Archive for the ‘General’ Category

I think there are a lot of resources that are important but people might not have seen or skipped over it. So I am putting up a list of the most overlooked but important resources.

Getting started
The best way to get started if you know nothing about Unity is to go through the 3D Platform Tutorial. With this in-depth tutorial you can learn how to make a 3rd person platform game in Unity, but at the same time you will learn all the basics of Unity that will give you a head start when creating your own game.

Unity Locomotion system
If you are doing a lot of character animation in your game, you must check this out. Rune’s Locomotion system was presented at GDC 2009 in a fully packed session. The great thing about it is that it does stylized IK, meaning that it uses the existing animations to do good looking motions and only minimally adjusts them to place feet on the ground etc. It also scales really well, you can start out with a simple walk cycle and it will automatically synthesize sidestep / run / backwards animations for you. If you provide more animations the animations will simply look better.

Get the project folder here

Watch the Unite 2008 talk here.

Visual Studio Integration
In our roadmap we announced Visual Studio integration for Unity 2.6. However you can already use Unity with Visual Studio very well. Lucas Meijer has a blog post on how to create Visual Studio projects from a Unity Project folder automatically here.

Shaders
Amir’s Unite 2008 Shader talk is the defacto best tutorial on building shaders. He reshot the session into a 2 hour talk so he could go through all the details.

Customizing the asset pipeline
Lucas is really into tightly controlling the asset pipeline and automating every single bit. Fortunately Unity is very extendable, so he has a lot of places where he can plug in. Watch the talk here.

Matthew’s Physics Talk at Unite 2008
I generally love hearing Matthew’s talks. Got to love the pictures. This year on car physics was very useful.

Unity GUI
Nich’s Unite 2007 talk on how to create your own GUI controls is still very relevant.

The wizkid Forest talks about particles
Forest Johnson, a (then) 15 year old kid single handedly programmed the Avert Fate demo, he did some awesome particle effects too and then gave a kickass impromptu particle talk at Unite 2007.

Rune on dynamic walking	Amir on shaders	Lucas on pipeline
Matthew on physics	Nich on Unity GUI	Forest on particles

Blogs about Unity:
The Flashbang guys have an awesome blog about Unity, that contains deep technical information that sometimes even I didn’t know about.

Lucas has a great blog about Unity with a lot of very useful information.

Somebody made  a site collecting video tutorials about Unity.

Woah my first blog post! And I am going to dive right into the roadmap. This time we are taking a look at what is coming up in the near future.

Unity 2.6

Unity 2.6 is our next big release in the Unity 2.x series (And will be available as a free upgrade). We are planning to release Unity 2.6 sometime later this summer. Here’s some of the things to come:

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It’s been a busy year already for everyone in the Unity community and the year is still just getting started! Unity 2.5 is around the corner, GDC looms close and as of late there have been a few pieces of Unity content making waves that are well worth your time and attention. Specifically I’m referring to Zombieville USA (Mika Mobile) and Blush (Flashbang Studios).

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I remember a long time ago when I first heard of this odd new (at that time) site called Orkut, I readily signed up and started my own person social networking experience. Before long it seemed that Orkut was passe and it was replaced with Friendster. Again I signed up and joined the fray, but I soon grew weary of the experience and dropped off the radar for a bit. Instead of using social networking sites I focused on my own personal website and interest-specific forums for meeting up and interacting with others online. Due to not fully enjoying those early experiences I was slow to get back into things with the advent of LinkedIn, MySpace, Facebook and of course one of the newest entrants into the fray, Twitter.

Slowly but surely I succumbed, ultimately signing up for both LinkedIn (here) and Facebook (here) skipping over and avoiding the whole MySpace experience. As of late I’ve come across lots of folks jumping on the Twitter bandwagon and so I figured that it was finally time to give it a go. So today I finally signed up for a Twitter account, feel free to stalk me… err, “follow” me, if you’d like:

http://twitter.com/higgyb

I’m now following a number of folks, many of whome are coworkers at Unity Technologies or members of the Unity Community. Are you on Twitter? Will I follow you next? <insert evil music here>

As most of the Unity universe already knows, we recently announced that Unity 2.5 is coming soon, and that among other new features it will most prominently include Unity editor support on Windows. In case you live in a cave or are otherwise out of the loop with respect to Unity news:

Unity: Coming Soon in Unity 2.5

I think it goes without saying that this has caused an incredible stir amongst the game developer community and it’s caused a lot of new eyeballs to look our way. For those of us working on Unity it’s an incredible time to say the least and all signs seem to indicate that this year’s roller coaster ride is just getting started…

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The new year has hardly begun and it’s already been incredible, I say that as it feels to me like Unity and Unity content are in the news a lot as of late. While I know that those of us at Unity Technologies have been firm in our belief that Unity is the best thing going in game development, I think a lot of the recent media coverage and content launches are helping to show that’s really the case. Given that, I thought I’d take a minute and point out some of the recent media mentions for others to check out and perhaps share some of your own. Enjoy.

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Now that we’re a week deep into 2009 I thought I’d share a few of my new year’s resolutions, at least those that pertain to Unity in particular.

1. I will post more regularly here on my blog. I’ve often found myself excited by various bits of information from the Unity universe yet I’ve not been good about coming here and sharing that info for all to read and enjoy. Some times that information will be tidbits I glean from public sources and in other cases it may come from internal sources and thus be “extra juicy” for those outside the company walls.
    
2. I will make sure that I’m more available to the community in general, specifically by being more active on the forums and the IRC channel than I was in the closing months of 2008. Customer service and contact with the community are two key agenda items for us and I’m the point man for those efforts so I’ll do better in 2009 and beyond.
    
3. I will focus on specific community building agenda, including things like trying to form and interact with local user groups, improve the forums (finally!), coordinate student related events, and on and on and on. The Unity community is fantastic, but as it continues to grow (wait for the stampede of Windows content authors!) we’ll need to do more to ensure that it continues to be a healthy, happy and productive.
    

There is a ton more to do in 2009 but I want to focus my “promises” on the above. I think that those three resolutions are ones that will offer the most “bang for the buck” and so I’m here to commit to them in earnest. I’m here to share information, support our users in every way possible and continue to build and strengthen an already awesome community.

Am I on track folks? And what are your Unity-related resolutions?

I wish everyone all the best in 2009, let’s rock!

…I had recently arrived in Copenhagen (read more here) to begin this journey called “Unity”. One year ago I was thrilled by the fact that we’d grown so much in just a single year, and now looking back at the last twelve months I’m again stunned, shocked and thoroughly excited at what we’ve been able to do. In the two years I’ve been working at OTEE/Unity Technologies we’ve grown from a team of six, huddled in one small office sitting nearly on top of each other, to over thirty people between two companies in four different office locations and in three countries. And the scariest/best part is that I firmly believe that our ship has barely set sail, we have so much more to do and so much further to go!

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For those who haven’t seen it, The Graveyard (from the folks at Tale of Tales) is a unique and intriguing experiment of sorts that blurs the line between artwork, games and interactive experiences. It first cropped up on the Unity Community Forums some time ago and now there is a great postmortem write up on gamasutra.com that spans ten pages. In the postmortem they walk from concept on through to completion and talk about things that went right, wrong and otherwise. For anyone using Unity or working in the interactive 3D space it should prove to be an interesting read so go give it a look!

Postmortem: Tale of Tales’ The Graveyard

I was recently made aware of a great new game made in Unity called Sommersault. It’s a very cool game that was developed in part by Jonas Echterhoff, a long-time friend and part-time employee for Unity Technologies and Unity Studios. The game features some interesting and fun game play and it recently took second place in the European Innovative Games Awards. If you’ve got a few minutes take a look and have some fun, it’s definitely worth the time.