Posts by Tom Higgins

I know it’s been a while since I last posted so I figured that it was time to get back to blog posting and provide some updates as last week was rather exciting for us. Here’s the latest from our end…

Casual Connect Seattle
July 23-25, 2008
http://seattle.casualconnect.org/

Once again we were a sponsor for the Casual Connect Seattle conference held in, you guessed it, Seattle, Washington. For those that haven’t been watching this conference it’s been growing over the last few years with something like 30-40% growth year-on-year (I heard that this year had just under 2000 attendees). It’s a conference that focuses heavily on the casual games sector (duh!) and that always brings out a great crowd of folks that attend the sessions and stop by the sponsor tables to chat. Over three days Sam and I worked the table, had well over a dozen meetings, spoke to countless potential new customers and lots of existing ones. Of note we hung out with Matt and Ben from Flashbang quite a bit, but also many others including some old friends and an interesting dinner with Sam’s parents. All told it was a fantastic conference once again, well worth the cost and effort to attend. If you haven’t gone to one of the Casual Connect conferences yet then you might want to give them a try soon!

Unity 2.1 Released
July 24, 2008
What’s new in Unity 2.1

On Thursday of last week we put out the authoring side of the Unity 2.1 update (the 2.1 web player went live on Friday, July 18) and it’s far more of a major update than a minor one! Not only will you find the usual bug fixes, but you’ll also find plenty of new features that truly are significant. A few highlights:

• Streaming Asset Bundles
  Load assets on demand with new web streaming features. You can now stream in your game world as characters, locations, and objects come into view. You can also stream entire levels from the web as you navigate through the world.
• Streaming Terrains
  A seamless world is key when making an MMO. With Unity 2.1 you no longer are limited to a single terrain. Immerse your user in an endless landscape, based on streamed data.
• Undo
  Yes, undo! Traditional, reliable Undo and Redo are now available for all scene operations. You can stop constantly saving your work – it just works.

There are plenty of other features so make sure to check out the What’s new in Unity 2.1 page on our website.

Press Release News: 2 In-Browser MMOs in development using Unity!
July 24, 2008
Cartoon Network Creates First AAA, Browser-Based MMOG for Kids

Along with having announced the release of Unity 2.1 (featuring MMO/Virtual World-friendly features) we also announced that there are two full-blown in-browser MMOs in development using Unity front ends! The first of those is Cartoon Network’s coming FusionFall title which is targeting a younger audience and that hopes to involve millions of users enjoying hundreds of hours of game play. The second MMO in development is coming from Funcom and ArtPlant and is a casual MMO that will also attract an extremely large user base and offering countless hours of play-time, all served up inside your browser. We’re quite excited to have both of those projects on board with Unity front-ends as they’re both new breeds of content and with Unity, they’ll deliver an unparalleled experience inside the browser. w00t!

Of course all of the above is on top of our recent announcement that we’ll once again be hosting another Unity developer conference, Unite 2008, as well as another developer contest, the 2008 Unity Awards. It’s quite a busy time for all of us in the Unity community, I hope your summer is proving as exciting as ours is!

One of the coolest things about working at a tool company is the chance to see the interesting, innovative and exciting things people do with that tool. This week I got to take advantage of that benefit by visiting the San Jose office of NeuroSky. These folks have developed a group of products based around bio-sensors that pick up on your brain waves and then translate those for use as input in a variety of applications. The idea of “thought based input” appeals to a variety of industries and use cases, whether for medical analysis, development of assistive devices or of course use in next generation game content.

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I frequent many sites to stay up-to-date on various game industry news and today a real gem of an article appeared on Gamasutra courtesy of Daniel Cook and it’s a must read for anyone working in the casual games space:

The Casual Games Manifesto

It’s a relatively brief article that offers some great insights and suggestions to help guide casual game developers to a more profitable future. Specifically he points out some issues (from the developer’s perspective) in the business model offered by most major game portals. But he doesn’t leave it at that, he goes further and offers strategies as to how developers can start taking steps to turn the developer-portal relationship into a tool that offers you, the developer, a bigger (hopefully!) piece of the revenue pie.

Go read it today, it’s worth the 20 minutes or so it will take you to cover the five page (six if you count the appendix) article.

…I was on a plane bound for Copenhagen, a city I’d never been to in order to start working with a bunch of people I’d never met (other than talking with David over the phone). I had left Adobe wanting to find something new, something that would be more promising in terms of real-time 3D and games was concerned, and I was hoping to find all that at OTEE (now known as Unity Technologies). It all began a few months before that flight in late August of 2006, I had already announced my pending departure from Adobe to the Director user community and was only a few days away from leaving Adobe for good.

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Greetings and welcome to the all new Unity Technologies blog! In the past there were a few of us here that had blogs and as individuals we only posted on occasion, there was no centralized page to view all of our blogs together, we weren’t organized with common categories, generally, it was a bit too out of order to be useful. Now that we’ve had some time to catch our breath after Unity 2.0 we’ve gotten around to implementing a new and proper blog site for all of our staff to use together in order to share our thoughts and ideas.

Over time you will begin seeing posts from a number of us, from our engineering staff, from our studios team, from our in-house artists and developers and maybe even from our CEO himself. In the end we want to give everyone out there a place to come read our various ramblings and musings, and possibly to read up about what’s happening “on the inside” here at Unity Technologies. So please bookmark this page, subscribe to the RSS feed or just drop by on occasion. If you have any comments or suggestions then please feel free to post comments or contact me and let us know what you think!

Unity FTW!