Archive for September, 2009

Here we are again, putting the final touches on the latest and greatest release of Unity — version 2.6. The team is already amazed at how many new games are being made today! They’re being rolled out so quickly that we can’t always keep up. So to help us make sure that everything in the 2.6 release is going to be 100% silky smooth compatible with all the published webplayer games out there, we’d like to ask the Unity community for some help once again.

If you want to help make Unity 2.6.0 a flawless release, there are two simple things you can do.

1) Auto-update to the 2.6 webplayer plugin by visiting this Auto-Update test page.
2) Go play as many webplayers as possible.  Try out lots of players old and new!

If you have any problems at all during the auto-update process or running a webplayer, we want to know about it immediately. Please post about it in a reply to this thread on the Unity forums. Include the URL of the problematic webplayer, and the OS, browser, and graphics card you’re using. We really want to fix everything so if you run into problems, don’t forget to post! And thanks!

GamesIndustry.biz’s Phil Elliott talks to Unity CCO Nicholas Francis about iPhone development and the growth of Unity Technologies in this interview entitled United We Stand.

Thanks to you guys, having an iPhone game made with Unity topping iPhone chart sales is no surprise to anyone. But do you know that there were simultaneously 3 games in TOP100 ALL apps at the beginning of the last week? Now even better -- at least* 5 games made with Unity can be found in TOP100 GAME charts today!

*) we do not know all iPhone games made with Unity, so if your game is not listed here, please, let us know!

These games are in TOP100 GAME charts at the moment:

1. BATTLE BEARS


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ShogunGamer’s Corey Rollins did a great interview with EA Tiburon’s Greg Rinaldi about his team’s experience using Unity to create Tiger Woods PGA Tour Online.

Using Unity 3D allowed us to have a much more efficient budget, team size and timeline than we would have had if we’d decided to build our own solution from scratch.  Unity was an excellent jumping off point and allowed us to get to a playable prototype in about a month’s time with a team of approximately 5 people.  By the time we launch Tiger Woods PGA TOUR Online, we’d have been working on the project for about a year with a team of about 15-20 developers.

Read the entire interview here.

Just a quick announcement to say that our users have organized a gathering of Unity developers in downtown Austin at 8pm tonight (Thursday) at the Driskill Hotel Bar (map).

We’re happy to announce that tickets to this year’s Unite ‘09 conference are now on sale! This year’s event is a bit different than the prior two years as there is now an optional lead-in day of classes that folks can attend. The conference runs Tuesday to Friday, October 27th to the 30th, Tuesday is a day of classes whereas Wednesday through Friday is a three day conference featuring fifteen technical sessions on a number of topics. All in all it’s going to be another great event!

For more information about Unite ‘09 please visit the following URL:

http://unity3d.com/unite

To go ahead and buy your tickets today please visit our online store at the following URL:

https://store.unity3d.com/shop/unite

We’ll see you in San Francisco!

This blog post is written by Ben Throop who has been working on a Detonator framework to generate great-looking explosions in Unity games. The project was one of the four selected projects that were selected for the Unity Summer of Code and the first to be wrapped up and released.

Explosions are a really common element in games, but they can be difficult to create. Starting from scratch can be time consuming and requires expertise with particle systems, lighting, texturing, and animation. Tweaking existing effects to fit a game can also be a challenge because its difficult to change the size or color of a set of particle emitters in unison. Making explosions should be fun, fast, and rewarding instead. That’s why Detonator was created.

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A group of us are here in Austin TX representing Unity at the Game Developers Conference Austin. The show floor just closed for the day and I wanted to give a status report of the events thus far before heading off to dinner.

We’ve got a great presence on this year’s expo floor; you can’t miss it since it is nearly the first thing you see when you walk into the expo (booth #301). There has been a lot of traffic at our booth so far; we gave demonstrations of Unity and answered questions from current and prospective users all day long — we ran out of “large” t-shirts but we have some other sizes on the way!

One of my favorite aspects was hearing user stories and getting feedback directly from our customers; I’m so happy that we’re able to empower these creative teams!

We also had an opportunity to witness a really really really great project that’s being made in Unity… I hear that there will be some sort of press release about the company tomorrow but you’ll have to wait a while to hear any details about the project

If you’d like to check out EA’s Tiger Woods PGA Tour Online or if you’re considering Unity and are at GDC Austin, please come by our booth tomorrow or Friday!

Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s Jim Rossingol recently did a great interview with our very own Nicholas Francis about the history of Unity and “making tech simple”. Check it out here!

I decided to clean up the Touch Phases project I had from a while back and post it to our iPhone example projects. You can now record and play back touch input in either the editor or on the device. Even before adding recording/playback, I used this project as a debugging tool when building the Penelope demo/tutorial. I hope that it will help as you develop your own iPhone apps. Here’s a short video of the recording/playback support: