Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category

One of the unwritten commitments we make to our customers is that our webplayer will play back their content identically in all versions we publish.  We constantly tweak and improve the webplayer. For example webplayer 2.6 added threaded background loading and improved animation culling. Each change that we make intending to improve the webplayer has…

…I took a plane to Copenhagen. Well ok, it all started a bit before:

A while ago, I was talking to a customer who was trying to figure out how to best make a customizable character in their game. After explaining how I’d do it, I figured it would make good material for a more extensive demo project. Bas Smit (who wrote it) and myself just gave a presentation…

During the summer, I’ve had the pleasure to mentor Michał Mandrysz, as he created an External Lightmapping Tool for Unity, as part of Unity’s Summer Of Code. As of today, you can download the tool from the resources section of our website. What is it? A tool that lets you use 3d Studio Max to…

Here we are again, putting the final touches on the latest and greatest release of Unity — version 2.6. The team is already amazed at how many new games are being made today! They’re being rolled out so quickly that we can’t always keep up. So to help us make sure that everything in the…

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…

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….

This blog post is written by Michał Mandrysz who is working on support for External Lightmapping in Unity. The project is one of four selected projects that were selected for the Unity Summer of Code. What’s lightmapping? If you’re not familiar with the terms “baking” and “lightmapping” then let me introduce them to you a…

We have a ton of people at Unity who have been or are involved in the demoscene. Assembly is one of the largest demoscene parties, and this year we were sponsoring the event, sent in some folks there and had a couple of seminar presentations. Our presentations were not directly Unity related, but still might…

The Demo Team is putting the finishing touches on the iPhone Standard Assets that will go out with the Unity iPhone 1.1. release. There are plenty of useful assets that you’ll get: 1. Additive-Projector (can be used to fake spotlights) 2. Blob-Shadow 3. iPhone-specific shaders 4. Default Skybox asset 5. Joystick and TouchPad scripts 6….

Just making characters in your game look around can bring them much more to life as well as express important information to the user. Here we’ll discuss a few use cases and present a script that makes it simple to implement in your game. First a tech demo video to set the context:

The Locomotion System for Unity has previously been briefly mentioned on this blog, but this post will go more in depth with what exactly it can do to bring more life to your animated characters. The Locomotion System is all about making walking and running in games look better and more believable without requiring dozens…

Everyone knows the internet is made up of a series of tubes.  Since Unity has such a strong internet component in the webplayer, nothing but the fastest of all tubes are acceptable to deliver Unity webplayers to you and your players. To harness the power of these tubes, Unity Tech has begun working with a…

With Unity 2.5.1 quickly wrapping up development, the last item on our to-do list is verifying webplayer compatibility.  As a team we do systematic testing on a broad range of weplayers.  However, we really want 200% confidence instead of a measly 100%.  So we’re asking for a little help — from you! If you want…

If you’re using compressed audio in your iPhone game, then you should grab Unity iPhone 1.0.3. It is a hot fix release with a single purpose – to improve performance of a compressed audio playback under the iPhone OS 3.0. Now some technical bits. Previously we have been using the AmbientSound as an audio session category. The AmbientSound category…

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…

Unity roadmap blog post said: Currently Unity mixes the fixed function pipeline for vertex lit objects and vertex shaders for pixel lit lights. On Direct3D this creates some rendering artifacts on very close or self intersecting surfaces. We want to end this by implementing a full fixed function emulator in vertex shaders. You won’t have…

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?

Assuring quality is a tricky task, and involves a lot of people — testers, developers, and even you the users! There are thousands of you and only a few of us, so today I want to talk to you about this: If you see this Bug Reporter appear, odds are that you’ve just experienced a…

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…

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…

Whooosh! First release candidate of Unity iPhone 1.0.2 just went out to our beta testers. It’s a good time now to overview our planned releases and directions we will be taking in the near future. Unity iPhone 1.0.2. Based on custom builds we’ve been sending to devs in need, this release will address engine memory…

With 2.5 out the door, I finally got some time to work on new features. I love that part – to me new features are so nice – the first couple of weeks always feels like you’re the world’s fastest coder (after that, reality sets in and you actually have to make it work in…

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…

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…

Almost a month ago I said we’re preparing reports of Unity Web Player hardware statistics. Well, here they are: unity3d.com/webplayer/hwstats Operating system versions, desktop resolutions, graphics driver versions, shader models, memory sizes and some more. All broken down by quarter so some sort of “trends” can be seen (sure, changes can be caused by general…

Pretty much everyone knows Valve’s hardware survey – it’s a very valuable resource that shows what hardware the typical “hardcore PC gamer” has (that is, gamers that play Valve’s games). However, the “casual gamer”, which is what Unity games are mostly targeted at, probably has slightly different hardware. “Slightly” being a very relative term of…

People have been asking: why built-in shadows don’t work on Unity’s terrain? (here, here, …) Yes, right now (Unity 2.0.2) they don’t. Why – because we didn’t have time to make them work yet. Both terrain and built-in shadows are new features in Unity 2.0, and those two don’t happen to just work together. Here’s…

Just had this chat conversation: & 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…

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…