These are exciting times. Today, at the Flash Gaming Summit in San Francisco (of which we’re proud Gold Sponsors), Adobe has announced the public availability of a beta version of the Flash Player, codenamed Molehill, that has a very interesting new feature: hardware accelerated 3D support.

Molehill exposes a very low-level shader-based interface to the graphics hardware. Adobe has decided to focus on that low-level part, and do that really well. The molehill pre-release will not be shipping with a 3D engine, scene building tools, model and animation importers / exporters, physics, lighting or lightmap creation tools, etc.

Hmmm….does that list sound familiar? It sounds a lot like what you all love Unity for!

In the past few months, our engineers have been investigating the possibility of adding a Flash Player exporting option to Unity. That investigation has gone very well, and we’re moving into full production.

For Unity users, this no doubt spurs a lot of questions. Questions such as:

• Will Unity on Flash support the full Unity feature set?
• When will it be ready?
• Okay, when will a beta be ready?
• What will it cost?
• Will it do A, B or C?

These, and many other questions, we cannot answer just yet.  We can say that it will be as good as we can make it and we’ll do it as fast as we can do it.

We do however have some concrete answers for you now that shouldn’t wait…

Q. Is this the end of the Unity’s own Web Player?

Absolutely not. The Flash and Unity Web Players both have their strengths.  We’re excited by the opportunity to target the Flash Player and all of its features with Unity, but there will be plenty of experiences that the Unity plugin is better suited for. It will be up to developers in the end, to decide whether they want to target only the Flash Player, only the Unity Web Player, or some combination of the two (now things are getting interesting!)

Q. What programming language will I use?

You’ll have two options:

1. For people with a Flash background:
   Target our ActionScript API directly from Flash. Think:
   var go:GameObject = new GameObject(“Just normal ActionScript 3 code”);
2. For people with a Unity background:
   Script your content in C# / JavaScript / Boo, like you’re used to, and have Unity automatically translate it to ActionScript when you hit publish.

This is an important development for us, and we hope you’re as excited as we are to see your content reach further than ever.

Let’s start with a demo: (click it to start)

Please view the full post to see the Unity content.

You’re looking at the DressingRoomExample from the project. It shows how to use the system to make an avatar creator, where you can choose different types of clothing, accessories, etc.

This demo project serves two purposes:

• A drop in solution for people who want to add customizable characters to their games.
  It’s quite easy to just add your own characters, as long as you follow the naming conventions by the example characters included (feel free to use the included example characters as well!) 

  If you’d like to get started with this, download this screencast (Quicktime, avi) giving you a headstart on how to use the system.

• A reference project that shows how to use AssetBundles. The project uses asset bundles extensively, and is a great example for people who are looking for a more real world AssetBundle project to look at for inspiration.

The project also contains a second example usage of the customizable character system. It’s an example of a solution to a problem virtual worlds often run into: A wizard with a magic red cape logs in, and runs towards you. But you don’t have the red cape downloaded yet.
The demo solves this problem by displaying a white particle cloud, indicating the presence of a character. When all the different assets that are required to properly display the character are downloaded, we spawn the character in the particle cloud, and make the particle cloud dissapear.

The customizable character system is written in C#, and can be used from JavaScript and C#.

Please feel free to use all assets and code in the demo for your own projects. We hope you like it.

What is it?
A tool that lets you use 3d Studio Max to make great looking lighting for your game.

I’ve been making lightmaps for ages already, why would I care?
Because with this tool, you can actually layout your scenes in Unity. Previously if you wanted to use lightmaps, you’d usually layout your scenes in 3d Studio Max or Maya or some other tool, and would have had a hard time moving things around in Unity later on.

Do you have some examples for this?
Take a look at this video tutorial from Michał, going over the example project included with the tool.

Great. Do I need to prepare my assets in any way to make this work?
You need to provide lightmap texturecoordinates for all meshes that you want to have lightmapped. However each object can have its own seperate lightmap sheet. The tool will take all lightmap sheets from all specified objects in the scene, put them all into one mega lightmap sheet, export your scene to fbx, have Max import the fbx, have Max generate a lightmap, and then that lightmap gets picked up by Unity automatically.

Take a look at this more detailed screencast, which goes trough this process, and shows how to go from an empty project to a lightmapped environment.

But I don’t use max! I use …..
There’s nothing in the tool that makes the technique inherently limited to 3d Studio Max. However the tool does provide some nice extensions to Max that make the lighting baking a one click process. With a bit of effort, one could take this project, and make it work for other authoring tools.

I still have some other question
Try out the new answers.unity3d.com and get it answered!

Many thanks and congratulations from the Unity team go out to Michał for being part of the Summer of Code program. You can find more indepth info on the tool on Michal’s website.

The conference will have many Unity employees, as well as Unity users, giving presentations, to share their experience with the conference’s attendees. In order to make sure we get the best line up of speakers possible, we’re calling out to the Unity community:

We would like to invite everyone who would want to give a presentation at Unite 2009, to send a speaking proposal to speakingatunite@unity3d.com. We will select the speakers who we feel can give presentations most useful to the conference’s attendees. That might be you!

We are looking for a wide range of topics. All publishing platforms, all disciplines (programming, design, workflow, business), content for beginners, content for advanced users. We will seriously look at all proposals made. Surprise us.

We’d like the proposals to contain, at minimum, an outline of what you would talk about, as well as the kind of audience it’s aimed at (beginners, artists, etc). Presentation slots are maximum 45-50 minutes long.

The presentations will be videotaped, and placed on our website. You can find the sessions from the previous two events here. If you have any questions, feel free to get in touch with speakingatunite@unity3d.com to get them answered.

The deadline for your speaking proposal submission is Wednesday the 16th of September.

During the last six weeks, the selected participants for Unity’s first Summer of Code program have been working hard at making the ideas from their proposals come to life. It has been very exciting for us at Unity to see what people can do with our product with a good idea and six weeks of hard work.

The mentors at Unity will be doing a final review of their projects, and work with the participants to make sure it’s all nicely wrapped up and ready to be published on our website. We’ll put up another blog post when that happens.

It might take some time though, as some participants might be catching up on some sleep

What’s lightmapping?

If you’re not familiar with the terms “baking” and “lightmapping” then let me introduce them to you a little. Baking is an operation of prerendering expensive details (in calculational sense) like illuminated lightning, highlights and shadows into a texture so that it doesn’t have to be renderered at realtime. It requires some additional effort from the game designers, but it benefits hugely in performance. This solution is pretty old, but according to words of John Carmack it’s still up-to-date and will be – even in high end games.

What is the Lightmapping Tool?
It’s a tool for lightmapping scenes in external applications (yeah, I know most of you would  wish to see an integrated system, but it’s not that easy to write this kind of system; however there are several huge benefits from using an external one, especially as powerful one as VRay).
As you may have heard before, my job is to wire lightmapping process tightly with 3dsmax and VRay. The system automates the process of both external baking, and setting up the lightmaps in Unity.
Lightmapping tool manages up to 99 lightmap atlases (could be even more but the interface would have to be modded for such extreme jobs) which hold object information with resolution proportional to their size on the stage. It can start external applications (currently only 3dsmax), assign appropriate renderer or load a preset max scene which holds information about lightning and so on. I’m planning to make a short screencast video when the work is done, so you can be sure you understand everything clearly

This picture presents about 1/6 of a whole scene lightmapped with only one 2kx2k lightmap rendered with VRay on medium settings

What makes this solution different?
Many people have asked me how my tool will change the way the lightmapping is done. The answer is  quite simple – it gives you the power to decide whatever in scene will be static (and lightmapped) or not – at anytime without much pain.

Let me introduce how the workflow is looking:

1. Open a the lightmapping tool (all the previously lightmapped objects from the scene will be  already present at Lightmapping tools lists),
2. Setup export options,
3. Export to 3dsmax and make anything that’s needed to make the scene look good,
4. Max will be opened (if not opened before),
5. Setup lightning in 3dsmax and store presets with light and renderer settings using the the  additional tool Lightmapping. You’ll be able to switch between them later to render the scene,
6. Bake them with a single click.
7. Come back to Unity to see the effects of your work. No texture drag and dropping – everything is automated

How is the work going?
Most of the options you’ve seen are implemented and working, today the system hits it’s first beta day and will be given to first beta testers (by the way: if you’re interested in beta testing, please write a message to masteranza at gmail dot com).

It’s over four weeks of developing right now, and I must say that the original idea really evolved. I’ve read some feedback coming from the community  and I decided to generalize my system. Of course I stick to the guide lines (Main Goals) send to Unity team, but I try to generalize whenever is possible. Let’s look at the “Advanced” window – it was not designed to fit 3dsmax or VRay options only, but with a little effort every external tool.

What’s more, after exporting, the FBX file system waits for lightmaps to appear so, automatic setting up them is also tool independent. I will do my best to help everyone willing to extend the system in future for such tools like Blender, Maya and so on.

What’s left to do for this week:

• correct the material setting subsystem
• correct some issues with lightmap edges
• eliminate bugs
• optimize the code
• try making GUI more intuitive
• gather feedback from beta testers and make improvements
• make icons and additional graphics for both (Unity and Max) interfaces

Personal experience
Developing the system gave and still gives me a lot of satisfaction. I’ve learned a lot of things and had a chance to use things I’ve learned in school in practice. Starting from Immediate-GUI, going through the ‘normals space’, up to some deeper MaxScript insights. Although it took me almost half of my vacations [and a small eye strain ;-D] I’ve already planned a game development in Unity as soon as I get my Unity Pro license.

What I noticed during development is that Unity makes some things really easy to do and it’s not only about the Unity Engine internals, but the way things are organized here – I’m thinking about the huge community, enormous library of already written scripts and almost instant help on any problem.

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 )