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!

With such a rapidly growing community and user base behind Unity it’s become increasingly difficult to keep tabs on all the developer blogs, cool content, all the new 3rd party tutorial and learning sites and all the new community-focused forums/social networking groups that are popping up. To help keep tabs on all that we thought it would help to get a few reddit.com pages up for all to use! The pages are moderated, meaning anyone can submit but a Unity Tech moderator must approve all links before they’ll appear, but the lists are out there and open to submissions so jump in, add some links and of course vote stuff up or down so we can all see what’s new and popular!

Unity Blogs
http://www.reddit.com/r/unity_blogs/

Unity Community Sites/Social Networking Groups
http://www.reddit.com/r/unity_sites/

Unity Games
http://www.reddit.com/r/unity_games/

Unity Tutorials
http://www.reddit.com/r/unity_tutorials/

These are not the be-all and end-all of our company efforts to keep track of what’s going on in the community, but it’s a great solution for us all to work with and contribute to in the meantime. If you have any links to suggest then please go submit them now! If you have any other page ideas (other reddit.com pages we should have) then please suggest those as well, either by commenting in response to this blog post or by contacting me directly.

By now many folks are aware of the fact that Will Goldstone has written a book about Unity, it’s called Unity Game Development Essentials and it’s being published by Packt Publishing. Early on Will and his publisher graciously shared PDF copies with folks, including everyone on the Unity Community Forums. While it was extremely exciting to know that a book was in the works, then available in electronic form, I have to admit that the best moment of all came today when a brown box was delivered to my desk for me to open. I’m the guy that handles incoming mail and packages sent to the San Francisco office so it wasn’t unusual for me to have a “present” to open today. When I cracked open the box I found a nice surprise inside, the three copies of Will’s book I’d long ago ordered had finally arrived!

So for those that don’t know about it, consider this your heads up to check it out! It’s a book geared towards the beginner end of the spectrum and from what I’ve read so far (a fair chunk of the PDF already) he did an excellent job of laying things out for those of you just getting into Unity. If you’re interested give it a look on either the Packt Publishing site or over on Amazon.com:

Unity Game Development Essentials (Packt Publishing)
Unity Game Development Essentials (Amazon.com)

Kudos, and a huge thanks, to Will Goldstone for the effort, I know he put a lot of blood, sweat and tears into this book and it shows. Well done Will!

This past weekend I traveled down to Atlanta, Georgia to speak at SIEGE 2009 (Southern Interactive Entertainment & Game Expo). During my trip I not only got to meet a number of local developers at the conference and our dinner out, but I was also lucky enough to meet Manny (a.k.a. diaomndTearz on the forums/Twitter) and his family (wife and young son). They graciously hosted me for the weekend saving me from another yawner stay at an area hotel. While only a whirlwind 36 hours were spent in town I enjoyed myself quite a bit while spreading the word about Unity. I only got a taste of Atlanta but I liked what I saw and would happily go back any time!

The conference ran Friday to Sunday, but we were only there one day and that was Saturday. After breakfast Manny and I made our way down to the conference so we could arrive in time to attend a session before we were to speak in a session of our own. The session we attended was one about serious games in corporate training, while it was all great information it was nothing too shocking to me although I’m sure many in the games industry would benefit from hearing it (it’s a great market for your talents folks!). What did surprise me though was that the room was small, and I mean tiny, and it was hot hot hot, making me sweat within minutes of entering. Manny and I sent texts back and forth that we each hoped our room would be different, luckily it was.

After attending that one session we went to the room where ours would be held, it was much larger and the temperature was set quite a bit cooler, no worries there. The time for our session arrived and nobody was in the room, I had that moment of worry, “really?” It was just the volunteer working the door who hadn’t started letting folks in, soon enough the room was almost completely full (holding something like 100+ people in all). My session was a panel discussion with myself and four Unity developers as the panel and Manny as the moderator. He led us through over an hour’s worth of chatter about Unity, covering topics from pricing/licensing to our art asset pipeline and on to platform support and product directions. Through it all the crowd, 1/3 of whom said they’d at least tried Unity before, was very engaged and we were actually forced to leave the room as we were running too far over (sorry about that!).

Our session room, all these chairs would soon be full…

Following my session I sat in the hallway talking with a number of folks, some that thanked me as they’d just never heard about Unity while others thanked me as they’d already jumped on board and just loved the tool. Of course I had a few folks that wanted to ask the tougher questions, ones about our lack of a proper debugger, complaints about the lack of Linux support or others poking about source/version control solutions. All of them were easily handled as I think we’ve got a solid story to tell and features on the way. All told it was a great day of talking to a few existing users and hopefully a whole bunch of potential new ones. I know that in the day or two since that presentation I’ve already received a number of emails from folks wanting more information, I suppose that means the conference was a success. I’ll say well done to Manny for putting together a great panel!

What conference is worth attending if you don’t go out at least once? The guys in Atlanta didn’t disappoint as they took me out to the Vortex Bar & Grill and my oh my it was delicious! The burgers were huge and tasty, the drinks strong and the company entertaining.Over burgers & drinks we talked shop and a bit about life, travels and the world around us, all in all it was an awesome evening. I had driven there with Manny and his wife and due to my early flight the next morning we cut out early, picking up their son on the way home. Sure I had an early flight but we weren’t done, we went to their house for a rousing evening of Rock Band. Manny and I took the guitar and bass, his wife rocked the drums and his son sang, and man he sang his little heart out! We rocked out, eventually putting their son to bed (a late night for him!) and soon enough, ourselves. Once again I have to say thanks to them for making it a great weekend, hanging with the family was much better than a boring couple of nights in a hotel!

Good times at Vortex!

All too soon it was early Sunday morning and the alarm was going off. I dragged myself out of bed, showered and got ready so Manny could drive me to the MARTA train for a brief ride to the airport, then a long day of travel home. With some travel delays my travel time home was over twelve hours, and yet somehow I arrived while my suitcase went to New York. Oh well, I can live for a few days without the dirty laundry…

I’d love to go back to SIEGE next year, or just back to Atlanta to hang out with the developers in the area. Thanks again for the great weekend, it makes evangelizing Unity a pleasure!

PS: A big huge thanks goes out to Manny (and his family!) for not only helping get the panel group together at all, but for being such an awesome host. He picked me up on Friday, fed me delicious home grilled steaks that same night, drove me around on Saturday and got up in the wee hours on Sunday to get me off to the airport. He and his family made me feel welcome in their home I had a great time hanging out with them and cannot say thanks enough!

We’re happy to announce that tickets to this year’s Unite ‘09 conference are now on sale! This year’s event is a bit different than the prior two years as there is now an optional lead-in day of classes that folks can attend. The conference runs Tuesday to Friday, October 27th to the 30th, Tuesday is a day of classes whereas Wednesday through Friday is a three day conference featuring fifteen technical sessions on a number of topics. All in all it’s going to be another great event!

For more information about Unite ‘09 please visit the following URL:

http://unity3d.com/unite

To go ahead and buy your tickets today please visit our online store at the following URL:

https://store.unity3d.com/shop/unite

We’ll see you in San Francisco!

Explosions are a really common element in games, but they can be difficult to create. Starting from scratch can be time consuming and requires expertise with particle systems, lighting, texturing, and animation. Tweaking existing effects to fit a game can also be a challenge because its difficult to change the size or color of a set of particle emitters in unison. Making explosions should be fun, fast, and rewarding instead. That’s why Detonator was created.

Detonator for Unity makes incorporating good explosions easier for all types of developers. At its most basic level, Detonator is a component that can be attached to any GameObject. At runtime it then creates an explosion with configurable color, size, duration, detail, and sub-elements like sparks, smoke, and shockwaves. For those that want to dig in a bit, Detonator is an explosion framework. Customize each sub-component or create new ones if you want to write a bit of code. Tweak detail levels with a single parameter and save your favorites to prefabs… or dynamically link color to damage type and size to damage amount!

Test out the explosions generated with Detonator for yourself below. Click to start the webplayer:

Please view the full post to see the Unity content.

If you’re doing explosions in your Unity game, Detonator can probably help you create good looking, scalable effects in less time!

Get the Detonator Parametric Explosion Framework from our Resources section and populate your own game with spectacular explosions. If you’d like to follow the continued development, check out Ben’s site at http://variancetheory.com.

The conference will have many Unity employees, as well as Unity users, giving presentations, to share their experience with the conference’s attendees. In order to make sure we get the best line up of speakers possible, we’re calling out to the Unity community:

We would like to invite everyone who would want to give a presentation at Unite 2009, to send a speaking proposal to speakingatunite@unity3d.com. We will select the speakers who we feel can give presentations most useful to the conference’s attendees. That might be you!

We are looking for a wide range of topics. All publishing platforms, all disciplines (programming, design, workflow, business), content for beginners, content for advanced users. We will seriously look at all proposals made. Surprise us.

We’d like the proposals to contain, at minimum, an outline of what you would talk about, as well as the kind of audience it’s aimed at (beginners, artists, etc). Presentation slots are maximum 45-50 minutes long.

The presentations will be videotaped, and placed on our website. You can find the sessions from the previous two events here. If you have any questions, feel free to get in touch with speakingatunite@unity3d.com to get them answered.

The deadline for your speaking proposal submission is Wednesday the 16th of September.