Posts by Aras Pranckevičius

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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…I took a plane to Copenhagen.

Well ok, it all started a bit before: (more…)

At end of April 2009, Joachim sent this out to all developers at Unity:

We want to try one more thing… On Friday work on something cool.

I think there are a lot of low hanging fruits in Unity where somebody with drive can just do something cool that pushes us forward. Things that are hard to put in words, but just make sense when you see it done.

So every Friday, developers can work on something cool, something they have been craving to do for a long time. A feature, a demo, a tutorial, a video tutorial, docs, cleaning the toilet, something on the website. Whatever. Be creative, push the envelope.

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This blog post is written by Sándor Moldán who is working on a set of Terrain Erosion tools for Unity. The project is one of four selected projects that were selected for the Unity Summer of Code.

The objective of this Unity Summer of Code project was to develop a toolset for the Unity Editor which would streamline and improve the workflow involved in creating terrains for games.

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We have a ton of people at Unity who have been or are involved in the demoscene. Assembly is one of the largest demoscene parties, and this year we were sponsoring the event, sent in some folks there and had a couple of seminar presentations. Our presentations were not directly Unity related, but still might be interesting for some of you.

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Unity roadmap blog post said:

Currently Unity mixes the fixed function pipeline for vertex lit objects and vertex shaders for pixel lit lights. On Direct3D this creates some rendering artifacts on very close or self intersecting surfaces. We want to end this by implementing a full fixed function emulator in vertex shaders. You won’t have to do anything, it will just work!

Well, the good news is that we have done it, and it is definitely coming in Unity 2.6!

It is funny, because the problem seems like a simple one: “there are double-lighting artifacts on close surfaces”. The solution, however, is “we need to implement whole fixed function pipeline manually”, which involves combining shader assembly fragments, doing register allocations, packing vertex pipeline state into bits and other low level hacking.

In other words, it required quite a bit of thinking and implementation effort, so I decided to write up a technical report on how we solved it. If you’re a graphics programmer or love programmer speak or just have nothing better to do: here’s the report.

For some reason I was browsing through old emails and found some old development screenshots of Unity 2.5.

Unity 2.5 was the first version of the editor running on Windows and eventually was released in March 2009. Some development of it started at end of 2007, just after Unity 2.0 was released. First there was some serious code shuffling, converting from Objective C into C++, refactoring into platform independent interfaces and similar highly invisible stuff.

Here’s the first Unity running on Windows screenshot I could find (this is February 2008): (more…)

Almost a month ago I said we’re preparing reports of Unity Web Player hardware statistics.

Well, here they are: unity3d.com/webplayer/hwstats

Operating system versions, desktop resolutions, graphics driver versions, shader models, memory sizes and some more. All broken down by quarter so some sort of “trends” can be seen (sure, changes can be caused by general hardware change or simply different people groups playing different games).

Enjoy!

Pretty much everyone knows Valve’s hardware survey – it’s a very valuable resource that shows what hardware the typical “hardcore PC gamer” has (that is, gamers that play Valve’s games).

However, the “casual gamer”, which is what Unity games are mostly targeted at, probably has slightly different hardware. “Slightly” being a very relative term of course.

Lo and behold – we have a glimpse into that data.
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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. (more…)