ReSharper by JetBrains

The things that ReSharper showed me and thought me is simply amazing. It’s like having your own personal pair programmer sitting right next to you all the time.

It tells you if your code is good, if you actually use the code you create and it even helps you reformat/refactor your code to make it more robust.

An example that blew me out of the field was with an iteration I was working on which went over a List. ReSharper offered a suggestion to use Linq and went right ahead rewriting the whole iteration into a Linq statement. This is great for teaching you new stuff !

Switched from MonoDevelop to Visual Studio 2011

After working a while with MonoDevelop I got tiered of the instability of it on the mac. Also the irregular behavior of the Intellisense got annoying and more of a distraction  then actually be helpful. Because the Intellisense really is a nice helper to point out what arguments and types your functions expect and prevents a lot of typo’s I wanted to see how it works out in Visual Studio 2011 (VS). Next to that Ive heard a great good deal about ReSharper from Jetbrains.

Time to dust off my Parallels virtual and install VS. It took me quite a while to get through all the settings of both VS and ReSharper, but let me tell you , it’s really worth it. You can completely tell it what your coding style is. From the globals like using two spaces in stead of tabs for indentation, not putting curly braces on a new line, to the minor details like adding a space after your comma’s.

I started messing around with Unity using UnityScript since thats a really easy entry point especially if you already feel comfortable with Javascript. Though after writing some script, having a good feeling about Unity and wanting to do things right, I made the decision to switch over to C#. Since I work on a daily basis with the highly dynamic language called Ruby, I still have to wrap my mind around the staticness of C#. Though now I’ve been working with it for about a month, I must say i really do like it. Even though at first C# seems quite static, you actually can make it dynamic as well with the use of lambda’s and the like.

The Intellisense of VS is awesome ! It works really well and is an invaluable tool, but the things that ReSharper showed me and thought me is simply amazing. It’s like having your own personal pair programmer sitting right next to you all the time. It tells you if your code is good, if you actually use the code you create. It even helps you reformat your code to make it more robust and can detect more advance things. An example that blew me out of the field was with an iteration I was working on which went over a List. ReSharper offered a suggestion to use Linq and went right ahead rewriting the whole iteration into a Linq statement. This is great for teaching you new stuff !

 

P.S.

As I am quite hyped about this I saw that JetBrains also created RubyMine, which is a Ruby IDE. We normally work with Textmate but it seems development has ceased on it and so we where already looking for an other tool. RubyMine is a very nice tool as well and we use it now on a daily basis. The only “negative” thing about it is that it’s a Java based program thus a resource hog and no native look and feel.

 

iTween by Bob Berkebile a.k.a pixelplacement

iTween is a very nice script that will help you animating your objects with a nice and consistent abstraction. Animation itself is not that hard in unity but why make your life harder then it already is ? The documentation of iTween is very clear and well written. Also it seems like everyone is actually using it 🙂

Sometimes you need to take care when importing that you do not end up with a duplicate of iTween since they can cause conflicts. Just remove the one from the import so it uses your default version.

Fov Mesh Maker by Hyungseok Seo

Fov Mesh Maker by Hyungseok Seo is a very nice tool if you would like to know if objects are in a field of view of an other object.

I’ll let the video do the explaining :

Simple Path by Alex Kring

If you need any Pathfinding in your game , please take a look at Simple Path by Alex Kring.

I guess the video will tell you the specifics a lot better then I could, so have a look :

Even when you are new to unity, this is a wonderfully documented plugin which is a simple breeze to work with.

Filter Forge

Filter Forge

While watching one of the many unity3d tutorials out there, one spoke of Filter Forge. This is a Photoshop plugin but can be used Stand Alone as well. IT works on both Mac and Windows. Though initially the price seems quite steep ($400,-), you’ll figure very soon that it’s worths it money as it comes with a texture library of around 8000 different textures.

The great thing about his program is that the textures are all procedurally created and thus have a lot of settings you can tweak with. This way you can change the color, details, bumpiness and a whole slew of other things 🙂 After generating your texture you can then let Filter Forge generate Normal Maps , Bump Maps, Hight Maps, Light Maps etc etc of the texture you generated. Import those into unity and create your materials from them with all the options you’ll need.

As you can imagine this gives you a huge boost in graphics and making you game look awesome 🙂 Also at the time of this writing ( 19 July 2010) they are having a 50% discount ! So go for it !