Roald Høyer-Hansen

Beast lightmapping – no doubt Never has lighting a scene been so much fun! Great interface and superb integration with Unity. It has actually changed the way I work, as I now do all my lightmapping/baking inside Unity, with Beast. I am sure 90% of the games we’ll see after 3.0 will look 10x as good as the ones we see today

Charles Hinshaw

There are BIG features, but I’m really enjoying the little scene view tweaks that improve daily use. Vertex snapping, look-at rotation, live previews for materials, dragging prefabs into the scene live with ray-snapping, interactive light gizmos, and rect selection — get used to them and then use a 2.x build and see how frustrating it gets. Unity 3 is going to allow for scenes to be constructed much more quickly and accurately.

Aras Pranckevicius

Personally, I’m quite happy with all the behind the scenes stuff that went into 3.0 rendering – surface shaders, seamless shader compilation into OpenGL ES shading language, the way we encode Deferred Lighting buffers etc. But I doubt anyone except me would ever notice them

Obscure features that are awesome: XOR operator support in JavaScript! XOR is cool because:

• It’s exclusive – very exclusive.
• No short circuiting semantics with this guy.
• It appreciates differences in people, or at least in operands, which is almost the same as people.
• It has an X in it. Everything that has an X in it is cool. And this one starts with an X.

Samantha Kalman

I’m most thrilled about the new audio features. Big things like fx filters and reverb zones to add atmosphere to your audio are awesome, but little things like reliable synching of multiple playing sources is completely wonderful. Combined with spectrum analysis you can do things like procedurally modify colors, meshes, lighting, or anything else based on audio playback. As someone who wants to make synaesthesia-invoking music games, I am so happy that these features made it into 3.0.

Nicolaj Schweitz

I love the new audio features, especially the possibility to use audio to affect any runtime variable. I can’t wait to see what people get out of this.

The mod tracker file support might start a new epoch in music for games — or should I say a revival of the demo scene trackers.

I am also amazed by the new physics features. Cloth is a powerful feature that along with DSP effects and reverb zones will expand the way our users will present their game worlds.

I am really happy that we have managed to include a lot of details into the mix, audio preview in the scene, object selector, audio rolloff curves, UI for the player settings — I could go on and on. It soothes my perfectionist heart to see that many minor improvements in Unity.

Rune Skovbo Johansen

A few things that are exciting to me, and haven’t been mentioned yet:

• New font back-end and text input with IME support should make Unity far more interesting to developers targeting Asia and other markets that have unique fonts.
• A few very typical basic math functions have been added that you’d need in many games, but which are not trivial for newbies to come up with on their own: MoveTowards (for floats and vectors) RotateTowards (for rotations and vectors), and a some others.
• Lots of small bug fixes all around that improve stability and performance.
• Full debugging capabilities

Joachim Ante

I think Unity has made the transition to being a robust level editing tool — developers can place modeled objects from inside Unity as opposed to artists creating the whole level in maya/max. You could always use Unity in that way in theory, but there were some drawbacks why people didn’t do it workflow wise and feature wise when they were doing a high end production.

There is a bunch of stuff that contributed to it, in order of importance:

1. Being able to lightmap from within Unity
2. Static batching
3. Being able to place things with the vertex snapping & raycast snapping
4. Occlusion culling so you can get performance out of big scenes
5. Being able to quickly find assets with the object picker
6. Being able to search stuff in a super awesome looking way

Equally important is the unified editor; we actually managed to get all platforms back under one tool again. This is awesome right now, but we also spent a lot of time making it easier to add new platforms, so that after 3.0 we can add new platforms at the speed of a rocket ship.

First up is design3, a subscription based site created by Noesis Interactive, who create professional courseware for Universities. They have over 200 Unity specific videos and more on the way. Whether an educator, a student, or a business, you can check out their free trial and see if it works for you.

Next up we have Will Goldstone’s Unity 3D Student. This is a great concept, he doesn’t provide the standard “here is a huge tutorial about how to make X kind of game” but rather has micro tutorials that teach fundamental concepts — and then challenges that require the student to piece together what they’ve learned.

And finally, the Tornado Twins have begun to serve up their tutorials on their Unity Prefabs site. The first few chapters of each series are free; if you like them then you can purchase the remaining chapters for that series.

We’re having a great Summer: We passed the 200,000 user mark, we passed the 30 million webplayer mark, we won the Develop Grand Prix, and we’re getting ready to ship Unity 3. To celebrate all this, we decided to throw a party.  For our blog readers who happen to find themselves in the SF bay area next week, why not join us for drinks after work on Tuesday the 24th of August?

For details, and to RSVP, please visit http://unitysf.eventbrite.com

Muse Games just released our game “Guns of Icarus” on Steam! Thanks to Unity’s cross-platform support, we were able to be one of the first SteamPlay games available.

Guns of Icarus, as well as Max and the Magic Marker and Bob Came in Pieces are all Unity games which were available at launch as “SteamPlay” games — games which you can buy on Steam and then download for either Mac or PC, or both. I had to find out more, so I contacted Austin Lane, one of the founders of Muse Games.

What’s your name/title?
Austin Lane, we’re pretty small so our titles don’t mean much but I’m essentially the creative/product director. Brian Kehrer, our technical director, helped with some of the dev questions. We’re both co-founders.

What is Muse Games, a developer or a portal?
Both! We believe completely in the future of high-quality gaming in the browser, and MuseGames.com is our attempt to realize that future. That said, we feel it’s our duty to set the bar through our own games. In the end, people are looking to play great games, and if they’re no good it’s irrelevant what the rest of the experience is.

Also, we truly relish the creativity & freedom that gamemaking brings us. We had a serious two hour conversation about flamethrowers the other day. I mean c’mon, that’s awesome.

How long has Muse Games been using Unity?
Muse has only existed for about 16 months, but the core team has been using Unity since 2006!

When did you start developing Guns of Icarus? What was the development timeframe? How large was the team?
We developed Guns of Icarus last summer and fall. It took us about 5 months total and we had between 3 and 4 team members (+ some extra art help) working on it through that time.

What was the process of getting Guns of Icarus onto Steam like? Did you have to do any technical integrations? Any kinds of loops that you had to jump through with Valve?
Really easy actually. We just showed them the game and what people thought about it and they said yes. There has been no loop jumping whatsoever and we’ve really enjoyed working with them. Technically though, yes, there are implementation details. We had to build a compatibility layer between the C++ of Steam and the C# of Unity, and that took some time. If anyone’s interested, we’re gonna figure out how to offer this solution along with our other API tools to developers sometime this summer.

Do you have plans to develop future titles with Unity? Any details?
Absolutely. Our next title “CreaVures” will be debuting this summer. We’ll have a trailer for everyone in just a few weeks. We’re really excited about that. We’re also debuting an entirely new MuseGames.com next month.

And there’s even bigger announcements coming that won’t start popping up til later this year!

Anything you can say about your Unity meetups in NYC?
They’re really casual and really fun. We combine Unity discussion with actual gaming of all kinds (console, pc, board, etc), which really helps people bond and stimulates genuine discussion. We spend enough time hearing theory and poring over implementation details during work, so we try to use our meetups to forget about that stuff for a second and help remind us what it’s all about – the joy of gaming. Also we have free beer. So that’s good.

How many of the games on Musegames.com were developed by Muse Game vs third parties?
We’ve just recently debuted our first two 3rd party games, but that’s been a long time coming largely because of all the backend development we’ve been getting in to order. This summer we’ll be ramping up our 3rd party publishing significantly, and our release pipeline is starting to look pretty solid . MuseGames.com is ready to show the world what Unity & the community are capable of.

p.s. If you’re a developer with a great game, let us know!

What’s your favorite aspect of using Unity?
Ease of prototyping & multiple deployment is by far Unity’s killer feature. However equally important to the easy to use tool set and API is the ability to dig deeper into the program and interact with the application on a much lower level. We find that Unity does exactly what we want 90% of the time – out of the box. When we need to go deeper or change fundamental behavior, Unity doesn’t get in the way or slow us down.

Have you extended Unity’s editor in any way?
We’ve frequently used the editor scripts to add small features or to integrate better with our art pipeline; this includes things like exporting arbitrary textures to files, or changing the default mesh import settings. But there have been a couple of larger extensions, as well. The first is our build scripts, which have to build multiple versions of the same game for different distributors with different integration requirements, feature restrictions, and so forth. We’ve also added game-specific extensions to turn the Unity editor into something like a level editor, using custom assets and editor tabs, that can integrate new scenes with our game code without a programmer needing to set anything up.

Have you/Muse Games used any other technologies like Flash or Unreal? How do they compare?
Not really. Flash is a strange solution because it wasn’t originally designed for game development. It’s been co-opted because of its plugin penetration, while Unity was built from the beginning to make powerful, modern games. If we want to change the future of gaming on the web, we need to look to the future of gaming on the web. We don’t think Flash is the future.

Unreal is a great, powerful tool like Unity. Just look at the level of games being made with it. But it can’t handle the web and cross-platform development we’re focusing on, and quite frankly, the licensing terms are really expensive for an indie like us.

It’s no secret we favor Unity for these reasons and more.

Do you have any tips on how to get exposure for your game or how to reach new audiences?
Make an original game, and polish it. Gamers, despite their cynicism, are the most engaged and adventurous audience around. If you make something good, they will give you a chance. I’m not sure why so many people choose to clone games they’ve seen countless times before. Don’t sell yourself short. Pretend you’re building the next franchise. If you only had one chance to make a game ever, even if its just in your spare time (actually, especially if its in your spare time), what game would you make? Make that game.

That will go miles further than any marketing you can do.

Also, good trailers are really worth it – chances are high the trailer is where the potential player will be making a go or no-go decision.

Anything else about your game or your company that you’d like to share?
We love to hang out and avoid work. If you’re in the area (downtown Manhattan) stop by!

Anything else about Unity that you’d like to share?
Unity makes a lot of what we do possible – rapid prototyping & development, 3d on the web, cross-platform deployment. But Unity alone cannot change the end consumer’s mind. It’s up to us developers to show people what the tool is capable of. Content sells the platform, and it’s going to take all of us to change the face of online gaming

Thanks to everyone who came by our booth; you helped to make this our best GDC yet! Our booth drew a crowd from the time the doors opened until they closed every day of the expo. Lots of people wanted to get a sneak peak at some of the recently announced Unity 3 features as well as get hands on demonstrations of Unity’s elegant interface and efficient workflow. There was also a bunch of playable Unity content running on iPhones, web browsers, an in-development Broadcom chipset, a Wii, a 360, and a giant multi-touch table!

There was Unity stuff going on outside of our booth too, including sessions, presentations, and sponsorships.

Photos:

A set of photos that shows off our booth elements, a set that shows how busy the booth was, and some artsy shots of some Unity employees.

Sessions:

Autodesk has posted a video of Adam Mechtley (of Touch K.O. and Flashbang fame) speaking about Maya, Motionbuilder, and Unity iPhone workflow and optimizations.

Tom Higgin’s iPhone Summit session: Fastest Path from Concept to Top Paid got a write-up in TUAW and in Japanese in Inside Games.

I wasn’t able to find a write-up of the GDC Session: Unity for people who know what they’re doing, but I hear that it was really well attended.

Congratulations:

Congratulations to all of the Winners and Finalists of the IGF who won a copy of Unity Pro! (Something we did as part of our IGF Gold Sponsorship.)

Also, congratulations to the creators of Guerrilla Bob and Tumbledrop, two Unity iPhone games which were finalists in the IGF Mobile contest.

And a huge Congrats to Press Play — their PC/Mac/Web/Wii game Max and the Magic Marker won the D2D Vision Award!

Lastly, congratulations to Nathan Hansen; winner of the drawing we had at our booth for a free license of Unity Pro, and to Jeremy Sprague who won a copy of Unity iPhone in the post-show Conference Associates raffle!

Booth

Come by our booth this year and get your badge swiped for a chance to win a license of Unity Pro or Unity iPhone! Our booth is 1,000 square feet (that’s 2.5x larger than last year!) and it is made out of wood, yes wood, and was designed by our friends at Because We Can who are pretty notable in the San Francisco area for doing the offices of game companies like Three Rings, Backbone, and Cryptic. The booth number is 1112, but it’s at the front of the expo hall so you definitely won’t miss it!

The main focus of our booth is to give attendees a hands on experience. To do that we’re going to have three demo machines for giving people a tour of Unity and features they can be looking forward to and we’ve got three demo machines to show off the just-released Unity iPhone 1.6.  We’ll also have lots of great Unity content that people can get their hands on including: an iPhone arcade with four iPod Touches containing the very best Unity iPhone games, a Wii playing the award winning Max and the Magic Marker, a Xbox 360 showing Interstellar Marines, a web arcade showing a variety of Unity web player games, and a FishTish multi-touch table showing off uniTUIO content.

We’ll also be presenting in our booth’s theater and joined by the partners from our Partner Pavilion as well as the uniTUIO guys and Autodesk.

Schedule

Tuesday

Fastest Path from Concept to Top Paid

iPhone Summit, Room 306, 12:30-1:00pm

Tom Higgins, Product Evangelist at Unity Technologies talks about Unity iPhone and why it’s become the dominant middleware solution for content published in the App Store. The presentation will include an overview of the tool and its feature set, the development workflow and a sampling of success stories to highlight what’s possible with the amazing Unity game engine.

iPhone Summit Mixer, Sponsored by Unity Technologies

5:30pm-7:30pm near the iPhone summit room at the back of the hallway

Wednesday

Myspace Tutorial Day: Unity on Myspace

Room 300, South Hall, 10:30-11:00am

Featuring Tom Higgins and A few folks from Cmune who will talk about their experience creating social games with Unity for social platforms like Myspace.

GamesBeat@GDC

Room 305, South Hall, 2:15-3:00pm

Our CEO David Helgason will participate in a pannel on Disruptive Innovation

OpenFeint Party

8:30-12:30

We’re the drink sponsor at the OpenFeint party

Thursday

Expo floor opens.

IGF/Game Developers Choice Awards

North Hall, Hall D, 6:30pm

Friday

Session: Intro to Unity for People Who Know What They’re Doing

Room 121, North Hall, 9:00-10:00am

Unity’s Lucas Meijer will give a technical demonstration of Unity’s featureset. He will be joined by Unity’s CTO Joachim Ante, lead graphics engineer Aras Pranckevicius, and technical artist Joe Robins. C++ / C# scripting integration, shader programming, asset pipeline and iphone publishing workflow are among the topics that will be discussed. A must attend session for anyone evaluating engines for their next game.

Expo-only pass holders welcome!

Unity for Engineers

Expo Hall, NVIDIA Booth, 12:00-1:00pm

Saturday

Last day of the show, come by the booth one last time to hear a session you missed or to say goodbye!

I personally think that the two PDFs that come with Unity are a great place to start. They are: 1 – GUI Essentials.pdf and 2 – Scripting Tutorial.pdf and they can be found in the Tutorial folder in your Unity installation folder on your hard drive.

Community member tonyd’s Newbie guide to Unity Javascript is a great introduction to programming for novice programmers.

Experience programmers new to Unity will definitely want to check out our MonoBehaviour scripting reference which is a one stop cheat sheet for the base class every script derives from.

We also provide some introductory video documentation but there have been some really high quality videos popping up on the internet that I wanted to showcase.

Jason Busby and Zach Parrish of 3D Buzz just released a series of 29 videos detailing many aspects of Unity game creation. This series is a C# remake of the UnityScript based Unity Jump Start series created by Casey Jones.

Infinite Ammo’s Alec Holowka of Paper Moon and Aquaria fame has recently been creating a series of Infinite Ammo Unity tutorials as well. I really like Alec’s way of explaining not only how to use Unity but best practices in game programming. The picture in picture effect is also nice and adds a lot more personality to the whole viewing experience.

Will Goldstone’s video tutorials have also been a mainstay in the community and were the foundation for his book. They do a great job of covering the ins and outs of the terrain tool and give a good overview of the particle editor and some simple gameplay examples.

The fun guys over at PC gaming enthusiast site Rock, Paper, Shotgun are making a RPS themed game, with the help of their community, and detailing their progress along the way:

“Those who don’t read RPS every day might not have noticed we’re making a game using the newly-free Unity development suite. So to explain: twice a week for the next two months I’ll be posting about my experiences with the tools.”

They’ve already made three posts detailing their progress. You can follow along — or even lend a hand — here:

• Rock, Paper, Shotgunity Development Diary
• Rock, Paper, Shotgunity Collaboration Forum

I’m pleased to announce that we released Unity iPhone 1.5.1 yesterday.  Unity iPhone 1.5.1 includes improved XCode support and improved AssetBundle support, but more importantly Native APIs (NSGetEnviron and exc_server functions) have been removed to comply with new Apple requirements, previously reported by Joachim here.

This release also removes the requirement for prospective users to write to our sales staff for an *evaluation copy, you can now just go directly to our download page to try it out for yourself!

For more details about Unity iPhone 1.5.1, please check out the release notes.

*Note: Unity iPhone is currently only for use with Mac OS X and you’ll need to be a registered iPhone developer with the paid version of the SDK to properly evaluate the product.

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.

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!

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

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!