defines my free time according to the time of the semester begins to act once again, as the papers and exams start to get more frequent and scary.

So here's a short list of the thing I am going to do in this second half of the year: