Unity Meetup: Was the Pizza Worth it?

This year no GDC for me. And no Unite for me either.

But a 20-minute walk from home? That I can do.

So I dropped by a local Unity meetup held in Berlin, Germany. And a couple of interesting things happened. In order of importance:

• Pizza. That alone was worth the meetup, because free pizza is good pizza. No pineapple though, my italian partner wouldn’t be too amused.
• Unity Profiling Tools. I shared a beer with the software engineering manager at Unity responsible for improving some of the most iconic profiling tools. I quite liked our chat and will invite him to join a live stream with Q&A in the Performance Taskforce membership.
• Netcode for GameObjects. A talk on NGO by Esteban Enrique, a senior multiplayer developer at Unity. He showed his arcade game made with NGO. The way I see it, NGO works well if your game is simple enough. But once you go pr0 with lag compensation, client prediction, addressables and such, you’ll be better off with other tech like fish-networking, Netcode for Entities or so on.
• Washigo. An award-winning XR project about deflecting viruses spread by people sneezing at you. You use the hand pose tracking on Quest for this. Fun to see the overly exaggerated “sneeze” particle effects splashing on your face.

I was asked to give a local talk at some point, which I might end up doing because 1) pizza and 2) why not. So if you drop by Berlin, you know what to do.

Lastly, I also had a chatty chat with Ferhan, cofounder of XR bootcamp, and took that embarrassing picture with him. His agenda is pretty full of events for this year, as he is helping students become solid XR developers and get a job in the sector. That includes the XR Rendering Optimization Masterclass that I teach there. If you are interested in a career in XR, just drop me a message and I will connect you to the right person.

And what about you? Any Unity meetup you’d recommend?

Ruben (The GameDev Guru)