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

Any talk about mobile will start with the iPhone – it’s the device that really showed even disbelievers like me that you do want a general-purpose computer-like device in your pocket. The iPhone has been great for us – we got in on it early and let our users publish to it – adding “quite a few” users in the process. We’ve now shipped 6 versions and over 500 Unity appstore games have been launched. Pretty much whenever anyone does a list of top-something-or-other on iPhone games, you can spot a couple of Unity-powered games.

What games are people playing on the iPhone? From what I’ve heard based on data from ingame ad networks, an interesting trend is surfacing: iPhones are typically used for play sessions of around one hour – mainly in the evenings. If iPhones are really giving traditional consoles a fight in their own turf, this means that mobile devices have a huge future in the gaming space as well.
So how will all this play out? I expect that over the next few years we’ll see a bunch of mobile platforms appear. Some of these will stay and quite a few more will die – in the end, I wouldn’t be surprised if we ended up with iPhone, Android and a third player. Obviously, we want our customers to be able to deploy their games to as many platforms as possible – this means that we could be adding support for some that will possibly go away in the end – that’s ok. While platform fragmentation is annoying to us, the ease of targetting multiple platforms is something we’ve always held close to our heart. Maybe we’ll suffer a bit when porting, but at least it’s only us and not all the people that just want to get creative. It’s our unofficial slogan: We suffer, so you don’t have to.

Some of you have probably seen the announcement that we’re going to support NVidia’s Tegra 2 chipset. This is the first of various things we’re ready to announce and also says something about how we see the world: there’s chipsets and OSes (and then there’s the physical devices). We work on supporting a chipset (like SGX/ARM for iPhone) and we work on supporting an OS (Windows, MacOSX, iPhoneOSX). Behind the huge range of mobile devices mentioned above, there’s a somewhat smaller list of stacks: Broadcom, Qualcomm, Apple, NVidia Tegra – with an OS on top: iPhoneOSX, Windows CE, Linux, Android, etc. those are the ones that are real work for us to support – but once we have some more of these, adding new devices shouldn’t be that hard.

And then there’s the Apple tablet (sure, there’s others – but who really cares?). I expect it to be OSX-based, probably some SGX/ARM chipset – while I know as little as anyone else, I’m basically thinking of an oversized & clocked iPhone 3GS. Supporting it will be some pain, but nothing major (these things are hard to say – half the time on the original iPhone port was spent on one single issue).

Either way, I think gaming on mobile platforms are going to be huge, and I think we’re small and nimble enough to be among the very first with support for many of these platforms. If any of you are going to GDC, I’d love to meet up and chat about these things – drop by our booth (or failing that, there’s a wonderful comment thingy below this post).

The projection image on the wall is the final result of camera input and the presenter slides which will get liveedited to a separate machine. They’re mixing everything in realtime using modul8 vj software.

We’ll also be color-keying in the conference visuals with our slides. Cool stuff – I just hope it doesn’t crash…

I’m giving a talk about the inner workings of immediate-mode GUIs at GDC Europe tomorrow (in Cologne). Looking forward to doing it – it’s been my main Unity development area for the past 2 years, so I guess I somehow ended up being an expert on that subject It’s Monday at 2:10 – 3:00 PM

If any of you are there, I hope you come – and if you want to meet up in Cologne, drop me a mail or a PM on our forum, and I’ll try to squeeze you in.

I was just going through some old folders sitting in a dusty corner on my hard drive, when I found a backup copy of images I posted to a Danish gamedev forum in the first years of Unity. Thought I should share these:

Unity 0.2 (or thereabouts)

This is Unity running in what I believe to be OS X 10.0 – it’s a game Joachim and I made together over a weekend when I visited him while he was still living with his parents. The funny thing is both seeing how much has changed, but also how little: we got ShaderLab in bottom left, Hierarchy view, Project (called Library back then) and the inspector top-right. What did we actually do during all those years? (and yes, that is python gamecode scripts you can see in the Library – this was before we switched to Mono)

I modelled the Apache – l33t gfx skillz, no?

Fast forward 1-2 years:

Here we have a weekend game we did in a somewhat later Unity. Don’t know why I put it here – I just always liked it, I guess.

Over & out \n

Upcoming 2.6 timeline WIP

I’m really excited about this. I’m thinking that it should be able to require a lot less scripting work for a bunch of stuff. It will also support material animation (so you can actually just make some curves for a UV scroll – instead of having to code the thing from scratch).

Transparency creates visual noise – our eyes are very good at edge detection, and having transparent stuff increases the number of edges that we have to process. Also, a lot of GUI has some sort of layering effect – either through shading, coloring or by using floating windows. Using transparency breaks this layering (in nature, very few things are partially transparent).

Who got the idea that having a large 50% transparent panel was a good idea? – you can neither see the panel nor the text beneath.Now, I said at the top that semitransparent GUI is ususaly not a good idea – let’s take a look at where it does work:

• Almost completely opaque – Aperture is probably the best example of this. Their panels are 95% opaque – so you hardly notice the transparency, they just pick up a tiny bit of color from the underlying pictures.
• Almost invisible – The iPhone has this neat trick where they add a soft darkening effect to the entire screen when a modal dialog pops up. You don’t notice the darkening bit, but it makes the modal dialogue stand out.

Sometimes as GUI designers, we can’t quite decide whether or not we want the user to see something – and so we are tempted to make them semitransparent. This is bad – we should make up our minds. Either something is there and can be manipulated or it is not. I got that wrong in Unity: When you have a move tool handle going into or away from the screen we want to disable it (dragging sends the object to infinity fast and it blocks the free move handle) – I was scared of confusing user with move handles popping in and out of existence, so I decided to “dull” them down to 50% transparency.This is NOT enough, so now I’m confusing users with handles that can sometimes be dragged and sometimes not.Great work, Nicholas. I’ll fix that later (and blag about it later still) – it’s back to coding for me.Happy Easter!

Unity has a very minimalist GUI; this stems from the basic premice that GUI you don’t interact with is an actual loss to your productivity – every GUI element that you do not use is one you look at many hundred times a day when working with Unity, and hence something you need to discard from using many hundred times a day. After a while you get pretty good at ignoring a piece of user interface, but when it adds up, you end up with a cluttered mess. Take a look at many 3D apps to see just how bad this can get.

On to what I actually wanted to talk about – the world space indicator arrows, and why they are not there.

At its heart, Unity is not a modelling app – it is an app where you bring together pieces of art from other apps. This means that usually telling which way is up is not a problem:

Geez, I wonder which way is up?

While this can be quite hard to see in a 3D-modelling app (where you might be constructing your mesh by connecting raw verts), by the time you put things into Unity, this is not so big a deal. 

What about when you’re just starting out? In this case, I can see we have an issue – I cannot tell how I’m looking at a box. However, adding an RGB axis thingy to show the directions to every scene view seemed to be way overkill; it would add on-screen clutter for the people who have huge, complex scenes to manage – in order to solve a slight confusion when you’re starting out a new scene. I thought we could use more subtlety;

In real life, we don’t have the problem of telling up from down. Apart from the fact that we can usually assume that our feet should be pointing downwards, there are other cues – mainly a horizon line and lighting.

Light tends to come from above. How about adding a soft top-down light to Unity’s default light setup? This could be a hint of a global up we might just pick up without thinking about it?

I’m also considering always having a very simple skybox in the sceneview – basically something that would tint the upper half of the background a bit lighter than the lower one.  

—-

There is, however, another solution; Sometimes, other people just make some excellent work: In one of the later Maya versions, they added the ability to click the indicator arrows to orient your viewport to a direction:

They even animated the viewport turning to make sure you didn’t get confused while changing views. I noticed that even experienced Maya users picked up this concept immediately – and apparently didn’t mind the animations. Now, those axis arrows are no longer mere decoration, they are actually used to perform a function we do very often – and giving them this functionality means we can remove the (seldomly used and much more cumbersome to use) direction drop-down. 

This is one of the things I plan to be playing with when I do my huge Scene View cleanup.