Unity3D is great for indie developers. We have yet to build a large Unity project, but we’ve built a couple of small projects so far but during this process we did see Unity3D from the ugly side. It seems that the engine can do some things blazingly fast and easy but some other ones were clearly neglected during development. But that’s another post.

So, I’ve tried to find out how big teams work on large Unity projects if even we are struggling. But no luck.

Ones were mumbling about source control, separating control over scenes editing etc. That’s kind of obvious and shows that those people don’t have any experience at all.

But recently I watched all the videos from Unite 11 conference. I really wish I could visit it and talk to Unity gurus. But anyway, here are the videos I found useful. Videos where speakers share their experience on working in Unity3D as a team. The information which is practical and useful:

Greg Wilson – What We Actually Know About Software Development, and Why We Believe It’s True from CUSEC on Vimeo.

The talk is rather long but is definitely worth watching.

The author talks about:

• Studies and references of “well-known” information concerning software development. Which are lacking.
• Time estimates and that all techniques and applications to calculate time needed for specific tasks are worthless.
• When refactoring is useless.
• How software complexity increases with adding more features.
• Code metrics don’t work.
• And how we need to ask for the sources of information we get.

Recently I found a great post where the author (using a script) ranked TED videos by the number of times they were mentioned in social services. And since TV series are getting more and more stupid I decided to start watching these videos. I’ve seen many great TED talks in the past and anyway videos people talk about the most shouldn’t be bad. So I decided to download all of them.

One would open that large XLS file from the site and start clicking links. It might seem easier to just watch one video from the list at a time than to write a script which visits URLs and downloads videos. But I wanted to upload all of them to my iPhone and watch/listen to them while on my way to work. So here’s the final script:

require 'rubygems'
require 'nokogiri'
require 'open-uri'
require 'HTTParty'

urls = IO.readlines("data.txt").map {|line| line.chomp}
if !File.exists?("videos")
  Dir.mkdir("videos")
end

urls.each_with_index do |url, count|
  begin
    doc = Nokogiri.parse(open(url).read)
    node = doc.xpath("//dt/a1")
    video = "http://www.ted.com" + node.attribute("href").to_s
    videoName = "videos/(#{count+1})" + url.match(/http:\/\/www.ted.com\/talks\/(.*)\.html/i)[1] + ".mp4"
    puts "Downloading #{url} to #{videoName}"

    File.open( videoName, "w+") do |f|
      f << HTTParty.get( video )
    end
  rescue
    puts "Failed to download #{url}"
  end
end

I uploaded the same script with data for TED videos (with rating >=5) and Gemfile to install required gems to GitHub. Some of the videos don’t have links to video files, so you have to watch them online.

A video from Lee Brimelow about new features in Flash CS5 where he shows some cool stuff like

• New imported fonts browser.
• New XFL text file format. This is really cool.
• Some Text Layout Engine examples.

On December 10, the Nobel Prize ceremonies will be streamed live online using the Flash Platform. President Obama will receive his award at 1pm CET (7am ET). To watch the ceremonies, go to http://nobelprize.org/awardceremonies/ceremonyoslo/video/2009/index.html

Posted on blogs.adobe.com. Is it that big news to let everyone know? Not at all.

Flash has become the standard for video playback over the internet. You don’t need to say that an online streaming will be with Flash. You do need to explicitly say if you use some other technology though. And you might have comments like “wtf, you are not using flash for video streaming? now I have to download something else!”.

There’s not much information on AIRORM library apart from Getting Started tutorial. Here’s the video which doesn’t really says much about it too but may be helpful.

One of the great videos from 360|Flex is Advanced ActionScript APIs by Jacob Wright. A lot of cool information about Proxy class and using custom metadata. Will definitely be useful even for experienced AS3 developers.

It doesn’t play from the site for me, but plays fine with Adobe Media Player.

I’ve never used Adobe Media Player which came with CS3 (or CS4?) before. But when I started watching old videos from various Adobe conferences at tv.adobe.com I had to try it because some videos were not playing )8 What’s more, you can download all the videos you like with Adobe Media Player. It saves them to /Users/-user-/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Adobe Media Player/Local Store/cache as FLVs.

Just filter off unfunished ones, batch convert them for iPhone and watch/listen during your trip to work or while jogging.