On Monday, the news came out that Microsoft acquired GitHub for 7.5 Billion dollars. As with most things, there are those who think it is great news and those who think the news spells doom for GitHub.
I’m in the former camp. I think this will ultimately be great. Microsoft has said they will continue to have GitHub run as its own entity just like they did with LinkedIn and Minecraft.
Starting with Unity 2018.1, Unity Technologies introduced new Project Templates. The 2D and 3D project templates have been a part of Unity for years, but now there are additional ones. They include the following:
3D with Extras
Lightweight Render Pipeline
VR Lightweight Render Pipeline
High Definition Render Pipeline
AR Basic
AR Sample
Each one has its own strength and weaknesses. High Definition Render Pipeline has the best graphics, but requires a lot of computing power.
If you are doing work for the HoloLens, you probably want to stick with the Lightweight Render Pipeline or just 3D.
If you are using an immersive mixed reality headset / VR headset, you probably want the VR Lightweight Render Pipeline.
On Monday, Microsoft had the SharePoint Conference and in the keynote they introduced SharePoint spaces.
SharePoint spaces brings Mixed Reality to the enterprise. The reason why I’m talking about this is because it shows that Microsoft is planning on utilizing the immersive headsets in the enterprise and not just in the consumer market.
SharePoint spaces will be utilizing WebVR and BabylonJS, which makes sense, because SharePoint is a website building tool. Many enterprises utilize SharePoint for their company intranet’s.
If you are on the fence about digging into Mixed Reality and HoloLens development, this should tip you on over to the side of actually doing something to start learning this new way of development.
Head over to LearnHoloLens.com and sign up to learn what you need to develop mixed reality games, apps, and experiences for the HoloLens. This information is the very similar to what you need for the immersive headsets as well.
To see part of the SharePoint Conference keynote, you can watch my video here:
There has been some confusion in the community around Unity’s versions and which ones should be used.
(If you’d rather watch a video, you can see it at the bottom of this post).
There are two streams – the Long Term Support or LTS stream and the TECH stream.
When you need a stable environment that won’t change for two years, except for security fixes or major issues that affect a lot of people, you want to go with the LTS stream. This can be thought of as the last released minor version of a major version of Unity. For example, Unity 2017.4 is the LTS version of Unity 2017.
When you want to work with the latest features that Unity has to offer, you want to take advantage of the TECH stream. Currently, the Unity 2018 version is in the TECH stream.
In general, if you are doing new development, you most likely want to be utilizing the TECH stream. If you release your game, app, or experience using Unity 2018.2, for example, then you will want to update your code once 2018.4 LTS is released. That way you can be on the latest stable version that has long term support. You will effectively move from the TECH stream to the LTS stream.
If you are doing active development for additional content, or whatever, you could choose to stay on the TECH stream and upgrade your project to the latest version of Unity, which in this example would be Unity 2019.1 (which would be released at about the same time as Unity 2018.4 LTS).
There is a great image that Unity has that shows how this works.
