Posts by Thomas Grové

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.

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).

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!

Today is very exciting for us because we’ve just released a much anticipated update to our iPhone development platform — Unity iPhone 1.5.

Some of the highlights from this major point release include:

Significant Performance Boosts

• Up to 3x faster than 1.0.3.
• Performance critical paths rewritten to take advantage of VFP coprocessor, animation skinning is up to 4x faster.
• Automatic batching of meshes to reduce draw calls.

Built-in Anti-piracy Protection

• Identify if Apple DRM was removed from the application bundle and modify application behaviour accordingly.

More Power

• Full support for native Objective C and C++ code opens full access to the iPhone 3.x APIs and custom plugins.
• Access to video-playback, on screen keyboard support, and GPS/location services.
• Support for 8-texture shading on iPhone 3GS with automatic fallbacks for iPhone 3G.

Better Docs

• Detailed instructions on iphone-specific optimizations.
• New 150 page tutorial to get you up to speed with iPhone game making.

Further information about this release, a download link for the update, and a link to the Penelope Tutorial can all be found here: http://unity3d.com/unity/whats-new/iphone-1.5

Submissions for the 2009 Unity Awards are now open! Our goal is to honor the very best content being made in Unity. If you’ve been working hard on a project, now is you chance to earn some recognition–and some prize money–for your efforts!

Check out the official contest information and rules page for all of the details you need to know. We look forward to your entries!

*update: We’re putting information about each of the entries that we receive in this forum post.

Some ambitious community members from the #unity3d IRC channel have put their heads together and organized a competition to create simple example projects and tutorials. The competition and initiative is called UniKnowledge. Here is an excerpt of their information:

How it works
As i said before, you don’t have to worry about media. We are focusing on game logic and structure here. The objective here is to develop the best sample project, not the best game. This means that you have to:

• Focus on the gameplay structure of the project
• Make it playable. Play the prototype yourself and see if it plays good, smoothly
• Explain everything you did, and how to reproduce that
• You can use everything to aid the teaching process: videos, presentations, images, etc.
• Comment your code!
• Explain how and why things work

The prizes, amongst other things, include Unity Pro/iPhone Advanced licenses and cash! For full details about how you can enter the competition–and contribute to the Unity Community in the process–visit the official wiki page and forum thread:

• http://www.unifycommunity.com/wiki/index.php?title=UniKnowledge
• http://forum.unity3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=28307

Prominent iPhone publisher Chillingo, who published Touch KO (made in Unity!), is actively courting Unity developers on our forums. If you’re working on an iPhone game in Unity, why not try contacting them?

The demo team’s first example iPhone project is now available for free at the App Store. The demo is entitled Penelope and—as previously mentioned—contains examples of three different control schemes. Please check it out and look forward to a tutorial and example project in the near future!