Hi, Thought you might all be interested to know about www.devposters.co.uk. It’s our new company, offering large API and application reference posters. Our first product is a fully laminated 83x40 inch giant Unity scripting reference poster (here , click on the thumbnails for larger views) containing all of the Unity3d runtime classes in the same place for easy reference, along with the relationships between the classes.
From the site:
“This poster is designed to be placed on a wall where you work so that you have all the information on runtime classes from the manual visible at all times. Each class contains all variables (with their types), all function calls (including all overloads, with typed parameter lists and return values), inherited classes and variables, inheritance relationships and constructors. Singleton classes (eg: Physics, Input) are marked in red. Frequently used classes are colour coded, and the classes are organised so that related classes and enums are close together on the poster (eg: all networking classes/enums are in one area, while physics and collision classes/enums are in another area). Totally up to date with Unity v3.3, also includes all latest Android and iPhone classes.”
We’re running a promotion until 1st April – until then, you can enter the promo code UFR1 when buying and get £10-00 off the regular price. If you’ve got the time and are serious about learning scripting in Unity, it’s well worth checking out as it can really speed up learning the various classes and improve your scripting productivity in general!
What happens if these posters get outdated? You know with the more frequent updates we’re getting lately there are also new variables/commands/events being introduced/exposed. For £65 (excluding shipping and taxes) there for sure does exist a update plan, right?
I would love to see a comparable electronic version in a enhanced Unity documentation.
Hi Taumel, This is a good point, although the updates are generally not changing the core classes much (3.2->3.3 was really just mainly fixes for Android, along with one var being deprecated for instance). At that rate you’d be looking at a very long time before the poster is outdated… incomplete possibly, over time, in the case of new features being added, but outdated would be a long way off - I can’t think of any example of classes being removed for instance. We are constantly updating as new versions appear though.
Having said that, we would be looking to sell updates to previous customers at a very large discount. Obviously it’s not really practical to send out new versions to everyone every time the documentation is updated - printing laminated posters of this size is very expensive, even in bulk.
One other thing worth pointing out - (until April at least) it’s £55
An electronic version could contain the same information, but the main reason the poster works is that all information is visible at the same time… including the relationship between the classes etc. With an electronic version you just wouldn’t have the resolution or screen real estate to get that advantage (this poster is printed from a vector art source at 1200dpi… 83 inches @ 1200 dpi - about 100k pixels across
I’m quite aware of the cons of this but the pros are that…
a) it’s also a help if you can scroll and zoom in such a chart on your computer (i have a few other things which work this way)
b) no pollution/CO2/etc.
c) it should be cheaper (and therefore could increase the number of customers for you until Unity doesn’t enhance their docs as well)
d) it’s easy to keep it up to date, not all updates will come with such tiny changes like the last one
e) if still needed you could always print the parts you’re most interested in on your own.
It’s quite difficult to convey the usefulness of having all of the information in one place through pictures… just 10-15 minutes of working using the poster and you can really notice the benefits. Initially we thought about making an app similar to what you describe, but it just wouldn’t be the same as the poster in terms of usefulness (that’s not to say it wouldn’t be useful at all, just not as useful in terms of increased learning speed and increased productivity).
The classes are arranged so that related parts are near to each other (eg: physics, rendering, audio, etc)… so it’s not just the information from the manual… again, not easy to show visually on the website how everything is connected and arranged, due to the small screen area.
I agree with the benefits you described for a physical poster but personally i still see a reasonable benefit for a electronic document as well, may it be one big scroll&zoomable page and/or more arranged for some sub navigation, more as people are often working with two screens nowadays.
