Terrain Toolkit

The Terrain Toolkit is an integrated set of tools for the Unity Editor which is designed to streamline and improve the workflow involved in creating realistic terrains for games. The toolkit enables the creation of large scale, realistic and playable game worlds within a very short time span.

Unity already has a powerful terrain engine as one of its core features. The Terrain Toolkit expands on this by providing the user with the ability to rapidly create a variety of different landscapes directly within Unity without needing to use third party software. An additional advantage is that landscapes can now be generated dynamically at runtime. This means a Unity game can have a potentially infinite number of levels or landscapes with a negligible impact on the file size.

Integrated terrain creation tools

The Terrain Toolkit provides an intuitive interface within the Unity Editor allowing a Unity artist to simply generate, erode and texture terrain objects. Quick and easy-to-use presets are provided for first time users, while advanced users can tweak low level settings such as rainfall and evaporation to get exactly the result they are after.

Watch the tutorial video to learn more about using the Terrain Toolkit:

A powerful runtime API

The Terrain Toolkit comes with a powerful API that allows developers to call any of the terrain generation, erosion and texturing scripts at runtime.

This Unity web player shows the Terrain Toolkit API in action: http://www.sixtimesnothing.com/terraintoolkit/APIExample.html

Where to next?

I plan to continue work on the Terrain Toolkit by both making further improvements to existing features, as well as expanding on the feature set to allow even more flexibility in the creation of procedural terrain.

Here are some of the planned features for future versions of the Terrain Toolkit:

• Texture presets
• User defined presets
• The ability to apply pre-defined presets through the API
• Realtime destructible terrain
• The ability to create multiple, maskable terrain ‘layers’
• An advanced hydraulic erosion filter based on a shallow water model
• Glacial erosion

Documentation

Comprehensive documentation for the Terrain Toolkit and the API is included in HTML format. The latest version of the documentation can also be viewed here: http://www.sixtimesnothing.com/terraintoolkit

Questions and support

If you have any questions about the Terrain Toolkit, the API, or any suggestions for improvements or new features, please feel free to contact me on the Unity forums (Nekharoth) or through my developer blog: http://sixtimesnothing.wordpress.com

Get the Terrain Toolkit from our Resources section.

I have been working on a Unity Javascript mode for Emacs for a few weeks ago and now is in a state that is usable enough to share with the community .

As you can see it colors comments (multiline and single line), has support for basic data types, and also supports string coloring.

It also colors function declarations, if – else decisions, while and for/foreach loops and most importantly, it colors all the Unity functions supported by the engine!

Feel free to modify it. Also if you do anything interesting that can be added to the mode just let me know!

If I have time I’ll add a function to open the browser and search the docs for the word where the cursor is positioned. If for some reason you make it before I can, then just contact me and I’ll add it to the mode .

Anyway, if you, like me, are an emacs addict, you can grab this mode from here: unityjs-mode.el

To make it work, just add this to your .emacs:


;; UnityJS mode for emacs
(autoload 'unityjs-mode "unityjs-mode" "Major mode for editing Unity Javascript code." t)
(require 'unityjs-mode)

And make sure to load the path where you are going to store the mode .

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 news, the great news, just keeps on coming! Recently the folks at Kongregate.com announced their new Konduit Platform and one of the cool benefits of that news is that they are now open to non-Flash game content, and that of course means they’re open to Unity content! While it’s always cool to read about new possibilities, nothing speaks louder than action and so hot on the heels of the Konduit announcement was the recent acceptance of not one but two Unity titles on their site! The Unity games that are now live are Big Fun Racing and Bubble Bang, both of which come from Decane/Martin Schultz. Now that Martin and Kongregate.com have paved the way for others to follow, who’s next?

If you’re keen on giving it all a look for yourself then here are a few important links:

Kongregate.com

Kongregate.com’s Developer Center

Kongregate.com’s Konduit Platform

Once more, kudos to Martin for leading the way and props to Kongregate.com for opening their doors to a variety of technologies. That open door is good for us as a tech provider just as much as it is for game players wanting diverse game types/genres. Exciting times to say the least!

Apple recently put out their iTunes Rewind 2009, it’s Apple’s way of recognizing the best music, TV, movies and of course iPhone applications and games from this last year. What’s exciting for us is that there are three Unity-authored games found among the best and top selling games lists! Given that awesome achievement I thought it would be cool to take a minute and offer those three games their proper kudos and congratulations.

Best Games of 2009
There are two Unity-authored games found on the best games list for 2009, those are:

Ravensword: The Fallen King
Samurai: Way of the Warrior

I know that I’ve played both games and have to agree that they’re both awesome and well worth a look if you haven’t checked them out already!

Top Selling Games of 2009
The top selling games list has yet another Unity-authored game listed, one that most of us have likely heard about long ago as it sat atop the sales charts for some time:

Zombieville USA

Congratulations to everyone that has games out on the AppStore using Unity, but an extra dose of congratulations goes out to the folks above for a job well done. Here’s to hoping we see more of the Unity community listed as part of iTunes Rewind 2010!

Tony Garcia, Director of Business Development, and I went to Toronto recently for a whirlwind Unity tour like the one Tom Higgins did not too long ago in Vancouver. What can we say? We love supporting Canadanian Unity developers! It also helps that J. Joly over at OverInteractive Media keeps setting events like these up.

The actual events happened November 10th and 11th as a networking mixer for the launch of the Toronto Unity User Group (UUG) and a Unity Skills Workshop the next day. Tony did a keynote presentation at the Gladstone Hotel for the networking mixer and had a short Q&A with attendees. The next day, I did a three and a half hour workshop at George Brown College. Both events were packed full and it was great meeting so many Unity developers.

Mr. Joly and the other folks at OverInteractive Media are all about Unity and they’ve successfully kicked off three Unity Users Groups in Canada: Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal. When they are not starting user groups, they are working on building dimeRocker: a soon-to-be-released distribution platform that will enable Unity game developers to both self-publish, monetize and grow traffic for their 3D multi-player game content across the social web, beginning with Facebook. Interested developers can join the closed Beta, which will launch November 25th at G-Star in Busan, Korea.

I have much respect for J. Joly and the gang from OverInteractive Media. The entire week was planned and managed by them. They secured many local sponsors to make the events happen. They even hosted us for a dinner at the Mildred Pierce Temple Kitchen as a way to thank us!

Pictures or it didn’t happen!

Outside the Gladstone Hotel

Attendees arrive...

Raffle!

Skills Workshop at George Brown College

*) order of the titles is rather arbitrary and does not represent position in the top neither necessarily means that title is still in the chart

1. Ravensword: The Fallen King -- arguably the best RPG game on iPhone so far!




2. Star Wars Trench Run -- official Star Wars title.
3. Skee Ball -- successor to 10 Cups 7 Balls
4. Little Runner -- now with Doodle Jump Easter Egg!
5. Scarecrow -- 2nd App Store hit from Ezone.com guys.

… and yeah, Ravensword is really amazing!

Some of our users have expressed concern that the higher volume of posts will make the forums less valuable. Specifically, they are concerned about the growing stream of new users who are thirsty for basic Unity knowledge and ask basic questions that have maybe been asked and answered many times before.

We understand the concern, and we want to support a more efficient way of asking questions and getting answers. This is why we have launched UnityAnswers.

UnityAnswers is our new community site for asking questions and getting answers about Unity. To quote the UnityAnswers FAQ:

UnityAnswers is a place for asking questions and finding answers – all about Unity! UnityAnswers co-exist with the Unity Forums, but they have different functions:

• UnityAnswers is a place for questions that can be answered! Avoid asking questions here that are subjective, argumentative, or require extended discussion.
• Unity Forums is a place for discussions, opinions, showing off your work, getting feedback, and general community chatter.

Why is UnityAnswers better than the forums for getting answers to questions?

Because we’ve seen it work on Stack Overflow.

It allows for people to vote on answers, making the best ones float to the top. You can vote up good questions and helpful answers so they float to the top, while off-topic questions and less helpful answers are listed lower. No more golden tips buried on page 5 of a thread! The person who asks a question can also mark a specific answer as the accepted answer.

It’s easier to find existing questions and answers. The search function is actually good. A great feature is that when you want to post a new question, you will be shown a list of possibly related existing questions as soon as you start typing your question title. Maybe the question has already been asked before and you can just go see that one. If an existing question is the same as you were having, be sure to vote it up! If it has an answer that is also helpful to you, vote that answer up as well.

People who are more trusted by the community get more power! Besides making the best questions and answers float up, the voting system also grants reputation points to you whenever other people vote up your questions or answers. Reputation you can interpret as “how much does the community trust you”. The more reputation points you get, the more things you are allowed to do. (See the FAQ for details.) At the high end of this reputation spectrum there is little difference between users with high reputation and moderators. That is very much intentional. We don’t run UnityAnswers. The community does.

What does this mean for the Unity Forums?

The Unity Forums will co-exist with UnityAnswers. The forums are great for discussions and chat, so we’ll keep them all. Some of the forums will be completely unaffected, such as Announcements, Collaboration, Gossip, and Showcase.

However, for some of the forums, we hope that the use pattern will change. The forums Unity Support, Scripting, UnityGUI, Multiplayer Networking, iPhone Development, ShaderLab, and External Tools are primarily about questions and answers, so we hope that a large chunk of the volume in those will move to UnityAnswers instead.

Here’s what you can do to help:

Use UnityAnswers! If you have questions, ask them there instead of on the forums. If you don’t have questions, you can still help the community by browsing UnityAnswers regularly and see if there are any questions you can answer (which will also earn you reputation).

Direct others to UnityAnswers! If you see a question in the forum and you know the answer, rather than answering the question directly in the forum, try to answer it at UnityAnswers and link to there.

• If a similar question already exists at UnityAnswers, just link to that. (The search works nicely!) If it’s already answered, great! You don’t have to. If not, you can post your answer there.
• Otherwise you can just create the question there – you can even copy the question from the forum directly. After that, you can answer the question yourself, which is perfectly ok.

We know this is a bit more work short-term, but think of the long-term benefits! Your answer will be much easier to find at UnityAnswers than in the forums. It won’t be buried and never found again after a few months.

UnityAnswers is still very new and we’re in the process of getting properly used to it, but we already like it quite a bit and we hope you will too! To login, you can use any OpenID provider, or use your forum account. On the login page, just click on the Unity logo.

Earlier this week iLounge released their 2010 iPod + iPhone Buyer’s Guide and a number of Unity titles are featured in their top games list! For starters you can check it all out at the following URL:

iLounge’s 2010 iPod + iPhone Buyer’s Guide

It’s a rather large (20+MB) download as they provide a ton of material, including their suggestions for top games and applications to purchase if you own an iPod touch or iPhone. But as noted above the exciting point for us is the fact that a number of Unity-authored games are listed in their Top 100 Games of 2009! So to help promote those games and offer them some extra kudos I’ll preempt the download above and list them here in the order they appear in the guide:

Downhill Bowling from Game Resort LLC (page 22)
Downhill Bowling Lite (free)
Downhill Bowling ($2.99)

Vans SK8: Pool Service from Fuel Games (page 23)
Vans SK8: Pool Service Lite (free)
Vans SK8: Pool Service ($2.99)

Battle Bears from SkyVu Pictures (page 27)
Battle Bears Free (free)
Battle Bears ($0.99)

Inkvaders from Chillingo (page 27)
Inkvaders Lite (free)
Inkvaders ($1.99)

10 Balls 7 Cups from Graveck (page 31)
10 Balls 7 Cups ($0.99)

Note: 10 Balls 7 Cups has been rereleased on the AppStore under the name Skee-Ball as well!

Volcano Planet by Jelly Biscuits (page 35)
Volcano Planet Lite (free)
Volcano Planet ($0.99)

A huge kudos to all the developers behind the games above, clearly it’s a job well done and you deserve some recognition for your efforts!

Best Overall
The best overall category is the one in which we recognize the true best-of-breed content for the year and it was a tough task to say the least. There were many titles that came close to being finalists, but ultimately only a few made that final run at the title.

Winner: Max & the Magic Marker, developed by Press Play

Runner Up: Lego Star Wars: Quest for R2-D2, developed by Three Melons

Finalist: Paper Moon, developed by Infinite Ammo
Finalist: Monospace, developed by Nonverbal
Finalist: EnerCities, developed by Paladin Studios

Best iPhone Game
Given the popularity of iPhone/iPod touch games in general, and of course the way in which Unity iPhone has become the dominant middle-ware tool of choice, we felt it truly necessary to recognize the best iPhone games on their own.

Winner: Monospace, developed by Nonverbal

Runner Up: Samurai: Way of the Warrior, developed by Mad Finger Games

Finalist: Snake Galaxy (now being published as Paris Galaxy), developed by DigDog
Finalist: Battle Bears, developed by SkyVu Pictures & Blackish
Finalist: Touch KO, developed by Adam and Matt Mechtley

Best Visual Design
One of the exciting things about a tool like Unity is that it lets you experiment in ways you might not be able to with other tools. The rapid iterative abilities and easy work flow make experimentation easy, and that leads to some incredibly beautiful and unique visuals.

Winner: Doppelscope, developed by Tobias Baumann

Runner Up: Blush, developed by Flashbang Studios

Finalist: Choma, developed by Knife Media
Finalist: Max & the Magic Marker, developed by Press Play
Finalist: Paper Moon, developed by Infinite Ammo

Best Technical Achievement
To go along with rewarding the best visual effort we wanted to recognize those titles that displayed solid technical achievement as there are so many folks out there pushing the technical boundaries with Unity. This category was extra tough as we all have our pet areas of interest with our technology, audio, shading/graphics, game play mechanic and more.

Winner: Blush, developed by Flashbang Studios

Runner Up: Max & the Magic Marker, developed by Press Play

Finalist: Time Donkey, developed by Flashbang Studios
Finalist: Touch KO, developed by Adam and Matt Mechtley
Finalist: Super Volei Brasil 2, developed by Aquiris

Closing Thoughts
As I noted up top there were 129 separate entries at the beta stage and that’s an awesome turn out! I know that not all of you were able to get a final build submitted and certainly not all of you made it into the final judging stage (involved roughly 30 entries), and even fewer of you made it into the top-5 finalist categories. But through it all the hard work and effort the Unity community puts forth to make killer content is a critical component in driving our technology forward. Content is king y’all, and without you I don’t know where our tech would be. So thanks to everyone that participated in this year’s Unity Awards and a huge round of applause and hefty kudos to the finalists, and especially the winners. Rock on!