How is Jess going Freddy, still getting people chatting with her ?

I haven't done anything new as I've been playing LOTRO a lot  

Will check on her later maybe.

Will the Jess (Unity3D) be on display at the exhibition?

Reference: https://www.aisb.org.uk/events/loebner-prize

Nope but thanks for thinking it might be worthy enough. It's been a long while since I did any work with Unity, so that's all past it's use by date I'm afraid.

Freddy,

Talk about Unity3D a little.  The pros, the cons, etc...

Oh, Jess was much more than worthy, I thought.

The last LPC champ had the help of a startup to get that far.

I don't really know how to sum up Unity, it's pretty complex and I don't know what they have added to it recently. I suppose the pro is that you can get into a game/graphics engine without having to design or code one. The IDE is pretty intuitive for the most part, often you have to find settings buried somewhere in some plugin, but generally documentation is usually quite good.

You still need to be able to program to get anything novel. In theory you could make a whole game just by buying plugins - but that's not as simple as it sounds. There is a lot of pre-made content though - I got a bit carried away buying stuff over there that I barely used. Even with all that, a single programmer isn't likely to make the next big game, but you never know.

But I liked the ease of getting Daz figures into the Unity engine compared to other things I had tried. And you still had useful control of things like bones and animations.

The next big thing I was waiting for in Unity was multi thread in a browser. Whether that has happened I don't know. You see the old Unity had a web player, so you could run it in a browser. But that was abandoned and was old anyway. I'd still like to get a 3D version of Jess running in a browser.

Other than that you need to know C# or Javascript to program in Unity - either one is very good. I prefer C# myself. And the community over there on the forums were great when I was posting there a few years back.