Its that time of year again!

It seems like a lifetime ago that I was attending my very first Global Game Jam back in early 2009.

I doubt I could ever have imagined that in the subsequent years I would be working for the company who’s tools I was using for the 48 hour caffeine sustained chaos.

So its with great joy that I’m happy to announce how we are supporting the Jam this year.

First and foremost we are issuing Unity Pro trials to ALL participants attending the jam. Which include iOS, Android and Asset Server. For more information please contact your local venue organizers who in turn, should be receiving information on how to get access to the trial from the global organizers.

In addition to that we are also supporting a small number of venues around the globe directly. These sponsorships will help keep you guys ticking over with food, drink, electricity, rental of space and all of the other costs included in setting up such a tremendous event.

Before I go I’d just like to wish everyone attending (or those still considering attending) the very best of luck. I’m a huge fan of Game Jams myself so I can’t wait to see what you guys come up with! (and I’m totally jealous that I won’t be able to participate this year)

The recently released Unity Developer Preview is jam-packed with new features. Among the most exciting of these features are previews of two new export options for publishing to the web: Google Native Client and Flash.

In addition to leveraging users’ already-installed software to get them into your games even faster, these platforms will allow Unity developers to perform for a previously unreachable audience: Linux users!

Wait, what?

Thanks to the cross-platform nature of Google’s Native Client toolkit, Unity web players built using the Enable NaCl Support option will just work for Chrome users, regardless of whether they’re using Chrome on Linux, Windows, or Mac OSX. This makes the Chrome Web Store one of the first distribution channels to provide high-quality 3D games to all three major desktop platforms.

In addition, players making use of Unity’s new Flash export feature will also run in any Stage 3D-enabled browser, regardless of operating system. Linux users will take a moderate performance hit here, however, as Adobe has delayed Linux support for GPU-accelerated rasterization in Stage 3D. Nevertheless, an out-of-the-box Flash build of the Angry Bots demo looked great and ran smoothly on my Ubuntu workstation, at the cost of somewhat higher CPU usage.

We’re excited about these publishing options because they represent Unity’s first official support for Linux, an oft-requested feature.

How many people are we talking about?

Linux usage is notoriously difficult to track, since there’s no single point where cash gets exchanged for code, and is generally underreported. However, we do have a few relevant data points.

w3schools, a comprehensive online web development reference, keeps comprehensive statistics about their visitors’ operating system usage, as reported by browsers. In 2011, reported Linux usage has held steady between 5 and 6% (for comparison, reported MacOS usage is between 7 and 9%). Additionally, w3schools has been gathering these statistics for years, so it’s possible to see a general growth trend for Linux since it started with around 2% reported usage in 2003. Some have suggested that w3schools’s content biases its userbase toward more technical users who could be more likely than a random sampling of the general public to have adopted Linux, but there are clearly non-technical roads that lead directly to w3schools.

What does this mean for my game?

The Humble Indie Bundle, a series of pay-what-you-choose, independent game bundles that supports Linux, OSX, and Windows, reports that 20 to 35% (based on highly scientific pie chart estimation ) of each bundle’s total revenue originates from Linux users. In addition, Linux users choose to pay an average of 100%+ more than Windows users, and about 50% more than OSX users. (Current statistics for HIB4 show an average payment of $10.29 for Linux, $7.42 for OSX, and $4.57 for Windows.) Other data points include 2D Boy, who reported that 17% of the sales in their pay-what-you-choose campaign for World of Goo came from Linux users, compared to 18% on OSX, with Linux users again choosing to pay substantially more than users on other platforms. Frictional Games reported in 2010 that 12% of sales for their Penumbra series were attributable to Linux users.

So, this means that you can realistically gain 12-35% revenue potential just by clicking the Enable NaCl Support checkbox before building your webplayer.

Show me the goods!

The Angry Bots demo has been on the Chrome Web Store for some time now – go check it out! Google also featured several Unity games (4 of the 7 games featured were built with Unity) in its recent Chrome Web Store trailer: Cordy, Pirates of New Horizons, Sleepy Jack, and Running Fred.

The Chrome Web Store is the first link every Chrome user sees when opening a new tab, so get your awesome games up there where 33.4% of all Internet users can’t miss them!

Union is working with LG to bring games to their impressive 2012 line of smart TVs. These aren’t run-of-the-mill TVs—LG’s Magic Remote supports motion control for games, a built-in camera enables Kinect-like gesture control for select titles, and stereo 3D is supported right out of the box.

Frisbee Forever LG smart TV demo at CES 2012

And then there’s the processing power. Madfinger’s jaw-dropping shooter Shadowgun runs at a smooth 30 frames per second at 720p. Frisbee Forever, the multi-million selling hit iOS game from Kiloo Games, (which is also available for Nokia’s N9 handset) soars on LG smart TV with motion control. Both were demoed in LG’s booth and received quite the response from CES attendees. These two great games are just the beginning: more Union games will debut on LG smart TV this spring.

As with the other platforms with which Union works—BlackBerry PlayBook, Roku, and Nokia MeeGo N9—we currently don’t have plans to support LG smart TV deployment from Unity. Instead, Unity-authored games for LG smart TV will be released through Union.

If you’re keen to learn more about Union and the work we’re doing with games for LG smart TV or want to submit a game to Union, contact us.

With a huge feature set to show off, and new export targets such as the much talked about Flash and Google Native Client support, this developer preview is something of an early christmas gift we hope you’ll get a kick out of playing with. As if the carrot of previewing the features of 3.5 wasn’t enough, we are also running a contest for those of you interested in deploying Unity content to Flash, which could land you the awesome prize of $20,000 dollars.

Keep in mind that the preview of the Flash export support is just that – a preview, but we felt that we had hit a milestone that meant the feature was stable enough to let you guys get hands on and help us put it through its paces, as we’re sure you will! There are some limitations of our existing Unity feature set however, and you can jump onto the beta preview page and read the FAQ for more information, something we’ll be updating as time progresses so that you keep abreast of the latest information.

We have created a new section of the forum to help you discuss and organize your thoughts on any issues arising from the developer preview, so why not join in the debate now as you give Unity 3.5 a spin for yourself?

http://forum.unity3d.com/forums/33-Developer-Preview

Green Stash Mesh Plants

As graphic cards, game engines and mobile platform capabilities evolve, so must natural detail. That’s why we’re especially thrilled about 3DAttack’s mesh plant package, Green Stash Mesh Plants, now on the Asset Store. With 3-4 level of detail meshes, the highest levels of detail are entirely mesh: not a transparent texture on a quad among them. While the lower poly LODs have conventional quad leaves, the highest versions are glorious mesh reproductions of existing species of appealing plant life. With Green Stash, 3DAttack sets a new standard for years to come.

See for yourself!

GeoPainter

If you’re working on a terrain with Unity Terrain’s detail mesh feature, it’s not at all difficult to quickly populate a terrain environment with Green Stash plants and other detail meshes. But imagine you are working on complex mesh surfaces too.. like huge mesh boulders, mesas, middle-earth style rooftops, roads, whatever– all which should have plant life, rocks, debris and other details atop them too! What to do? Hurry to the Asset Store, get your copy of GeoPainter, and place game objects into your scene by simply painting them on! Need to make a messy pile of bricks or logs on the floor? Normally this kind of thing is surprisingly time consuming, but GeoPainter makes messes easy! Instead of manually placing each piece one by one, use GeoPainter to instantiate and position them in your scene with a single brush stroke. With built-in parameters for randomization, you can easily add chaos and irregularity for a more organic feel. While you’re at it, use GeoPainter to plant bunches and rows of great new Dexsoft vegetables in your field or garden. Just be sure to keep the crows and bugs away! One of these should do the trick!

Our good friends at Massive Black, who include some of the most accomplished and talented artists in the industry, have invited Unity to participate in their annual workshop! Unity artist reps Joe Robins and Roald Hoyer-Hansen will be on hand to dispense knowledge to help attending artists get the most out of the Unity tools and engine.

Massive Black has been hard at work creating one of the most amazing visual treats that has been developed using Unity. This will be shown for the first time at the Massive Black workshop and we can’t wait to see the final results.

Monday November 21st, Roald is teaching “Creating Cool Games without a Programmer” at 2:30-4pm and Joe is teaching “Creating a multi-platform Real-time portfolio for your artwork using Unity” at 4:30-5:30pm.

You can check out more information at: massiveblackworkshop.com

We do this with a combination of:

• Continuous Integration
• Automated Testing
• Code Hosting
• Code Reviews
• Manual Testing

I’ll talk about how we do the first four of those things here.

Continuous Integration

The Continuous Integration Server

Our builds and automated tests are all run by TeamCity.

We use TeamCity from JetBrains as our continuous integration solution.  One of the things we like best about TeamCity is that it has a very clear UI that gives the end user a good indication of the state of a project.  For testsuites, it’s easy to see at a glance whether the suite passes or fails and what tests are failing.  It can farm builds out to agents on Windows, OS X, and Linux, and keeps an extensive history of builds and tests, which are very useful when trying to figure out why a test is failing or whether there is something wrong with an agent.  Generally speaking, we are quite happy with the feature-set and also with the support we’ve received from JetBrains.

Our only real complaint now is regarding the web UI — it can still be slow to load at times (specifically, when loading a large project page that hasn’t been loaded for a while, or when opening the custom build run dialog when a lot of agents are attached).  It can also be difficult regarding managing multiple branch projects, as there is currently no way to synchronize changes between branches that are copies of each other.  However, the projects are stored in XML, and the schema is not complicated, so I have written a tool to do this instead by modifying the XML directly.

The Build Farm

TeamCity farms builds out to a distributed build farm of between 40 and 50 machines.

Along with TeamCity, we have a build farm of approximately 45 machines, known as build agents.  Most of these are virtual machines running Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.  We also have a few physical machines used for graphics tests, because testing graphics functionality requires a level of GPU manipulation that we could not achieve with virtual machines.  Our virtual build agents are virtualized with VMWare Workstation on Linux hosts, using a combination of Apple and non-Apple hardware.

The reason for choosing virtual machines, despite the performance hit it gives us, is that virtualization allows us to easily maintain the system — instead of updating 45 machines separately, we update the template virtual machine image for a given operating system, then copy it to the live buildservers.  It also allows us to make every agent appear to be the same hardware-wise, even if they are running on different types of host hardware.  This is important because as we add more build agents, they will be running on different generations of hardware, and for the purposes of testing, we need them to all appear the same.

Automated Testing

TeamCity provides a very clear interface for seeing the status of test suites.

We have several automated test suites that we run on a regular basis.  These are used, along with manual testing, as a metric for how stable our mainline codebase is, as well as when a feature branch is stable enough to be merged back into trunk.  We currently have four types of test suites:

• Unit Tests — these test the correctness of individual functions / small bits of functionality in the code, but they do not test high-level features of the product.  These are used by developers, but not by our continuous integration server.
• Graphics Tests — these work by building a Unity project that renders a set of static scenes.  The project is then run on the target platform (desktop, console, or mobile), and screenshots of each scene are saved.  We then compare the saved screenshots against a set of “known good” screenshots.  If the difference is greater than a certain amount, we assert that the test has “failed”.
• Functional Tests — these work by launching one instance of the editor or player, and testing various aspects of its functionality.
• Integration Tests — these are the most high level tests.  They work by launching an instance of the editor or player, testing a particular action or series of actions, and shutting down the editor or player and going on to the next test.

Our integration tests are executed by our continuous integration server as NUnit tests.  TeamCity can run MSBuild projects directly, and we have a script that runs them with Mono’s Xbuild on Mac OS X.  We developed our own framework for running the graphics tests.

Our regression rig tells us if anything has changed in the playback of previously-recorded content.

We also have a regression rig that we developed ourselves.  The regression rig, similar to the graphics tests, compares content played in Unity against previously recorded content, and checks for regressions.  This is a good way to catch high-level regressions (for example audio having become bit-shifted).

Our test suites are always being expanded, and, along with our regression rig, they have helped us catch a number of regressions and bugs.

Code Hosting and Reviews

Like many software companies, Unity Technologies has run through a few different version control systems.  In the beginning, there was no version control.  Eventually the first Unity Ninjas began using CVS, and eventually Subversion. About a year ago, we started to investigate distributed version control systems and eventually settled on Mercurial.  Now all of our source code is versioned in Mercurial, except for our public Mono, MonoDevelop, and Boo-related repositories on GitHub.

Why Mercurial?

Well, we had a few requirements.  The first was that the version control system work with our continuous integration server, which is TeamCity, so we started off considering Git, Mercurial, and Bazaar, and Perforce.  We also wanted something distributed because we have developers working in several different locations, and we also work on multiple platforms.  A distributed system allows our developers around the globe to interact with the remote server less frequently, and it also allows all of us to easily test our changes on multiple local machines without having to share changes that potentially break some other platform with each other.  We also wanted to be able to do feature development in branches and merge them back together successfully.  So we were left with Git, Mercurial, and Bazaar.  We spent some time evaluating these three systems.  We were interested in:

1. A simple, easy to use and understand command-line interface
2. Good GUI tools for the system on OS X and Windows
3. A good code review tool that works well with the system.

We also wanted a system that we felt had a lot of momentum — an ecosystem that is growing and developing around it.  After a few weeks of testing, we eventually decided on Mercurial because:

1. It was substantially more simple to learn and use than Git
2. It had good GUI tools for both Windows (TortoiseHg) and Mac (SourceTree, and now TortoiseHg)
3. It had a couple of different options for large-scale code review tools
4. It had a good-sized user-base (which is growing), a regular development cycle, and seemed to be well-adopted by both open-source and and commercial projects

Another very big win for Mercurial is that it was the only DVCS (at the time, at least) that had even attempted to handle the issue of large binaries in the repository.  This was done through a few different publicly-available extensions to Mercurial.  Distributed version control systems, by nature, don’t lend themselves well to codebases with a lot of large binaries, so we knew we would need some system that can cooperate with the version control system to store the large binaries outside of the repository, but still let us version them in some way.  Not having to develop our own system completely from scratch was a really big win.

How to Host Mercurial and What to Use for Code Reviews?

After we decided on Mercurial, we needed to figure out how to host it and how we would review code.  With this switch, we also wanted to implement a new development policy.  Up until this point, we had always worked with just one central copy of the codebase, except for when we branched for release.  This led to something almost always being broken, which had a serious effect on productivity.  We wanted to be able to easily do feature development in branches; perform peer code reviews, build, and test verification on the branch; then merge it back into the mainline repository once it is complete.  The goal is that trunk is always in a releasable, or nearly releasable, state.

A Code Review in Kiln.

We looked at a few different code review systems, and eventually settled on Kiln from Fog Creek Software.  Many people already know that we have used FogBugz as our issue tracking system for a while now.  While FogBugz has some room for improvement (specifically, it doesn’t work very well as a public-facing bug tracker), it has done a pretty good job of serving our needs, and we have a really large amount of data in the system.  At this point, we would need a pretty compelling reason to put in the effort to move all of that data to a new system.  Kiln is a Mercurial code hosting system that interfaces with FogBugz and provides nice web-browsing of the repositories, code reviews on a per-changeset basis with one or more reviewers, and a server-side implementation of a Mercurial extension that handles large binaries. We have had some ups and downs with Kiln, mostly with regards to performance.  Our repository size, which is about 1.6 GB with a clean working copy, and has several fairly large binaries, as well as our number of concurrent developers, about 65 and growing, and our build farm, another 45 or so machines, seem to have pushed it to its limits performance-wise.  The self-hosted version of Kiln is currently not built with scalability to large teams (with large repositories) in mind, which results in very slow clones & pushes when there is heavy load. Hopefully, this will get resolved in the future. We’re not sure what our own future is with Kiln, but I will say that its feature set is quite nice, and it has allowed us to move to our desired development model of feature development in branches rather than in mainline.  Beware that it is written in .NET and does not run on Mono, so if you want to consider Kiln, you will need to run a Windows server.  I can say, however, that the Fog Creek support staff has spent countless hours trying to help us work through our various issues with Kiln.

Conclusion

Building and testing for so many platforms is a really difficult task — especially as our development team is rapidly growing, and we find ourselves putting strains on infrastructure and processes in areas we didn’t expect.  These tools and processes are fundamental to how the development team gets things done here at Unity.

We’re pleased to announce that we’ve reached well over 2,000 packages this month, and our customer base has expanded to over 43K registered users! Top selling developers are making over $10K+ per month, and frankly things couldn’t be more exciting. Some amazing new packages have arrived this month… Here are some of our favorites!

Multiplatform Toolkit
Owlchemy Labs, creators of the smash-hit mobile game SnuggleTruck, bring their amazing multiplatform toolkit to the Asset Store! Owlchemy’s new tool makes it easy to quickly reconfigure your project for multiple platforms with just a few quick clicks. You can easily change textures, buttons, text clips, font sizes and other graphical elements to fit the various aspect ratios and performance capabilities of multiple platforms. Unity already makes cross-platform development easy enough, and if you’re armed with Owlchemy’s Multiplatform Toolkit, you’ve got everything you need to make multiplatform development a no-brainer!

RageTools
An exciting new addition to the Asset Store is Freakow’s RageTools, a collection of tools to enhance the RageSpline vector art tool. The very cool extension, Rage SVG-In allows you to directly import vector artwork made with Inkscape and Adobe Illustrator™ into Unity for immediate use! RageTools also brings RageSpline group management, pivot point adjustments, canvas alignment tools, and a brilliant LOD system to control anti-aliasing and curve smoothness in runtime.

Substances
Substance abuse is rampant in the Unity developer community, as Allegorithmic’s  dynamic material integration gains more and more popularity among Unity users.  You’ll find over 600 tweakable, space-saving Allegorithmic substances on the store, as well as the powerful Bitmap2Material tool– check out the free trial version first.  The 18 Free Substances Pack is a great way to familiarize yourself with this time and space saving technology.  We’ve got a couple of very popular example products up on the store, including the Airstream Demo and Pimp Your Hooligan example projects.  Get hooked on Substances today!

uScript, Playmaker and Antares Universe
The latest contender to the visual, node-based scripting tool arena, uScript from Detox Studios is the way to create game logic without writing a single line of code.   The uScript editor integrates nicely into the Unity editor environment, for a basically seamless development experience!  Our other two popular visual scripting toolkits, Playmaker and Antares Universe, are also incredibly popular, five-star solutions.

Other noteworthy additions to the store include Dynamic Elements Effects Pack, from Kalamona, which brings over thirty top-quality RPG-style spell and magic effects to Unity.  You’ll find even more AAA environments and characters rolling in from the incredibly prolific Dexsoft, and run, don’t walk, to get the free Strumpy Shader Editor– the tool so cool we had to hunt down and hire its developer!  We’ve also added new high quality music from one of Hollywood’s biggest production music houses, APM Music!

The Unity Asset Store is always on the lookout for great new content.  We’ve even expanded our team to actively hunt down and scout out top quality assets. We offer content sellers a 70/30% rev share split (you get the 70%) and monthly payouts by PayPal, with no transaction fee, either!  Some content sellers have earned so much that they quit their day jobs to focus exclusively on the Asset Store, while some smaller sellers make enough on the side to buy videogames, motorcycles, pizza and beer. Top seller or not, nearly all of them have had a great time bringing their creations to the Unity developer community.  Got what it takes?  We’re picky, but send us your stuff!

The London Unity Usergroup had its fifth and sixth events within the last 6 weeks (due to the former being delayed after the london riots), and I was there as always to capture the talks and show you what goes on at the meetups.

At MeetUp 5, Russ Morris and his colleague George showed off their fantastic game Super Springbreak Speedboat Hero SD. The game, designed in a retro 3D style is a passion project for the duo, who along with one other member go by pseudonym PLA. Piloting a speedboat around a custom course you design, avoiding sharks and dinosaurs, you can pit your time for the course against others online by sending a link that the game generates. Your opponent then races against a ghost of your run.

PLA – Making Super Springbreak Speedboat Hero SD

The second talk at Meetup 5 was by Beatnik studios – apologies to both them and you but the audio for this talk was lost due to a technical problem I won’t bore you with!

At Meetup 6, Mike Bithell gave a talk about how he is learning Unity to better realise his game Thomas Was Alone. This was a great talk as it highlights how quickly someone new to Unity can take the tool and start making very slick looking games – plus the concept is awesome! See the talk below.

Mike Bithell – Making Thomas Was Alone

Meetup 6 also featured an open mic talk by Benedetta Frida Baldi, a neuroscience PhD student who is making a game in Unity to teach how parts of the brain work, I’ll let the video speak for itself. A quick aside to ignore Russ’s comment that this was the first ever open mic we’d had – the first was actually Tom Jackson, discussing his game AWOL at LUUG 4! Hope to see more Open Mic projects shown at LUUG 7!

Open Mic – Benedetta Frida Baldi – Virtual biology

As usual, keep an eye on the meetup group for the scheduling of the next meetup, look forward to seeing you there! -
http://www.meetup.com/London-Unity-Usergroup/

What elements make water?

Hydrogen & Oxygen

in Unity?

There are many different types of water you can create or use from prefabs. To take advantage of the latest water effects and scripts I will be concentrating on the Water4ExampleSimple assets which are essentially a couple of 3D meshes representing your water surface, with:

• WaterTile script
• Water shader

An empty object indicating the world space placement with:

• A Water script which exposes the colours, normal texture and main parameters for the effect
• A reflection script
• An optional lighting script for specular effects
• An optional displacement script

How can I make some water?

The simplest way is to drag the prefab into your scene, and assign your custom mesh:

• Assets > Import Package > Water (pro only)
• In the project window open the  Standard Assets > Water (Pro only) folder
• Open up Water4 folder
• Drag the Water4Example (Simple) Prefab into your scene
• Position approximately where you need it
• Select one of  the tile meshes, go to the mesh component in the inspector > select the round target icon on the right and choose your mesh (must be in your project)
• Rotate the Water4ExampleSimple parent node 90 degrees, if your mesh comes in at the wrong angle (this can be caused when you export from a 3D app with a different co-ordinate system to Unity)
• Place your mesh by moving the parent node
• Remove the second tile mesh

Settings

Once you have your mesh as water you can begin to play with the settings. Select your Water4ExampleSimple node, and check the parameters in the inspector.

Water Base

Planar Reflection

This script is for enabling/disabling realtime planar reflections. Reflections are claculated in relation to the height of the parent mesh that has this script attached to. So the local Y transform of child meshes should be 0. Here you can also enable the reflections to include (or not) the skybox.

Specular Lighting

You can adjust the specular power from here and drag’n'drop any transform to indicate a specular light source. This can be your directional light transform or any other game object (doesn’t need to be a light).

Gerstner Displace

Here you can adjust the settings for the wave generation created by the Gerstner waves generation algorithm.

Water art tips

• Go and check out some actual water – its always wise to get some visual ref for what you are trying to do. Make a video if you can.
• Water absorbs red light from the spectrum reflecting back more green and blue rays, in additions to sky, which gives water the impression of being Blue in colour so:
  • You can’t make your surface blue (and you probably shouldn’t)  but if you use green and blue colours on the surfaces below the water such as a pool you can help with the illusion.
  • (I guess this is why Pool designers use green/blue/turquoise tiles).
  • The darker the blue, the deeper water appears – you can use a darker colour on the bottom and tint the refraction darker.

• Moderate the effects, subtlety can help suspend disbelief, be sure to experiment but think about moderating:
  • Scrolling speed of normals
  • Reflection
  • Refraction
  • Fresnel and Normal strengths
  • Displacement

• One useful tip is to turn practically everything off e.g. set sliders to zero and then build up the effects to get the desired impact.
• If you have a convex mesh (such as water fall/pool lip) add poly detail to the curve to help the water ‘bend’.

Next time > Water 4 Advanced is the same tech but with foam and depth extinction.

For me personally its been an amazing ride to see the evolution of the conference and the level that we have reached in the last few years. Topping it again next year is certainly going to be a challenge but we do have some extraordinary people who have worked insanely hard to make this years conference the great success it was.

On behalf of everyone at Unity I would like to thank all the people who came to the conference from far and wide. The Unity Community is not only extreemly awesome, it is also the very reason we can all do what we do.

This Unite it was great to finally show some of the super awesome 3.5 and beyond features. When working in one of the development offices at Unity you see these features being developed over time and it can be easy to forget how insanely cool all of this stuff is. So unveiling these new game changing tools to the people who will put them to use is always a joy.

Friday was once again jam packed with some really cool sessions all of which we are working triple hard to get live as soon as humanly possible. Be sure to check out this link in order to see the sessions that are getting converted to videos and being posted to the site. They will be available at the videos section of our site.

Once again, thanks to everyone who was able to attend. I had a truly awesome time and I am almost scared to see if we will continue to have double the number of attendees again next year

Without further ado, here is the link to the Keynote.

Earlier in the day we had a plethora of sessions covering topics ranging from business to art.

Highlights included a sneak peak of the new Shuriken particle system, which is shaping up to be a truly awesome new feature. We also held the Unity Road Map and Wish List session, where attendees are welcomed to quiz us about the future direction of Unity and we open up a dialog to ensure our development road map is in sync with what our users want. The Road Map and Wish List sessions for those who have never been to Unite, are unique in as much as the entire session is off the record and its a chance to talk frankly about the direction Unity is taking so this is one session that you have to be at Unite to see.

At the end of the day we held the Unity Awards. It was great fun to present and we gave out some very deserving awards.

The winners were as follows:

Best Student Game
GLiD – Spiderling

Best Cross-platform Game
Buddy Rush – Team Sollmo of Company 100

Best Gameplay
Rochard – Recoil Games

Best Graphics
Rochard – Recoil Games

Best Non-game
Virtual History Roma – Mondadori

Community Choice
Battlestar Galactica Online – Bigpoint and Artplant

Grand Prix
Battleheart – Mika Mobile

Again I would like to congratulate all the people who entered the competition. There was some absolutely tremendous work produced this year.

On a side note, we also plan to have our session videos up in record breaking time this year. So everyone in the community who was unable to make it, can check out all the cool stuff that has happened so far.

One last note I would like to make, is that there are plans this Friday for anyone who is around, to attend a Unity Game Jam at the San Francisco hacker space Noisebridge.
Its being organized via facebook so if you are interested in jamming, check out the facebook event

The keynote included a host of major announcements and 3.5 feature demos. We will be getting a video online as soon as possible for anyone who wasn’t able to be here for it – and for those that want to go back and watch it all again

Some highlights of our keynote included news of our first acquisition, which comes in the form of Montreal-based studio Mécanim — now known as Unity Canada. We had been talking to them for a while, really loved their tech and thought they were cool guys. The team is hard at work building a character animation tool that will mean big things for Unity users. They worked on Motion Builder, FBX, and HumanIK.

Joachim also gave a sneak peak of some of the awesome new features coming to 3.5 including: Level of detail, Integrated AI and pathfinding, Light probes, Our whole new particle system “Shuriken” and much more.

Also shown was the launch trailer for Madfinger’s new title Shadowgun, which launched on the app store yesterday as well as a sneak peak at the new title, Bladeslinger being developed by Luma Arcade.

We also demoed AngryBots running in a browser via flash using our in-development build to flash feature.

And as if that wasn’t enough we then had an awesome guest speaker in David Brevik, president and COO at Gazillion Entertainment who had some great advice on making the most of the technology we have and being part of building a golden age in gaming.

1 day down, 2 days of awesome to go.

They’ve also done an awesome job continuing their support of their services for Unity users by releasing several new tutorials that will help you get started. The latest videos will help the Blender, modo and zBrush crowds. Now go animate something/someone!

Blender:
http://www.mixamo.com/c/automatic-rigging-for-blender-unity3d

modo:
http://www.mixamo.com/c/automatic-rigging-for-modo-unity3d

zBrush:
http://www.mixamo.com/c/automatic-rigging-for-zbrush-unity3d

Export

Edit

Finalise

It may be a worthy read both for artists and programmers, as we discuss the possibilities of some unusual special effects and their technical side.

Get it while it’s fresh: Special Effects with Depth (14MB pdf)

Yours,

Kuba and Ole

Unity supports textured 3D models from a variety of programs or sources. This short guide has been put together by games artists with developers at Unity, to help you create assets that work better and more efficiently in your Unity project. This will be incorporated into the documentation in due course

Scale & Units

• Set your system and project units  for your software to work consistently with Unity e.g. Metric.
  • Working to scale can be important for both lighting and physics simulation;
  • Be aware for example; Max system unit default is inches and Maya is centimetres.
  • Unity has different scaling for FBX and 3D application files on import, check FBX import scale setting in Inspector.
  • If in doubt export a metre cube with your scene to match in Unity.

• Animation frame rate defaults can be different in packages, is a good idea to set consistently across your pipeline – e.g. 30fps for example.

Files & Objects

• Name objects in your scene sensibly and uniquely – this can help you locate and troubleshoot specific meshes in your project:
• Avoid special characters *()?”£$n  etc.
• Use simple but descriptive names for both objects and files (allow for duplication later).
• Keep your hierarchies as simple as you can.
• With big projects in your 3D application, consider having a working file outside your Unity project directory – this can often avert time consuming updates and importing unnecessary data.

Sensibly named objects help you find stuff quickly

Mesh

• Build with an efficient topology – use polygons only where you need them.
• Optimise your geometry if it has too many polygons – many character models will need to be intelligently optimised or even rebuilt by an artist esp if sourced/built from:
  • 3D capture data
  • Poser
  • Zbrush
  • Other hi density Nurbs/Patch models designed for render

• Evenly spaced polygons in buildings, landscape and architecture where you can afford them, will help spread lighting and avoid awkward kinks.
• Avoid really long thin triangles

Stairway to framerate heaven

The method you use to construct objects can have a massive affect on the number of polygons, especially when not optimised. Observe the same shape mesh : 156 triangles (right) vs 726 (left). 726 may not sound like a great deal of polygons, but if this is used 40 times in a level, you will really start to see the savings. A good rule of thumb is often to start simple and add detail where needed. It’s always easier to add polygon than take them away.

Textures

Textures are more efficient and don’t need rescaling at build time if authored to specific texture sizes – e.g a power of two – up to 4096×4096 pixels, e.g. 512×512 or 256×1024 etc.  (2048×2048 is the highest on many graphics cards/platforms) there is lots of expertise online for creating good textures, but some of these guidelines can help you get the most efficient results from your project:

• Working with a Hi-res source file outside your unity project can be good working practice (such as a PSD or Gimp file – you can always downsize from source but not the other way round).
• Use the texture resolution output you require in your scene (e.g. save a copy – such as a 256×256 optimised PNG or a TGA file for example) you can make a judgement based on where the texture will be seen and where it is mapped.
• Store your output texture files together in your Unity project for example: \Assets\textures
• Make sure your 3D working file is referring to the same textures for consistency when you save/export.
• Make use of the available space in your texture, but be aware of different materials requiring different parts of the same texture can end up using loading that texture multiple times.
• For alpha (cutout) and elements that may require different shaders, separate the  textures. E.g. the single texture below (left) has been replaced by 3 smaller textures below (right)

1 texture (left) vs 3 textures (right)

• Make use of tiling textures (which seamlessly repeat) then you can use better resolution repeating over space.
• Remove easily noticeable repeating elements from your bitmap, and be careful with contrast – if you want to add details use decals and objects to break up the repeats.

Tiling textures ftw

• Unity takes care of compression for the output platform, so unless your source is already a JPG of the correct resolution it’s better to use a lossless format for your textures.
• When creating a texture page from photographs, reduce the page to individual modular sections that can repeat, e.g. you don’t need 12 of the same windows using up texture space. That way you can have more pixel detail for that one window.

Do you need ALL those windows?

Materials

• Organise and name the materials in your scene – this way you can find and edit your materials in Unity more easily when they’ve imported
• You can choose to create materials in Unity from either:
  • <modelname>-< material name> or:
  • <texture name> – make sure you are aware of which you want.
• Settings for materials in your native package will not all be imported to unity:
  • Diffuse Colour, Diffuse texture and Names are usually supported
  • Shader model, specular, normal, other secondary textures and substance material settings will not be recognised/imported (coming in 3.5)

Import/Export

Unity can use two types of files: Saved 3D application files and Exported 3D formats – which you decide to use can be quite important:

Saved application files

Unity can import, through conversion:  Max, Maya, Blender, Cinema4D, Modo, Lightwave & cheetah3D files, e.g. .MAX, .MB, .MA etc.

http://unity3d.com/support/documentation/Manual/HOWTO-importObject.html

Advantages:

• Quick iteration process (save and Unity updates)
• Simple initially

Disadvantages:

• A licensed copy of that software must be installed on all machines using the Unity project
• Files can become bloated with unnecessary data
• Big files can slow Unity updates
• Less Validation – harder to troubleshoot problems

Exported 3D formats

Unity can also read FBX, OBJ, 3DS, DAE & DXF files – for a general export guide you can refer here:

http://unity3d.com/support/documentation/Manual/HOWTO-exportFBX.html

Advantages:

• Only export the data you need
• Verify your data (re-import into 3D package) before Unity
• Generally smaller files
• Encourages modular approach

Disadvantages:

• Can be slower pipeline or prototyping and iterations
• Easier to lose track of versions between source(working file) and game data (exported FBX)

Characters & Animation

Coming soon!

At the latest London Unity User Group, the evening kicked off with a beginner talk by Jasper Stocker, and was followed by ‘Open Mic’ talks by myself – demoing a quick Space Shooter demo I made in Unity – and LUUG regular Quickfingers, showing off a game he made for recent Ludum Dare 48 game jam. The headline act was Richard Fine, who gave an excellent talk on creating large game worlds in Unity.

As usual I do my best to capture the LUUG meets for others to catch up with, this time  however I only had a single camera to work with, and no screen capture – ability.. but here is the footage anyway! enjoy folks..

Quickfingers – Making AWOL for Ludum Dare

Richard Fine – Making Large Game Worlds

Part One

;

Part Two

For more info on London Unity Usergroup, including the next meetup, see the meetup site – http://www.meetup.com/London-Unity-Usergroup/

The goal for the asset store has always been to be a quick and convenient way to get assets for games. With Unity 3.5, we’re taking a huge stride towards this.

Part of 3.5 is a revamped object picker. The idea is that you will be able to quickly browse and assign all assets in your project – and available online – from one integrated window. Something like this:

This page gives an overview of the default Unity Hotkeys

Ahem.

So yeah, a bunch of us were at SIGGRAPH 2011 in lovely Vancouver, doing talks, meeting people and going to super interesting sessions. Me & ReJ did a long technical session about optimizing graphics for mobile platforms. GPU architectures, shader optimization details, case studies from actual Unity games and so on.

Here it is: Fast Mobile Shaders (17MB pdf).

Enjoy!

The recent release of 3.4 brought many awesome new features to Unity.. with it came a ton of new assets and optimizations to the Unity Asset Store! Here’s a quick look at recent and notable additions to the store.  If you haven’t been to the Unity Asset Store before, you’ll find it inside Unity– just launch Unity and select Window > Asset Store.  It’s an incredibly convenient way to find quality, ready-to-use, royalty-free models, scripts, sound effects, music and editor extensions right in your workspace.  It couldn’t be easier!

Addicted to Substances

Airstream Substance demo project

A mind-blowingly useful new feature in Unity 3.4 is the integration of the dynamic texture generation system, the Allegorithmic Substance engine, directly inside Unity.  If you’re not yet familiar with Substances, you should check them out, as they’re the most efficient way to pack tons of complex textures (with diffuse, specular, normal maps and more) into a very, very small footprint!  You can actually adjust an Allegorithmic Substance’s parameters in run-time with code or even animation keyframes, to create living, dynamic textures which can change over time in your game.   To get started, you’ll need to pick up a pre-existing, incredibly-customizable substance from the Asset Store, which contains the basic procedural patterns for your textures.  Use them like any material on your mesh objects and adjust the parameters as you like!

You will find over 500 pre-made Allegorithmic Substance on the Asset Store, ranging from commonly used textures including metals, woods, sci-fi and fabric, to vivid, organic and alien textures.   Allegorithmic’s system is so addictive, if you’re not careful you might become a substance abuser!  Allegorithmic’s substances can be found in the Materials & Textures section of the Asset Store.  It’s a great way to beef up your project.

We have a free 18-substance pack on the Asset Store as well as a two great example projects to get you going.

Rain{one}

Rain{one} AI behavior tree by Rival{theory}

Popular on the Asset Store this month is the very brainy AI system, Rain{one} from the Los Alamos thinktank, Rival{theory}.  It’s the easiest way to give in-game characters core AI capabilities such as the ability to sense the world, navigate, and create complex behaviors through goal or task based logic. Features include…

1. Pathfinding, Pathfollowing and Path Graph Generation
2. Behavior Trees and Goal Oriented Behaviors
3. Movement & Locomotion
4. Environment Sensors
5. One-Click AI Configuration

It’s a great way to give your zombies some braaaains.

Nature!

Nature Pack

Imagine.. the serenity of soaring trees, blooming wildflowers, the graceful curves of a fern, clouds, the majesty of a stony cliff. A verdant, rolling landscape.  There are many places to find such natural beauty… like Yosemite, the Swiss Alps, and the Unity Asset Store.  Quite popular this month is the comprehensive and well-crafted Nature Pack, which has over 30 trees and bushes, stones, natural textures and more, all prepared for use with Unity’s Terrain System.  You’ll also find mushrooms, wildflowers and trees of many species.

Free tunes from the folks at AudioDraft

The good people at the music crowd-sourcing company, AudioDraft, have recently added three packages of high-production, cost-free and royalty free music for the Asset Store.  Check out their Arcade, Orchestral, and Space themed music packs!

Improved Performance and UI

You might have noticed that the Asset Store has a new look, with a category tree hierarchy system, making it a cinch to find what you’re looking for, or just to browse casually.  There’s also speed optimization and purchase data caching for an easier shopping experience.

Content creators making a bundle!

Last month marked the most recent payout to content creators on the Asset Store, with a couple of our sellers having each earned tens of thousands of dollars.  Distributing and selling content on the Asset Store is a great way to put your skills to work, get your vision out to the Unity community, and making money! We’re always looking for great new content to put on the Asset Store.  We’re on the lookout for great models, complete game projects, editor extensions and tools, script libraries, audio and more.  If you’ve made something awesome, please send it our way!

Hand’s demonstration on making cross platform games with Unity, Part 1
Time: 9:30am – 10:20am
Speaker: Carl Callewaert

A hands-on demonstration of the development of a multiplatform game starting with prototyping the game to the final version running on Android, iOS, the web, Facebook and as a standalone app. The steps include but are not limited to: programming, art assets import and updating, particles, GUI, AI and building for multiplatform deployment.

Hand’s demonstration on making cross platform games with Unity: Part 2
Time: 10:50am – 11:40am
Speaker: Carl Callewaert

A hands-on demonstration of the development of a multiplatform game starting with prototyping the game to the final version running on Android, iOS, the web, Facebook and as a standalone app. In this part more advanced topics will be covered.

Performance optimization tips and tricks for Unity
Time: 12:40pm – 1:30pm
Speaker: Jonas Echterhoff

This session will demonstrate optimization techniques on a sample Unity project, show how to use the Unity profiler to find performance bottlenecks, and will show some common pitfalls to avoid for optimal performance in Unity projects.

Shader Authoring in Unity
Time: 2:00pm –   2:50pm
Speaker: Shawn White

It’s difficult to make a game today without writing at least one shader. Whether you’re indie, mainstream, or somewhere in the middle, having the ability to write your own shaders will give you what you need to make your game POP! Unity provides a suite of built-in shaders to get you started, but in this talk we’ll get you up to speed on what you need to know about writing your very own shaders in Unity.

Being Social: How Games Can Leverage Facebook on the Road to Success
Time: 3:20pm –   4:10pm
Speaker: Tom Higgins

The explosive growth of social networking is changing the ways in which people of every type interact with each other in some incredible ways. That’s easy to say but it takes a bit more effort to properly understand. What are those changes? Are they limited to those creating browser-based content or do they extend to the desktop and mobile apps as well? And most importantly, how can you and your team take advantage of them in your games? This presentation will discuss some of the most prominent questions facing developers targeting social networking sites and describe how developers can put that information to use right away. The discussion will focus on Facebook and the Unity game engine in particular as they offer developers unique opportunities for success. But in the end the strategies that will be shared can easily be applied anywhere, regardless of what social networking site or game engine is being used. Developers of all types can attend this session and learn how to incorporate social networking features into their own efforts, from the early design phases all the way through to release, giving themselves a much greater chance of success.

Using and publishing content and extensions on the Unity Asset Store
Time: 4:40pm –   5:30pm
Speaker: Tom Higgins

This session will start with an introduction to the Asset Store, showing what is available and demonstrate how to search for and use content in your own projects. After that he will go through how to submit your own content and extensions to the store, how it should be formatted and go through common mistakes to avoid and other hints for speeding up the submission process.

Distribution with Union
Time: 5:40pm –   6:30pm
Speaker: Brian Bruning

There’s never been a better time to be a game developer.  Huge audiences are now reachable without the aid of publishers or retail outlets.  But what are the odds of getting noticed out there today in the new digital landscape?  What tactics are most effective?  What should you be doing to get noticed and find customers?

What are Substance Materials?

Substance materials are procedurally generated assets, from technology developed by Allegorithmic. A ’substance’  is basically a set of maps, defining a whole material with all channels: Diffuse, Normal, Specular, Bump, etc. 3DS Max and  Maya have substance support for rendering, but now with Unity implementation we can make use of them in real-time applications.

Why use Substance materials?

There are a number of reasons to use of procedural materials:

• Dynamically updateable in game
• Resolution independent
• Animation supported
• Tiny file size
• Really fast to create textures, especially bricks, tiles and other tileable surfaces, that are otherwise time consuming to generate from photographic source
• Fast to duplicate and create library of unique material
• They are cool

Where do I get Substance Materials?

The Asset Store in unity (Window > Asset Store) includes free and paid substance packages available to browse.

How do I use them?

To customise a substance material and apply in Unity follow these steps:

• Import or create a mesh onto which you want to apply materials;

• Make sure it is UV’d evenly, or as desired – use a checkerboard or dummy material (Currently unity cannot import subtance materials assigned in external packages)
• Create a fairly even topology, polygons spread to rule out kinks etc.
• Apply relevant smoothing as required

• Check FBX import settings for the Mesh, Select  Materials Generation ‘Per Material’  esp if using multiple materials per object
• Drag object into hierarchy or viewport and save scene
• Find Substance material asset you want to use (the square substance icons)

• Apply to object by dragging directly onto the mesh in the viewport or with multi material meshes to the element (shown below)

• Edit the parameters for your material instances;

• Randomise seed to create variations on the patterns
• Adjust sliders for other parameters such as colour, dirt amount, normal strength or whatever your substance has exposed in the inspector
• Change shader if required to add reflections and other fx

• View the results in the viewport – can be useful to create shader spheres in your scene for representative lighting

Studio Workshops

Monday, August 8th
10:40am- 12:10pm Joe Robins “Creating a Multi-platform, Real-time Portfolio for Your Artwork”
3:45pm- 5:15pm Aras Pranckevicius and Renaldas Zioma “How to Write Fast iPhone and Android Shaders in Unity”

Studio Talks

Monday, August 8th
12pm-1pm Roald Hoyer-Hansen “Creating a Cool Game Without a Programmer”

Tuesday, August 9th
10:30am- 11:30am Kuba Cupisz and Ole Ciliox “Special Effects with Depth”

Thursday, August 11th
10:30am- 12pm Robert Cupisz and Kaspar Daugaard “Lighting Worlds in Unity”

Since 64-bit browsers are not yet very widespread on Windows, the 64-bit web plugin has received limited testing coverage during our 3.4 beta. For that reason, we have decided to make this plugin available on an experimental basis for anyone who wishes to test or run Unity content in a 64-bit Windows browser. It is not yet available on our our main Web Player download page and the default JavaScript we supply for embedding Unity content will not link to it, so you have to manually download the installer. If 64-bit browsers become more common on Windows in the future, we will change this and release it as a fully supported product.

Without further ado, here it is!

Even though this is an unsupported product, please use the bug reporter which comes with Unity to report any issues you might have with the plugin!

Through the integration of Allegorithmic’s Substance technology, Unity 3.4 features highly customizable procedural textures that can be adjusted both within the Unity editor and at runtime. Using substances in Unity, developers can stream high quality textures in just a few kilobytes, significantly reducing download times. Those textures can also be modified in real time on PC and Mac or baked into traditional textures for mobile platforms. Substances also include smart filters allowing artists to make awesome bitmaps and optimize their texturing pipeline.

Other notable new features and enhancements include:

• Editor enhancements, such as user-assignable Scene View icons and modifiable primitive colliders, allow for more efficient game development.
• Optimizations and performance improvements on everything from shadow renderers to animation components result in increased visual quality and faster rendering.
• Downloadable content with caching for complete scenes and asset bundles leads to smaller downloads and improved player experience across all platforms.

Unity 3.4 also contains hundreds of minor improvements and fixes. Complete release notes can be found at: http://unity3d.com/unity/whats-new or you can download it and check it out.

 

London Southbank University, 23rd June 2011 – Unity users, newcomers and developers gather at the third London Unity User Group (LUUG) to see presentations from developer Mike Renwick on his experience with recently launched Augmented Reality solution String (poweredbystring.com) and Jon from agency Preloaded on their experience of developing Boccia, a recent project for the Paralympics and UK TV channel, Channel4.

Without further ado, I’ll let the presentations speak for themselves, here they are -

Mike Renwick – String Augmented Reality

Preloaded – How we made Boccia

As usual, the event was followed by a meetup at the local pub, The Ship. The next meetup is scheduled for next month, with a date TBC, to subscribe to news visit the meetup page at -

http://www.meetup.com/London-Unity-Usergroup/