Well, the videos from Unite ‘09 ended up not coming out quite as soon as we had originally planned, but the good thing is that we’ve been able to improve the demo in the meantime. I’ve been spending some Fridays improving it from a pure tech demo to a small game with actual gameplay. Shoot the hovering orb repeatedly to make it break and go into a frenzy before finally exploding! Give it a go (click the image to go to the live demo):

Can you take down the Orb at the insane difficulty level?

Besides demonstrating animation techniques, the demo is also a complete game with gameplay, particles, physics, ragdolls, pause game handling, and more.

To learn more about how this demo was done, grab the 3rd Person Shooter example project and watch the video of the Character Animation Tips & Tricks presentation from Unite ‘09.

I personally think that the two PDFs that come with Unity are a great place to start. They are: 1 – GUI Essentials.pdf and 2 – Scripting Tutorial.pdf and they can be found in the Tutorial folder in your Unity installation folder on your hard drive.

Community member tonyd’s Newbie guide to Unity Javascript is a great introduction to programming for novice programmers.

Experience programmers new to Unity will definitely want to check out our MonoBehaviour scripting reference which is a one stop cheat sheet for the base class every script derives from.

We also provide some introductory video documentation but there have been some really high quality videos popping up on the internet that I wanted to showcase.

Jason Busby and Zach Parrish of 3D Buzz just released a series of 29 videos detailing many aspects of Unity game creation. This series is a C# remake of the UnityScript based Unity Jump Start series created by Casey Jones.

Infinite Ammo’s Alec Holowka of Paper Moon and Aquaria fame has recently been creating a series of Infinite Ammo Unity tutorials as well. I really like Alec’s way of explaining not only how to use Unity but best practices in game programming. The picture in picture effect is also nice and adds a lot more personality to the whole viewing experience.

Will Goldstone’s video tutorials have also been a mainstay in the community and were the foundation for his book. They do a great job of covering the ins and outs of the terrain tool and give a good overview of the particle editor and some simple gameplay examples.

Let’s start with a demo: (click it to start)

Please view the full post to see the Unity content.

You’re looking at the DressingRoomExample from the project. It shows how to use the system to make an avatar creator, where you can choose different types of clothing, accessories, etc.

This demo project serves two purposes:

• A drop in solution for people who want to add customizable characters to their games.
  It’s quite easy to just add your own characters, as long as you follow the naming conventions by the example characters included (feel free to use the included example characters as well!)

  If you’d like to get started with this, download this screencast (Quicktime, avi) giving you a headstart on how to use the system.

• A reference project that shows how to use AssetBundles. The project uses asset bundles extensively, and is a great example for people who are looking for a more real world AssetBundle project to look at for inspiration.

The project also contains a second example usage of the customizable character system. It’s an example of a solution to a problem virtual worlds often run into: A wizard with a magic red cape logs in, and runs towards you. But you don’t have the red cape downloaded yet.
The demo solves this problem by displaying a white particle cloud, indicating the presence of a character. When all the different assets that are required to properly display the character are downloaded, we spawn the character in the particle cloud, and make the particle cloud dissapear.

The customizable character system is written in C#, and can be used from JavaScript and C#.

Please feel free to use all assets and code in the demo for your own projects. We hope you like it.

Recently, some Unity customers who have been very anxious to get their iPhone game approved by Apple, have received a rejection notice because they use something that was no longer approved by the Apple rules.

We have been working hard on this issue as it stalls and affects our iPhone developer customers. We were able to correct the issue 2 days after we first heard about it and delivered that fix to those who had reported the problem. Many of them have been already resubmitted their application to Apple. The first Unity game to completely pass the App Store Submission Process is “Star Wars: Trench Run”.

We will be releasing this new version, Unity iPhone 1.5.1, publicly on our website sometime next week. In the meantime, if you have an urgent need or concern, please contact oleg@unity3d.com and request an iPhone build with this issue fixed.

Note that Unity games already on the app store are not affected by this.

For those who are interested here are the technical details:

What do those functions actually do?

_NSGetEnviron is used by the Mono runtime to provide an implementation of the .NET core API method: Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable(). On UNIX environment variables are often used to pass arguments to applications. Due to how the function is exposed, it does not let developers do any data collection.

exc_server is used by the Mono runtime to provide graceful NULL reference exception handling. This is useful for developers, when they dereference a null pointer, we can avoid a crash and instead throw an exception and continue the game.

While those functions are useful for debugging purposes, Apple now rejects Apps that use them.

In order for us to solve this problem we simply removed any calls to _NSGetEnviron and exc_server. Update Unity iPhone 1.5.1 was sent out to developers days ago. Most of them have already resubmitted their Apps to the AppStore with the functions removed. Unity iPhone 1.5.1 will go live this week. The first Unity game to completely pass the App Store Submission Process is “Star Wars: Trench Run”.

By now many folks are aware of the fact that Will Goldstone has written a book about Unity, it’s called Unity Game Development Essentials and it’s being published by Packt Publishing. Early on Will and his publisher graciously shared PDF copies with folks, including everyone on the Unity Community Forums. While it was extremely exciting to know that a book was in the works, then available in electronic form, I have to admit that the best moment of all came today when a brown box was delivered to my desk for me to open. I’m the guy that handles incoming mail and packages sent to the San Francisco office so it wasn’t unusual for me to have a “present” to open today. When I cracked open the box I found a nice surprise inside, the three copies of Will’s book I’d long ago ordered had finally arrived!

So for those that don’t know about it, consider this your heads up to check it out! It’s a book geared towards the beginner end of the spectrum and from what I’ve read so far (a fair chunk of the PDF already) he did an excellent job of laying things out for those of you just getting into Unity. If you’re interested give it a look on either the Packt Publishing site or over on Amazon.com:

Unity Game Development Essentials (Packt Publishing)
Unity Game Development Essentials (Amazon.com)

Kudos, and a huge thanks, to Will Goldstone for the effort, I know he put a lot of blood, sweat and tears into this book and it shows. Well done Will!

Unity makes game development accessible to a broad audience, but creating awesome games is not always enough in itself. Luckily, there’s lots of articles and blog posts about how to get games noticed. We have linked to some of the best in this blog post.

One important point raised in several of the articles is that building buzz and making sure your game gets noticed is something you should start doing long before your game is released. So if you’re thinking “Well before I think of spreading awareness I first need to actually make my game LOL”, well, then you’re probably mistaken.

Go on, read on!

How To Use And Abuse The Gaming Press And How The Gaming Press Wants To Use and Abuse You.
Kieron Gillen has written an excellent article on how to get your game in the gaming press – from the insider point of view of a gaming press journalist.

The secret is that we actually want to write about you. When someone has a phenomenal amount of work to do before the nineteen day clock ticks down to deadline, anyone able to present them something interesting to fill their pages saves them an amount of work. While games writers try to stay aware of what’s happening in the games scene, and will go after anything that attracts their attention, by going after the games press you hugely increase your chance for favourable coverage.

The Idiot’s Guide to Marketing Your Indie Game
Michael Rose, one of the editors at indiegames.com, has written the perhaps most straight article on how to market your indie game, with focus on how to get it featured in blogs and magazines.

Nitty gritty time it is. In this guide, I’ll be explaining exactly what it is you, the budding games developer, should be providing me, the eager games journalist, with.

Building Buzz for Indie Games
Paul Tayler has written an article on how to build buzz that discusses such things as building a following around your game, writing a good press release, doing maintenance and keeping momentum post-release, doing previews and release hype, and how to handle reviews. Some things in the article should be taken with a grain of salt, but there are a lot of good bits in there.

Marketing anything takes a lot of time and effort. Most small indies skew their efforts far too far towards production and away from marketing: this is one of the reasons why so few are a genuine commercial success, and why many high-quality games generate minimal revenue.

The Zero Budget Indie Marketing Guide
Rodain Joubert has written an article on marketing targeted at small indie teams. He writes about being visible in the indie games community, the importance of a nice presentation of your game in trailer videos and announcements, getting feedback from players, and about the importance of knowing the game media.

This guide is for anybody who has a nice game under their belt and wants to give it some more exposure. It doesn’t matter if you’re just a two-bit dev submitting simple concepts to some backwater forum. In fact, it’s probably better if you are: this article is geared towards you, and can help you make the most of something that would otherwise disappear into the murky undercity of the Internet.

Forums
An easy way to increase your exposure in the indie community is to participate in the various forums dedicated to indie game development.

Unity Forums
The Unity forums are of course the best place to discuss Unity game development specifically. The community is very friendly and helpful.

Indie Gamer Forums
The Indie Gamer Forums have forums for anything from announcements and portfolios to business, game design, and indie lifestyle. Also follow the blog.

TIGSource Forums
TIGForums have forums dedicated to GDC, TIGJams, announcements, the quirky TIGSource competitions, and more. Also follow the blog.

Don’t Forget us when You’ve Become Rich and Famous…
One last thing – for a long time, Unity became increasingly popular, largely without a marketing budget, dependent mostly on word of mouth and presence in the indie community, much like the techniques described above. Here at Unity Technologies, it always gives us a warm fuzzy feeling when people mention in announcements, press releases, interviews, or other public communications that they used Unity to make their game. Nobody is obligated to do this, it just makes us happy when people help spread awareness of Unity. In the end it also gives us even more resources (mentally and financially) to keep making Unity even better and provide top notch support.

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:

Apple reengineered Safari to run as a full 64-bit application. While this is a good thing, it has a pretty big impact on plugin developers like us. Even though plugins do not actually need to be 64-bit binaries themselves, since they are now running as separate processes, they need to communicate with Safari using new 64-bit capable APIs. Basically, the old Carbon-based NPAPI is being replaced with a Cocoa-based version, which requires a lot of restructuring of plugin code.

Unfortunately, this change sort of caught us by surprise – the APIs which are now required have just been publically released in Safari 4.0, and are now being made mandatory to use in Snow Leopard less than three months later. Which now means that we won’t be able to ship a working web plugin for 64-bit by it’s release date this friday. We are working on it as hard as we can, and we do have a working proof of concept of Unity web content displaying in 64-bit Safari. We aim to release an updated plugin in October.

Until then, there are two possibly ways to play Unity web content on Snow Leopard: One is to use Firefox, which still works as always. The other one is to set up Safari to run in 32-bit mode. To do that, click Safari in the Finder, select Get Info from the context menu, and click on Open in 32-bit mode.

When users open web pages with Unity content in 64-bit Safari, all they will see is a blank screen where the content should be. However, it is possible to detect this situation from JavaScript, so you can at least display a meaningful error message on your site. When the plugin fails to load, the GetPluginVersion() function is undefined. Here’s some sample code, showing how to use that to display an error message:


if (navigator.appVersion.indexOf("Safari") != -1
&& navigator.appVersion.indexOf("Mac OS X 10_6") != -1
&& document.getElementById("UnityEmbed").GetPluginVersion == undefined)
{
document.write('<br>You are running Safari in 64-bit mode, which is not yet supported by ')
document.write('the Unity web plugin.<br>');
document.write('To see the content, switch Safari to 32-bit mode, or use Firefox. <br>');
document.write('See <a href="http://blogs.unity3d.com/?p=1358">this blog post</a>');
document.write(' for more information. <br>');
}


If you are using our default html template, you can just add this code after the line document.write(”);.

We apologize for any inconveniences this causes, and, as always, we will try to resolve the issue ASAP. Looking forward, though, moving to these new APIs will make the Unity web experience a better one, as this allows us to do more robust input handling, and proper layering of Unity content with other parts of your web site.

Oh, and before anyone asks: The Unity editor as well as standalone games made with Unity are unaffected by this issue.

First a tech demo video to set the context:

As can be seen, the looking behavior works regardless of which animations are playing. (One problem though is that when the two hands are holding the gun together, they are not always properly coordinated, but that’s a problem to solve another time!)

Use Cases
When two characters in a game are talking together (one of which might be a player avatar) they can look at each other to make the interaction look more sincere.

When the avatar comes near a health pack, a weapon that can be picked up, or another important item, he could look at that item. Besides looking natural, this can also make the player more attentive to the item if she hadn’t noticed it herself.

When there’s nothing of particular interest nearby, simply making the character look around at different random points in space looks much more natural than just looking straight ahead. It can also express mood – if the character looks around only at points directly in front, he is probably pretty focused, while if he looks around to the sides and behind him too, he is probably more exploratory or searching around.

Head Look Controller
In between the main things we’re working one here at Unity, we sometimes get to do some projects on the side. In order to make it simple to make a character look at any point in space without requiring extra animations, I have made a head look controller script component as such a side project:

Head Look Controller example project

Head Look Controller (script only) at Unify Community Wiki

This script can be used to make a character look towards a specified point in space, smoothly turning towards it with for example the eyes, head, upper body, or whatever is specified. Multiple ranges of bones can be specified, each with different settings for responsiveness, angle constraints etc.

In the video above the controller on the character is set up with one range of bones for the spine and one for the neck and head. Unfortunately the eyes of that character can’t turn, but that could be set up as well with an appropriately rigged character.

Segments should always be specified with the bones/transforms closest to the root specified first and the ones deeper in the skeleton specified after that.

Here’s the settings I used in for the component:

I have set the Threshold Angle Difference for the spine to 30, since the spine shouldn’t turn if the target angle (the angle between the direction towards the target and the direction straight ahead) is less than 30 degrees. The Bending Multiplier control how much the segment bends or turns compared to how big the target angle is. The segment will attempt to be no more than Max Angle Difference away from the target angle, though it won’t bend any further once it reaches the Max Bending Angle.

I set the responsiveness of the head segment higher than that of the upper body, since people tend to turn the head quicker. If segments had been specified for the eyes as well, they should have had an even higher responsiveness.

I specified the left and right arm under Non Affected Joints, so that the arms keep keep pointing in the original direction despite the bending and turning of the upper body. By setting the Effect to 0.3 I let them be affected a little bit though.

The Head Look Vector and Head Up Vector are just used for reference to know the default alignment of the head. Per default they are set to forward (0,0,1) and up (0,1,0) respectively.

The Target point that the character should look at is specified through scripting.

“Pro Tips!”
I said above that a character could look around at random points when there’s nothing else to look at. Actually, looking around at a few different points looks more natural in any case. Even when talking to a person or when having found an important object, people rarely tend to stare incessantly at the same point. Introduce more variation by looking at the main point of interest most of the time, but look away at some random points in space now and then.

And if your character supports it, don’t forget to blink once in a while! That is super-easy to do, either with a procedural script or with a traditional animation that only affects the eye-lids and which plays all the time at a higher layer than the other animations. Blinking a bit can really help make a character look less artificial, so if the eyes of a character are ever seen in your game, it’s worth spending the small amount of time it takes to implement.

Go on! Make those characters more believable!

The Locomotion System is all about making walking and running in games look better and more believable without requiring dozens of animations. The system automatically blends your keyframed or motion-captured walk and run cycles and then adjusts the movements of the bones in the legs to ensure that the feet step correctly on the ground. The Locomotion System is available for free when used in a Unity game.

Video Introduction

The best way to understand what the Locomotion System is all about is by watching a short introduction to it:

The Locomotion System was also presented at last year’s Unite conference:

Besides the Unite conference presentation, the Locomotion System was also presented at GDC 2009 in a fully packed session.

Recently it has been used in the online game Robin Hood Showdown accompanying BBC’s popular television series. The system allowed the characters in the game to run in arbitrary directions while aiming against the player, while still keeping the number of used animations down, thus helping keeping the web-player size small.

Like Unity itself, the Locomotion System has been designed to be highly flexible, while still being painless to use:

Automatic Adjustment to Uneven Terrain
You want your character to walk on hills, on stairs, over rocks and debris and other small obstacles? No problem. Need your character to face in one direction (let’s say, aiming at something) while walking in another arbitrary direction? Done; no extra work involved. The Locomotion System can automatically adjust animations made for a specific speed and direction on a plain surface to any speed, direction, and curvature, on any surface, including arbitrary steps and slopes.

Full Control of Style
Animators are experts in creating motions with specific styles and personalities. The Locomotion System uses keyframed or motion-captured animations as input and only adjusts them minimally to move the feet correctly in a dynamic and detailed environment.

Full Control of Behavior
Move your character around by any means you desire, be it a CharacterController, a RigidBody, or your own custom movement logic. The Locomotion System simply observes the position, alignment, velocity and rotational velocity of your character and deduces everything from that, along with some raycasts onto the ground. This means the system can be used equally well for player avatars and for AI characters; for third person control, point-and-click control, scripted movement paths, or whatever control scheme you need.

Use With Any Legged Character
The Locomotion System is not just for animating humans. It can be used for just about any character with legs, and indeed the project folder comes with a human, a heron, and a coyote. As can be seen in the videos above the system has also been tested with a bear and a wolf. Give me a holler if you try out the Locomotion System with an animated spider. I didn’t have a spider model myself for testing, but I sure want to see it in action! (Actually, give me a holler no matter what you use the Locomotion System for – I’m interested in seeing where people take it.)

Simple Automagic Setup
If you think that all this advanced tech is complicated or cumbersome to use, you’d be wrong! The Locomotion System features a fully automated motion analyzer that analyzes all the provided animations and figures out the velocity of each and well as the times that the feet lift off the ground and land, and lots of other data that it uses at runtime. All it needs from you is a little help with pointing out which bones constitutes the different legs, and a few other simple details. It can all be specified using drag-and-drop and typing in a few values. No scripting required!

Indie Budget Compatible
Big game studios these days are able to create quite realistic walking and running on uneven terrain, but it typically requires hundreds of animations to pull it off. The Locomotion System takes a different approach and attempt to do much with little. Even with just an idle animation and one walk cycle, you still get walking on any uneven terrain and in arbitrary directions, including turning. You can supply more animations too, if you want, and then the produced motion will look even better. One user used walking and running in 8 directions each, and it looked great. So supply as few or as many animations as you like, and the Locomotion System will take what you have and make the best of it. How’s that for Indie friendly? Oh, and did I mention that the Locomotion System itself is completely free to use in Unity games?

Try For Youreself!
You can take the Locomotion System for a spin yourself, right here! Watch the automatic demo mode or take control yourself. There’s a bunch of visualization options too! Just click the image to load the web-player.

Please view the full post to see the Unity content.

Press the Auto-Demo “Off” button to take control yourself. Move the character with the keyboard arrow keys. Optionally, the facing direction can be controlled with the W, A, S, D keys. Hold down shift to walk instead of run. Use + and – keys to speed up or slow down time.

Alternatively, with a game pad, such as an XBox 360 controller, the direction and speed can be controlled precisely with ease, while independently controlling facing direction with the secondary stick.

Download the Locomotion System yourself and see if it might add some extra life to your animated characters!