Archive for July, 2009

After a crazy week featuring not one but three separate events crammed into the span of one week I’m finally coming up for air and thought I’d take a minute to share some thoughts with y’all. The first of those events was the longest and most involved and that was last week’s Casual Connect Seattle conference.

I’ve been lucky enough to attend every Casual Connect conference in Seattle and without fail this year’s event was as awesome as ever. I’m quite impressed at the work done by the Casual Games Association as they’ve managed to expand this event from a few hundred or so in 2006 to something on the order of 2000 attendees as last week’s event, and they’ve done that while retaining the same cool vibe that makes it such a cool conference. I say that because the conference really does offer a great feel to it, it’s more like a community affair than some large anonymous bulk conference and it has such a great focus on the casual games business that it really speaks to the heart of most folks using (or that should be using) Unity.

Unfortunately I wasn’t lucky enough to get away from the table to attend any sessions but word on the “street” is that they were of course as valuable as ever. What I was lucky enough to enjoy was the incredible amount of traffic by our sponsor table and the wide range of meetings I was able to have with people from all backgrounds. What’s more is that we as a company noticed a very tangible shift in who was there asking about us. In years past most folks dropped by the booth with a “so, what’s Unity?” sort of approach, this year it was far more on the “I’ve heard of Unity and want to know more!” side, so they were intent and interested visitors to say the least!

All told we had an incredible time, we met with countless developers as well as a number of high-level strategic partners, and both of those groups will be extremely valuable in helping all of us push Unity even further in the coming weeks, months and years. I have to offer a big shout out to my fellow UT crew members that were there as they all worked hard and did a great job. On top of that I’ll offer another huge shout out to Luke Burtis of the Casual Games Association as he’s an incredible contact for us that’s managed to pull through on all accounts.

Thanks to our team, thanks to all the Unity users that were in the house, thanks to Luke and the Casual Games Association crew and of course thanks to everyone at the conference – that rocked!

Read the rest of this entry »

The Demo Team is putting the finishing touches on the iPhone Standard Assets that will go out with the Unity iPhone 1.1. release. There are plenty of useful assets that you’ll get:

1. Additive-Projector (can be used to fake spotlights)

2. Blob-Shadow

3. iPhone-specific shaders

4. Default Skybox asset

5. Joystick and TouchPad scripts

6. Easy-to-use water reflection script

7. Control schemes aplenty: 2D side scroller, camera-relative, FPS, FPS w/ tilt, player-relative, tap-to-move

With the Unity iPhone 1.1. release imminent, you’ll be enjoying all of these goodies, soon!

Two weeks ago we announced our Unity Summer of Code program through which we offer indie & student developers the chance to get paid for doing something cool in Unity. Now we have reviewed all of the almost hundred proposals and selected the four of them that we found best matched the program!

The ultimate goal for a parametric explosion system?

Read the rest of this entry »

I learned programming on an Amiga 500. Some lowlevel stuff with copperlists, sine and cosine lookup tables and a line drawing algorithm to get a rotating box on the screen.

Some people think that’s cool.

It’s not.

It sucks.

Today, if you’re young (or old) and want to learn how to make a computer do something cool, things look better. You can learn faster and make more, cooler stuff in less time.

Unity embodies that transformation.

Anybody with $200 and a willingness to learn can make a game that I couldn’t have imagined when I was making my rotating box.

I’ve had the opportunity to become part of this transformation: I have joined Unity.

To allow you to make better games. To remove more pain from your game development process. To make game development possible for even more people. To make game development become like painting and writing: something anybody can do, good or bad.

A bit about myself:

I started Artificial Intelligence at the University of Amsterdam, but left for a job in games faster than you can say “Dijkstras algorithm”. For the last ten years, I’ve been a freelance game programmer working on games for Lego, Intel, Paramount, Cartoon Network, Adobe, Arplant, and many others.  Adobe Director was my tool of choice for most of those ten years.  Director 8.5 (first version with 3d) was a great product, way ahead of its time. Unfortunately nobody noticed, and no significant features got added as a decade passed.  At the Game Developers Conference ‘08, I went to say hi to Tom Higgins at the Unity booth. Joachim Ante gave me a demonstration, and had a good answer for every “but does it do X?” question I fired. I was pleasantly surprised. From that point on I switched tools. Out with Director, in with Unity. I kept a blog as I switched tools at http://lucasmeijer.com. I’ve gotten to know the Unity team in in that process, and as time progressed, it seemed a good idea to everybody involved if I’d join the team.

I’m working on whatever makes Unity more successful, which includes a fair amount of programming.

– Lucas Meijer ( lucas@unity3d.com, twitter: lucasmeijer )

Just making characters in your game look around can bring them much more to life as well as express important information to the user. Here we’ll discuss a few use cases and present a script that makes it simple to implement in your game.

First a tech demo video to set the context:

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m happy to report that Unity 2.5.1 has finished baking in the oven and is now ready for download! As with all minor updates (anything 2.x) this is a free update for all existing Unity 2.x license holders, you just download the new build, install it and get back to work! From the news item on our website:

We’re very excited to share that Unity 2.5.1 has been completed and is now available for all Unity developers! 2.5.1 is all about stability of the Editor and Web Player, along with some other improvements that somehow snuck in. This hotfix release is recommended for all Unity developers. Due to one particular bug fix, we also recommend that all developers using the Web Player as a deployment target read through the Tech Note inside the 2.5.1 release notes.

And here are two relevant links:

Unity 2.5.1 Release Notes
Download Page

Existing license holders can simply download the new installer from the download page above (there is only one installer for Unity Indie, Pro, trial, etc.) and run it to update to the latest build. Have fun!

Note: this release does not contain updates to Unity iPhone, that update (Unity iPhone 1.1) is being handled separately and in parallel, more news on that will be shared later as appropriate.

I’ve always said that Unity as a product is made up of 60% community, 20% grand ideas and concepts, 15% groovy tech and 15% wicked developers (yes I am aware that this amounts to 110% – would you have expected anything less?).

Since my first day at Unity Tech, I’ve wanted to do this post, but quite simply I’ve been way too busy on this end. I still am, but I’m taking some time off to do this anyway, ha!

I’ve surfed most corners of the community for a while now (shout-out to #unity3d on irc.freenode.net! You should stop by and check it out!) and being part of this is really, really (really) grand. In my first blog post from UT, I’d like to mention a few of the groovy community projects I’ve stumbled on and could remember at the time of writing (I’ll try remembering/researching some more projects later). So without further ado, I present *drumroll* amazing community projects!:

Read the rest of this entry »

We here at Unity Tech draw inspiration from a variety of sources, some come from within, others from outside, this one definitely came from an external source. We’ve long wanted to offer some sort of venue for the student and/or indie developer that would allow noobies to the industry a chance to learn and develop their skills, to gain professional experience, and to do so in a way that benefits them while also offering something useful to the Unity Community at large. Our (not so original) solution? The Unity Summer of Code! From our main website:

Unity’s Summer of Code is a program through which we offer indie & student developers the chance to get paid for doing something cool in Unity. You will suggest a project to work on, and if the project is accepted you will be paired up with a core Unity developer who will guide you in the implementation.

The goal of USC is make sure we have some great assets for other people to learn from — we’ve seen the amazing talent in our user community, so we invite you to join us and help us push the limits of what can be done in Unity.

We encourage all up-and-coming Unity developers to give this program a look and if interested, to toss your hat in the ring for consideration.  Everyone that’s even mildly interested in this program should check out the Unity Summer of Code page on our site. From there you can feel free to post questions here as part of follow-up comments, or you can post them in the Unity Community Forums as we have an announcement thread with Q&A already underway. Either way, give it all a look and let us know if you’re up to the task!