The recently released Unity Developer Preview is jam-packed with new features. Among the most exciting of these features are previews of two new export options for publishing to the web: Google Native Client and Flash.

In addition to leveraging users’ already-installed software to get them into your games even faster, these platforms will allow Unity developers to perform for a previously unreachable audience: Linux users!

Wait, what?

Thanks to the cross-platform nature of Google’s Native Client toolkit, Unity web players built using the Enable NaCl Support option will just work for Chrome users, regardless of whether they’re using Chrome on Linux, Windows, or Mac OSX. This makes the Chrome Web Store one of the first distribution channels to provide high-quality 3D games to all three major desktop platforms.

In addition, players making use of Unity’s new Flash export feature will also run in any Stage 3D-enabled browser, regardless of operating system. Linux users will take a moderate performance hit here, however, as Adobe has delayed Linux support for GPU-accelerated rasterization in Stage 3D. Nevertheless, an out-of-the-box Flash build of the Angry Bots demo looked great and ran smoothly on my Ubuntu workstation, at the cost of somewhat higher CPU usage.

We’re excited about these publishing options because they represent Unity’s first official support for Linux, an oft-requested feature.

How many people are we talking about?

Linux usage is notoriously difficult to track, since there’s no single point where cash gets exchanged for code, and is generally underreported. However, we do have a few relevant data points.

w3schools, a comprehensive online web development reference, keeps comprehensive statistics about their visitors’ operating system usage, as reported by browsers. In 2011, reported Linux usage has held steady between 5 and 6% (for comparison, reported MacOS usage is between 7 and 9%). Additionally, w3schools has been gathering these statistics for years, so it’s possible to see a general growth trend for Linux since it started with around 2% reported usage in 2003. Some have suggested that w3schools’s content biases its userbase toward more technical users who could be more likely than a random sampling of the general public to have adopted Linux, but there are clearly non-technical roads that lead directly to w3schools.

What does this mean for my game?

The Humble Indie Bundle, a series of pay-what-you-choose, independent game bundles that supports Linux, OSX, and Windows, reports that 20 to 35% (based on highly scientific pie chart estimation ) of each bundle’s total revenue originates from Linux users. In addition, Linux users choose to pay an average of 100%+ more than Windows users, and about 50% more than OSX users. (Current statistics for HIB4 show an average payment of $10.29 for Linux, $7.42 for OSX, and $4.57 for Windows.) Other data points include 2D Boy, who reported that 17% of the sales in their pay-what-you-choose campaign for World of Goo came from Linux users, compared to 18% on OSX, with Linux users again choosing to pay substantially more than users on other platforms. Frictional Games reported in 2010 that 12% of sales for their Penumbra series were attributable to Linux users.

So, this means that you can realistically gain 12-35% revenue potential just by clicking the Enable NaCl Support checkbox before building your webplayer.

Show me the goods!

The Angry Bots demo has been on the Chrome Web Store for some time now – go check it out! Google also featured several Unity games (4 of the 7 games featured were built with Unity) in its recent Chrome Web Store trailer: Cordy, Pirates of New Horizons, Sleepy Jack, and Running Fred.

The Chrome Web Store is the first link every Chrome user sees when opening a new tab, so get your awesome games up there where 33.4% of all Internet users can’t miss them!

Green Stash Mesh Plants

As graphic cards, game engines and mobile platform capabilities evolve, so must natural detail. That’s why we’re especially thrilled about 3DAttack’s mesh plant package, Green Stash Mesh Plants, now on the Asset Store. With 3-4 level of detail meshes, the highest levels of detail are entirely mesh: not a transparent texture on a quad among them. While the lower poly LODs have conventional quad leaves, the highest versions are glorious mesh reproductions of existing species of appealing plant life. With Green Stash, 3DAttack sets a new standard for years to come.

See for yourself!

GeoPainter

If you’re working on a terrain with Unity Terrain’s detail mesh feature, it’s not at all difficult to quickly populate a terrain environment with Green Stash plants and other detail meshes. But imagine you are working on complex mesh surfaces too.. like huge mesh boulders, mesas, middle-earth style rooftops, roads, whatever– all which should have plant life, rocks, debris and other details atop them too! What to do? Hurry to the Asset Store, get your copy of GeoPainter, and place game objects into your scene by simply painting them on! Need to make a messy pile of bricks or logs on the floor? Normally this kind of thing is surprisingly time consuming, but GeoPainter makes messes easy! Instead of manually placing each piece one by one, use GeoPainter to instantiate and position them in your scene with a single brush stroke. With built-in parameters for randomization, you can easily add chaos and irregularity for a more organic feel. While you’re at it, use GeoPainter to plant bunches and rows of great new Dexsoft vegetables in your field or garden. Just be sure to keep the crows and bugs away! One of these should do the trick!

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!

What elements make water?

Hydrogen & Oxygen

in Unity?

There are many different types of water you can create or use from prefabs. To take advantage of the latest water effects and scripts I will be concentrating on the Water4ExampleSimple assets which are essentially a couple of 3D meshes representing your water surface, with:

• WaterTile script
• Water shader

An empty object indicating the world space placement with:

• A Water script which exposes the colours, normal texture and main parameters for the effect
• A reflection script
• An optional lighting script for specular effects
• An optional displacement script

How can I make some water?

The simplest way is to drag the prefab into your scene, and assign your custom mesh:

• Assets > Import Package > Water (pro only)
• In the project window open the  Standard Assets > Water (Pro only) folder
• Open up Water4 folder
• Drag the Water4Example (Simple) Prefab into your scene
• Position approximately where you need it
• Select one of  the tile meshes, go to the mesh component in the inspector > select the round target icon on the right and choose your mesh (must be in your project)
• Rotate the Water4ExampleSimple parent node 90 degrees, if your mesh comes in at the wrong angle (this can be caused when you export from a 3D app with a different co-ordinate system to Unity)
• Place your mesh by moving the parent node
• Remove the second tile mesh

Settings

Once you have your mesh as water you can begin to play with the settings. Select your Water4ExampleSimple node, and check the parameters in the inspector.

Water Base

Planar Reflection

This script is for enabling/disabling realtime planar reflections. Reflections are claculated in relation to the height of the parent mesh that has this script attached to. So the local Y transform of child meshes should be 0. Here you can also enable the reflections to include (or not) the skybox.

Specular Lighting

You can adjust the specular power from here and drag’n'drop any transform to indicate a specular light source. This can be your directional light transform or any other game object (doesn’t need to be a light).

Gerstner Displace

Here you can adjust the settings for the wave generation created by the Gerstner waves generation algorithm.

Water art tips

• Go and check out some actual water – its always wise to get some visual ref for what you are trying to do. Make a video if you can.
• Water absorbs red light from the spectrum reflecting back more green and blue rays, in additions to sky, which gives water the impression of being Blue in colour so:
  • You can’t make your surface blue (and you probably shouldn’t)  but if you use green and blue colours on the surfaces below the water such as a pool you can help with the illusion.
  • (I guess this is why Pool designers use green/blue/turquoise tiles).
  • The darker the blue, the deeper water appears – you can use a darker colour on the bottom and tint the refraction darker.

• Moderate the effects, subtlety can help suspend disbelief, be sure to experiment but think about moderating:
  • Scrolling speed of normals
  • Reflection
  • Refraction
  • Fresnel and Normal strengths
  • Displacement

• One useful tip is to turn practically everything off e.g. set sliders to zero and then build up the effects to get the desired impact.
• If you have a convex mesh (such as water fall/pool lip) add poly detail to the curve to help the water ‘bend’.

Next time > Water 4 Advanced is the same tech but with foam and depth extinction.