Monthly Archives: November 2012

7 TED Talks on the benefits of gaming

The TED blog has posted 7 talks on the benefits of playing video games.

In addition to the fairly well known improvements to spatial awareness and multitasking, one researcher found that these benefits were still measurable even 5 months later!

However, I do think asking the question “can’t you do something more productive than shooting zombies?” ignores the obvious — that games prepare us for the inevitable, looming zombie apocalypse. Duh!

Some good TED talks… though none answer the most urgent question of our time: What is the biggest rock?

Unity 4 released!

The day after I finally get around to installing the beta, Unity 4 is released!

Among the new features I’ve been really looking forward to are DirectX 11 rendering, the Mecanim animation system, and Linux builds.

And, judging from the extensive release notes, there’s a ton of new optimizations, improvements, and fixes.

Unity continues its unstoppable ascendancy towards global domination!!!

aMaze – Maze Generator for Unity

aMaze is an easy to use maze generator for Unity, perfect for randomly generated levels, building interiors, or dungeons.

Features

Fast generation of “perfect” mazes (i.e. mazes with no inaccessible areas, no circular paths, and no open areas, with one path between any two points in the maze).
A single, easy to configure script dropped on a GameObject.
Mazes are created from Unity prefabs, and supports random selection of prefabs for easy theming (i.e. tile sets) and variation (within a theme/tile set).
Prefabs can be any size, and non-square.
Multiple mazes can be created within a single level/scene.
Mazes can be created/destroyed at run-time.
Mazes are statically batched after creation for efficient run-time rendering.

aMaze is available in the Unity Asset Store.

Below is a video tutorial showing how to use aMaze.