Archive for the ‘Rants & Raves’ Category

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:

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I’ve always said that Unity as a product is made up of 60% community, 20% grand ideas and concepts, 15% groovy tech and 15% wicked developers (yes I am aware that this amounts to 110% – would you have expected anything less?).

Since my first day at Unity Tech, I’ve wanted to do this post, but quite simply I’ve been way too busy on this end. I still am, but I’m taking some time off to do this anyway, ha!

I’ve surfed most corners of the community for a while now (shout-out to #unity3d on irc.freenode.net! You should stop by and check it out!) and being part of this is really, really (really) grand. In my first blog post from UT, I’d like to mention a few of the groovy community projects I’ve stumbled on and could remember at the time of writing (I’ll try remembering/researching some more projects later). So without further ado, I present *drumroll* amazing community projects!:

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First, lets see what is inside new iPhone 3G S. Number of technical sites wrote reviews already (mostly based on well educated guess since real hardware is out of reach for most), so I will be brief:

• New and shiny ARM Cortex-A8 as main CPU running at 600MHz. New chip maintains 100% backwards compatibility with older ARM1176 chips powering original iPhone family – so no worries here.
• New PowerVR SGX chip serving as GPU. SGX family is a huge leap over MBX Lite which we saw in original iPhone. It is faster, has pixel and vertex shaders and supports a bunch of features you would normally get only on your desktop GPUs. It comes with OpenGL ES 1.1 and OpenGL ES 2.0 support too.
• New NEON™ SIMD unit which is a fantastic addition to help in number crunching operations such as mesh skinning.
• Double the L1 cache size and introduced L2 cache – this means speed.

All this is great great of course, but how could we help to reduce the complexity while supporting full spectrum of old and new devices? Thanks to the desktop origins of Unity engine, we have solved part of this problem even before iPhone was introduced. In order to harness wild variety of Macs and PCs with different GPUs Unity implemented mechanisms to determine capabilities of the graphics device and fallback to less demanding shaders at run-time.

You can learn more about SubShaders and Fallbacks here:

http://unity3d.com/support/documentation/Components/SL-Shader.html

Different graphic cards have different capabilities. This raises an eternal issue for game developers; you want your game to look great on the latest hardware, but don’t want it to be available only to those 3% of the population. This is where subshaders come in. Create one subshader that has all the fancy graphics effects you can dream of, then add more subshaders for older cards. These subshaders may implement the effect you want in a slower way, or they may choose not to implement some details

I’m really looking forward for Unity iPhone 1.1 being released so we can concentrate on adding OpenGL ES 2.0 support to Unity. Meanwhile you will be able to enjoy 8 texture combiners in a single pass available on the new iPhone 3G S devices.

We wrote a number of hand optimized assembly routines to speed up calculations on VFP coprocessor for Unity iPhone 1.1. For example skinning is now several times faster and significantly outperforms GPU! We’re going to continue this trend by harnessing NEON™ capabilities for iPhone 3G S.

One more thing I want to share with you – we have not seen the actual iPhone 3G S device yet. For better or worse, Apple have been really secretive. Right now we’re looking forward to get the devices from the first batch of publicly available ones. That should allow us to implement and test new features ASAP. Meanwhile we’re working close with Apple to verify existent content works fine on iPhone 3G S.

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)

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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.

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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.

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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