Archive for February, 2010

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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?

Read the rest of this entry »

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.