In the Unite 2009 conference keynote we promised you that Unity would be picking up speed, and it has: Unity has become a powerhouse in the game industry and beyond. Nobody else is as active in democratizing sweet game technology to as many developers, and enabling them to target as many consumers. Unity has been used by well over 100,000 developers of all shapes and sizes to create thousands of games and other interactive 3D content that has touched over 40 million people.

We’re moving fast. Our engineering team now consists of 36 people (up from some 12 or so a year ago), and they are firing on all cylinders. We’ve continually released major updates with tons of features over the last years. We also started working on an Xbox 360 port, and recently blogged that our iPhone team is working on iPad support.

But those teams are just a handful of our people! So what else have we been up to? Thousands of code check ins have been done, many subsystems reworked, leading technologies integrated in Unity, and a massive automated testing suite implemented so that we can move as fast as we can.

In fact, here’s a historical graph of our code checkins:

As a project grows developers tend to check in less frequently, so the actual slope of work being done is much steeper.

Until today it was all hush-hush, but now we’re finally ready to announce our plans. Let it be known: for the last year we’ve been working on the next major release: the uber-cool Unity 3: unity3d.com/unity/coming-soon/unity-3

So far the only time frame we’ve promised is “summer 2010″, but we’ll be giving early beta access – and a discount – to anyone who pre-orders.

Also, we’ve just announced that Unity will add support for iPad, Android, Xbox 360, and PS3! That’s the kind of “author once, deploy anywhere” that has remained a developer’s wet dream for years. And not just from “one codebase”, but from one heck of a unified and polished IDE paired with the industry’s best asset pipeline!

I hope you’ll stick around with us, we’re only just getting started!

PS. Because we’re unifying the core Unity products with Unity iPhone (and all the other deployment targets too) the upgrade rules are a bit complicated and we haven’t done the best job at explaining them. We are working on this, please bear with us as we are inundated with questions – we will sort this all out and make it as clear as it can be in the near future.

We’re happy to report that highly awaited and much discussed Unity iPhone 1.6 has been released and is available for download.

Yes, it’s exactly that mysterious build that adds generics support, enables multiplayer for iPhone and noticeably shrinks final binary size. You might have seen some trackbacks on Unity forums.

So what’s so good about it?

Now imagine that you can use all that .NET 2.0 third party libraries, you can use your Unity 2.6 projects without a hassle of converting your code to a restricted .NET 1.1. That’s for the win!

Next is Unity Networking support. Basically you can take your 2.6 multiplayer game, implement controls for iPhone and it will just work. Sounds awesome, doesn’t it?

Remember that old-good Star Trooper demo? Now imagine same thing with multiplayer support. It does work with several Macs and iPhones connected simultaneously. Now it’s only your imagination that limits your multiplayer possibilities for iPhone!

You'll have that demo as soon as corresponding tutorial is ready for you to get booted up immediately.

You remember that iPhone apps cap has been increased to 20 megs, don’t you? That means that more of your games are available for immediate cellular download for your customers. And if you use Unity iPhone 1.6, you’ll have better chances to keep your game size under that cap. So just go now and build your old game with Unity iPhone 1.6.

Do you feel the size difference? Do you see reduced startup times? Do you notice reduced memory footprint? You do! Sweet, we can see you smiling now.

Oh, by the way, in case you haven’t noticed, this all was free for you… yep, a small detail you hadn’t thought about

GDC is nearly upon us, I can’t believe it! We’ve got so much going on at this year’s show — there will be plenty of chances for people to learn more about Unity throughout next week. I’m going to give you a rundown of where we’ll be and what we’ll be doing.

Booth

Come by our booth this year and get your badge swiped for a chance to win a license of Unity Pro or Unity iPhone! Our booth is 1,000 square feet (that’s 2.5x larger than last year!) and it is made out of wood, yes wood, and was designed by our friends at Because We Can who are pretty notable in the San Francisco area for doing the offices of game companies like Three Rings, Backbone, and Cryptic. The booth number is 1112, but it’s at the front of the expo hall so you definitely won’t miss it!

The main focus of our booth is to give attendees a hands on experience. To do that we’re going to have three demo machines for giving people a tour of Unity and features they can be looking forward to and we’ve got three demo machines to show off the just-released Unity iPhone 1.6.  We’ll also have lots of great Unity content that people can get their hands on including: an iPhone arcade with four iPod Touches containing the very best Unity iPhone games, a Wii playing the award winning Max and the Magic Marker, a Xbox 360 showing Interstellar Marines, a web arcade showing a variety of Unity web player games, and a FishTish multi-touch table showing off uniTUIO content.

We’ll also be presenting in our booth’s theater and joined by the partners from our Partner Pavilion as well as the uniTUIO guys and Autodesk.

Schedule

Tuesday

Fastest Path from Concept to Top Paid

iPhone Summit, Room 306, 12:30-1:00pm

Tom Higgins, Product Evangelist at Unity Technologies talks about Unity iPhone and why it’s become the dominant middleware solution for content published in the App Store. The presentation will include an overview of the tool and its feature set, the development workflow and a sampling of success stories to highlight what’s possible with the amazing Unity game engine.

iPhone Summit Mixer, Sponsored by Unity Technologies

5:30pm-7:30pm near the iPhone summit room at the back of the hallway

Wednesday

Myspace Tutorial Day: Unity on Myspace

Room 300, South Hall, 10:30-11:00am

Featuring Tom Higgins and A few folks from Cmune who will talk about their experience creating social games with Unity for social platforms like Myspace.

GamesBeat@GDC

Room 305, South Hall, 2:15-3:00pm

Our CEO David Helgason will participate in a pannel on Disruptive Innovation

OpenFeint Party

8:30-12:30

We’re the drink sponsor at the OpenFeint party

Thursday

Expo floor opens.

IGF/Game Developers Choice Awards

North Hall, Hall D, 6:30pm

Friday

Session: Intro to Unity for People Who Know What They’re Doing

Room 121, North Hall, 9:00-10:00am

Unity’s Lucas Meijer will give a technical demonstration of Unity’s featureset. He will be joined by Unity’s CTO Joachim Ante, lead graphics engineer Aras Pranckevicius, and technical artist Joe Robins. C++ / C# scripting integration, shader programming, asset pipeline and iphone publishing workflow are among the topics that will be discussed. A must attend session for anyone evaluating engines for their next game.

Expo-only pass holders welcome!

Unity for Engineers

Expo Hall, NVIDIA Booth, 12:00-1:00pm

Saturday

Last day of the show, come by the booth one last time to hear a session you missed or to say goodbye!

In addition to all of our other GDC activities, we’re going to be joined in our booth with a selection of great partners. This is a win-win opportunity where we’re able to bring some more exposure to these partners and their presence helps our booth to reflect the diverse ecosystem that surrounds our tool and community! Each of these partners is going to be on hand to demo their products at their kiosk and will also have an opportunity to present in our theater. I hope you’ll come to see what they have to offer! In order to entice you, here is some info about them:

Graveck is a Saint Paul based development studio specializing in games developed using the powerful Unity engine. With their unparalleled Unity experience and drive, Graveck creates top-notch web games and retail boxed games for world renowned clients along with groundbreaking original titles. They also had the number 1 top paid app in the App Store for five weeks!

OpenFeint is the largest and most successful social gaming network, with over a thousand games and fourteen million players. Think Xbox Live meets Facebook for the iPhone with features like challenges, leaderboards, achievements, chat, forums and powerful game discovery. OpenFeint is the free, easy way for developers and players to get more out of games.

Aquiris is a development studios baased in Porto Alegre, state of Rio Grande do Sul, southern of Brazil. They've been developing games and other interactive media for both Brazilian and global companies. They are amongst the most prolific Unity developers, having developed a total of 20 games projects, 13 of which were started and completed after establishing their games focus in January of 2008.

Noesis Interactive is the premier developer of Video Courseware and training materials for indie-developers and game modders. Noesis is dedicated to improving gaming related education worldwide and preparing its users for industry careers or independent production. Noesis is based in the California San Francisco Bay Area, just minutes from Silicon Valley.

Digimi On the heels of a successful merger, DAZ 3D-Gizmoz present Digimi, the ultimate platform for generating personalized avatars. Leveraging the collaboration of existing technologies from DAZ 3D and Gizmoz, Digimi offers a premier solution for complete avatar customization in Unity and allows developers to import photo-realistic heads and customized avatars into games and virtual worlds at runtime.

dimeRocker is a branded self-publishing platform that enables Unity developers to deploy, monetize and build traffic across the social web (Facebook, mySpace, etc.) for their 3D games from one central account. The goal is to provide a complete solution so developers can spend less time managing the web and more time creating the best content possible. They're set to launch their open beta during GDC, so keep your eyes peeled!

This blog post is written by Sándor Moldán (Nekharoth on forums) who has been working on Terrain Toolkit to help generate realistic terrains in Unity Editor. The project was one of the four selected projects that were selected for the Unity Summer of Code.

Terrain Toolkit

The Terrain Toolkit is an integrated set of tools for the Unity Editor which is designed to streamline and improve the workflow involved in creating realistic terrains for games. The toolkit enables the creation of large scale, realistic and playable game worlds within a very short time span.

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At Unite ‘09 Paulius Liekis and I did a presentation on Character Animation Tips & Tricks. We discussed a range of animation techniques such as realistic foot placement, procedural aiming and head turning, and how to smoothly turn procedural adjustments on and off while reloading. We had prepared a tech demo demonstrating these techniques, and we promised to make the project folder available online shortly after the conference.

Well, the videos from Unite ‘09 ended up not coming out quite as soon as we had originally planned, but the good thing is that we’ve been able to improve the demo in the meantime. I’ve been spending some Fridays improving it from a pure tech demo to a small game with actual gameplay. Shoot the hovering orb repeatedly to make it break and go into a frenzy before finally exploding! Give it a go (click the image to go to the live demo):

Can you take down the Orb at the insane difficulty level?

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As y’all know the user base for Unity is exploding and that growth includes developers across the spectrum, from games to non-games, from small development shops to large studios, from social media outlets to major media providers. Today we have news about not just a major media provider but a major toy manufacturer as well, that company being none other that LEGO! Allow me to quote a bit of the press release that went out today:

Building on the success of LEGO® Star Wars: The Quest for R2D2 and BIONICLE: Glatorian Arena, Unity Technologies, the provider of the market-leading Unity development platform for 3D interactive content on the Web, PC, Mac, Wii™ and iPhone, announced today a new three-year deal with the LEGO Group, in which the company will standardize on Unity authored content for 3D content on www.LEGO.com.

As one of the world’s leading manufacturers of play materials for children, the LEGO Group recognizes the need to offer an innovative online environment for consumers to share their passion and creative flair. To do this, the LEGO Group is developing its web strategy to deliver an online consumer experience to match and enhance the real world fun and invention of LEGO products.

The LEGO Group identified Unity as the best 3D platform available to fulfill its short-term and long-term requirements.

“We’ve invested a great deal of time evaluating technology for the next phase of www.LEGO.com,” said Claus Toftegaard Matthiesen, Technology Manager of the LEGO Group. “We believe that Unity’s flexibility, strength and power will give us scope to create world leading content for our consumers and are looking forward to the cooperation.”

You can read the full press release here.

I personally find this exciting for a number of reasons. Of course it starts out by being a great business deal for Unity Technologies, so let’s get that one out of the way. But worth noting is that it will also serve all of us very well by helping push vast numbers of web player installs due to the high traffic numbers they experience on their website, that’s great for everyone using or adopting Unity for web based content. Finally, it’s also interesting as it’s yet another bit of validation that not only is our technology up to the task of delivering the best in-browser game content possible, but that it’s worth doing so for a mass-market site targeting users of a younger age.

All around this is a good deal and it’s news that I just couldn’t help sharing. Kudos to everyone that was involved in securing this deal, both on the business development front as well as our hard working engineers, for without them none of this would be possible!

Ok, so the iPad is now officially old news. Let me get something out of the way, first: yes, we will support it. Yes, we are aiming for 0-day support. If we get there or not basically depends whether on if Apple can get us early access to the device.

With that out of the way, here’s what I actually had in mind – Looking at the event, Apple unveiled pretty much what most of us expected – but it wasn’t until a bit later that it hit me what is so great about this:

I’ve never before seen a computer that is so designed for consumers. It goes straight into the stream of iPod, iPod Touch, etc. Sure, it’s using general-purpose chips behind it, so it’s not like it can’t do “real” apps, but the focus is here 100% on consumers. That means games.

Apple has been taking games more and more seriously – I guess that started happening when they realized games were one of the main movers of iPod Touches. This means that as far as we’re concerned what we’re looking at is the launch of a new console. For indies it’s even better: Apple actually gets the whole “make life sweet for developers” – so it’s a platform that you can make games on and you can even earn money – all major console’s stores are simply embarassing compared to the AppStore. In short, on iPod/Pad/Phone the hoops you have to go through to develop, publish and get paid are crazy low. If you’re one of those people who think the submission process is slow/bad/bloated, just try becoming a registered developer with Sony or Microsoft

Naturally, we want to be there the moment it happens. Whenever new and exciting platforms come out, we want to be there. Our goal is to let our users publish anywhere. We can’t support all platforms instantly, but Apple have had an uncanny ability to produce hits. With the iPad I think they’ve done it again.

So we are scrambling like mad to get support for it. On the iPhone our guys worked round the clock to get it out – hopefully that won’t be neccessary this time, but we’d always rather burn some midnight oil than end up like the large behemoth we’re currently seeing on the sidelines – 18 months after iPhone launch with no shipped support for this platform mumbling OMG! The Net Is Broken

This past weekend was the Global Game Jam, where teams from all around the world worked tirelessly to create amazing games in a single weekend. Here in Copenhagen, the local branch of the Global Game Jam is the Nordic Game Jam that was held at the IT University of Copenhagen. The cool things about the Nordic Game Jam are that it’s the “original” jam, and Unity’s old office is inside the ITU itself! So of course we had to be there. Six of us from UT presented talks on using Unity as an Artist or a Programmer.

You may have heard about Fun Fridays here at Unity HQ. Those of us who were giving the talks thought it would be a good idea to spend some Fridays to make a small game that we could use as a visual aid. This turned out to be a great idea. We created new material to help teach new Unity users, and those of us who worked on it have a really fun game to share with friends, family, and the community! I’d like to share this game with you now… We call it Granny Theft Tofu and you can play it in the embedded webplayer below.

The goal is to get yourself to the Tofu shop and back home again before time runs out, all while causing as much traffic carnage as possible. Arrow keys will move Granny around. And there’s an easter egg in the game too; an Amiga graphics mode.  See if you can find it!

I’m incredibly happy to have helped create this game! I think everybody on the team learned something about Unity that they didn’t know before. It was also nice to sit down with Unity as a user once again, and help others learn what it is and what makes it so special. I hope you’ll all enjoy the game, and perhaps walk away inspired.

A long held dream in the development world has been the idea of “author once, deploy anywhere”. To explain what is meant by that is simple, it’s the notion of being able to author your content one time, then through the simple click of a button deploy your content on any platform you like, whether that’s on the desktop, the web, gaming consoles or mobile devices. Nobody is quite there yet and there is more work to be done, but with that in mind Unity Technologies is making tremendous progress in making this dream a reality, and Unity is already used by thousands to distribute content across a variety of platforms. While the benefits of this author once deploy anywhere notion might seem clear at first blush, there are a few points worth discussing in particular, so let’s look at those in a bit more detail.

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