I hadn't touched my Unity Gamepad sample code on github for about 7 months.  Downloaded it with trepidation and ran it and it works fine.  I was worried than an Android or Unity update might have broken something, but it all works fine, even on a Shield Tablet with the Wireless Game Controller. 
Then I realized I need to create a profile for the PC Gamepad I'm using (Afterglow XBox360 controller) which maps the shoulder buttons differently than a stock Xbox360 controller in Unity. Grrrrr!!!!

Maybe I'll just go and buy a proper XBox360 controller!

I needed to sort a list of users by email domain, the trick is to make a new column and only grab everything in the email name to the right of the "@".  
It's not hard but like most things, some advice on the internets is better than others.

=RIGHT(B1,LEN(B1)-FIND("@",B1))

Honestly I think I could have written the python code to do this in less time than it took me to find a decent solution in excel (10 minutes)... 
Which reminds me I have to fix the scripts the generate my monthly reports. Joy!

I inflicted my mobile VR rig on a bunch of people at the recent Tapsense HackerBus kick off event.  This is actually version 2.0.  It uses the lenses from a Google Cardboard in a frame built again from a cheap optivisor and plastic card and balsa wood.   Don't laugh, balsawood is very light and stable, two features that are important when attaching precision lenses to your head.   I'll post some better pictures of this at some point.
Space Terror VR has become my go to game for demoing VR.  Its a horror game set in space and with headphones its particularly effective.

Ran into an interesting Unity issue last night.  Baking light-maps for mobile causes the scene to become over bright int the viewer although it looks fine on the target.  After a lot of shenanigans trying to figure out what had gone wrong I discovered that building for the PC fixes the problem.   Doh!
Picture on the left is the broken one.
Also have an issue with uv coordinate precision on older mobile GPUs.  Can probably fix the by making the terrain smaller, right now its way bigger than it needs to be....
But I should learn about pathing first.

I was trying to figure out how to share some simple global data between scenes in Unity, simple stuff like "Lives" and "Level".  Poking around on the interwebs turned up some complex looking solutions using singletons or prefabs that don't get unloaded etc.  
Turns out there is a really easy way of doing this by simply declaring class members as public static.  There is great little article here on how to do it.
 

Last month I got to present 2 awards at the first ever Proto awards on behalf of NVIDIA.  These are like the Emmys  but for Virtual Reality.  Hosted in the historic Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood it was a huge amount of fun and a great chance to evangelize NVIDIA's virtual reality technology.
The event was picked up by Tom's Hardware which was pretty cool even if I do look wasted in the picture :-/

Six months ago I wrote a controller wrapper for GamePads for Unity so that you could use an XBox360 controller on windows and any old gamepad on Android.  I got it all working, wrote an article on it and shipped the code on Github.  Fast forward to yesterday and I get a wild hair to do some Unity development.  I'd been meaning to try the inControl input manager from Gallant Games for some time.  It has better features than my effort and is more actively maintained.  It's a great product and well worth the price ($25) if you are developing with Unity and need to support gamepads.  Highly recommended!!
But this blog isn't about that....

Doing the same stupid thing over and over again.  Here are some things I learned six months ago, that I relearned this week.  I wish i'd written this stuff down before!


USB OTG cables SUCK
An OTG cable cans still provide power when the data lines are fragged.  When you connect your Android it should show up in device manager.  If it doesn't, its new cable time.  Go for short but high quality cables and expect them to last about 2 weeks tops during development.

If the GamePad starts acting weird, restart Unity
This shouldn't be the case but sadly it is.  Sometimes you even have to restart the PC too.  Its annoying, hopefully they will fix this in 5.

The Logitech F710 is weird
This controller seems to cause problems with my PCs, both of them so I avoid using it.  I use a generic AfterGlow 360 controller on the PC and either a Nyko playpad pro or NVIDIA Shield portable for Android.
Whatever, if you use one of these, keep it set in X (xinput) and not the D(direct input) mode.
I also had to copy the XInputInterface.dll into my Unity project to get this working in the editor, although it works fine in the actual player.

Android SDK and Unity Versions
I had a problem where AAPT (Android Asset Packaging Tool) was crashing. I used the SDK manager to uninstall several versions of the Android Build tools until it started working.  I think version 20 was the first version that worked.