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A bit over four years ago Unity 1.0 entered beta, and was subsequently released June 6th, 2005. Since then we’ve released 20 updates, grown from 3 to 34 people, seen hundreds of games and other products released (as well as thousands of demos and throw-aways).
But what is this all about anyway? Read the rest of this entry »
For some reason I was browsing through old emails and found some old development screenshots of Unity 2.5.
Unity 2.5 was the first version of the editor running on Windows and eventually was released in March 2009. Some development of it started at end of 2007, just after Unity 2.0 was released. First there was some serious code shuffling, converting from Objective C into C++, refactoring into platform independent interfaces and similar highly invisible stuff.
Here’s the first Unity running on Windows screenshot I could find (this is February 2008): Read the rest of this entry »
First, I’ve got to brag about Unity iPhone 1.0.2. The feedback we are getting is great — increased frame rate, audio working a lot better, memory leaks are out the window. We couldn’t be happier about it!
But so far, most of the Unity bloggers have focused entirely on technical subjects, road maps, and release information… and from our best brains! But where is the completely irrelevant blogging about the Unity trampoline, my cats, what’s served for lunch at Unity, idiosyncratic server names, and the like? It’s right here!
First scoop: The Unity trampoline. Inspired by the essential-geek-startup-novel Microserfs, we got a Unity trampoline. It was briefly mentioned late one night when Joachim was bouncing restlessly between coding, and he immediately bought one online. A few days later, *VIOLA* (sic), we have a 4m diameter trampoline of death in our back yard.
Unity Tramponauts include Joe, Sam, Alex, David, Nich, me and a few other brave souls. Joe’s mastered backflips in less than a week. Because Unity developers are well-trampolined each day, your software is guaranteed to be robust and well-exercised. How many other game engine developers do you know who rigorously trampoline their dev-team daily?
The Lunch Report: As you may or may not know, Unity Technology feeds our highly-intelligent action-squad of programmers with nutritious, brain enriching lunches daily. Most recently, however, our caterer has taken to serving fish and chicken on a daily basis. It has been theorized that our caterer receives an enormous dump-truck every morning full of chicken.
Today’s lunch: Interestingly, fish was absent. Mixed salad with arugula, couscous with vegetables, chickpea and chicken blend, and the standard bread with cheese. Water and napkins were also present.
Hi guys.
I was just going through some old folders sitting in a dusty corner on my hard drive, when I found a backup copy of images I posted to a Danish gamedev forum in the first years of Unity. Thought I should share these:
Unity 0.2 (or thereabouts)
This is Unity running in what I believe to be OS X 10.0 – it’s a game Joachim and I made together over a weekend when I visited him while he was still living with his parents. The funny thing is both seeing how much has changed, but also how little: we got ShaderLab in bottom left, Hierarchy view, Project (called Library back then) and the inspector top-right. What did we actually do during all those years? (and yes, that is python gamecode scripts you can see in the Library – this was before we switched to Mono)
More and more people and companies are realizing how Unity can help them unleash their creativity and concentrate on making their games rather than on making their games work. However, some people are still hesitant to try out Unity (despite our free 30 day trial for Mac and Windows) because they think the lack of access to the Unity source code will inherently limit their creativity and only let them create certain types of games. This is a gross misconception.
Myth: The lack of source code access to an engine is limiting in what kind of game it is possible to create.
First of all, it is possible to buy a source code license for Unity (contact us for details), but the vast majority of games don’t need it and can be made using vanilla Unity Indie or Unity Pro.
One of the coolest things about working at a tool company is the chance to see the interesting, innovative and exciting things people do with that tool. This week I got to take advantage of that benefit by visiting the San Jose office of NeuroSky. These folks have developed a group of products based around bio-sensors that pick up on your brain waves and then translate those for use as input in a variety of applications. The idea of “thought based input” appeals to a variety of industries and use cases, whether for medical analysis, development of assistive devices or of course use in next generation game content.
Just had this chat conversation:
…
Joachim: yeah it’s awesome
Joachim: function Start () { /* super secret code snippet */ }
Aras: whoa
Joachim: it rocks
Joachim: automatically instantiates material for you
Joachim: the same way we do it for scripts
Joachim: best thing since sliced bread i think
Aras:
Aras: hey, back in the day the terrain was best thing since sliced bread!
Joachim: sliced bread appears to be always worse depending on what i work on.
Aras: maybe sliced bread is just not so good in fact
Aras: sliced bread is overrated
And no, I won’t say what we were talking about 
With our recent iPhone announcement having my mailbox boiling over, I’m so happy that I’ll be spending a long weekend in Berlin. I’m flying out to Berlin Wednesday evening to meet up with my whole family – arriving from London, Reykjavik, and Halle – and to celebrate my grandmother’s birthday, eat good food, and have intense conversations about what we are up to.
If course I’ll take the time to meet with a few interesting companies while I’m there – amongst others, people doing hardware instead of software… I’ve met so few of those, it’s going to be exciting to learn about their no-doubt very different business models, and see where Unity can be a fit.
So, anyone else I should be meeting up with? As I’ve written before, the authorized way to meet up in foreign cities is dopplr.com.
We haven’t been making a lot of noise out of Unity Technologies HQ lately, but things have not been at a standstill. We’re having daily conversations with top people at the biggest companies in our space (game developers, publishers, huge brands, search, engineering, …), with some pretty wildly awesome things in the pipeline. If only I could tell you, even just 5% of the big things that are brewing. Huge products, big brand entertainment, … auwww how annoyed I am at the secrecy of this industry: why can’t we just all tell everyone what we’re up to!? Just some of the things? Like, right now
Okay, what can I tell you? How about:
– 2 x full blown MMO being made with Unity
– 5 x virtual worlds being made with Unity
– 3 x well funded game portals being made with Unity
– several VC funded projects that we haven’t even been told what are about
– And of course thousands of Unity licenses being used for things that we know nothing of
… and that’s not mentioning all the evaluation projects and projects pending funding. 2008 will be a wild ride.
A very common question we get is “what is the penetration of the Unity plugin?”
There’s several ways to answer that question. It’s in the millions. It’s also growing, and the rate of growth is increasing. And this year there’s a long line of very major and high-profile game releases planned, which will accelerate this even more. But while the future may be good (and with Unity, the future is good), it’s not now.
But why did you ask that question? Most likely it is to figure out the risk of using Unity content on your site. That you’ll have lots of visitors, many of which who don’t have and won’t install the plugin and leave for somewhere else.
Of course plugin penetration is very important to this, but if a technology doesn’t have >95% ubiquity, the plugin installation process is just as important.
We spent a lot of effort figuring out how to make the plugin install process for Unity as simple as possible. And it’s a lot easier than that of the Shockwave player (not to mention other sub-par technologies). Well, parts of the install process took effort and thinking… but how much effort goes into not requiring registration and pushing adware?
– The whole plugin is 3MB download for everything
– And it is delivered from a Content Delivery Network so all users get a fast download
– The installation doesn’t require a browser restart on any platform
– And it even keeps the user on same the site without even a page reload
– There’s no user registration required
– And no Google toolbar or other adware
– Unity supports Microsoft Vista and Intel based Macs
– And doesn’t crash on old/ancient graphics card and driver combinations
Our statistics tell us that for people who don’t have the plugin already installed, over 60% complete the plugin installation (this differs between different types of content, and just as importantly, based on the presentation of your content… that is material for another blog post).
Depending on where you deploy Shockwave content, it is commonly believed that 50% of your visitors have the plugin installed already. Of the remaining 50%, you’ll lose some because of the plugin installation process. Because of the reasons outlined above, for Shockwave we believe it is around 40%. So do the math:
Shockwave:
Preinstalled: ~50%
Successful plugin installs: ~20% (50% x 40% success rate)
Total successful views: ~70%
Unity:
Preinstalled: ~1%
Successful plugin installs: ~59% (99% * 60% success rate)
Total successful view: ~60%
As a solid proof, R/C Laser Warrior recently was the most played game on shockwave.com for 2 weeks straight, with up 40.000 simultaneous players, and is still listed as a Top Online game there. And that’s on a site dominated by Shockwave games.
Still, you might worry that using the Unity technology is a bit daring, and early-adopter-ish. A couple of weeks ago, a Massive Media Conglomerate called Disney released a Unity-based game online game, Sooga Mountain. So I ask you, can you be as agile and daring as those guys? 
