Unity Technologies Blog

One of the coolest things about working at a tool company is the chance to see the interesting, innovative and exciting things people do with that tool. This week I got to take advantage of that benefit by visiting the San Jose office of NeuroSky. These folks have developed a group of products based around bio-sensors that pick up on your brain waves and then translate those for use as input in a variety of applications. The idea of “thought based input” appeals to a variety of industries and use cases, whether for medical analysis, development of assistive devices or of course use in next generation game content.

Read the rest of this entry »

People have been asking: why built-in shadows don’t work on Unity’s terrain? (here, here, …) Yes, right now (Unity 2.0.2) they don’t. Why - because we didn’t have time to make them work yet. Both terrain and built-in shadows are new features in Unity 2.0, and those two don’t happen to just work together.

Here’s a glimpse into what is needed to get it working. Read the rest of this entry »

Just had this chat conversation:

…
Joachim: yeah it’s awesome
Joachim: function Start () { /* super secret code snippet */ }
Aras: whoa
Joachim: it rocks
Joachim: automatically instantiates material for you
Joachim: the same way we do it for scripts
Joachim: best thing since sliced bread i think
Aras:
Aras: hey, back in the day the terrain was best thing since sliced bread!
Joachim: sliced bread appears to be always worse depending on what i work on.
Aras: maybe sliced bread is just not so good in fact
Aras: sliced bread is overrated

And no, I won’t say what we were talking about

I frequent many sites to stay up-to-date on various game industry news and today a real gem of an article appeared on Gamasutra courtesy of Daniel Cook and it’s a must read for anyone working in the casual games space:

The Casual Games Manifesto

It’s a relatively brief article that offers some great insights and suggestions to help guide casual game developers to a more profitable future. Specifically he points out some issues (from the developer’s perspective) in the business model offered by most major game portals. But he doesn’t leave it at that, he goes further and offers strategies as to how developers can start taking steps to turn the developer-portal relationship into a tool that offers you, the developer, a bigger (hopefully!) piece of the revenue pie.

Go read it today, it’s worth the 20 minutes or so it will take you to cover the five page (six if you count the appendix) article.

With our recent iPhone announcement having my mailbox boiling over, I’m so happy that I’ll be spending a long weekend in Berlin. I’m flying out to Berlin Wednesday evening to meet up with my whole family – arriving from London, Reykjavik, and Halle – and to celebrate my grandmother’s birthday, eat good food, and have intense conversations about what we are up to.

If course I’ll take the time to meet with a few interesting companies while I’m there – amongst others, people doing hardware instead of software… I’ve met so few of those, it’s going to be exciting to learn about their no-doubt very different business models, and see where Unity can be a fit.

So, anyone else I should be meeting up with? As I’ve written before, the authorized way to meet up in foreign cities is dopplr.com.

We haven’t been making a lot of noise out of Unity Technologies HQ lately, but things have not been at a standstill. We’re having daily conversations with top people at the biggest companies in our space (game developers, publishers, huge brands, search, engineering, …), with some pretty wildly awesome things in the pipeline. If only I could tell you, even just 5% of the big things that are brewing. Huge products, big brand entertainment, … auwww how annoyed I am at the secrecy of this industry: why can’t we just all tell everyone what we’re up to!? Just some of the things? Like, right now

Okay, what can I tell you? How about:

– 2 x full blown MMO being made with Unity
– 5 x virtual worlds being made with Unity
– 3 x well funded game portals being made with Unity
– several VC funded projects that we haven’t even been told what are about
– And of course thousands of Unity licenses being used for things that we know nothing of

… and that’s not mentioning all the evaluation projects and projects pending funding. 2008 will be a wild ride.

A very common question we get is “what is the penetration of the Unity plugin?”

There’s several ways to answer that question. It’s in the millions. It’s also growing, and the rate of growth is increasing. And this year there’s a long line of very major and high-profile game releases planned, which will accelerate this even more. But while the future may be good (and with Unity, the future is good), it’s not now.

But why did you ask that question? Most likely it is to figure out the risk of using Unity content on your site. That you’ll have lots of visitors, many of which who don’t have and won’t install the plugin and leave for somewhere else.

Of course plugin penetration is very important to this, but if a technology doesn’t have >95% ubiquity, the plugin installation process is just as important.

We spent a lot of effort figuring out how to make the plugin install process for Unity as simple as possible. And it’s a lot easier than that of the Shockwave player (not to mention other sub-par technologies). Well, parts of the install process took effort and thinking… but how much effort goes into not requiring registration and pushing adware?

– The whole plugin is 3MB download for everything
– And it is delivered from a Content Delivery Network so all users get a fast download
– The installation doesn’t require a browser restart on any platform
– And it even keeps the user on same the site without even a page reload
– There’s no user registration required
– And no Google toolbar or other adware
– Unity supports Microsoft Vista and Intel based Macs
– And doesn’t crash on old/ancient graphics card and driver combinations

Our statistics tell us that for people who don’t have the plugin already installed, over 60% complete the plugin installation (this differs between different types of content, and just as importantly, based on the presentation of your content… that is material for another blog post).

Depending on where you deploy Shockwave content, it is commonly believed that 50% of your visitors have the plugin installed already. Of the remaining 50%, you’ll lose some because of the plugin installation process. Because of the reasons outlined above, for Shockwave we believe it is around 40%. So do the math:

Shockwave:
Preinstalled: ~50%
Successful plugin installs: ~20% (50% x 40% success rate)
Total successful views: ~70%

Unity:
Preinstalled: ~1%
Successful plugin installs: ~59% (99% * 60% success rate)
Total successful view: ~60%

As a solid proof, R/C Laser Warrior recently was the most played game on shockwave.com for 2 weeks straight, with up 40.000 simultaneous players, and is still listed as a Top Online game there. And that’s on a site dominated by Shockwave games.

Still, you might worry that using the Unity technology is a bit daring, and early-adopter-ish. A couple of weeks ago, a Massive Media Conglomerate called Disney released a Unity-based game online game, Sooga Mountain. So I ask you, can you be as agile and daring as those guys?

ESC is a superbly innovative virtual worlds company, mostly based out of NY (like Unity, they have a diaspora of cool employees all over the place). They’re most famous for their SecondLife work, but now that everyone is tiring of SL (no?) they’re of course looking at the next possibilities. And if you want to build a virtual world today, Unity’s the obvious #1 (number-only?) choice.

During GDC this year I met up with John Swords III, business developer at ESC (and a really impressive guy). He did an impromptu interview with me there (we had to hide in a corner next to a garbage-can to get a sufficiently quiet spot to do the recording), which I think gives a good image of my thoughts about Unity this spring… with a sprinkling of history in between.

Listen in: http://blogs.electricsheepcompany.com/sheep/?cat=71

Semitransparent GUI is all the rage these days. This is usually not a good idea. Here, I’ll go into some of the details why transparency (mostly) sucks.

Transparency creates visual noise - our eyes are very good at edge detection, and having transparent stuff increases the number of edges that we have to process. Also, a lot of GUI has some sort of layering effect - either through shading, coloring or by using floating windows. Using transparency breaks this layering (in nature, very few things are partially transparent).

Who got the idea that having a large 50% transparent panel was a good idea? - you can neither see the panel nor the text beneath.Now, I said at the top that semitransparent GUI is ususaly not a good idea - let’s take a look at where it does work:

Read the rest of this entry »

As someonewho spends a lot of time on the road, and knows a lot of people in a lot of different places (and many of whom also spend a lot of time on the road), this is the invention that was needed: dopplr.com.

The concept is simple: it’s a lightweight social network where you enter your travel itineraries, and voilà! dopplr tells you who’ll be in the same city as you at the same time. No “applications”, games, dating, advertising, or in fact anything else.

Just go here, sign-up, add me as a contact, and we’re all set! I mean it, right now: sign up

See you … wherever.