Unity Technologies Blog

ESC is a superbly innovative virtual worlds company, mostly based out of NY (like Unity, they have a diaspora of cool employees all over the place). They’re most famous for their SecondLife work, but now that everyone is tiring of SL (no?) they’re of course looking at the next possibilities. And if you want to build a virtual world today, Unity’s the obvious #1 (number-only?) choice.

During GDC this year I met up with John Swords III, business developer at ESC (and a really impressive guy). He did an impromptu interview with me there (we had to hide in a corner next to a garbage-can to get a sufficiently quiet spot to do the recording), which I think gives a good image of my thoughts about Unity this spring… with a sprinkling of history in between.

Listen in: http://blogs.electricsheepcompany.com/sheep/?cat=71

Semitransparent GUI is all the rage these days. This is usually not a good idea. Here, I’ll go into some of the details why transparency (mostly) sucks.

Transparency creates visual noise - our eyes are very good at edge detection, and having transparent stuff increases the number of edges that we have to process. Also, a lot of GUI has some sort of layering effect - either through shading, coloring or by using floating windows. Using transparency breaks this layering (in nature, very few things are partially transparent).

Who got the idea that having a large 50% transparent panel was a good idea? - you can neither see the panel nor the text beneath.Now, I said at the top that semitransparent GUI is ususaly not a good idea - let’s take a look at where it does work:

Read the rest of this entry »

As someonewho spends a lot of time on the road, and knows a lot of people in a lot of different places (and many of whom also spend a lot of time on the road), this is the invention that was needed: dopplr.com.

The concept is simple: it’s a lightweight social network where you enter your travel itineraries, and voilà! dopplr tells you who’ll be in the same city as you at the same time. No “applications”, games, dating, advertising, or in fact anything else.

Just go here, sign-up, add me as a contact, and we’re all set! I mean it, right now: sign up

See you … wherever.

One of our customers found an interesting bug the other day: embedding Unity Web Player into a web page makes some javascript animation libraries not work correctly. For example, script.aculo.us or Dojo Toolkit would stop doing some of their tasks. But only on Windows, and only on some browsers (Firefox and Safari).

Wait a moment… Unity plugin makes nice wobbling web page elements not wobble anymore!? Sounds like an interesting issue…

Read the rest of this entry »

A request I’ve gotten from quite a few new users is to have some indicator axes in the Scene View showing you what is up and what is down. There is a reason why they are not there, and it ties into the core of my Job here at UT: GUI design. I’ve wanted to comment a bit on this.

Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve got a feature we want to do — it’s something we call “intermediate mode render calls”. The idea is that some script could say:

Draw( position, rotation, mesh, material );

And that would make the mesh appear with the given material at the given position on the screen, and it would just work with pixel lights, shadows, projectors and whatnot.

Read the rest of this entry »

…I was on a plane bound for Copenhagen, a city I’d never been to in order to start working with a bunch of people I’d never met (other than talking with David over the phone). I had left Adobe wanting to find something new, something that would be more promising in terms of real-time 3D and games was concerned, and I was hoping to find all that at OTEE (now known as Unity Technologies). It all began a few months before that flight in late August of 2006, I had already announced my pending departure from Adobe to the Director user community and was only a few days away from leaving Adobe for good.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ll be in London from Monday morning through Thursday morning. Anyone want to meet up for coffee and tech-talk (or business-talk, that’s actually why I’ll be in town)?

We had a super lovely “full service” evening with some of the guys. I cooked dinner, and then cut Nicholas’ and Forest’s hair. I suspect Nicholas might blog about that later, he got some pretty cool pictures on his still-shiny iPhone… that little thing can really get our interface design juices going, triggering endless discussions about Apple’s highs and lows.

Afterwards I booked tickets for me and Joachim to go to Vienna tonight (Thursday).We have a meeting most (or all) of Friday, but if someone local has time I would love to have lunch with someone from the Unity universe on Saturday. 

In any case I have to see the Secession house in Friedrichstraße 12, where I haven’t been since 1997 or so. 

d.

Today’s games industry has many strange and wonderful features. Its most distinguishing feature is the current dominance of technology-focused, so-called “triple-A” games at the top of the market. These shiny, spangly games command the lion’s share of the marketing money, media attention and newspaper headlines. At the other end of the industry, we have the “casual games” market, which encompasses card games like Windows Solitaire, Minesweeper, the various “Match-3″ variants and their like.

And there is almost nothing – nothing – in between.  

Read the rest of this entry »