Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category

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…

Semitransparent GUI is all the rage these days. This is usually not a good idea. Here, I’ll go into some of the details why transparency (mostly) sucks. Transparency creates visual noise – our eyes are very good at edge detection, and having transparent stuff increases the number of edges that we have to process. Also,…

One of our customers found an interesting bug the other day: embedding Unity Web Player into a web page makes some javascript animation libraries not work correctly. For example, script.aculo.us or Dojo Toolkit would stop doing some of their tasks. But only on Windows, and only on some browsers (Firefox and Safari). Wait a moment……

A request I’ve gotten from quite a few new users is to have some indicator axes in the Scene View showing you what is up and what is down. There is a reason why they are not there, and it ties into the core of my Job here at UT: GUI design. I’ve wanted to…

We’ve got a feature we want to do — it’s something we call “intermediate mode render calls”. The idea is that some script could say: Draw( position, rotation, mesh, material ); And that would make the mesh appear with the given material at the given position on the screen, and it would just work with…