Historically, the Creative Assembly have worked purely on PC and Consoles, writing their own engine tech for the Total War series, we visited the studio to ask them about their experience of using Unity to take the series to mobile platforms.

Check out Total War Battles: Shogun on the App Store -
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/total-war-battles/id499885330?mt=8

The American Business Awards are the nation’s premier business awards program. More than 3,000 nominations from organizations of all sizes and in virtually every industry were submitted this year for consideration in a wide range of categories. Finalists were chosen by more than 140 business professionals nationwide during preliminary judging in April and May. More than 150 members of 10 specialized judging committees will determine Stevie Award placements from among the Finalists.

We wanted to share this great news since it is, thanks to you, that Unity continues to grow so rapidly and re-invest for more innovations and services. We’re looking forward to the fall and the final results!

The Product

I assume you know about Unity if you’re reading our blog. As a developer, you’re intimately familiar with most of the features, but there are a few aspects from a tester’s point of view you might not have thought about before.

Eyes Wide Open

Unity is one of the most testable products I have ever worked on. Practically everything in Unity is available for a tester. It consists of a ton of APIs, profilers, logs etc. which enables us to do anything we want from code, including verifying that any action we have taken actually gets us the expected result. On top of that, Unity on the core parts requires only a single installation on a single machine, so the infrastructure required to run automation is very small.

All those platforms

There is one caveat though. A core feature of Unity is that it can build your games to many platforms, which naturally requires us to test such functionality. This does complicate a test rig quite a lot and it puts requirements on how our frameworks are built, so we can get the most bang for our testing buck.

From a more general point of view, we have the problem of covering all those platforms both during a regular test run, but also when you have submitted a bug saying “this and this phone has given us this specific problem”. Or different browser versions on different OS’, or specific graphics cards etc etc. You get the drift.

The love

Let’s not forget about the love we get from our community. In so many ways you guys are the backbone of Unity, adding true value through the forums, answers and testing cycles. This is something we take very seriously, something which commits us to be responsive and helpful.

Our Strategy

AAA

No, not the large productions. Automation, automation, automation. We have the testable product, we have the infrastructure and we have the need. Were we to make a single cycle product, and then move on to the next, we would not be taking such a bet on automation, but features in Unity live for years and repeated manual testing on such a product simply doesn’t make sense.

Use the community

We have you guys. You’re a great help as it is, but we can do a whole lot more. We can help you with tools which will help you test your own games. Let’s face it; while we believe we’re doing a heroic effort to cover everything, it is practically impossible.

Tools might include better overviews of bug reports, automated duplicate finders when you submit bugs, integration to answers. Even something like publishing testing suites for you to run on your own games could be an option. Helping you will go a long way in helping us, if we do it in a way where results can be piped back to us in a way so we can take action on it.

Good internal reporting

This is about making reports for the Unity development team. We need to assess the quality of different parts of Unity, which parts have good coverage, a high concentration of bugs, or where users are experiencing a lot of pain.

This point is very easy to say, it’s also conceptually easy to lay out a plan for which type of reporting you want, but the implementation of such a metric based regime is very hard. It requires us to use the same terminology across all of our tools, capture our data consistently and on a regular basis and then build the reporting needed on top of them. We’re currently in the phase of implementing the same terminology across our testing tools right now.

The People

Everything starts with the people. We are not stronger than the people we hire, the people we retain and the people who make it all happen. At the time of writing there are 17 engineers and student workers in the Unity QA team, but we are hiring many more.

Where we are

Currently, testing in Unity is based in Copenhagen, Vilnius and Brighton. We are also recruiting for a new office in Odessa.

In Copenhagen we have mostly been focusing on the editor and the core, since this is where most of those developers are placed. Vilnius is mostly about handhelds and consoles and Brighton has been taking care of the Webplayer. I say mostly, because at times everyone is spread across several features, for example, PS3 testing is now in Brighton.

As you can see, all of Unity is spread across the globe. One of the great things about the QA team is that we are constantly in communication with each other via a big Skype channel. 27 people participating, with regular eavesdropping by the devs and the support team.

Roles in test

We have some distinct roles in test, which helps us define our recruiting better, but being in test you often have to have a wider scope on what you do than when you are a developer.

Software Development Engineers in Test are developers working in test. These guys are working on tools, frameworks and feature automation all at once. Their job is often to figure out ways to improve the overall workflow for everyone involved in the development of Unity, by improving the automation on the build farm, making regression suites to prevent bugs flowing in and also evangelizing the usage of the frameworks for both testers and developers. They are the backbone of the AAA strategy.

Software Test Engineers are what you would call “manual testers”, but that is not a fair term. Beside figuring out how to actually get proper coverage on a feature, a task which requires a fair amount of technical knowledge, these guys also need to be good at creating an overview of an area . They are also the very first “users” of features, able to provide feedback very early in the lifecycle and ensure that we have as good a first shot as possible for our alpha users. They are the backbone of a good internal reporting strategy.

QA Student Workers are using their time on looking at the bugs you submit, try to reproduce each and every one of the and then forward the bug to the developers. These guys are doing a heroic effort to respond to your report. If they can’t figure out what is going on, they forward it to a QA within the area or send a reply to you asking for more information. It is a relatively new role in Unity, which we started in the spring 2012 and they are a big part of our effort to be responsive to our community.

The community

We have the best community in the world. A bold statement, but I believe it to be true. I have never been in a company where the community has had such a big influence and impact. I’ve said it earlier in this blog post, but it is something we value deeply. We use the community for many things and I’ll highlight a few here.

Sometimes we assemble alpha groups. The alpha lists are comprised of a small number of people who have a track record of giving us good feedback on features. They are given drops earlier than anyone else and we ask them to take a build (often broken in some areas) and help us make sure we make the right features for the next versions. This feedback is what we use to change any issues we might have with how you guys use it.

The community also helps us very visibly with reporting bugs to us, both during beta tests and after released versions. Beta tests run for a considerable time, through several releases and we gather tons of bugs from you guys. The beta testers who are really good at finding AND reporting bugs are also given some swag for their efforts (finding them is good, but to make a great beta tester you should consistently deliver easy to reproduce bug reports. More on this in part two).

Finally I want to mention the willingness to help us when we ask for it in one of our beta groups. I recently called for very large projects from real-life production teams and got a response within one working day. There is no end to how much we appreciate that kind of response and participation.

Join us!

I think our lead developer Lucas Meijer articulated all my thoughts about this challenge when he stated that “writing automated tests is very fucking hard”. It is a job which requires you to know a lot about testing techniques, infrastructure, the product, and be a coder who can write extremely solid code. A guy such as Lucas. It is interesting how this task is frowned upon when you look at the challenges it poses. I have met a lot of good developers in my career, but the stars of any dev team were also those that had a great aptitude for testing. I guess this little rant is to say that you should not expect “to start as a developer in test and then grow into a developer”. It’s the other way around.

It is also a difficult job to be a great software test engineer: you need to possess the correct mix of technical knowledge, and communication and organizational skills. It’s a rare mix, and we continue to look for the right candidates.

If you’re that guy or girl, if you want to be the one making everything run smoothly in a feature team and if you have a passion for quality you can’t stop preaching about, join us: http://www.unity3d.com/company/jobs .

The only slight hitch was the venue being evacuated as we began for 40 minutes due to a fire alarm! Sorry everyone!

In his talk, Richard discusses some best practice tips for code architecture in Unity – If you missed the talk, you can check it out in its entirety below, and leave comments if you wish. You can also download the Keynote files from Richard’s talk here.

Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger

Code Style and Architecture in Unity

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Richard’s talk was followed by giveaways of Will Goldstone’s beginner Unity book ‘Unity 3.x Game Development Essentials‘ and 3 lucky attendees walked away with a copy. Due to the earlier fire alarm, Open Mic sessions were cut short, but we hope to have more next time if anyone cares to join in!

As always, the meetup was followed up by a trip to nearby pub ‘The Ship’, where fun and frolicks were had by all. Well, fun at least. Want to join us next time or speak? visit the Meetup.com group here -

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

After GDC, we took some time to spread our wings outside of the entertainment space to exhibit at industry events for military training, and virtual reality. To our delight, Unity received non-stop interest at both the Defense GameTech Users and Laval Virtual International Meeting on Virtual Reality conferences. Our booth at GameTech, and co-booth at Laval (special thanks to our French reseller AGMD), were packed with participants wanting to learn more about creating Simulations, Training and Virtual Reality applications with Unity. Even better, at GameTech, four Unity-authored projects won top awards in three prize categories while simultaneously, at Laval Virtual, four separate projects won honors in virtual reality. In total, eight Unity powered non-game projects were awarded prizes in late March.

Unity projects sweep the Federal Virtual Worlds Challenge, take home $41,000USD in prize money

The Defense GameTech User’s Conference took place in Orlando, Florida. This is a US hosted international forum on computer and mobile based military training using game technology.

The Federal Virtual World Challenge,(FVWC) is a serious games competition that takes place each year at GameTech. Hosted by the US Army Research, Development and Engineering Command, Simulation and Training Technology Center, the FVWC invites the training development community to create innovative, interactive training and analysis solutions using game technology. Cash prizes were awarded in 4 categories this year: Distance Learning, Concept Building, Familiarization and Holodeck- Making it So.

For the second year in a row, a Unity-authored project from Innovation in Learning (IIL) won the $25,000 USD Grand Prize. IIL’s “CliniSpace BattleCare” leveraged Unity’s cross-platform deployment capabilities to build an interactive graphic novel style iOS App to train medical staff on the basics of battlefield trauma triage.

Prasad Amberkar, Technical Lead for CliniSpace says that “Unity’s cross-platform development and deployment was as easy as it could get. We were able to rapidly create custom tools on Unity, which helped streamline and speed up our processes. The run-time/remote profiler has helped us identify elements (content, function calls etc.) that need optimisation for seamless running on tablet devices. Overall it has been a great experience working with Unity and we consider it the optimum game engine for our work”.

Fragile Earth Studios won second place in the “Holodeck” category with their Unity-powered TerraViz project, a multi-platform 3D data visualization tool that runs on desktops, web browsers, and mobile devices.

“We’ve found the flexibility of Unity very helpful in our work”, says Julien Lynge a video game developer from Fragile Earth Studios. “Unity’s documentation was great, and the environment was intuitive, but what really sold us was the community. We could usually get questions answered in under a day between the forums and Unity Answers, and we found tons of sample code and projects to leverage.”

Finally, both the winner and runner-up in the “Familiarization” category were Unity-based projects. Designing Digitally, Inc. won for its 3D Virtual Campus Tours of the United States Air Force Academy, intended to be used for recruitment purposes. The runner up was the Canadian Virtual Naval Fleet — Navy Learning Support Center, which allows sailors to practice their skills in a virtual space before they are assigned to the actual ship.

And in France…Unity arrives in Virtual Reality

At the Laval Virtual International Meeting on Virtual Reality in France, our host’s booth was bustling. Unity technical support staff didn’t get a break from answering questions for the multitude of visitors keen to learn more about Unity (we definitely have to book more tech support for next year!)

Laval Virtual is a unique, international three-day trade show in France for virtual reality, augmented reality, marketing, military simulation, immersive and interactive content, and real-time 3D applications. Once again, a number of Unity-authored projects received awards including:

• EMCO3 won in the Science and Education category for MD Adviser, a medical training application that trains students in how to correctly diagnose a patient:
• MiddleVR from company i’m.in.VR won in the Engineering, Assembly and Maintenance category for its plugin that adds virtual reality capabilities to Unity.
• TeamLab Inc., of Japan, won in the Architecture, Art and Culture category for their project What a Loving and Beautiful World. The project presents all of the flowers, trees, butterflies, birds and rainbows that appear in Japanese calligraphy in a real-time virtual 3D space.

We also want to highlight the special recognition Unity customer Augmented Magic received at Laval Virtual, for “creating a new kind of augmented reality.” Augmented Magic is an entertainment company headed by the magician Moulla, who incorporates 3D virtual reality content into his shows. “It is like a big video game, but onstage, with a player, who happens to be the magician Moulla,” says Gamgie Rignault, technical director and 3D effects creator at Augmented Magic. “Moulla has to be free to move wherever and whenever he wants to, with the virtual reality content connected to his movements.”

We are excited about the growing momentum for Unity in these new markets and we already look forward to seeing what our customers will win next year!

I love game jams, there is something so incredible about setting out on a quest to craft a game with a tight deadline that can really push creativity in very interesting ways. If done right, its also possible to create a new gameplay mechanic that is not only original but is incredibly fun.

Now that the dust has settled after Molyjam a 48 hour game jam which took place globally at the end of March, a whole creche of baby game ideas has been brought, kicking and screaming into reality. It was a truly fantastic event that grew in scale exponentially from its humble beginnings as an idea to base a game jam around the unique game concepts tweeted by @petermolydeux

As soon as I started to hear mutterings of the Jam while I was at GDC, I knew that we should make sure that Unity supported the Jam by providing trial licenses to all participants and as a result, an impressive 70 Unity games were created during the jam.

There have already been some great interest in some of the games, Ben Pitt aka @robotduck with You Are The Road has already recieved 200,000 plays on Kongregate since putting the game up a week ago!

In Arms’ Way by Francis Coulombe, Mark Desmarais, Raymond Ortgiesen and Simon Préfontaine is a hilarious take on the Molydeux tweet

“FPS where your arms are controlled by a psychopath who keeps firing guns at innocent people. You must turn away from them and run.”

It’s a two player “anti co-op FPS game” where one player controls the movement and the other uses the mouse, with one player trying to kill everyone and the other attempting to stop that from happening.

Another interesting concept was Path:

“Romantic parkour game in which you and the love of your life must hold hands and jump around a city evading death and injury”

Naturally this is only a very small taste out of the 70 games that were cooked up during the 48 hour period, so I would certainly encourage you to dig into the list below.

Goodnight Molly

Inner Worlds

Babbies on a Plane

Dulcis Ex Machina

You Are The Road

Plug

Parlance

The Molydeuxds

Island Rumble

Path: Romantic Parkour

Bowl or Die!

Orphanage Arsenal

Hourglass: Countdown to destruction

Hole Feed Love Angel

Goo Goo Geiger

Dead Balls

Phone Frag!

Far From the Tree

28 Frames Later: Gutters of Blood

You Are The Road

Revenge Of The Road

I, Crow-Bot tm

In the dark, the blind can see

GhostDad 2 Colon Cats Vs. Merlins

PG S CT X: The invisible FPS

Baby GaGa

NukaBaby

You Must Hold Onto Your Mothers Hand

The Pits

Terror Bowl

Lets Protest!

Black and Rice 2: Battle of the Gods

The Endless Summer

War Dog

Number Seventeen Cherry Tree Lane

A Roll of Silence

Meant Only For the Righteous

Hugman

Dance Like There’s No Tomorrow

What Did Moly Dream?

Malevolent Traffic Management

SonShine

Coin Transfer

Betraille: Part Deux

In Arms’ Way

ScareCrow

Distortia

Rice On The Floor

Aholeic

Molytron

Forgotten

Shuriken Frenzy

Hold ‘A’ to Hug: a Green Square Story

On Bullet’s Time

Pigeux

Washing Machine Carnage: The Cleansing

Pro Business Simulator

Bear Survival

Ghost Horror

You Scale My Heart

Murdoor

Paused

Don’t Deux It

Gap

The Loor is Fava

Puppenhaus

Still Life

Marco

Hunger Quake

You Are A Spy & The World Is Transparent

Apocalypse Grandpa: Geriatric Overload

Path

Procedural / Generative / Modular – Grow Yourself a Game

When programmer art sucks and real artists do everything with ten million polys, how can a lone coder get anything done! In this talk Tom shows how a procedural & generative methods can help drive content production and game design in engines like Unity. Tom will show a number of his own projects and prototypes where modular and generative design have helped overcome the problems of content production.

Tom Betts, aka Nullpointer, is an artist, academic, coder and gamer. He’s been a lecturer, designer, published musician, professional artist, warlock…. but right about now he is working on his Phd about the sublime in digital games and he’s also head coder at Big Robot where he has worked on a game for Channel4, his own puzzler Avseq and future releases, hunted/lodestone . Hes exhibited digital artworks and performed at international venues such as Sonar, ZKM, Lovebytes, FACT and has done professional design/coding for Tate, the V&A and the Southbank Centre. He likes code, shambling music, drinking coffee, watching films where nothing much happens and is trying to grow a beard.

http://www.nullpointer.co.uk/content/

Tom on Twitter – @tomnullpointer

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As usual, the usergroup is followed by a trip to nearby pub, The Ship. If you’d like to attend the next one, check out the meetup.com page at – http://www.meetup.com/London-Unity-Usergroup/

Also, follow the usergroup on Twitter – @London_Unity3d

The new feature is dubbed “The Semantic Game Builder Interface” and it will let developers create a natural language based description of the desired game outcome which the tool will interpret and convert into a working implementation of the game using a combination of natural language processing and a ontology of knowledge of existing game genres and games. The development is lead by Professor in Computational Linguistics Mark Höffenberg, one of the lesser known architects behind the Semantic Web.

“In my prior work [on the Semantic Web] the progress was going very slow and the Semantic Web still hasn’t reached any widespread use due to the almost limitless scope of it which makes it very hard to reach a critical knowledge mass.” said Mark Höffenberg. “When Unity Technologies approached me six months ago and offered me a position to make a semantic interface to building games I immediately recognized it as a very exciting opportunity because games is a much more limited domain with more or less well defined boundaries, which make it actually within reach to create a working ontology of it.”

Behind the scenes the Semantic Game Building Interface will perform a lexical analysis on the description of the game to build a semantic model of the description. Markov Chains and Semi-Structured Relational Queries are then used to link the description up against a database of known information about game genres, game conventions, and popular released games, which also include data on construction and asset dependencies.

“We’re building this huge database of game construction knowledge that has never been done before.” said CTO Joachim Ante. Unity Technologies’ experience with automated testing has come in handy here, as the process is mostly automated, mining game reviews and descriptions off the Internet, although outsourcing is used for some of the manual data can can’t be constructed automatically.

According to Unity CEO David Helgason the feature is the newest among the efforts from Unity Technologies to democratize the games industry. “First we made the tools to let people focus on making fun games rather than solving technical problems. Then with the Asset Store we let people buy assets and extensions they couldn’t create themselves to let anyone be able to focus on and mine their own strengths while buying things from each other to compensate for individual shortcomings. But one barrier has continued to prevent many people from making games, and that is the lack of talent. With the Semantic Game Builder Interface, that is something we’re going to solve as well. We’re very excited about it!” said Helgason.

The feature is going to be very easy to use, the interface consisting largely of an input field where the semantic game description is typed in. “The technology is still in an early stage, but we’re seeing promising progress. Just the other day I tried to use [the Semantic Game Builder] to make a turn-based strategy game with it, and it was quite fun to play, actually.” said Höffenberg, while also admitting that there may be “some manual tweaking involved” after the game has been built.

When asked about if not the new feature will result in tons of games being made that are almost identical, Helgason replied, “Sure, this kind of democratization means that there will be some, or maybe quite a lot of games made that are very similar, without a lot of originality or vision – but then again that’s already the current state of the industry anyway.”

Over the last few years, Unity has made a name for itself as a first-class environment for creating gorgeous, cutting-edge 2D and 3D games that are capable of bringing the most beefy graphics cards weeping to their knees. During this time, however, we have kept our collective index finger fixed firmly upon the manic pulse of the indie scene, and we have observed the formation of a retrophilic counterculture.

In response to immersive, three-dimensional environments, some developers are opting for the elegant simplicity of 2D sprites. Instead of breathtaking photorealism, artists are making statements with bold, blatant pixelation. In lieu of being bombarded with 7 channels of eardrum-rupturing sound effects underpinned by the melodies of Grieg, Korpiklaani, E. S. Posthumus, or Diablo Swing Orchestra, gamers are treated to monophonic chiptunes reminiscent of a childhood well misspent.

We at Unity want the rest of the community to know that we feel your longing. We too are touched by the appeals of simplicity and elegance – of games that are first and foremost about gameplay, unique concepts, and imagination. These are games for which a kaleidoscope of sensory input would overwhelm players and detract from their key elements instead of enhancing them. These games are the reason why we have decided to push the envelope in a completely new direction.

Today, it is our pleasure to announce the Unity 1D Framework.

This powerful toolkit, completely integrated into the Unity environment, will allow you to pare your game down to the absolutely pure concept that resides at its core, while maintaining full integration with all of the existing tools that you’ve come to depend on: integrated physics; lightmapping and dynamic light probes; a flexible and performant rendering system featuring multithreaded, gamma-correct, HDR rendering; and of course the seamless, powerful art pipeline and ultrafast iteration time that have become Unity’s hallmarks.

What about audio, you ask? Not to worry! Unity’s sound engineers and hardware ninjas teamed up with device manufacturers across the board to implement and expose a full, cross-platform API for interacting with beep speakers on computers and consoles, including dynamic remixing at runtime, as well as high-performance beep emulation for mobiles, and even vibration/rumble and LED fallback, on supported platforms, for the deaf and hearing-impaired. Unity gives you the ability to submerge 3 of your users’ 5 senses in the raw single-dimensionality of your games – and we’re working on adding the other two!

While nobody can seem to recall precisely where the idea for the 1D initiative originated, our founders have been enthusiastic supporters from the beginning.

“Our focus since the 3.5 release has been on simplicity and elegance in every part of Unity,” explains CCO Nicholas Francis, “and our new 1D framework is sort of the distillation of that focus.”

CTO Joachim Ante prefers to concentrate on performance implications.  “Actually, working in a single dimension allowed us to strip away a lot of unnecessary code and really optimize to the next level. Usually, I talk about performance improvements in terms of 5x or 10x, but in this case it genuinely is more like x¹⁰.”

“Unity is about creativity,” adds CEO David Helgason. “We’ve worked very hard to make sure that people have all the tools they need to create visually stunning games with mind-blowing, high-end 3D effects, but it’s just as important to us to support the folks at the other end of the spectrum, who want to make your jaw drop with nothing more than the sheer amazement of their ideas.”

We’re officially collaborating with Adobe to make Unity and Flash work great together
We are committed to building the best tool there is to create content for the Flash platform, and are doing it with Adobe’s support and blessing to make the best product possible. You can check out the latest Adobe blogpost about our collaboration and their push to bring high-quality 3D games to Flash.

Development is going great (and we’re hiring)
We’ve been amazed at the content that has been created with the public preview (which is part of Unity 3.5 which you can download today). We took the feedback we got from that and fixed a lot of bugs and added some much requested features (Asset Bundles, WWW support, and tons of optimizations and bug fixes). We’re working on getting a new build with these new features out there very soon and expect to ship a final version later this year.

Adobe announced a brand new licensing structure for Flash games
You should definitely read the details as Adobe explains them here: www.adobe.com/go/fpl and here: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/premium-features-licensing-faq.html The short version is that Adobe is introducing a new revenue share licensing model where they will take a revenue share from some content publishers.

Adobe will charge publishers 9% of only the revenues directly caused by the game which exceed $50K.
If revenue is not directly caused by the game you pay nothing. i.e. An online teaser level for a iOS / Android game, a car company having a realtime 3d demo of their newest model which you can inspect and drive around, a 3d walkthrough for a library, etc, all would not pay the revenue share.

We see this as Flash positioning itself alongside other well known distribution channels: make money through the App Store, Apple takes a share. Make money through the Android Market place, Google takes a share. Make money through Flash, Adobe takes a share.

It’s also worth noting that the new Adobe license will prohibit scenarios where you’d have the first level of a game in the Flash Player, and the full experience inside the Unity Web Player. Alas, this is something you’ll need to be aware of if you were considering such a route.

Announcing pricing for Unity Flash add-on
We’re sticking with the add-on pricing model that has worked for us for years: Unity Flash Basic will cost $400 per developer, and Unity Flash Pro will cost $1500 per developer.

We are excited about what you’ll be able to do with Unity on the Flash platform and look forward to help you get the most out of it.

UPDATE:
We now have a dedicated forum thread for discussing the optimization tips shown in this sample level. Please continue discussion there -
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/130163-ShadowGun-Optimising-for-Mobile

The sample level project can be downloaded via the button below. It should be noted that this is not a gameplay example but purely designed to assist you in learning about optimal mobile techniques -

We’d like to thank MadFinger for their help with this project and for all the information they provide below. For those of you new to some of the terms mentioned here, we include links to external sites explaining the concepts involved:

General knowledge

If you want to have a 3rd person action game with beautiful graphics, complex levels with bunch of enemies with decent A.I. which runs flawlessly on iPhone 3Gs, you must put lot of effort into optimization. For the graphics side, you can optimize the number of triangles, amount of textures in memory and, of course, the shaders. We found that on mobile devices, shaders can be a real performance killer but also an incredible and powerful servant.

Alpha blending kills

The amount of faces using alpha blending, especially when it fills a large portion of the screen, reduces performance on mobile devices dramatically. When a bunch of alpha faces overlap each other and thus increase overdraw, it is a consistent killer for performance on slower devices.

Complex, per-pixel shaders kill framerate

We found that rendering large surfaces (in terms of screen area) with complex fragment shaders kills the framerate even more consistently than alpha blending. Complex fragment shaders should be used for smaller objects only.

Shaders in ShadowGun

Thanks to great cooperation between our programmers and graphic artists, we managed to create shaders that allow us to create advanced effects that do not have great demands on performance. The following shaders were used in the sample level from ShadowGun:

Environment specular maps (Shader Virtual Gloss Per Vertex Additive)

This shader combines Diffuse (RGB channels) and Specular (Alpha Channel). The Specular map uses the alpha channel of the texture to define the glossy vs matte parts of surface as usual, but specularity is not calculated per-pixel, but rather per vertex.

The resulting effect is reasonably convincing and it is significantly faster than using per-pixel specular calculations. It is perfectly suitable for large area meshes (like a level environment). This shader allows us to modify the strength of the specular effect and to approximately determine the direction of “light”.

Optimized dynamic character lighting and shading (Lightprobes and BRDF Shader)

The traditional problem with static lighting (Lightmaps) is achieving proper lighting on the dynamic objects (i.e. Player characters and NPCs).

Unity offers a classic solution, which stores lighting information for dynamic objects in proxy objects (Light probes). Dynamic objects then reconstruct incoming light information from nearby probes.

Unity also contains superb character shader, which is well optimized for mobile devices (check out the Mutant character in the sample scene). This shader supports Diffuse, Specular and Normal maps and uses a special script that generates a texture which is used for evaluation of the lighting in BRDF-like fashion. Resulting effect on characters perfectly mimics the next-gen character shading from big console titles.

Fog and volumetric light rays (Shader Blinking Godrays)

When you turn on the global fog in 3d engine, the framerate often drops below a usable level, especially on older mobile devices.

From a graphics point of view however, fog dramatically improves look of the environments, especially helping to perceive the depth and space of a scene. The solution we came up with is the use of simple mesh faces with a transparent texture (Fog planes) instead of global fog. Once a player comes too close to a fog plane, it fades out and moreover, vertices of the fog plane are pulled away (because even a fully transparent alpha surface still consumes lot of render time).

Preparation of the mesh in 3D app to work correctly with shader

• Vertex color alpha determines which vertices are moveable and which are not (in our case, vertices with black alpha stays, those with white alpha moves).
• Vertex normal determines the direction of movement.
• The shader then evaluates distance to the viewer and handles surface fade in/out appropriately.

Its simple to duplicate and distribute Fog planes through the level anywhere its needed. In a very similar way we use this shader for light rays, light source cones and other alpha effects.

Dense animated smoke at plane crash (Shader Scroll 2 Layers Sine Alpha-blended)

Because of density, the smoke particles are pretty expensive, and we found that it is better to use simple mesh with animated smoke texture (e.g. for background fire on crash site).

In our case, the smoke is animated by blending two textures and moving them over each other. There is also vertex alpha involved in order to smooth the edges of the mesh. The mesh is also colored with vertex colors (orange to mimic flames on the ground and greyish as smoke blends to the sky).

Moving Skybox (Shadow Scroll 2 Layers Multiplicative)

For our custom skybox, a similar technique with regards to scrolling in the shader creates a dynamic cloudscape -

Flags and cloths in the wind (Shader Lightmap + Wind)

Any animated objects in the scene brings life to level and when they are animated for “free” by the shader itself. We have animated the flags and cables in the wind in this way. Information which vertices are fluttering in the wind and which are not is defined by the vertex colors alpha in 3d modeling program (white alpha moves, black alpha dont). In shader parameters, user must define the direction and speed of flutter only.

Legal notice

All custom shaders in SHADOWGUN sample level are intelectual property of MADFINGER Games, a.s. and they are free to use (apart from BRDF character shader, which was created by Unity Technologies and is also free to use).
Meshes and textures in the level remains property of MADFINGER Games, a.s. and cannot be used for any commercial purpose without permission from MADFINGER Games, a.s.

Top of the list this GDC was our forthcoming Character Animation system which saw its first public unveiling at the Unity Developer day prior to GDC. The technology was then shown in several demonstrations at the Unity booth.

The new system allows a complete pipeline for character artists to create unparalleled realism in their characters’ motion; simply provide a rigged model in a T pose, and Unity’s forthcoming features take care of the rest, from motion capture data, through to blend trees and state machines, the system makes it simple to create incredible character behaviour – you’ll never look at a videogame character in quite the same way again.

Take a look at the feature preview video of the technology below for an overview.

Character Animation Feature Preview video

Featured Games

Also at the Unity booth were some fantastic games authored in Unity. The following trailer shows some of the latest and greatest –

We also had some great games playable at the booth, first up was Oliver and Spike: Dimensions Jumpers, by Rock Pocket Games, a beautiful third person platformer that takes the concept of 3D gaming into a new dimension, as you switch between several dimensions to navigate around the world -

Next is Derrick the Deathfin, a forthcoming Playstation Network title that blends Ecco the Dolphin with Blast Corps, in a cardboard world! Sound bizarre? it is, and it works!

Last but not least is Sky Legends, a fantastic aerial combat game from Smart Bomb Interactive. Already a popular title on the web, the game is soon making its debut on iOS and Android devices too, take a look at the trailer below -

In addition to these amazing games and the fantastic new animation technology on display, Unity staff were also on hand showing off the fantastic new feature set in Unity 3.5. You can download Unity 3.5 today, and check out some of those features in video form below -

Unity would like to thank our users for making GDC 2012 a joy, it was awesome to meet you all, and we hope to see you again at our own user conference, Unite, in August.

A few months ago, we got to see ‘Super Spring Break Speed Boat Hero SD’ in a talk by Russ Morris and George Buckingham from PLA studios, an asynchronous multiplier game for web browsers. This month sees the return of the game, with a streamlined name and on running on iOS devices. Russ discusses the issues the developers found in porting a poorly optimised web game to iOS, and reveals the techniques that made the game much more viable on mobile platforms.

Note: Apologies for the poor quality audio in these recordings, this will be corrected for the next event.

Russ Morris – Porting to iOS

Part 1 of 3

Part 2 of 3

Part 3 of 3

As usual, the usergroup is followed by a trip to nearby pub, The Ship. If you’d like to attend the next one, check out the meetup.com page at – http://www.meetup.com/London-Unity-Usergroup/

This free update represents another massive expansion of the capabilities of your favorite game engine. Some of the highlights include:

• Completely redesigned particle system “Shuriken”: A lot more power and configurability at better performance with great new tools.
• Another iteration of Umbra occlusion culling – delivering higher quality at much better baking speeds.
• Brand new level of detail system – allowing you to easily tweak your runtime workload without compromising results.
• New HDR and linear space lighting options – facilitating awesome visuals by giving you those all important tweakables.
• Google Chrome Native Client deployment: Webplayers no longer require a plugin install to run in Google Chrome.
• Built-in pathfinding and local navigation: Quickly bake a NavMesh in the editor and use it for player or AI navigation with runtime avoidance.

For a list of the more than 400 new features and improvements in Unity 3.5, check out the release notes.

Flash Public Preview

Even though 3.5 has shipped, we are continuing the public preview of our upcoming Flash Publishing license — all Unity 3.5 users can access this build target.

In addition, Jasper gave a talk as a post mortem to a game he created for toy brand Hot Wheels. In addition, several people spoke as part of an open mic, but sadly they were not recorded.

FIAF Post Mortem – Mike Renwick

FIAF Post Mortem – Cat Burton

FIAF Post Mortem – Quickfingers

Hot Wheels Post Mortem – Jasper Stocker

Part One

Part Two

Presenters

Jasper Stocker – @jasperstocker
Tom Jackson – @quickfingerz
Cat Burton – @catburton
Mike Renwick – @runonthespot
As usual, the usergroup is followed by a trip to nearby pub, The Ship. If you’d like to attend the next one, check out the meetup.com page at – http://www.meetup.com/London-Unity-Usergroup/

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!

After ten years of using Flash, BAFTA-winning game developer Iestyn Lloyd now works exclusively in Unity. He talks through his experiences with Unity, from ground-breaking early 3D web games to more recent work, including the acclaimed enhanced comic The Thrill Electric and cutting-edge experimental apps for iOS using the latest technology.

Why I’m Not Even Slightly Worried About This Whole Flash Thing – Iestyn Lloyd

As usual, the usergroup is followed by a trip to nearby pub, The Ship. If you’d like to attend the next one, check out the meetup.com page at – http://www.meetup.com/London-Unity-Usergroup/

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

Update: In LUUG 9, Russ talked about how this game was ported to iOS, watch the talk here.

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