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So, most of you have probably heard the news: Apple is going to release Mac OS X 10.6 “Snow Leopard” this Friday. This release will give Mac users plenty of new feature goodness and new technologies to play with, and brings a lot of changes under the hood. Unfortunately, I must inform you that one of these changes may cause some grief for Unity users, at least for the time being:
This blog post is written by Ben Throop who is working on a Detonator framework to generate great-looking explosions in Unity games. The project is one of four selected projects that were selected for the Unity Summer of Code.
We’re just 9 days away from the August 31 deadline so it’s time for an update. I’ve been working on Detonator, which is a parametric explosion system. It’s supposed to make getting nice, scalable explosions into your game really easy while at the same time providing a framework for more complex effects.
This blog post is written by Michał Mandrysz who is working on support for External Lightmapping in Unity. The project is one of four selected projects that were selected for the Unity Summer of Code.
What’s lightmapping?
If you’re not familiar with the terms “baking” and “lightmapping” then let me introduce them to you a little. Baking is an operation of prerendering expensive details (in calculational sense) like illuminated lightning, highlights and shadows into a texture so that it doesn’t have to be renderered at realtime. It requires some additional effort from the game designers, but it benefits hugely in performance. This solution is pretty old, but according to words of John Carmack it’s still up-to-date and will be – even in high end games.
What is the Lightmapping Tool?
It’s a tool for lightmapping scenes in external applications (yeah, I know most of you would wish to see an integrated system, but it’s not that easy to write this kind of system; however there are several huge benefits from using an external one, especially as powerful one as VRay).
As you may have heard before, my job is to wire lightmapping process tightly with 3dsmax and VRay. The system automates the process of both external baking, and setting up the lightmaps in Unity.
Lightmapping tool manages up to 99 lightmap atlases (could be even more but the interface would have to be modded for such extreme jobs) which hold object information with resolution proportional to their size on the stage. It can start external applications (currently only 3dsmax), assign appropriate renderer or load a preset max scene which holds information about lightning and so on. I’m planning to make a short screencast video when the work is done, so you can be sure you understand everything clearly 
This picture presents about 1/6 of a whole scene lightmapped with only one 2kx2k lightmap rendered with VRay on medium settings
This blog post is written by Sándor Moldán who is working on a set of Terrain Erosion tools for Unity. The project is one of four selected projects that were selected for the Unity Summer of Code.
The objective of this Unity Summer of Code project was to develop a toolset for the Unity Editor which would streamline and improve the workflow involved in creating terrains for games.
This blog post is written by Matthew Miner who is working on a cutscene editor for Unity. The cutscene editor is one of four selected projects that were selected for the Unity Summer of Code.
As described in an earlier blog post, the Cutscene Editor is a tool for creating realtime cutscenes without touching a script. This allows both veteran Unity developers and those new to the engine to easily toss together a scene without too much fuss. It works similar to modern video editing software like Final Cut Pro and Adobe Premiere, with a media browser and a preview window and a timeline. Anyone who has ever edited together a movie on their computer will find a familiar user interface which has been designed with ease-of-use in mind.
Read the rest of this entry »
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:
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?
After a crazy week featuring not one but three separate events crammed into the span of one week (plus this past week of travel and catching up) I’m finally back to having my head above water and thought I’d take another minute to share a few more thoughts with y’all.This time I’m here to talk about the Unity TGIF and Unity Skills Workshop events held in Vancouver this past weekend on Friday July 24th and Saturday July 25th.
The folks at OverInteractive Media in Vancouver are very hot on Unity and they’re starting to spin up Unity Users Groups, starting in Vancouver but hoping to roll them out all over Canada and beyond. In addition to that they’re working on a next generation publishing channel for Unity developers called dimeRocker that will focus on Unity content and help developers reach out to social networking sites from one centralized location. It all sounds extremely cool in the long run but it’s still in its early stages so there will be more details as time rolls on. For now though they wanted to kick start their local user group by having a Unity TGIF networking event and I was invited up to Vancouver to deliver the keynote presentation. Following that they booked a Unity Skills Workshop the following day which was to be a 4-hour hands-on training class focusing on new users stepping into the product. Both turned out to be incredibly awesome, read on for details about both events as well as some photos!
Unity TGIF
For the TGIF event on Friday night they rented out an insanely cool renovated Chinese theater in town (District 319), gathered around 150 people (the majority of whom don’t yet use Unity) and gave me the opportunity to introduce them to our product. The evening started with a social welcoming event that lasted about an hour, then there were a few brief introductory presentations by J. Jolly of OverInteractive Media as well as Jason Bailey of Super Rewards (both of whom are cool guys to say the least), following them I was given the stage for an hour. During that time I covered the basics of who we are, where we come from, why were here and how Unity can help them achieve their game development goals. The presentation went great, the questions came from all corners, some tough, some easy, but all showing an intense interest from the audience. After my presentation was done I couldn’t leave the stage area for a good 45 minutes as folks kept on coming up to me asking even more questions. Luckily Darrel Plant (long-time Director user, now a Unity developer) saved me by bringing me a cold drink from the bar to quench my thirst! The social after-party went on Until 10pm or so with me getting to spend a lot of time chatting with folks and I think it’s going to lead to quite a number of new users. A few folks reported to me that they bought Unity on the spot right after my presentation! Gold!
Unity Skills Workshop
For the Saturday Skills Workshop they booked us into the Centre for Digital Media, a cool digital media school in Vancouver. I was able to get in front of 35 people and gave a four hour class on Unity. It covered the basics but everyone there seemed to dig it and hopefully take away some, if not a lot of tidbits of information. In the room were total newbies, some Unity developers and even one guy from EA Vancouver! One of the guages of well it went is that we went over-time by about 30-45 minutes (so many questions!), folks ran off to buy the product right away as well as tweet/blog/post to Facebook about the event. I’m altogether quite happy to have spent my Saturday like that! Following the class I was treated to a great dinner that night with a few notable folks from the local games industry which not only provided me with some seriously good food (Chambar was incredible!) but also some time to wind down and chat with some local industry folks, making great connections both personal and professional. We sat at the table for nearly three hours covering about every topic you can imagine, but with a bunch of game geeks the topics kept coming back to games and ultimately, Unity. Again, gold!
I Owe Some Thanks!
I want to note that J. Jolly and Glen Lougheed from OverInteractive Media (and their whole gang of folks in Vancouver) get tons of appreciation out of me. The entire weekend was on their tab, they paid for the airfare, my hotel, all meals, kept me fed, busy, happy and productive. Of course that wouldn’t have happened without the help of many local sponsors so I’d like to call each of them out:
OverInteractive Media
dimeRocker
Super Rewards
work [at] play
Fan Trust
Centre for Digital Media
And last but definitely not least…
Seriously, without those folks these events may not have ever happened, and if so they wouldn’t have been nearly as cool. Thanks for such an incredible weekend!
Two weeks ago we announced our Unity Summer of Code program through which we offer indie & student developers the chance to get paid for doing something cool in Unity. Now we have reviewed all of the almost hundred proposals and selected the four of them that we found best matched the program!
The ultimate goal for a parametric explosion system?
