With a huge feature set to show off, and new export targets such as the much talked about Flash and Google Native Client support, this developer preview is something of an early christmas gift we hope you’ll get a kick out of playing with. As if the carrot of previewing the features of 3.5 wasn’t enough, we are also running a contest for those of you interested in deploying Unity content to Flash, which could land you the awesome prize of $20,000 dollars.

Keep in mind that the preview of the Flash export support is just that – a preview, but we felt that we had hit a milestone that meant the feature was stable enough to let you guys get hands on and help us put it through its paces, as we’re sure you will! There are some limitations of our existing Unity feature set however, and you can jump onto the beta preview page and read the FAQ for more information, something we’ll be updating as time progresses so that you keep abreast of the latest information.

We have created a new section of the forum to help you discuss and organize your thoughts on any issues arising from the developer preview, so why not join in the debate now as you give Unity 3.5 a spin for yourself?

http://forum.unity3d.com/forums/33-Developer-Preview

We’re pleased to announce that we’ve reached well over 2,000 packages this month, and our customer base has expanded to over 43K registered users! Top selling developers are making over $10K+ per month, and frankly things couldn’t be more exciting. Some amazing new packages have arrived this month… Here are some of our favorites!

Multiplatform Toolkit
Owlchemy Labs, creators of the smash-hit mobile game SnuggleTruck, bring their amazing multiplatform toolkit to the Asset Store! Owlchemy’s new tool makes it easy to quickly reconfigure your project for multiple platforms with just a few quick clicks. You can easily change textures, buttons, text clips, font sizes and other graphical elements to fit the various aspect ratios and performance capabilities of multiple platforms. Unity already makes cross-platform development easy enough, and if you’re armed with Owlchemy’s Multiplatform Toolkit, you’ve got everything you need to make multiplatform development a no-brainer!

RageTools
An exciting new addition to the Asset Store is Freakow’s RageTools, a collection of tools to enhance the RageSpline vector art tool. The very cool extension, Rage SVG-In allows you to directly import vector artwork made with Inkscape and Adobe Illustrator™ into Unity for immediate use! RageTools also brings RageSpline group management, pivot point adjustments, canvas alignment tools, and a brilliant LOD system to control anti-aliasing and curve smoothness in runtime.

Substances
Substance abuse is rampant in the Unity developer community, as Allegorithmic’s  dynamic material integration gains more and more popularity among Unity users.  You’ll find over 600 tweakable, space-saving Allegorithmic substances on the store, as well as the powerful Bitmap2Material tool– check out the free trial version first.  The 18 Free Substances Pack is a great way to familiarize yourself with this time and space saving technology.  We’ve got a couple of very popular example products up on the store, including the Airstream Demo and Pimp Your Hooligan example projects.  Get hooked on Substances today!

uScript, Playmaker and Antares Universe
The latest contender to the visual, node-based scripting tool arena, uScript from Detox Studios is the way to create game logic without writing a single line of code.   The uScript editor integrates nicely into the Unity editor environment, for a basically seamless development experience!  Our other two popular visual scripting toolkits, Playmaker and Antares Universe, are also incredibly popular, five-star solutions.

Other noteworthy additions to the store include Dynamic Elements Effects Pack, from Kalamona, which brings over thirty top-quality RPG-style spell and magic effects to Unity.  You’ll find even more AAA environments and characters rolling in from the incredibly prolific Dexsoft, and run, don’t walk, to get the free Strumpy Shader Editor– the tool so cool we had to hunt down and hire its developer!  We’ve also added new high quality music from one of Hollywood’s biggest production music houses, APM Music!

The Unity Asset Store is always on the lookout for great new content.  We’ve even expanded our team to actively hunt down and scout out top quality assets. We offer content sellers a 70/30% rev share split (you get the 70%) and monthly payouts by PayPal, with no transaction fee, either!  Some content sellers have earned so much that they quit their day jobs to focus exclusively on the Asset Store, while some smaller sellers make enough on the side to buy videogames, motorcycles, pizza and beer. Top seller or not, nearly all of them have had a great time bringing their creations to the Unity developer community.  Got what it takes?  We’re picky, but send us your stuff!

Through the integration of Allegorithmic’s Substance technology, Unity 3.4 features highly customizable procedural textures that can be adjusted both within the Unity editor and at runtime. Using substances in Unity, developers can stream high quality textures in just a few kilobytes, significantly reducing download times. Those textures can also be modified in real time on PC and Mac or baked into traditional textures for mobile platforms. Substances also include smart filters allowing artists to make awesome bitmaps and optimize their texturing pipeline.

Other notable new features and enhancements include:

• Editor enhancements, such as user-assignable Scene View icons and modifiable primitive colliders, allow for more efficient game development.
• Optimizations and performance improvements on everything from shadow renderers to animation components result in increased visual quality and faster rendering.
• Downloadable content with caching for complete scenes and asset bundles leads to smaller downloads and improved player experience across all platforms.

Unity 3.4 also contains hundreds of minor improvements and fixes. Complete release notes can be found at: http://unity3d.com/unity/whats-new or you can download it and check it out.

You can meet the Unity DevRel team this week at the annual E3 Expo in Los Angeles. We’ll be at the Sony Ericsson booth in South Hall #713. Stop by and show us your commercial Unity game and receive an exclusive Unity Developer T-Shirt! Hear about how to optimize your games for the Android-based Sony Xperia PLAY and the many other platforms we support. The Union team will also be present to discuss opportunities to bring your games to new devices, markets and services.

Also be sure to check out the amazing Glu Mobile 500Gs Developer Contest. Submissions must be created with Unity and it’s a great chance for your creativity and gameplay to earn you part of the $500k USD in worldwide prizes. Time is short for submissions, so don’t delay!

We look forward to working with you and seeing what you create with Unity!

A picture is worth a thousand words, they say.

No, that’s not Conan O’Brien, it’s Brady Wright, our first quarter’s top seller on the Unity Asset Store! If you’re not familiar with his products, check out EZ-GUI and Sprite Manager.

You too can win an 8′  x 2′ check and utterly perplex your bank teller! Submit your content to the Unity Asset Store!

A huge congratulations,  Brady, from all of us at Unity Technologies.

These are exciting times. Today, at the Flash Gaming Summit in San Francisco (of which we’re proud Gold Sponsors), Adobe has announced the public availability of a beta version of the Flash Player, codenamed Molehill, that has a very interesting new feature: hardware accelerated 3D support.

Molehill exposes a very low-level shader-based interface to the graphics hardware. Adobe has decided to focus on that low-level part, and do that really well. The molehill pre-release will not be shipping with a 3D engine, scene building tools, model and animation importers / exporters, physics, lighting or lightmap creation tools, etc.

Hmmm….does that list sound familiar? It sounds a lot like what you all love Unity for!

In the past few months, our engineers have been investigating the possibility of adding a Flash Player exporting option to Unity. That investigation has gone very well, and we’re moving into full production.

For Unity users, this no doubt spurs a lot of questions. Questions such as:

• Will Unity on Flash support the full Unity feature set?
• When will it be ready?
• Okay, when will a beta be ready?
• What will it cost?
• Will it do A, B or C?

These, and many other questions, we cannot answer just yet.  We can say that it will be as good as we can make it and we’ll do it as fast as we can do it.

We do however have some concrete answers for you now that shouldn’t wait…

Q. Is this the end of the Unity’s own Web Player?

Absolutely not. The Flash and Unity Web Players both have their strengths.  We’re excited by the opportunity to target the Flash Player and all of its features with Unity, but there will be plenty of experiences that the Unity plugin is better suited for. It will be up to developers in the end, to decide whether they want to target only the Flash Player, only the Unity Web Player, or some combination of the two (now things are getting interesting!)

Q. What programming language will I use?

You’ll have two options:

1. For people with a Flash background:
   Target our ActionScript API directly from Flash. Think:
   var go:GameObject = new GameObject(“Just normal ActionScript 3 code”);
2. For people with a Unity background:
   Script your content in C# / JavaScript / Boo, like you’re used to, and have Unity automatically translate it to ActionScript when you hit publish.

This is an important development for us, and we hope you’re as excited as we are to see your content reach further than ever.

Tuesday, March 1st, 10am to 6:15pm, Room 123 in the North Hall

Below is the schedule and description of our sessions. I will be posting more information on what’s happening at our booth later, but I hope to see you at our Unity Track!

Schedule

10-11:15am How to Make Money with Union & Technical Introduction to Unity3
Speakers: Brett Seyler, Tom Higgins, and Joe Robins
Brett Seyler, the General Manager of Union, will discuss what Union is all about and how Union can help developers make money.
You hear about Unity all the time, but never saw it in action? Always wanted to try it, but never got around to doing so? Tom and Joe will take you on a lightning tour of what Unity can do, and the platforms it can publish to, so you are well prepared to continue learning at the other Unity sessions.

11:15am-12:15pm Shader Authoring in Unity
Speakers: Shawn White & Robert Cupisz
It’s difficult to make a game today without writing at least one shader. Whether you’re indie, mainstream, or somewhere in the middle, having the ability to write your own shaders will give you what you need to make your game POP! Unity provides a suite of built-in shaders to get you started, but in this talk we’ll get you up to speed on what you need to know about writing your very own shaders in Unity.

12:15-1:45pm LUNCH

1:45-2:45pm Making the Unity Editor do what YOU want
Speakers: Nicholas Francis & Amir Ebrahimi
The extensibility of the Unity Editor is one of its great strengths.  Nicholas and Amir will show how to make the Unity Editor do exactly what you want, instead
of what the creators of Unity thought you wanted.

2:45-3:00pm BREAK

3-4:00pm Building a Better Asset Pipeline
Speakers: Adam Mechtley
With support for a variety of native file formats, Unity has one of the most streamlined asset pipelines for models, textures, and other game assets. This talk will focus on advanced techniques that users can use to extend Unity’s asset pipeline to automate tasks and enhance interoperability with other industry-standard software such as Autodesk Maya.

4:15-5:15pm How Electronic Arts uses Unity
Speakers: Carlos Barbosa
Carlos will discuss how Unity fits into the development workflow at EA Sports, and share their lessons learned from asset pipeline to distribution.

5:15-6:15pm Optimizing for Mobile and Programming Work Flow
Speakers: Erik Hemming & Lucas Meijer
Unity is a 100% C/C++ based game engine that allows gamecode to be written in c#. We’ll describe how this all works when targetting mobile devices, and how to achieve the best looking content with the tools available in Unity. The talk will touch on topics such as profiling and debugging, and also look at how to best optimize the content for a particular platform. We’ll discuss different hardware as well as software limitations of the different mobile devices, and how those affect your target audience.

I’m thrilled to join the Unity team as the new Developer Relations Director focused on our Union business unit. My enviable job is to work with our great developers to find and deliver games to emerging and existing markets through the technical, business and marketing services of Union.

In case you missed the big news this week, Sony Ericsson has announced an amazing gaming-centric Android phone called Xperia PLAY. Unity played a key role in their announcement, and you’ll hear more technical details around this partnership at the upcoming Game Developer Conference. As a brief overview, Unity worked with Sony Ericsson to expose their unique PlayStation style gaming controls through Unity’s Android support. Unity developers interested in learning more about our support for the Xperia PLAY in Unity can contact us at union@unity3d.com. You can also read more about our partnership at the Sony Ericsson’s Developer Blog.

Three of our hard working developers jumped at the chance to update their games with these controls and were previewed at the launch event. Our hearty thanks to Angry Mob Games, Luma Arcade and Art In Games for their quick and impressive efforts.

Union plays a unique role in this Sony Ericsson announcement. While all Android games built with Unity will work well with the Xperia PLAY, Sony Ericsson wants to see enhanced and differentiated games. Our developers participating in Union are the perfect targets, as they want their content to be best suited for new devices and platforms. Through the business and marketing strength of Union, we’re able to offer Sony Ericsson a steady stream of optimized games. These Union games will be highlighted to Xperia PLAY owners. And as we all know, titles which get visibility are much more likely to reach game players. It’s a true win-win for Union developers and Sony Ericsson.

The Union team will be attending the upcoming Game Developer Conference in San Francisco, Feb 28 – Mar 4, 2011. Please send us a meeting request at union@unity3d.com, or just stop by our tradeshow booth for a chat. And as always, drop us an email if you want to learn more and get involved with Union. We have many more exciting opportunities coming.

I look forward to seeing what you create with Unity!

Nothing inspires us more than seeing talented developers make amazing games with Unity. That’s why we are proud to be the event sponsor of this year’s Nordic Game Jam and are offering Unity Pro licenses to the winning team.

The Nordic Game Jam starts at 6:00PM Friday, January 28 and consists of 48-hours of sleep-deprived game development fun. Available tickets are limited, so if you can make it to Copenhagen and are looking to collaborate and meet other game developers (including a more than a couple from Unity), you should sign-up today at the Nordic Game Jam site.

Collaboration is critical at an event like this. To help make your Game Jam a success, and to ensure that your team is able to work together efficiently and effectively, we’ve created a trial serial number for Unity Pro that includes an Asset Server addon license. The serial is active now, so you can start getting your work environment set up right away:

U3-YGTJ-2682-KKDQ-5535-NQ73

Of course, we also realize that The Nordic Game Jam is part of the Global Game Jam and that there will be game jams all over the world taking place in the same time slot of 48 hours. Feel free to use this serial wherever you are.

If you have never touched Unity before but would be curious to try it out for the Jam, you still have a week to play around and get used to how everything works. Why not start off by checking out these basic videos to get up to speed. Unity Basics

Oh and finally, good luck with the jam, have a cool weekend and enjoy making awesome!

Love,
Unity

We had visitors from as far as India, Israel, Uruguay and Australia – a total of 22 nationalities (and another 15 or so if you include Unity employees). And although these people are all working on different things – from MMOs to mobile games to a host of projects outside of gaming – they’re all remarkably similar in their passion, creativity and intelligence.

At Unite, we also did something we haven’t done since 2005: we launched a new way of doing business. And we did it twice during the Unite keynote (watch it here), which feels kind of wild for us.

The first is the Unity Asset Store, the flagship feature of Unity 3.1 which we launched (as a free update) during the Unite keynote. The Unity Asset Store is accessed from within Unity and is a way to download and buy Unity assets without leaving the app. It’s cool as it launched with around 70 cool packages in it, and from now on, it’ll be the prime repository for Unity assets, whether these are art packages, tutorials, scripts and libraries, or even whole new features for Unity (using the editor extensibility). I promise you that this is going to be big, and with more than 2000 developers having signed up days after it launched, it seems that many agree!

The second is Union – our new business unit created to help you get your titles on new and/or closed platforms to earn additional revenue. We are already accepting submissions of finished mobile games into Union and are really excited about where this will go during 2011.

We’ll post video and presentations from Unite over the next few weeks but you’ll have to go to our Facebook page to see the pics from the conference, including the ones of us dancing on the catwalk at the best-ever Unite party

As we look ahead, we’re all laser focused on innovating to expand usability, power and platform reach so we can deliver on our vision of democratizing interactive 3D technology. And with the continued upgrades to the Unity platform as well as the launch of the Unity Asset Store and Union, we’re going broader with that laser sharp vision than ever before!

If we don’t see you before, we hope to get to see you at GDC 2011 in San Francisco – and thank you again for the love and support!

We were off to a fantastic start of Unite yesterday! We sold out with 650 participants – nearly double the size of last year’s conference but were able to make space for everyone (though the keynote session ended up being standing room only for the latecomers!)

The live stream of the keynote did work for many, but for many others it didn’t. We’re so sorry about that, but now it’s been posted here: http://unity3d.com/unite/keynote

We made two gigantic announcements here. First, we announced the Unity Asset Store, a digital store so you can share and trade assets – and monetize your skills in a new way. The Unity Asset Store is embedded inside the Unity editor and will act as a hub for you to find free and commercial independently created assets for use in your games and other interactive 3D projects.

Second, we announced Union, a new business unit that will bring your Unity games to new platforms and channels and create new revenue streams for you. We have encountered a huge thirst for great games from a huge range of platforms, and a broad range of these opportunities are currently only being captured by large game publishers. With Union, we can help the smaller developers band together to approach these opportunities as one. We see Union as a further step on the road to the democratization of game development – a road that started with technology but can go much further.

And then Jesse Schell was our keynote guest speaker, and blew our mind with his fresh new talk about The Future of Virtual Characters. I’m so amazed by Jesse: yesterday was the third time I’ve heard him speak, and while his talks are always super dense and full of ideas and most amazingly I haven’t yet heard him repeat himself. Like, at all!

Gamasutra’s Chris Nutt did a great write-up here in case you missed and want to check out: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/31469/Unite_10_Jesse_Schell_And_The_Future_Of_Virtual_Characters.php

We’re so excited to see where you’re going to take this all and want to thank you for making all of this possible! Yay and double yay

This year’s Unite 2010 is less than two days away, and I can’t wait to see those of you who’re attending in Montreal! This will be our biggest and baddest conference so far, with some 600 of the coolest people from the Unity universe coming together for the usual three intense days of learning, sharing, and partying (in awesome Montreal, but that’s secondary).

We’re all but sold out, but we’ve worked hard to expand capacity, so you can still make it if you hurry – and don’t miss the sweet hotel deal too! More info and booking here.

The program contains over 25 sessions with over 50 speakers, including some of our top engineers and community experts; the Unity Awards will feature some of the best content created with Unity; the business speed dating aims to connect developers and opportunities; and much more! And of course, there will be a huge big party Thursday night!

If you can’t attend the event, you can still be a part of Unite 2010 experience by viewing our keynote, where renowned visionary and game designer (and Unity developer) Jesse Schell will be this year’s guest speaker. The keynote will be streamed live at 10am EST (GMT-5) on our front-page. We got some pretty wild announcements to share, so stay tuned!

View the keynote here! (but not until Wednesday)

Finally I wanted to give special thanks to our sponsors, including Intel, NVidia, Design3, Electrotank, Exit Games, Mixamo, and the Panasonic Cloud Entertainment Company – it’s really important for us to have good friends that support the cause.

Yet another wonderful thing has befallen us – Unity has been nominated for the Game Developer’s 2010 Frontline Awards in the category “Best Engine”. We were a runner up last year, but since then we’ve released Unity 3, soft-launched Unity for Android, and are coming well along with both Xbox 360 and PS3 support. So we think we might have a chance.

The decision is made by a voting system so in the end it’s up to you, the developers! Feel free to make your voice be heard: may whichever engine you think deserves to win, win!

Speak up right here: Frontline Awards Voting Page.

(… I’ll wait …)

Lot’s of love and thank you so much. See you out there in the community – some of you even at the Unite conference, just a week from now!

Swinburne University of Technology AU
Rasmussen College US
Central Piedmont Community College US
University of North Florida US
Purdue University US
Rochester Institute of Technology US
Champlain College US
Upper Austria University of Applied Sicenses AT
Tokyo University of Technology JP
Bradley University US
University of Arkansas US
College of St. Scholastica US
Nassau Community College US
Bond University AU
Southern Polytechnic State University US
George Mason University US
University of Wales, Newport UK
Abilene Christian University US
Pontíficia Universidade Católica de São Paulo BR
Lewis University US

All together we received over 60 submissions from high schools, community colleges, universities and graduate schools. Submissions came from all parts of the world including the US, Austria, Australia, Japan, Brazil, the UK, South Korea, Columbia, Mexico and the Philippines. Although it was difficult to pick just 20 winners, we feel the proposals from these schools were a cut above in their level of detail and impact for their region.

These first round winners will each receive a license to Unity Pro, Unity Android and a Google Nexus One phone to develop, refine and test their curriculum proposals. In the second round of the RFP three lucky schools will be chosen to win a full 20 seat Android mobile development lab including Unity Pro, Unity Android Pro and 20 Google Nexus One Phones.

Congratulations to the winners and we look forward to seeing your secound round submissions!

Hey guys and gals.

Super-happy news here from Unity HQ: Unity 3 is nearly ready – the beta testers and preview customers got their hands on the RC1 build a few days ago. This means we’re wrapping up this cycle and shipping soon.

It also means that our pre-order rebate is about to expire, so now is your last chance to pick up Unity 3 at the discounted price. Head over to the Unity 3 page to see more about it, or go straight to the store to buy your copy today!

I can’t wait to finally get this out there – it’s been a tremendous release. A few random stats: over 40 man-years of effort went into Unity 3, and over 100,000 hours of beta testing activity has taken place. Thanks to all of you who helped us out!

Happy coding

Yup, you read that right, it’s that time of year again, the time to get yourself ready for this year’s edition of our annual developer’s conference, Unite 2010!

Unite 2010
November 10-12, 2010
Montreal, Quebec Canada

Once again, Unite 2010 will bring artists, programmers, designers, researchers, publishers, and other Unity enthusiasts from around the world together for three intense days of learning and networking. The conference will be held on November 10-12, 2010 at the Marché Bonsecours in Montreal, Canada. A detailed agenda is on the way, but tickets are on sale now! Early Bird pricing lasts until September 10th and during that time tickets are only $300, after the Early Bird pricing expires tickets will be $400. If you’re just that eager then go for it and buy your tickets to Unite 2010 today!

Purchase Tickets

If you’re at all like me then you’re out there wanting more information, a lot more information! Well, we don’t have everything sorted just yet but I can point you to the early information that we do have. First let me point you to the press release that we put out just this morning that announced Unite 2010 with some important information and a few great quotes:

Unity Technologies Announces Unite 2010, It’s 4th Annual Developer Conference

After reading the press release you should hop on over to our website for additional information about the conference:

Unite 2010: Save The Date

Our website has information about Unite 2010, including information about where the conference is being held and travel information to help get you there. Our website also touches on the conference agenda which is still in development, but with that comes the opportunity for members of the community (that’s you!) to submit your own presentation proposals as we have an open call for speakers!

Unite 2010: Call for Speakers

I have no doubts in my mind, Unite 2010 is going to be another incredible week during which we’ll get to hang out together, to Unite to share our passion for Unity. Be there!

To help capture a bit of the feeling and emotion from those earliest of days I’d like to share some thoughts from David Helgason, our CEO. The following is taken from a blog post he made late at night on June 6th, the eve of Unity’s official release upon the world, titled “Last Day In This Life” (permalink):

I sincerely love my life.

It’s late again now, I’m listening to Xploding Plastix’ Amateur Girlfriends Go Proskirt Agents of the hateful genre nu-jazz… however it’s completely lovable like anything which is insanely too much.

… yeah… last day of what life? We’re wrapping up the last stuff for Unity, due to be released tomorrow, probably 2pm Pacific Standard Time (utc-8 if I recall correctly)… it’ll be out for the world to enjoy.

Keli is finishing off the webshop so people can actually buy Unity, I’m wrapping up the new Conception designed website, and Joe? He’s fixing bugs at what seems to be an average speed of 0.42 bugs per minute.

Most of the guys have gone home now – they know it’ll be a long day.

I need coffee. Now.

Little did he know just how much his life, and the lives of many thousands of others would actually change…

Fast forward to today, June 7th, 2010, there are now in excess of 170000 developers out there with Unity installed and that user base includes everyone from students and hobbyists on up to major studios like Electronic Arts. Additionally, the founders’ vision involved not just the creation of a new engine, but one that would empower developers to reach everyone, everywhere. As such Unity has grown from a tool that at first let developers target the desktop and web, to one that now allows them to target the desktop, web, mobile devices and consoles. Needless to say it’s been an incredibly exciting five years and we can only dream about what the next five (and beyond!) will be like. So today we celebrate and honor the 5th birthday of Unity. Please take a look at the press release we put out as it includes a number of interesting key facts about our company as well as a timeline of key milestones showing our progress over the last five years:

Unity Technologies Celebrates Five Years of Continual Leadership and Innovation in Making Cutting Edge Game Technology

Thanks to everyone at Unity Technologies for all the hard work and incredible passion you put into your work, we would never have this awesome thing called Unity without the blood, sweat and tears you’ve given. And thanks to everyone out there for your love, support and use of the product, without users out there creating cool content there is no Unity, period. So always remember that Unity isn’t just a product name, it’s a mission we’re all on together to democratize game development so we can all bring our digital dreams to life, and I for one couldn’t be happier to be a part of it.

Happy Birthday Unity!

Here’s the last peek into the old office as we closed the door behind us. The empty offices bring back fond memories of a constantly growing company, late nights spent crunching on Unity releases and the gallons upon gallons of coffee consumed at my desk.

Without further ado, I would like to introduce our new office with more than ample space and meeting rooms everywhere. Following are some snapshots taken just after we moved in.

At the moment, the walls are a little barren. If any of you have interesting artwork (high resolution screenshots of Unity games!) that we could hang on our walls, let me know.

Update: Send any artwork you want us to consider decorating our walls with to wall-art@unity3d.com

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.

Building on the success of LEGO® Star Wars: The Quest for R2D2 and BIONICLE: Glatorian Arena, Unity Technologies, the provider of the market-leading Unity development platform for 3D interactive content on the Web, PC, Mac, Wii™ and iPhone, announced today a new three-year deal with the LEGO Group, in which the company will standardize on Unity authored content for 3D content on www.LEGO.com.

As one of the world’s leading manufacturers of play materials for children, the LEGO Group recognizes the need to offer an innovative online environment for consumers to share their passion and creative flair. To do this, the LEGO Group is developing its web strategy to deliver an online consumer experience to match and enhance the real world fun and invention of LEGO products.

The LEGO Group identified Unity as the best 3D platform available to fulfill its short-term and long-term requirements.

“We’ve invested a great deal of time evaluating technology for the next phase of www.LEGO.com,” said Claus Toftegaard Matthiesen, Technology Manager of the LEGO Group. “We believe that Unity’s flexibility, strength and power will give us scope to create world leading content for our consumers and are looking forward to the cooperation.”

You can read the full press release here.

I personally find this exciting for a number of reasons. Of course it starts out by being a great business deal for Unity Technologies, so let’s get that one out of the way. But worth noting is that it will also serve all of us very well by helping push vast numbers of web player installs due to the high traffic numbers they experience on their website, that’s great for everyone using or adopting Unity for web based content. Finally, it’s also interesting as it’s yet another bit of validation that not only is our technology up to the task of delivering the best in-browser game content possible, but that it’s worth doing so for a mass-market site targeting users of a younger age.

All around this is a good deal and it’s news that I just couldn’t help sharing. Kudos to everyone that was involved in securing this deal, both on the business development front as well as our hard working engineers, for without them none of this would be possible!

Well ok, it all started a bit before:

I exchanged some emails with David and Joachim and they invited me for a gamejam in their office. Then one thing led to another, I was young and needed money (oops! wrong topic) and on January 2006 I started working on this thing called “Unity”.

Unity was at version 1.2.1 then. Since then we’ve released about a dozen new versions, added hundreds (or thousands?) of new features, a handful of new platforms and have grown a lot.

Also, we stopped saying “Sales are INSANE!!!!11″ whenever they exceeded a whopping ten thousand euros per week. Seriously, that much money in 2006 was a big thing. Our Windows build machine was a single core Celeron with 512MB RAM because that’s what we could afford! Well ok, we’re still saying “sales are insane!” from time to time, just the threshold has gone way up.

Occasionally we’d get excited about strangest things. I think this email is about some car model from ATI that was on front page of our website in 2006. It’s beyond me why we’d put a car on Unity website, but somehow it seemed to make sense at the time.

It would take too much space to list all the awesome things that happened in those four years. I got to work on some things too, like Windows Web Player, Direct3D renderer, shadows, editor for Windows and whatnot. But I mostly concentrate on creating trouble, which does not seem to hinder Unity that much. I need to get more efficient!

Seriously though, it has been an amazing ride so far, and I hope it will only become better. Thanks to everyone at Unity Technologies and the community!

Rock on!

So, 2009 has been an amazing year. I won’t list out all our achievements, but they’ve been many, and some big enough that achieving just one of them would have made us very proud.

But just in time for the Holiday season, Unity Technologies has been selected as one of the 5 top gaming companies by Game Developer Magazine. According to them, this puts us in a pretty interesting family of Apple, Epic, Valve and Zynga. A cute detail is that we’re by far the smallest. And (apart from Zynga) also the youngest.

Without gushing too much I want to thank you my incredible colleagues (who worked so hard to make this all happen) and our users for this.

Both groups have more than tripled this year, so there’s a constant stream of new faces, new histories and backgrounds, and of course amazing new skills being added to the mix. I guess that part is what makes me love my job the most.

Thanks.

Hey folks, the end of another incredible year is rapidly coming to a close and the holiday season is fast upon us, and we here at Unity Technologies want to help everyone celebrate with a special end of year discount. Specifically we’re offering everyone the chance to save 20% off of any purchases made in our online store between now and the end of the year. In order to take advantage of this offer you simply need to visit our online store and enter ENDOFYEAR2009 into the rebate coupon field and you’ll save 20%, it’s that easy. You can visit our online store by clicking on the following link:

Unity Online Store

Remember, this end of year discount offer is only valid through December 31st so make sure you take advantage of it before the new year begins!

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!

The UK Office

Hello everyone!

My first blog post is to announce that our UK office is open and rocking already. There are now five of us working for Unity Technologies from the UK, and we have started recruiting heavily to fill more positions. I will talk about what we are doing at this office in a separate blog post, but put simply we are doing a lot of community, support and QA work here. The office is in a converted convent, at least according to local legend. There is certainly a statue of the Virgin Mary on the end wall of the building. Some of the offices are small and are meant to be where the nuns slept.

Yesterday we had Samantha and Oleg visiting us, so we took a photo to prove to the Danes that we do exist.  Sadly Matt was ill, so the photo only shows 6 of us.

This may not be our final home, but it is convenient for now. As we grow we will look for more permanent and scalable offices. I am thrilled to be involved in the start of this UK arm of Unity Technologies.

Thanks,

Graham

 

UK office crew — (From left, Oleg, Samantha, Chris, Dave, Graham and Andy).

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

We want to try one more thing… On Friday work on something cool.

I think there are a lot of low hanging fruits in Unity where somebody with drive can just do something cool that pushes us forward. Things that are hard to put in words, but just make sense when you see it done.

So every Friday, developers can work on something cool, something they have been craving to do for a long time. A feature, a demo, a tutorial, a video tutorial, docs, cleaning the toilet, something on the website. Whatever. Be creative, push the envelope.

In other words, we started to work on “anything cool” on Fridays. This was dubbed as FAFF (Fridays Are For Fun).

Boy, what a positive effect on team morale that was!

It also resulted in some FAFF work being polished & promoted into official releases already. Things like:

• Animation Events in Unity 2.6 animation editor
• Display realtime brush preview in terrain editing tools
• Timeline Charts for Unity 2.6 profiler
• Custom Icons for standalone game builds
• Head Look Controller sample project
• Precise raycast-based snapping in Unity 2.6

…all started out as Friday projects!

Developers have experimented with lots of other stuff on Fridays. Some of them were just playing around or learning Unity better. Some Fridays were for evaluating various middleware packages, implementing some features or doing some fancy R&D. Some of the projects were an interesting kind of “fun”. Like improving internal build farm setup, a system for better tracking of crash reports, improving the website, or other similar things that often involve Perl scripts. Well, eveyone has his own kind of fun

So yeah. On Fridays, we just ignore the schedule and work on something cool. Something that pushes our own tech – something that we can’t defend from a business standpoint but that’s just too great to not get done. If it rocks, we’ll ship it. Because, at the end of the day – who knows where the next killer idea will come from.

This is just the latest picture in what has become a company tradition: To take a group photo whenever enough of us are gathered at the same place.

This photo was taken little more than half a year earlier at GDC in San Francisco:

And again half a year before that at Unite 2008 in Copenhagen:

This one was taken two years ago at Unite 2007 (although we cheated and included Unity Studios in the lineup as well.)

And finally around year 2005, just around the release of Unity 1.0, we had this photo taken:

As you can see, our little company has been growing almost constantly. And it still is. Only in the two weeks since we returned from Unite 2009, we have added 3 employees to the staff list!! Do you think there’s room for your face in next year’s group photo? Take a look at our jobs page and see which positions we have open.

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!