Dan Puzey - dan

Logitech GHub: fixing my G903

Getting the G903 "button on the bottom" working using GHub.

Self-hosting Ghost on Azure

Since I first discovered it, I've been running my blog on Ghost. But, being the cheapskate/curious developer I am, I've been self-hosting. Ghost was never really set up to run on Azure though, and there's always been a number of hoops to jump through to make that work. My

build

Why was Unity3d taking two hours to bake occlusion data?

This is the problem I was faced with when building The Signal From Tolva. The builds would take hours and it was the OC bake causing issues. I should pause to explain what I was doing in full. I value automation: it reduces risk, reduces effort, and makes it simpler

unity3d

Global Game Jam 2016

It seems I just took part in my first ever game jam and, to my surprise, I made something actually playable. Thanks in huge part to the artistic and audio wizardry of John Roberts and Nick Dymond, the screenie above was actually only the halfway point and totally fails to

unity3d

Handy Unity fact of the day

So, today's useful snippet, after too long debugging a related issue: if you have an Awake() method on a MonoBehaviour in Unity, and that method throws an exception that isn't handled, the component in question will be automatically disabled. on startup. It turns out that tracking down why something has

unity3d

Unity's .SetActive vs .SetActiveRecursively

A story of how fixing warnings broke all my code. It's all very well obsoleting this stuff, but you have to make sure it's still compatible... At some point during the 4.x cycle, Unity switched the way that a GameObject is activated and deactivated in a scene at runtime.

unity3d

Simple, better Unity logging

One of the issues that you can run into when developing with Unity is that logging is quite expensive. It's entirely possible, if you're trying to log a verbose amount of processing for one reason or another, you can end up crippling the framerate of your game. There are performance

unity3d

Making games run faster

Or: why micro-optimising games code often helps. I was part of a conversation on Twitter that started with a question about the relative performance of calling .GetComponent<T>() vs having a public field assigned in the inspector. I linked back to my earlier post that includes a profiling

Panicking about Facebook's messenger app

NOTE: This post is a direct copy of a reply I made on Facebook a little while back, to a friend who was panicking about the new Facebook messaging app based on this overreactive piece. Lots of alternatives to FB exist (Google+, MySpace, MSN, etc.), but none are as widely

unity3d

Unity3d brown bag

Last week at work I ran a short brown bag session at work on Unity3d. Whilst my office job (with a HR/payroll systems provider) doesn't have much use for 3d games technology, my team were all very enthusiastic to get an overview of games development . I covered at breakneck

gigs

Upcoming gigs

I've been pretty quiet on the musical front of late, but I have three gigs with three different bands coming up and - in an unexpected twist - these are open to public consumption! So, feast your eyes on this list and then, if something takes your fancy, come feast

Comment away!

I've just enabled Disqus comments on the site: now this at least has a chance of being a two-way conversation! It was a trivially easy thing to get set up, made even more so by the provision of specific instructions for getting Disqus running on Ghost. I'm not sure I

git

Git credential failures

Over the last couple of days at work, my Git started to play up: every time I tried to interact with the remote repo (for a fetch, push or pull), I got error messages like this: Failed to erase credential: Element not found fatal: Authentication failed for https://rhubarb.custard

unity3d

Benchmarking Unity3d scripts

As part of my ongoing involvement with Big Robot I've been doing a bit of work recently on working out "how best to do things" in Unity3d. Some of the output of that might turn up in a later post, but, since this is my first post in

intellitrace

VS Ultimate – leaving a mess

I was poking around my rapidly-filling SSD, wondering exactly what was taking up all the space on my C: drive, when I noticed that the c:\programdata folder was over 2GB in size. That’s not necessarily unusual, except that I’m careful to redirect most applications that would use

.net

Transforming Xml in a .NET project build

For a while now, ASP.NET has supported the manipulation of web.config files through transforms – a build step that tweaks the Xml in the file depending on the current build configuration. Although that’s only available for web.config files by default, it’s a useful thing to be