C# Memory Management for Unity 3D

If you’re developing games in any space or developing anything in the mobile space you’re going to have to be concerned about memory management. A lot. It doesn’t matter if you’re doing it manually, reference counting, using ARC or garbage collection. If you’re pushing the envelope in any way the details of how memory is managed matter greatly. In Unity 3D the C# garbage collection is one of those details, and there’s very few articles which deal with it specifically. Wendelin Reich just changed that:

I learned the hard way that in game development, you cannot rely on automatic memory management.

Wendelin Reich’s C# Memory Management for Unity Developers

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Visual Studio 2012 Supports Debugging Optimized Code

Bruce Dawson reveals this great feature. A year ago this would have been incredibly exciting to me. Even now it’s great news for native developers using Visual Studio:

It turns out that Microsoft shipped this feature in Visual Studio 2012, but forgot to tell anyone. This could be the most important improvement to Visual Studio in years but it s been almost top-secret.

Microsoft really should be shouting about this. Debugging Optimized Code – New in Visual Studio 2012.

What’s really amazing is that this isn’t considered a make-or-break product feature. IIRC Watcom C++ did this around 1996. Visual Studio survived. Watcom didn’t.

Playscript: Actionscript For .NET

Miguel de Icaza:

PlayScript is a superset of ActionScript and it was based on Mono’s C# 5.0 compiler. PlayScript is ActionScript augmented with C# 5.0 features.

Zynga’s PlayScript allows developers that have some ActionScript/Flash code to bring their code to any platform that supports the ECMA Intermediate Language (Microsoft .NET and Mono) and blend it with other .NET languages.

But the PlayScript has a fabulous feature, it allows mixing code in both C# and PlayScript in the same compilation unit.

Playscript

There have been a bunch of interesting new languages on the .NET platform which haven’t reached critical mass. Are there enough ActionScript developers and code out there to make PlayScript viable?

What WebGL is really for

Guillaume Lecollinet nails it:

In my opinion, WebGL shouldn’t be solely used for full-page 3D applications like the majority of examples we see online. It could also be integrated into regular web pages, in combination with other technologies and content.

Using WebGL to Add 3D Effects to Your Website