1. Ravensword: The Fallen King -- arguably the best RPG game on iPhone so far!




2. Star Wars Trench Run -- official Star Wars title.
3. Skee Ball -- successor to 10 Cups 7 Balls
4. Little Runner -- now with Doodle Jump Easter Egg!
5. Scarecrow -- 2nd App Store hit from Ezone.com guys.

… and yeah, Ravensword is really amazing!

We want to try one more thing… On Friday work on something cool.

I think there are a lot of low hanging fruits in Unity where somebody with drive can just do something cool that pushes us forward. Things that are hard to put in words, but just make sense when you see it done.

So every Friday, developers can work on something cool, something they have been craving to do for a long time. A feature, a demo, a tutorial, a video tutorial, docs, cleaning the toilet, something on the website. Whatever. Be creative, push the envelope.

In other words, we started to work on “anything cool” on Fridays. This was dubbed as FAFF (Fridays Are For Fun).

Boy, what a positive effect on team morale that was!

It also resulted in some FAFF work being polished & promoted into official releases already. Things like:

• Animation Events in Unity 2.6 animation editor
• Display realtime brush preview in terrain editing tools
• Timeline Charts for Unity 2.6 profiler
• Custom Icons for standalone game builds
• Head Look Controller sample project
• Precise raycast-based snapping in Unity 2.6

…all started out as Friday projects!

Developers have experimented with lots of other stuff on Fridays. Some of them were just playing around or learning Unity better. Some Fridays were for evaluating various middleware packages, implementing some features or doing some fancy R&D. Some of the projects were an interesting kind of “fun”. Like improving internal build farm setup, a system for better tracking of crash reports, improving the website, or other similar things that often involve Perl scripts. Well, eveyone has his own kind of fun

So yeah. On Fridays, we just ignore the schedule and work on something cool. Something that pushes our own tech – something that we can’t defend from a business standpoint but that’s just too great to not get done. If it rocks, we’ll ship it. Because, at the end of the day – who knows where the next killer idea will come from.

What is it?
A tool that lets you use 3d Studio Max to make great looking lighting for your game.

I’ve been making lightmaps for ages already, why would I care?
Because with this tool, you can actually layout your scenes in Unity. Previously if you wanted to use lightmaps, you’d usually layout your scenes in 3d Studio Max or Maya or some other tool, and would have had a hard time moving things around in Unity later on.

Do you have some examples for this?
Take a look at this video tutorial from Michał, going over the example project included with the tool.

Great. Do I need to prepare my assets in any way to make this work?
You need to provide lightmap texturecoordinates for all meshes that you want to have lightmapped. However each object can have its own seperate lightmap sheet. The tool will take all lightmap sheets from all specified objects in the scene, put them all into one mega lightmap sheet, export your scene to fbx, have Max import the fbx, have Max generate a lightmap, and then that lightmap gets picked up by Unity automatically.

Take a look at this more detailed screencast, which goes trough this process, and shows how to go from an empty project to a lightmapped environment.

But I don’t use max! I use …..
There’s nothing in the tool that makes the technique inherently limited to 3d Studio Max. However the tool does provide some nice extensions to Max that make the lighting baking a one click process. With a bit of effort, one could take this project, and make it work for other authoring tools.

I still have some other question
Try out the new answers.unity3d.com and get it answered!

Many thanks and congratulations from the Unity team go out to Michał for being part of the Summer of Code program. You can find more indepth info on the tool on Michal’s website.

Some of our users have expressed concern that the higher volume of posts will make the forums less valuable. Specifically, they are concerned about the growing stream of new users who are thirsty for basic Unity knowledge and ask basic questions that have maybe been asked and answered many times before.

We understand the concern, and we want to support a more efficient way of asking questions and getting answers. This is why we have launched UnityAnswers.

UnityAnswers is our new community site for asking questions and getting answers about Unity. To quote the UnityAnswers FAQ:

UnityAnswers is a place for asking questions and finding answers – all about Unity! UnityAnswers co-exist with the Unity Forums, but they have different functions:

• UnityAnswers is a place for questions that can be answered! Avoid asking questions here that are subjective, argumentative, or require extended discussion.
• Unity Forums is a place for discussions, opinions, showing off your work, getting feedback, and general community chatter.

Why is UnityAnswers better than the forums for getting answers to questions?

Because we’ve seen it work on Stack Overflow.

It allows for people to vote on answers, making the best ones float to the top. You can vote up good questions and helpful answers so they float to the top, while off-topic questions and less helpful answers are listed lower. No more golden tips buried on page 5 of a thread! The person who asks a question can also mark a specific answer as the accepted answer.

It’s easier to find existing questions and answers. The search function is actually good. A great feature is that when you want to post a new question, you will be shown a list of possibly related existing questions as soon as you start typing your question title. Maybe the question has already been asked before and you can just go see that one. If an existing question is the same as you were having, be sure to vote it up! If it has an answer that is also helpful to you, vote that answer up as well.

People who are more trusted by the community get more power! Besides making the best questions and answers float up, the voting system also grants reputation points to you whenever other people vote up your questions or answers. Reputation you can interpret as “how much does the community trust you”. The more reputation points you get, the more things you are allowed to do. (See the FAQ for details.) At the high end of this reputation spectrum there is little difference between users with high reputation and moderators. That is very much intentional. We don’t run UnityAnswers. The community does.

What does this mean for the Unity Forums?

The Unity Forums will co-exist with UnityAnswers. The forums are great for discussions and chat, so we’ll keep them all. Some of the forums will be completely unaffected, such as Announcements, Collaboration, Gossip, and Showcase.

However, for some of the forums, we hope that the use pattern will change. The forums Unity Support, Scripting, UnityGUI, Multiplayer Networking, iPhone Development, ShaderLab, and External Tools are primarily about questions and answers, so we hope that a large chunk of the volume in those will move to UnityAnswers instead.

Here’s what you can do to help:

Use UnityAnswers! If you have questions, ask them there instead of on the forums. If you don’t have questions, you can still help the community by browsing UnityAnswers regularly and see if there are any questions you can answer (which will also earn you reputation).

Direct others to UnityAnswers! If you see a question in the forum and you know the answer, rather than answering the question directly in the forum, try to answer it at UnityAnswers and link to there.

• If a similar question already exists at UnityAnswers, just link to that. (The search works nicely!) If it’s already answered, great! You don’t have to. If not, you can post your answer there.
• Otherwise you can just create the question there – you can even copy the question from the forum directly. After that, you can answer the question yourself, which is perfectly ok.

We know this is a bit more work short-term, but think of the long-term benefits! Your answer will be much easier to find at UnityAnswers than in the forums. It won’t be buried and never found again after a few months.

UnityAnswers is still very new and we’re in the process of getting properly used to it, but we already like it quite a bit and we hope you will too! To login, you can use any OpenID provider, or use your forum account. On the login page, just click on the Unity logo.

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”.

This is just the latest picture in what has become a company tradition: To take a group photo whenever enough of us are gathered at the same place.

This photo was taken little more than half a year earlier at GDC in San Francisco:

And again half a year before that at Unite 2008 in Copenhagen:

This one was taken two years ago at Unite 2007 (although we cheated and included Unity Studios in the lineup as well.)

And finally around year 2005, just around the release of Unity 1.0, we had this photo taken:

As you can see, our little company has been growing almost constantly. And it still is. Only in the two weeks since we returned from Unite 2009, we have added 3 employees to the staff list!! Do you think there’s room for your face in next year’s group photo? Take a look at our jobs page and see which positions we have open.

Earlier this week iLounge released their 2010 iPod + iPhone Buyer’s Guide and a number of Unity titles are featured in their top games list! For starters you can check it all out at the following URL:

iLounge’s 2010 iPod + iPhone Buyer’s Guide

It’s a rather large (20+MB) download as they provide a ton of material, including their suggestions for top games and applications to purchase if you own an iPod touch or iPhone. But as noted above the exciting point for us is the fact that a number of Unity-authored games are listed in their Top 100 Games of 2009! So to help promote those games and offer them some extra kudos I’ll preempt the download above and list them here in the order they appear in the guide:

Downhill Bowling from Game Resort LLC (page 22)
Downhill Bowling Lite (free)
Downhill Bowling ($2.99)

Vans SK8: Pool Service from Fuel Games (page 23)
Vans SK8: Pool Service Lite (free)
Vans SK8: Pool Service ($2.99)

Battle Bears from SkyVu Pictures (page 27)
Battle Bears Free (free)
Battle Bears ($0.99)

Inkvaders from Chillingo (page 27)
Inkvaders Lite (free)
Inkvaders ($1.99)

10 Balls 7 Cups from Graveck (page 31)
10 Balls 7 Cups ($0.99)

Note: 10 Balls 7 Cups has been rereleased on the AppStore under the name Skee-Ball as well!

Volcano Planet by Jelly Biscuits (page 35)
Volcano Planet Lite (free)
Volcano Planet ($0.99)

A huge kudos to all the developers behind the games above, clearly it’s a job well done and you deserve some recognition for your efforts!

Best Overall
The best overall category is the one in which we recognize the true best-of-breed content for the year and it was a tough task to say the least. There were many titles that came close to being finalists, but ultimately only a few made that final run at the title.

Winner: Max & the Magic Marker, developed by Press Play

Runner Up: Lego Star Wars: Quest for R2-D2, developed by Three Melons

Finalist: Paper Moon, developed by Infinite Ammo
Finalist: Monospace, developed by Nonverbal
Finalist: EnerCities, developed by Paladin Studios

Best iPhone Game
Given the popularity of iPhone/iPod touch games in general, and of course the way in which Unity iPhone has become the dominant middle-ware tool of choice, we felt it truly necessary to recognize the best iPhone games on their own.

Winner: Monospace, developed by Nonverbal

Runner Up: Samurai: Way of the Warrior, developed by Mad Finger Games

Finalist: Snake Galaxy (now being published as Paris Galaxy), developed by DigDog
Finalist: Battle Bears, developed by SkyVu Pictures & Blackish
Finalist: Touch KO, developed by Adam and Matt Mechtley

Best Visual Design
One of the exciting things about a tool like Unity is that it lets you experiment in ways you might not be able to with other tools. The rapid iterative abilities and easy work flow make experimentation easy, and that leads to some incredibly beautiful and unique visuals.

Winner: Doppelscope, developed by Tobias Baumann

Runner Up: Blush, developed by Flashbang Studios

Finalist: Choma, developed by Knife Media
Finalist: Max & the Magic Marker, developed by Press Play
Finalist: Paper Moon, developed by Infinite Ammo

Best Technical Achievement
To go along with rewarding the best visual effort we wanted to recognize those titles that displayed solid technical achievement as there are so many folks out there pushing the technical boundaries with Unity. This category was extra tough as we all have our pet areas of interest with our technology, audio, shading/graphics, game play mechanic and more.

Winner: Blush, developed by Flashbang Studios

Runner Up: Max & the Magic Marker, developed by Press Play

Finalist: Time Donkey, developed by Flashbang Studios
Finalist: Touch KO, developed by Adam and Matt Mechtley
Finalist: Super Volei Brasil 2, developed by Aquiris

Closing Thoughts
As I noted up top there were 129 separate entries at the beta stage and that’s an awesome turn out! I know that not all of you were able to get a final build submitted and certainly not all of you made it into the final judging stage (involved roughly 30 entries), and even fewer of you made it into the top-5 finalist categories. But through it all the hard work and effort the Unity community puts forth to make killer content is a critical component in driving our technology forward. Content is king y’all, and without you I don’t know where our tech would be. So thanks to everyone that participated in this year’s Unity Awards and a huge round of applause and hefty kudos to the finalists, and especially the winners. Rock on!

Wow, Unite 2009 has come to a close and once again it was an awesome/incredible/crazy/you-name-it week! Now that I’ve had a day or so to rest and recuperate a bit I figured I’d take a few minutes and jot down some notes and comments about last week’s event. Read on for my thoughts and post up some comments if you have any questions.

Content is King
We all know the phrase “content is king” when thinking about web technologies like ours*, but I think that also applies to conferences as well. The truth is that without high-quality sessions that offer attendees something valuable, our conference wouldn’t be worth much. The good thing is that I think we offered some incredible sessions this week and that feeling was backed-up by the in-person feedback I received on site. Many attendees indicated to me that they felt that each day offered them material they found interesting and more importantly useful. So for that I have to thank the crew internally at Unity Tech as we had many of us up on stage delivering presentations or assisting attendees during hands-on lab. Additionally I have to thank the awesome 3rd party speakers that showed up to deliver presentations as well, they volunteered their valuable time to help others learn more about Unity and that’s a generous offer to say the least. So, content is king even at conferences and all signs seem to indicate that was the case this year once again.

*If you don’t then know this, it’s an indication that for tech companies like us having great content in production is critical. We can have the greatest tech available but if nobody is using it to make cool stuff then who’s really going to know about it or care? So, “content is king”!

Some Incredible Numbers
This past week offered up some incredible numbers that show how much this conference has grown. Just two years ago we held our first conference, Unite 2007, in San Francisco and were excited that we had something like 80 people in attendance and we offered 11 presentations. Then a year later we held the conference again, Unite 2008 was in Copenhagen and it grew even larger attracting roughly 170 people who were there to take in a total of 15 presentations. So this year we held the conference for the third time, again back in San Francisco and the attendance growth continued once again as we had over 350 people in town to attend 21 presentations and 3 classes, this time over four days (compared to prior years being 3-day events). So we’ve gone from 80 to 170 to 350+, and I say 350+ as we had all 437 seats in the Cowell Theater full for the keynote, but many of those were press/media/guests there for that presentation only, we had 350+ there regularly despite a much higher peak number. Beyond that we offered more hands-on lab, we had a bunch more Unity Awards entries (a separate blog post on that is coming!) and we had a significantly larger Unity Tech employee contingent on site as almost all of our 50+ employees were on site. Simply incredible…

Our Community is Awesome
Once again I have to say that the Unity Community rocks! Not only did members of the community step up and deliver presentations, but a bunch more were simply there in attendance welcoming all the community newcomers that were getting introduced and they were all spending time networking, talking about Unity and sharing what they know. We spent lots of time socializing at the Pre-Unite Monday Night User Meeting, the Wednesday night Unity User Group “Drink & Shoot” Party thrown by the folks at dimeRocker and then once again at the official conference party Thursday night. I spent a ton of time each day at the show talking with forum regulars and community newbies, with lots of Flash users looking to make the jump on up to folks that have been using Unity since before I arrived on the scene. So again this past week showed just how awesome of a community we have and so I thank everyone of you (those that could attend as well as those that could not), y’all truly help make Unity and our Unite conferences something special.

What’s Next?
First up is a bit of rest, then come Monday morning we’ll be back at it as there’s a lot to do. First up will be some website updates to both the Unite pages as well as some information about this year’s Unity Awards finalists and winners. Then we’ll work with the awesome guys from ShiftControl to get the session videos they helped record prepared and posted online in a much faster manner than years prior. Then after that we’ll start looking forward to next year’s event, where it might be held and how many people we might think will attend. Given the progression we’ve seen it could be even crazier next year and without a doubt that’s exciting beyond belief, I can only imagine what it’s going to be like.

One Last Reminder, Thanks To…
The incredible crew from Melons Catering who delivered top-notch food each and every day. The crew at the Fort Mason Center that helped us put on a great show. Everyone at Unity Technologies for an awesome week of hard work, I know we put y’all through your paces so thanks for stepping up! To each and every 3rd party presenter, I know you put in your own time to prepare and deliver those, it’s appreciated. To ShiftControl who came on-site to handle the session recording, putting in some seriously long hours working under lots of stress with nary a sign of cracking. And finally, one last thanks to everyone that was there in attendance, conferences like this take a massive amount of work, induce mountains of stress and likely age us prematurely, but knowing that y’all enjoyed the week and that you learned a lot along the way makes it all worth it.

See you next year!

First we start with all the people crowded at the hall of the conference room:

Also some of the Unity guys were waiting for the big event!

Then we were able to get into the room, everyone was very excited!

Finally the keynote started! Big news about Unity 2.6 and Unity indie becoming free!

Our special guest from EA finished the keynote.

After the keynote Joachim, Lucas and Joe Robins showed us new things in 2.6 (the profiler and the new animation system).

Then after the “new things in Unity 2.6″ talk, we got our lunch, and some people came to our open mic and showed off their projects.

After that there were more talks, but the battery of my camera died

Stay tuned for tomorrow’s photos!