Did you know you can customize the look of the mouse cursor in your game by calling Cursor.SetCursor?

This is not so much a unity specific tip but more of a C# language tip. if you are trying to port or adapt your game code from one platform to another like for example from XNA over to unity implicit operators may come in handy for automatically casting types and making you code much more readable and easier to port.

Link to MSDN Documentation here

Often times we programmers can fall into bad programming habits and we can forget or overlook language and API features that would otherwise make our lives easier. :P

I recently purchased the $40 windows 8 pro upgrade deal. I already had windows 7 and was in the process of upgrading my computer to 32gb ram and a ssd so decided to take advantage of the offer.

I got the Windows 8 pro install utility to generate a iso for me and then made a usb boot stick and proceeded to install windows 8 as a clean install so I could start from scratch.

The problem came when I tried to activate windows and it said I could not. Even though windows 8 allowed me to perform a clean install the activation said I could not activate because I used the windows 8 upgrade to do the clean install?

After some searching I came across this article and it allowed me to activate my windows 8 installation.

http://www.ghacks.net/2012/10/27/windows-8-upgrade-clean-install-possible/

• Open regedit by pressing Windows-q, entering regedit and selecting the result from the list of hits.
• Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Setup/OOBE/
• Change MediaBootInstall from 1 to 0
• Go back to the start screen and enter cmd there.
• Right-click Command Prompt and select to run it as administrator.
• Type slmgr /rearm on the command line and hit enter.
• Reboot Windows now.
• Run the activation utility afterwards, enter your product key to activate Windows. (I didn’t have to do this step it was already activated)

I'm running out of tips from the unity docs so I will be posting small code snips that you can use

The first code snip is for object billboarding. Just drop the script onto the object and it will automatically face the camera.

You can specify the RequireComponent attribute on a class that inherits from MonoBehavior and Unity will add the specified component if it is not already present when you add the script to the game object.

[RequireComponent(typeof(RigidBody))]
public class SomeBehaviorScript : MonoBehaviour
{
}

The unity docs have a great list of recommended performance optimizations available here.