October 29 2009Unite 09 Day 2
So finally I’m uploading the photos after a day of great news!
First we start with all the people crowded at the hall of the conference room:
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Archive for the ‘Company News’ Category
October 29 2009A free Unity?
Short answer: yes!
Long answer: read on 
At the Unite 2009 conference we just announced that Unity Indie would be discontinued and that a new version of Unity (called just “Unity”) would be made free. Of course this requires some explanation, and since the forums (as well as Twitter and the rest of the interwebs) are aflame with speculation I think I better get started explaining.
Unity Indie no more
Unity Indie was a cool product. It was very featureful, enabling production of rich 3D games and other interactive content for the web and standalone PC and Mac builds too. And it was a commercial product too: it cost $199 and you were explicitly allowed to sell your work and make money with it. This was no “hobbyist” or “noncommercial” license.
But also it’s not been a significant part of our business at all: Unity Pro, Unity Wii and Unity iPhone for the bulk of our (rapidly growing) livelyhood.
However what we liked about Unity Indie was that it allowed many many people to get started with Unity. These people are hobbyists, students, professional and amateur independent developers, as well as teenagers and kids. And many of them are really valuable to the community.
Instead, a free Unity
Today we launched a new product called just “Unity”. It has the same features as Unity Indie had, and the same license (and can thus be used commercially). The only difference will be that it’s free of charge. No time limits, no trials. Just a registration and a download, and you’re good to go.
This new product won’t do anything funky or strange. There’s no forced advertising, there’s no new requirements to share your revenue with us, and there’s no “crapware” or “adware” installed with it.
Indie customers, expect an email from us
Secondly, we understand that people who recently bought Unity Indie might feel really unlucky. Every single Unity 2.x Indie license owner will be offered to upgrade to Unity Pro or to add Unity iPhone Basic to their license for a big discount. And everyone who bought Unity Indie in the last sixty days are alternately being offered full refunds if they don’t wish to upgrade.
These emails are going out in the next couple of days so please bear with us while we’re inundated with excitement and while we try not to make our severs overheat
Feel free to discuss this here or on the forums (http://forum.unity3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=34991), and we’ll try to answer your questions although we are also really busy at the conference (it’s awesome by the way, so many great people).
UPDATE: A few people asked if this move had anything to do with our new investors. It’s a fair question, but we had been thinking about this much longer. However when we told them, they were very supportive of the idea.
UPDATE 2: Thanks for the comments. A few questions have been asked repeatedly here and in our forums, so I addressed them here.
October 28 2009Unite 2009: Day 2 Begins
As the sun rises over San Franciso we’re gearing up for another exciting day at Unite 2009. Yesterday was a new experiment for us in having a day of classes added on to the conference and from what I saw it was a huge success. In one room we had a “Unity for Unity Developers” track with three 2-hour classes taught by our in-house experts (Nicholas, Aras, Joachim and Lucas) and so far the feedback forms show that folks learned a lot. At the same time in another room we had a “Unity for Flash Developers” track that featured four speakers (myself included) delivering one-hour sessions introducing Flash developers to Unity. The speakers were me, John Grden (engineer on Papervision3D), Paul Tondeur (author of a book about Papervision3D) and Mauricio Longoni (noted Unity community member already). All the sessions were great and the word around the conference was all positive.
Today we’re back to our “normal” agenda, three days of technical sessions. The view above is what I was lucky enough to take in while sipping my coffee outside the event center this morning at 7:30am or so. I’m strangely sleeping too little yet extremely amped up with energy. The vibe and excitement from everyone in attendance is great and it’s only going to get better. In 45 minutes the keynote starts and then day #2 begins… Here we go!
October 28 2009Unite 09 Day 1
For those who couldn’t come or those who didn’t know, today was the first day of Unite 09, everything was great!
Still we had some minor technical issues with the Internet, but we finally handled them.
So on this first day, here are some photos:
The Unity Conference entrance.
October 26 2009Preparing Unite
So, a bunch of us are busy getting everything ready for Unite – check out this people of guys who’s responsible for doing the conference visuals. It’s a pretty sweet setup (and this is just whatever gear they could fit in their hand luggage).
The projection image on the wall is the final result of camera input and the presenter slides which will get liveedited to a separate machine. They’re mixing everything in realtime using modul8 vj software.
We’ll also be color-keying in the conference visuals with our slides. Cool stuff – I just hope it doesn’t crash…
September 17 2009Unite ‘09 tickets now on sale!
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:
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!
September 17 2009Summer of Code: Detonator Framework Released!
This blog post is written by Ben Throop who has been working on a Detonator framework to generate great-looking explosions in Unity games. The project was one of the four selected projects that were selected for the Unity Summer of Code and the first to be wrapped up and released.
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.
September 5 2009Unite ‘09 Call for Speakers
Some time ago we’ve announced our third Unite conference.
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.
August 25 2009Snow Leopard’s 64-bit Safari and Unity
Update: We have released Unity 2.6.1 on December 2nd this year, which includes an update to the Mac Unity Web Plugin, which is fully compatible with 64-bit Safari on OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.
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:
August 24 2009Summer of Code: Progress of Detonator framework
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.
