Gam(e)Astra

On May 28th of this year,I was fortunate and privileged to attend Unity3d Porting Labs held at Microsoft India,Signature building,Bangalore.This was an event targeting  gameDev and hosted mainly for India Gamers Community members . The event had sessions by Microsoft,Dumadu Games and Intel.





Session 1: Unity3d Games Targeting Windows Phone and Windows Store 

Speaker : Ujjwal Kumar (Tech Evangelist,Microsoft)- Blog 

Takeaways :

• Steps to follow for porting your existing/New games to Windows phone and windows store through Unity3d.


• There were also some add-on's by unity3d for windows platforms.


• What's new in Visual studio 2013 for porting your games on windows phone 8.1.


• Importance of  Charm settings and Privacy Policy . Click here 


• Exporting your game as a DirectX  VS 2013 solution or a C# + Xaml solution.

Note : DirectX 11.2 is only from Windows Phone 8.1

Session 2 : Performance Optimization of Unity3d games for windows platform

Speaker : Dumadu Games

 Takeaways :

• Draw Calls has to be checked for more optimization.


• Target your devices ahead of your game development E.g., Lumia 630 has a quad core processor compared to Lumia 920.So choose your target devices more wisely for easy optimization.


• Have an eagle eye on Core Rendering/Final Rendering.


• GPU Optimization is important and Images with compression types DXT1 or DXT5 are better on windows.


• Always have images with a power of 2 and reduce the alpha layers.


• Merge all textures to one single texture (Static Batching).Dynamic batching is supported by default in Unity3d.


• CPU Optimization: Avoid Mesh colliders.


• Script Optimization :
  
  
  
  • Keep references avoid finding objects.
  
  
  • Avoid Update() unless necessary.
  
  
  • Avoid Raycasting instead calculate the distance between two objects.
  
  
  
  

Session 3: Intel's Real Sense with Unity3D

Speaker : Swetha from Intel

Though the session is on real sense,Swetha even spoke about the analyzers by Intel for game analytics and performance monitoring.

• Intel's Graphics Performance Analyzer (IGPA)


• Power analyzer from Intel.


• Battery Life analyzer.

Intel Perceptual Computing -Real Sense

The closing session was on GUI framework by Dumadu games (used  in-house).They are planning to release the same as a SDK shortly.The framework relieves you from the pain of developing and aligning the GUI elements in your game.

The best takeaways from attending these events are socializing and developing professional relationships with the best brains in the marketing.Also you will get a chance to clarify some doubts and questions you had.


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