Well, here they are: unity3d.com/webplayer/hwstats

Operating system versions, desktop resolutions, graphics driver versions, shader models, memory sizes and some more. All broken down by quarter so some sort of “trends” can be seen (sure, changes can be caused by general hardware change or simply different people groups playing different games).

Enjoy!

However, the “casual gamer”, which is what Unity games are mostly targeted at, probably has slightly different hardware. “Slightly” being a very relative term of course.

Lo and behold - we have a glimpse into that data.

How? First time the Unity Web Player is installed, it submits anonymous hardware details (details in the EULA). This happens only once, and contains no personally identifiable information. It’s much like visitor statistics trackers on the websites that gather your OS, browser information and whatnot.

We still haven’t prepared nicely laid out, colored and formatted reports into that data that we can share publicly like Valve, but we’re working on that. So in the meantime I’ll share some images without fancy graphs or colors, bear with me.

Remember, all this data is from people who installed Unity Web Player (most likely because they wanted to play some Unity content on the web). Hardware of standalone game players might be different, and hardware of your game’s players might be different as well. The data set is well over a million samples at the moment.

Enough talk, let’s show some pictures.

What operating systems do we have?

This one should be easy to understand.

What Windows versions are out there?

We should know OS X versions as well, right? Hey, Leopard already took over Tiger!

Hmm, looks like 64 bit Windows haven’t really taken off yet…

Enough about OS, what about CPU?

Poor Transmeta… (for the record, that’s 43 Transmeta CPUs)

Multicore CPUs are taking off (well, at least dual core ones).

Graphics card?

Capabilities of the graphics cards.

The capabilities are not as bad (certainly better than I expected). I mean, about 70% of them support shader model 2.0 or higher!

What is is troubling is the 3.7% that run in OpenGL 1.1 software mode… That means they don’t have graphics drivers installed or have disabled hardware acceleration. This is just crazy, I mean, without the drivers, even dragging windows around is horribly slow… how people even use the computer this way?

Another interesting point is that DirectX 8.0 level hardware (GeForce 3/4Ti) is pretty much dead. I guess that’s because there never was an entry-level graphics card from that range (before there was GeForce 4MX, which is DX7 level, and it was followed by GeForce FX 5200, which is DX9 level).

However, the above was technical capabilities of the graphics cards. Let’s take a look at which cards are out there:

Uh-oh. Can you say “low end”? The first decent card here is GeForce 8600, 15th on the list. Everything above - slow, slow, slow. Some horribly slow. Well, that’s casual gamer…

Here’s a rough performance indicator, graphics card fillrate in gigapixels/second:

For the record, fillrate of GeForce 8600 is 4.3 GP/s, Radeon X1600 is 2 GP/s, Radeon HD 2600 is 2.8 GP/s, and Intel 945 (GMA 950) is 1.6 GP/s. The difference from high-end to low-end in video memory bandwidth is even larger.

On a somewhat unrelated note, here’s DirectX 10 card distribution:

DirectX 10 can only be used starting with Windows Vista, and on DX10 capable graphics card. So that’s 2.6% of the Unity web game players - still not a very significant amount.

In conclusion

So here was the glimpse. We’ll prepare more and nicer reports into the hardware data sometime soon. Stay tuned!

Edit: it’s live - unity3d.com/webplayer/hwstats

Casual Connect Seattle
July 23-25, 2008
http://seattle.casualconnect.org/

Once again we were a sponsor for the Casual Connect Seattle conference held in, you guessed it, Seattle, Washington. For those that haven’t been watching this conference it’s been growing over the last few years with something like 30-40% growth year-on-year (I heard that this year had just under 2000 attendees). It’s a conference that focuses heavily on the casual games sector (duh!) and that always brings out a great crowd of folks that attend the sessions and stop by the sponsor tables to chat. Over three days Sam and I worked the table, had well over a dozen meetings, spoke to countless potential new customers and lots of existing ones. Of note we hung out with Matt and Ben from Flashbang quite a bit, but also many others including some old friends and an interesting dinner with Sam’s parents. All told it was a fantastic conference once again, well worth the cost and effort to attend. If you haven’t gone to one of the Casual Connect conferences yet then you might want to give them a try soon!

Unity 2.1 Released
July 24, 2008
What’s new in Unity 2.1

On Thursday of last week we put out the authoring side of the Unity 2.1 update (the 2.1 web player went live on Friday, July 18) and it’s far more of a major update than a minor one! Not only will you find the usual bug fixes, but you’ll also find plenty of new features that truly are significant. A few highlights:

• Streaming Asset Bundles
  Load assets on demand with new web streaming features. You can now stream in your game world as characters, locations, and objects come into view. You can also stream entire levels from the web as you navigate through the world.
• Streaming Terrains
  A seamless world is key when making an MMO. With Unity 2.1 you no longer are limited to a single terrain. Immerse your user in an endless landscape, based on streamed data.
• Undo
  Yes, undo! Traditional, reliable Undo and Redo are now available for all scene operations. You can stop constantly saving your work – it just works.

There are plenty of other features so make sure to check out the What’s new in Unity 2.1 page on our website.

Press Release News: 2 In-Browser MMOs in development using Unity!
July 24, 2008
Cartoon Network Creates First AAA, Browser-Based MMOG for Kids

Along with having announced the release of Unity 2.1 (featuring MMO/Virtual World-friendly features) we also announced that there are two full-blown in-browser MMOs in development using Unity front ends! The first of those is Cartoon Network’s coming FusionFall title which is targeting a younger audience and that hopes to involve millions of users enjoying hundreds of hours of game play. The second MMO in development is coming from Funcom and ArtPlant and is a casual MMO that will also attract an extremely large user base and offering countless hours of play-time, all served up inside your browser. We’re quite excited to have both of those projects on board with Unity front-ends as they’re both new breeds of content and with Unity, they’ll deliver an unparalleled experience inside the browser. w00t!

Of course all of the above is on top of our recent announcement that we’ll once again be hosting another Unity developer conference, Unite 2008, as well as another developer contest, the 2008 Unity Awards. It’s quite a busy time for all of us in the Unity community, I hope your summer is proving as exciting as ours is!

The story of how I found out about these people covers a rather indirect path. I first heard of their technology through a friend and Unity user Barry while he was working with SFSU’s Institute for the Next Generation Internet, but I didn’t actually see it myself until GDC 08 in San Francisco. I was cruising the expo floor and passed by a booth with a rather large crowd of people gawking at some demo on screen, and that demo was clearly (to me) using what appeared to be Unity’s default GUI skin. Upon closer inspection and asking a few questions it turns out that they were (and still are) using Unity to help showcase their technology.

So just what is it that they do or make? It’s a headset that you wear, it has a few sensors that lightly touch your skin and it plugs in to your computer as an input device. They then load their demo, created in Unity, and you move around the world using WASD/Arrow Keys. There are various objects in the demo world, you walk up to them and can move (push/pull/lift) or burn (set fire/explode) them by simply focusing your concentration - no keyboard, no mouse, just thoughts! It took a bit of getting used to as you have to either concentrate (focused attention, push/pull or burn) or clear your mind and relax (lift). Of course while you’re doing that your brain is thinking of a million other things distracting you, but once you get the hang of things it gets really cool.

In the videos found on YouTube you’ll notice that not only are they using brain activity readings but their also using partner technologies to track head and eye movement! They’re actually able to track eye movement and use that movement, including blinking, as input and control mechanisms! I’ve seen various reports of this sort of technology but this was definitely the first time I’ve seen it in person and I was suitably impressed with what they had to show.

You might be wondering about why they’re using Unity, I was too at first. Given that their core business focus is on an input technology and not application or game engine development, they needed a tool that would allow them to quickly test and showcase their content through actual demos, and Unity is the ticket. As proof of that they first adopted Unity as a demo development tool last November and they were able to write their own custom plugin and develop their Unity demo in time for GDC in February! That’s three months to learn the tool, code up a custom plugin to accept their device input and to develop demo content to showcase its abilities. Another clear case of how Unity’s ease of use, intuitive UI and powerful development abilities are meeting the needs of many, including an increasing number of people not directly involved in games development themselves. Cool.

I’d like to thank Johhny Liu from NeuroSky for playing a bit of phone and email tag with me in the weeks since GDC and for helping arrange the meeting. Of course thanks go out to everyone at NeuroSky for helping develop some cool technology and for using Unity as part of your demo and showcase toolset!

Here’s a glimpse into what is needed to get it working.

The Plan, straight from our internal planning wiki, with some explanations added:

o) Convert all terrain code to use Intermediate Mode Render Calls. This makes all the points below possible, and makes things like Projectors or wireframe terrain rendering in scene view pretty much just work.

o) Update terrain shaders for proper rendering order and soft vegetation. Expand ShaderLab so that a shader pass can indicate it should only be executed when Soft Vegetation is on.

o) Proper vertex lights on terrain, implemented in a vertex shader. Currently terrain handles up to four directional lights; we need to expand it to handle point lights as well. I think we’ll treat spot lights (when in vertex lit mode) as point lights; as calculating multiple spot lights in a vertex shader is next to impossible because of instruction count limits. Spotlights are not very useful in vertex lighting mode, right?

o) Implemented pixel lit shaders for terrain. This will get light cookies, per-pixel lit terrain, and ability for terrain to receive shadows.

o) Add option somewhere for pixel or vertex lit terrain (defaults to vertex lit).

o) Proper vertex lights on trees. Very similar to “vertex lights on terrain” point above.

o) Make tree shaders able to cast shadows. Because trees are scaled & animated in a vertex shader, the shadow-casting shader needs to apply the same animation as well.

o) Make Projectors not affect grass / trees. How? We’ll expand ShaderLab so a any shader can say “no Projectors on me, thanks”, and modify grass & tree shaders to do that.

o) Make projectors not affect terrain when game content is built with Unity 2.0. This is web player backwards compatibility - there are Unity games out there that use projectors and terrains, and they should continue functioning exactly like they did before. So Projectors should not affect terrain in this case.

o) Make tree shadows not s*cklook bad when they are squashed for billboarding. Trees are squashed into a planar shape when they approach billboards; this is to make the mesh-to-billboard transition less noticeable. However, this makes shadows from those trees look very wrong. Not sure how to handle this; I think we’ll just stop casting shadows when trees are starting to squash.

o) Redo Lightmapped terrain shaders:

• Use existing shaders for game content built with Unity 2.0. Again, existing web player games should work like they did before! For reference, in Unity 2.0.2 lightmapped terrain was not affected by any lights at all.
• Make new set of terrain shaders that follows the convention of other Lightmapped shaders: lightmap, plus additional lights on top. Whoa, hey, we need two new sets of those shaders: for vertex-lit terrain and for pixel-lit terrain!

o) Optimize the bejesus out of rendering internals. Why - because the old terrain rendering code was like this:

1. Figure out which parts of terrain and vegetation are visible.
2. Set terrain shader.
3. For each terrain chunk: draw it’s mesh!
4. Set tree shader.
5. For each tree: draw it’s mesh!
6. …similar for billboarded trees, grass, and so on.

This is all simple & nice. Of course this was exactly the problem why shadows, projectors and such didn’t work on terrain - everything was just rendered immediately. Now, the new terrain code just submits any visible parts of terrain as Intermediate Renderers, and the rendering code figures the rest out… But that means it’s going through generic rendering “pipeline”, that has to figure out lighting, sort out objects, set shaders and their parameters, etc. The major overhead in switching to this “proper rendering” is the lost ability to do this:

1. Set the shader.
2. Draw lots and lots of objects with it.

The rendering code in Unity does sort objects by shader, and does ultimately figure out that they are using same shader, possibly same set of textures, even possibly same set of lights and same set of material parameters - but some time is spent just figuring out that nothing actually changed between the objects.

Well, the upside is that optimizing rendering internals makes everything else run somewhat faster as well!

(I am here right now… the points above are done, the points below are on the list)

o) Make hills/trees outside of view be able to cast shadows (how?)

o) Expand shaders of detail meshes so they can cast shadows.

o) Optimize terrain & tree vertex lit shaders. Right now they process four vertex lights, where each can be directional or point light. This is noticeably slower than old shaders, that only supported directional lights (point lights need more calculations). We need to write multiple combinations of those shaders, specialized for specific situations (”one directional light”, “two direcitonal lights”, “two arbitrary lights”, and so on).

o) Add option somewhere for terrain to not cast shadows.

o) Add option somewhere for trees to not cast shadows.

o) Add option somewhere for detail objects to not cast shadows.

o) (maybe, don’t know how to do) Option for grass to receive shadows.

o) Reduce memory allocations in terrain code. Because of intermediate rendering, some of temporary arrays are not actually needed anymore.

Whew, that was quite a list! I’m not sure I’m able to even read through all of that… well, back to work.

…
Joachim: yeah it’s awesome
Joachim: function Start () { /* super secret code snippet */ }
Aras: whoa
Joachim: it rocks
Joachim: automatically instantiates material for you
Joachim: the same way we do it for scripts
Joachim: best thing since sliced bread i think
Aras:
Aras: hey, back in the day the terrain was best thing since sliced bread!
Joachim: sliced bread appears to be always worse depending on what i work on.
Aras: maybe sliced bread is just not so good in fact
Aras: sliced bread is overrated

And no, I won’t say what we were talking about

The Casual Games Manifesto

It’s a relatively brief article that offers some great insights and suggestions to help guide casual game developers to a more profitable future. Specifically he points out some issues (from the developer’s perspective) in the business model offered by most major game portals. But he doesn’t leave it at that, he goes further and offers strategies as to how developers can start taking steps to turn the developer-portal relationship into a tool that offers you, the developer, a bigger (hopefully!) piece of the revenue pie.

Go read it today, it’s worth the 20 minutes or so it will take you to cover the five page (six if you count the appendix) article.

If course I’ll take the time to meet with a few interesting companies while I’m there – amongst others, people doing hardware instead of software… I’ve met so few of those, it’s going to be exciting to learn about their no-doubt very different business models, and see where Unity can be a fit.

So, anyone else I should be meeting up with? As I’ve written before, the authorized way to meet up in foreign cities is dopplr.com.

Okay, what can I tell you? How about:

– 2 x full blown MMO being made with Unity
– 5 x virtual worlds being made with Unity
– 3 x well funded game portals being made with Unity
– several VC funded projects that we haven’t even been told what are about
– And of course thousands of Unity licenses being used for things that we know nothing of

… and that’s not mentioning all the evaluation projects and projects pending funding. 2008 will be a wild ride.

There’s several ways to answer that question. It’s in the millions. It’s also growing, and the rate of growth is increasing. And this year there’s a long line of very major and high-profile game releases planned, which will accelerate this even more. But while the future may be good (and with Unity, the future is good), it’s not now.

But why did you ask that question? Most likely it is to figure out the risk of using Unity content on your site. That you’ll have lots of visitors, many of which who don’t have and won’t install the plugin and leave for somewhere else.

Of course plugin penetration is very important to this, but if a technology doesn’t have >95% ubiquity, the plugin installation process is just as important.

We spent a lot of effort figuring out how to make the plugin install process for Unity as simple as possible. And it’s a lot easier than that of the Shockwave player (not to mention other sub-par technologies). Well, parts of the install process took effort and thinking… but how much effort goes into not requiring registration and pushing adware?

– The whole plugin is 3MB download for everything
– And it is delivered from a Content Delivery Network so all users get a fast download
– The installation doesn’t require a browser restart on any platform
– And it even keeps the user on same the site without even a page reload
– There’s no user registration required
– And no Google toolbar or other adware
– Unity supports Microsoft Vista and Intel based Macs
– And doesn’t crash on old/ancient graphics card and driver combinations

Our statistics tell us that for people who don’t have the plugin already installed, over 60% complete the plugin installation (this differs between different types of content, and just as importantly, based on the presentation of your content… that is material for another blog post).

Depending on where you deploy Shockwave content, it is commonly believed that 50% of your visitors have the plugin installed already. Of the remaining 50%, you’ll lose some because of the plugin installation process. Because of the reasons outlined above, for Shockwave we believe it is around 40%. So do the math:

Shockwave:
Preinstalled: ~50%
Successful plugin installs: ~20% (50% x 40% success rate)
Total successful views: ~70%

Unity:
Preinstalled: ~1%
Successful plugin installs: ~59% (99% * 60% success rate)
Total successful view: ~60%

As a solid proof, R/C Laser Warrior recently was the most played game on shockwave.com for 2 weeks straight, with up 40.000 simultaneous players, and is still listed as a Top Online game there. And that’s on a site dominated by Shockwave games.

Still, you might worry that using the Unity technology is a bit daring, and early-adopter-ish. A couple of weeks ago, a Massive Media Conglomerate called Disney released a Unity-based game online game, Sooga Mountain. So I ask you, can you be as agile and daring as those guys?