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><channel><title>ByDesign Games &#187; Rants &amp; Raves</title> <atom:link href="http://www.bydesigngames.com/tag/rants-raves/feed/" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" /><link>http://www.bydesigngames.com</link> <description>Next-Generation Casual Entertainment</description> <lastBuildDate>Thu, 09 Sep 2010 21:49:13 +0000</lastBuildDate> <language>en</language> <sy:updatePeriod>hourly</sy:updatePeriod> <sy:updateFrequency>1</sy:updateFrequency> <generator>http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1</generator> <item><title>[Unity Technologies] Unity 3 – What Feature is The Dev Team Most Proud Of?</title><link>http://www.bydesigngames.com/2010/08/23/unity-technologies-unity-3-%e2%80%93-what-feature-is-the-dev-team-most-proud-of/</link> <comments>http://www.bydesigngames.com/2010/08/23/unity-technologies-unity-3-%e2%80%93-what-feature-is-the-dev-team-most-proud-of/#comments</comments> <pubDate>Mon, 23 Aug 2010 02:11:14 +0000</pubDate> <dc:creator>Unity3D News Pipe</dc:creator> <category><![CDATA[Technology]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Rants & Raves]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Unity3D]]></category><guid
isPermaLink="false">http://blogs.unity3d.com/?p=3380</guid> <description><![CDATA[Unity 3 is looking to be our biggest release to date — bringing with it source-level debugging, deferred rendering, best-in-class lightmapping and occlusion culling, and a unified editor. As we are getting close to the end of our pre-order window, I decided to asks members of the dev team what features they are most excited [...]]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Unity 3 is looking to be our biggest release to date — bringing with it source-level debugging, deferred rendering, best-in-class lightmapping and occlusion culling, and a unified editor. As we are getting close to the end of our pre-order window, I decided to asks members of the dev team what features they are most excited about.</p><p><img
class="alignnone size-full wp-image-3394" title="Unity_3_Screen_2_small" src="http://blogs.unity3d.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Unity_3_Screen_2_small.jpg" alt="Unity_3_Screen_2_small" width="650" height="406"/></p><p><span
id="more-3380"></span></p><h3 style="padding-top:1em;">Roald Høyer-Hansen</h3><p>Beast lightmapping &#8211; no doubt <img
src='http://blogs.unity3d.com/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_smile.gif' alt=':)' class='wp-smiley'/> Never has lighting a scene been so much fun! Great interface and superb integration with Unity. It has actually changed the way I work, as I now do all my lightmapping/baking inside Unity, with Beast. I am sure 90% of the games we&#8217;ll see after 3.0 will look 10x as good as the ones we see today <img
src='http://blogs.unity3d.com/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_smile.gif' alt=':)' class='wp-smiley'/></p><h3 style="padding-top:1em;">Charles Hinshaw</h3><p>There are BIG features, but I&#8217;m really enjoying the little scene view tweaks that improve daily use. Vertex snapping, look-at rotation, live previews for materials, dragging prefabs into the scene live with ray-snapping, interactive light gizmos, and rect selection — get used to them and then use a 2.x build and see how frustrating it gets. Unity 3 is going to allow for scenes to be constructed much more quickly and accurately.</p><h3 style="padding-top:1em;">Aras Pranckevicius</h3><p>Personally, I&#8217;m quite happy with all the behind the scenes stuff that went into 3.0 rendering &#8211; surface shaders, seamless shader compilation into OpenGL ES shading language, the way we encode Deferred Lighting buffers etc. But I doubt anyone except me would ever notice them <img
src='http://blogs.unity3d.com/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_smile.gif' alt=':)' class='wp-smiley'/></p><p>Obscure features that are awesome: XOR operator support in JavaScript! XOR is cool because:</p><ul
style="padding-bottom:1em;"><li>It&#8217;s exclusive &#8211; very exclusive.</li><li>No short circuiting semantics with this guy.</li><li>It appreciates differences in people, or at least in operands, which is almost the same as people.</li><li>It has an X in it. Everything that has an X in it is cool. And this one starts with an X.</li></ul><h3 style="padding-top:1em;">Samantha Kalman</h3><p>I&#8217;m most thrilled about the new audio features. Big things like fx filters and reverb zones to add atmosphere to your audio are awesome, but little things like reliable synching of multiple playing sources is completely wonderful. Combined with spectrum analysis you can do things like procedurally modify colors, meshes, lighting, or anything else based on audio playback. As someone who wants to make synaesthesia-invoking music games, I am so happy that these features made it into 3.0.</p><h3 style="padding-top:1em;">Nicolaj Schweitz</h3><p>I love the new audio features, especially the possibility to use audio to affect any runtime variable. I can&#8217;t wait to see what people get out of this.</p><p>The mod tracker file support might start a new epoch in music for games — or should I say a revival of the demo scene trackers.</p><p>I am also amazed by the new physics features. Cloth is a powerful feature that along with DSP effects and reverb zones will expand the way our users will present their game worlds.</p><p>I am really happy that we have managed to include a lot of details into the mix, audio preview in the scene, object selector, audio rolloff curves, UI for the player settings — I could go on and on. It soothes my perfectionist heart to see that many minor improvements in Unity.</p><h3 style="padding-top:1em;">Rune Skovbo Johansen</h3><p>A few things that are exciting to me, and haven&#8217;t been mentioned yet:</p><ul
style="padding-bottom:1em;"><li>New font back-end and text input with IME support should make Unity far more interesting to developers targeting Asia and other markets that have unique fonts.</li><li>A few very typical basic math functions have been added that you&#8217;d need in many games, but which are not trivial for newbies to come up with on their own: MoveTowards (for floats and vectors) RotateTowards (for rotations and vectors), and a some others.</li><li>Lots of small bug fixes all around that improve stability and performance.</li><li>Full debugging capabilities</li></ul><h3 style="padding-top:1em;">Joachim Ante</h3><p>I think Unity has made the transition to being a robust level editing tool — developers can place modeled objects from inside Unity as opposed to artists creating the whole level in maya/max. You could always use Unity in that way in theory, but there were some drawbacks why people didn&#8217;t do it workflow wise and feature wise when they were doing a high end production.</p><p>There is a bunch of stuff that contributed to it, in order of importance:</p><ol
style="padding-bottom:1em;"><li>Being able to lightmap from within Unity</li><li>Static batching</li><li>Being able to place things with the vertex snapping &amp; raycast snapping</li><li>Occlusion culling so you can get performance out of big scenes</li><li>Being able to quickly find assets with the object picker</li><li>Being able to search stuff in a super awesome looking way</li></ol><p>Equally important is the unified editor; we actually managed to get all platforms back under one tool again. This is awesome right now, but we also spent a lot of time making it easier to add new platforms, so that after 3.0 we can add new platforms at the speed of a rocket ship.</p><p><a
href=http://blogs.unity3d.com/2010/08/23/unity-3-what-feature-are-the-dev-team-most-proud-of/>Source Article »</a></p>]]></content:encoded> <wfw:commentRss>http://www.bydesigngames.com/2010/08/23/unity-technologies-unity-3-%e2%80%93-what-feature-is-the-dev-team-most-proud-of/feed/</wfw:commentRss> <slash:comments>0</slash:comments> </item> <item><title>[Unity Technologies] Making history with Unity and OpenSim</title><link>http://www.bydesigngames.com/2010/06/30/unity-technologies-making-history-with-unity-and-opensim/</link> <comments>http://www.bydesigngames.com/2010/06/30/unity-technologies-making-history-with-unity-and-opensim/#comments</comments> <pubDate>Wed, 30 Jun 2010 00:01:19 +0000</pubDate> <dc:creator>Unity3D News Pipe</dc:creator> <category><![CDATA[Technology]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Rants & Raves]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Unity3D]]></category><guid
isPermaLink="false">http://blogs.unity3d.com/?p=3023</guid> <description><![CDATA[As our resident virtual world enthusiast, I&#8217;m always on the lookout for Unity developers making progress in the field. One of the most recent and exciting examples of this is heralded by the folks at London-based Rezzable. Renowned for their highly innovative and rich environments in Second Life, Rezzable has ingeniously created a Unity [...]]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<div
id="attachment_3036" class="wp-caption alignleft" style="width:650px;"><img
class="size-full wp-image-3036 " title="Rezzable brings Unity &amp; Open Sim together" src="http://blogs.unity3d.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/unity3d-preview-area-terracotta-warriors-coloured-on-click8.jpg" alt="Rezzable brings Unity &amp; Open Sim together" width="640" height="365"/><p
class="wp-caption-text">Rezzable brings Unity &amp; Open Sim together.</p></div><p>As our resident virtual world enthusiast, I&#8217;m always on the lookout for Unity developers making progress in the field. One of the most recent and exciting examples of this is heralded by the folks at London-based <a
rel="nofollow"  href="http://rezzable.com/">Rezzable</a>. Renowned for their highly innovative and rich environments in <a
rel="nofollow"  href="http://secondlife.com/whatis/?lang=en-US#Be_Creative">Second Life</a>, Rezzable has ingeniously created a <a
rel="nofollow"  href="http://rezzable.net/web2-0/unity3d-and-opensim-working-together-prototype/">Unity based client</a> which works with <a
rel="nofollow"  href="http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Main_Page">OpenSim</a>, an open source Second Life compatible server. Their technology communicates directly with the OpenSim back-end to stream and rez/instantiate SL-compatible content, including its very unique prim and <a
rel="nofollow"  href="http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Sculpted_Prims">sculpted-prim</a> geometry right into Unity in real time.</p><p
style="text-align:center;"><div
id="attachment_3093" class="wp-caption alignnone" style="width:650px;"><img
class="size-full wp-image-3093" title="unity3d-viewer-splash-june2010_640" src="http://blogs.unity3d.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/unity3d-viewer-splash-june2010_640.jpg" alt="unity3d-viewer-splash-june2010_640" width="640" height="411"/><p
class="wp-caption-text">Rezzable is using virtual worlds to teach real world history.</p></div></p><p>Rezzable&#8217;s innovation promises to blend Unity&#8217;s powerful AAA, browser-based technology with the vast banks of virtual world data created by OpenSim and Second Life world-builders over the last 8 years. This marriage between new technology and existing content offers a continuity to virtual world developers who needn&#8217;t scrap their existing body of work in order to take advantage of <a
rel="nofollow"  href="http://unity3d.com/unity/coming-soon/unity-3">Unity&#8217;s next-gen functionality</a>.</p><div
id="attachment_3031" class="wp-caption alignleft" style="width:650px;"><img
class="size-full wp-image-3031 " title="A monumental achievement!" src="http://blogs.unity3d.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/unity3d-preview-area-stonehenge-megaliths-tourist-shot2.jpg" alt="A Monumental Milestone - Unity, Rezzable &amp; Opensim!" width="640" height="365"/><p
class="wp-caption-text">A Monumental Milestone - Unity, Rezzable &amp; Opensim!</p></div><p>Kudos to Rezzable and world-builders everywhere, working hard to bring Unity and the dream of a digital metaverse together. Do you have any exciting news about Unity and virtual world development or applications? Please share!</p><p><a
href=http://blogs.unity3d.com/2010/06/30/making-history-with-unity-and-opensim/>Source Article »</a></p>]]></content:encoded> <wfw:commentRss>http://www.bydesigngames.com/2010/06/30/unity-technologies-making-history-with-unity-and-opensim/feed/</wfw:commentRss> <slash:comments>0</slash:comments> </item> <item><title>[Unity Technologies] 3.0 Upcoming demo</title><link>http://www.bydesigngames.com/2010/06/04/unity-technologies-3-0-upcoming-demo/</link> <comments>http://www.bydesigngames.com/2010/06/04/unity-technologies-3-0-upcoming-demo/#comments</comments> <pubDate>Fri, 04 Jun 2010 15:20:46 +0000</pubDate> <dc:creator>Unity3D News Pipe</dc:creator> <category><![CDATA[Technology]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Rants & Raves]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Unity3D]]></category><guid
isPermaLink="false">http://blogs.unity3d.com/?p=2818</guid> <description><![CDATA[Just had to share this: It&#8217;s a screenshot from our 3.0 launch demo, lovingly done by the super-talented chaps at Aquiris. (No image effects were applied here &#8211; just a Unity-lightmapped scene with crossfade to deferred rendering up close for max performance)]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Just had to share this: It&#8217;s a screenshot from our 3.0 launch demo, lovingly done by the super-talented chaps at <a
rel="nofollow"  href="http://www.aquiris.com.br/pt/home/">Aquiris</a>.</p><p><img
class="alignnone size-full wp-image-2828" title="Unity 3.0 Launch Demo" src="http://blogs.unity3d.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/3.0-beta13.png" alt="Unity 3.0 Launch Demo" width="640" height="373"/></p><p>(No image effects were applied here &#8211; just a Unity-lightmapped scene with crossfade to deferred rendering up close for max performance)</p><p><a
href=http://blogs.unity3d.com/2010/06/04/3-0-upcoming-demo/>Source Article »</a></p>]]></content:encoded> <wfw:commentRss>http://www.bydesigngames.com/2010/06/04/unity-technologies-3-0-upcoming-demo/feed/</wfw:commentRss> <slash:comments>0</slash:comments> </item> <item><title>[Unity Technologies] Google, Android, and the Future of Games on the Web</title><link>http://www.bydesigngames.com/2010/05/19/unity-technologies-google-android-and-the-future-of-games-on-the-web/</link> <comments>http://www.bydesigngames.com/2010/05/19/unity-technologies-google-android-and-the-future-of-games-on-the-web/#comments</comments> <pubDate>Wed, 19 May 2010 19:55:49 +0000</pubDate> <dc:creator>Unity3D News Pipe</dc:creator> <category><![CDATA[Technology]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Rants & Raves]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Unity3D]]></category><guid
isPermaLink="false">http://blogs.unity3d.com/?p=2788</guid> <description><![CDATA[Hello Unity developers!
I have some big news to share with you this week: today, we&#8217;re showing two new branches of our technology to the world at Google&#8217;s annual developer conference, Google I/O. The first is Unity Android, which we announced this spring. Though we&#8217;ve shown some sneak peeks at our Android support in private and at [...]]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Hello Unity developers!</p><p>I have some big news to share with you this week: today, we&#8217;re showing two new branches of our technology to the world at Google&#8217;s annual developer conference, <a
rel="nofollow" id="aj:4" style="color:#551a8b;" title="Google I/O"  href="http://code.google.com/events/io/2010/">Google I/O</a>. The first is Unity Android, which we announced this spring. Though we&#8217;ve shown some sneak peeks at our Android support in private and at GDC in March, we&#8217;ve not yet shown all anything like what we&#8217;re showing this week.</p><p><img
style="margin-left:10px;" src="http://blogs.unity3d.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/dev-sandbox.png" alt="" align="right"/>In the <a
rel="nofollow" id="ixbd" title="Developer Sandbox"  href="http://code.google.com/events/io/2010/about.html">Developer Sandbox</a> at the show, we have several Android demos running on two different devices. On Google&#8217;s Nexus One, we have both Penelope and Star Troopers. We&#8217;re also showing a couple demos running a new tablet device sporting Nvidia&#8217;s Tegra 2 chipset: the alien shooter we demoed on the iPhone 3GS GDC and Star Troopers.</p><p>The Developer Sandbox also includes a station showing another Google technology which, experimentally for now, we&#8217;ve made Unity support. That technology is called <a
rel="nofollow" id="mspy" title="Native Client"  href="http://blog.chromium.org/2010/05/sneak-peek-at-native-client-sdk.html">Native Client</a> and we think it&#8217;s a potential game changer for rich web applications and games in particular. In a nutshell, Native Client is a security sandbox currently in Chromium that allows the secure execution of native code. If you want to dig into the details (e.g. how can native code be guaranteed secure?!), I *highly* recommend you watch Henry Bridge&#8217;s explanation in <a
rel="nofollow" id="opmj" title="this video"  href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nP8Mo0jGQDk">this video</a>.</p><p>If we really cut to the chase for why this matters for Unity, it&#8217;s because what we&#8217;re showing is Unity running in Chrome with <em><strong>no plugin at all</strong></em>. That&#8217;s right, there&#8217;s no Unity Web Player installed on the machines running Unity content in Chrome. Rather, with Google&#8217;s clever technology, we&#8217;re running Unity content in Chrome using just default access and no additional installation or user interaction. It&#8217;s kind of wild!</p><p>Chrome&#8217;s market share is already <a
rel="nofollow" id="vc48" title="growing like a weed"  href="http://mashable.com/2010/05/04/chrome-firefox-ie-stats/">growing like a weed</a>, but it&#8217;s innovation like this that will keep driving adoption at a torrid pace. Even cooler still is the fact that all this new technology from Google is open source, so it can readily be adopted by other browsers if they want to. We think they should.</p><p>Unity&#8217;s Native Client port got some very prominent attention outside the Developer Sandbox as well, appearing in the keynote by Google&#8217;s Sundar Pichai this morning. Sundar showed Lego Star Wars in a mockup of the forthcoming Chrome Web Store. Though not fully public yet, the Chrome Web Store is being designed with games in mind, and we&#8217;re sure that it can be yet another great channel for Unity developers to reach large audiences.</p><p>Some quick, semi-blurry shots from the keynote (captions are mine):</p><p
style="text-align:center;"></p><p
style="text-align:center;"><img
src="http://blogs.unity3d.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/time-on-the-web.jpg" alt="time-on-the-web"/><br
/> <em> </em><br
/> <em>The Web is where people spend their time&#8230;</em></p><p
style="text-align:center;"><em><br
/> </em></p><p
style="text-align:center;"></p><p
style="text-align:center;"><img
src="http://blogs.unity3d.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/hard-to-find-good-web-apps.jpg" alt=""/><br
/> <em> </em><br
/> <em>&#8230;but it&#8217;s often really tough to find the best apps.</em></p><p
style="text-align:center;"><em><br
/> </em></p><p
style="text-align:center;"></p><p
style="text-align:center;"><img
src="http://blogs.unity3d.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/chome-web-store-preview.jpg" alt=""/></p><p
style="text-align:center;"><em>The Chrome Web Store will help organize the web&#8217;s best content with an open marketplace and tools for rating and discovery.</em></p><p
style="text-align:center;"><em><br
/> </em></p><p
style="text-align:center;"></p><p
style="text-align:center;"><img
src="http://blogs.unity3d.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/lego-star-wars.jpg" alt=""/></p><p
style="text-align:center;"><em>High quality content, including content created with Unity, will be available to a huge audience with no technical or commercial barriers to entry. May the best <span
style="text-decoration:line-through;">content</span></em><em> games win <img
src='http://blogs.unity3d.com/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_smile.gif' alt=':)' class='wp-smiley'/> </em></p><p
style="text-align:center;"><em><br
/> </em></p><p>I want to take a moment to say how fantastic it&#8217;s been to collaborate with Google. For a giant company famously populated with geniuses, the people we&#8217;ve worked with have been incredibly humble, open, and responsive. No doubt about it, this is a sharp, ambitious, and capable crew and they want to do good things for game developers.</p><p>In that vein, it&#8217;s no secret that Unity believes in the future of games on the web and mobile devices. We put the majority of our resources into charging ahead on these fronts. Both markets are relatively new, but they&#8217;re now attracting new audiences to games and seeing very high, sustained growth rates as a result. As a game developer, being on the web and on mobile devices offers you the most frequent opportunities to capture a gamer&#8217;s attention and in raw minutes, the greatest spans of time to entertain them. Because both mobile and web are largely open platforms, we feel Unity is providing the greatest value to you by staying at the leading edge of the curve. For developers, they are easy to enter and they unlock the largest audiences. Sounds like a winning combination to us!</p><p>At Unity, we also believe there&#8217;s significant value in targeting multiple devices. Bigpoint had a <a
rel="nofollow" id="zdtz" title="great demo"  href="http://www.develop-online.net/news/34074/GDC-Bigpoint-and-Unity-debut-cross-platform-gaming">great demo</a> at GDC this spring, using Unity to create a game that could be played head-to-head, phone and browser. Whether it&#8217;s offering complementary experiences between the web and mobile devices, or a truly seamless experience across both, we think it&#8217;s valuable for developers to offer entertainment this way. And we&#8217;re beginning to see that proven in many more cases by big and small developers alike.</p><p>We&#8217;ve been very pleased to discover that our goals – offering the best possible technology to help game developers succeed – are in fundamental alignment with both Android and Chrome. While we still think it&#8217;s very important to continue to support all major browsers and as many mobile platforms as possible, we&#8217;re very excited by the technological openness of Google&#8217;s platforms and by the frictionless marketplace they&#8217;re building to support them. This means low barrier to entry and high potential for game developers – exactly the right ingredients for games to flourish!</p><p>As I&#8217;m writing this, Google I/O just hitting stride for day 1. We will have a lot more to announce about this in the coming months, so stay tuned and we&#8217;ll keep up to date on the latest and greatest. If you&#8217;re attending the show, come by and see us in the Developer Sandbox. We&#8217;re happy to answer questions at the show, or in the comments below this post.</p><div><span
style="font-family:Verdana;line-height:normal;"><br
/> </span></div><p><a
href=http://blogs.unity3d.com/2010/05/19/google-android-and-the-future-of-games-on-the-web/>Source Article »</a></p>]]></content:encoded> <wfw:commentRss>http://www.bydesigngames.com/2010/05/19/unity-technologies-google-android-and-the-future-of-games-on-the-web/feed/</wfw:commentRss> <slash:comments>0</slash:comments> </item> <item><title>[Unity Technologies] Unity and the iPhone OS 4.0, update II</title><link>http://www.bydesigngames.com/2010/05/11/unity-technologies-unity-and-the-iphone-os-4-0-update-ii/</link> <comments>http://www.bydesigngames.com/2010/05/11/unity-technologies-unity-and-the-iphone-os-4-0-update-ii/#comments</comments> <pubDate>Tue, 11 May 2010 19:42:50 +0000</pubDate> <dc:creator>Unity3D News Pipe</dc:creator> <category><![CDATA[Technology]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Rants & Raves]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Unity3D]]></category><guid
isPermaLink="false">http://blogs.unity3d.com/?p=2752</guid> <description><![CDATA[Dear Unity developers.
First I want to thank all of you who have expressed support for us in the past weeks. While we can&#8217;t yet say exactly how the ToS 3.3.1 will play out, Unity is very different from Flash and we strongly believe that Unity developers will be unharmed. Oh, and awesome Unity games such [...]]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Dear Unity developers.</p><p>First I want to thank all of you who have expressed support for us in the past weeks. While we can&#8217;t yet say exactly how the ToS 3.3.1 will play out, Unity is very different from Flash and we strongly believe that Unity developers will be unharmed. Oh, and awesome Unity games such as <a
rel="nofollow"  href="http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/armada-galactic-war/id370460556?mt=8">Armada: Galactic War</a>, <a
rel="nofollow"  href="http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/rpg-snake-the-adventure-akua/id367594379?mt=8">RPG Snake</a>, <a
rel="nofollow"  href="http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/roswell-fighter-hd/id370135149?mt=8">Roswell Fighter HD</a>, and <a
rel="nofollow"  href="http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/zombieville-usa-hd/id366741832?mt=8">Zombieville HD</a> are still being accepted into and promoted in the AppStore (even after accepting the new ToS). Therefore we are continuing and renewing our investment into the platform, while also researching contingency plans in case we need to modify Unity to keep it compliant.</p><p>The whole company is still manically focused, putting all our efforts into making Unity 3 our best release ever. Unity 3 is very much about major new features, big ticket items like live debugging, deferred rendering, a built-in lightmapper, and things like that. But then we&#8217;re also obsessed about polish, so we are also adding features like <a
rel="nofollow"  href="http://blogs.unity3d.com/2010/04/23/unity-3-feature-preview-snapping-marquee-selection/">vertex snapping</a>. Small and large, these features most Unity developers will benefit from regardless of which platform(s) they&#8217;re targeting.</p><p>A <em>major</em> focus of this effort is Unity iPhone 3, where we&#8217;re rolling out some very specific (and cool) improvements for iPhone and iPad developers.</p><p>If you visited us at GDC 2010, you might have seen this very cool looking platformer game running on the iPhone 3GS. Our awesome demo team put this together to show what&#8217;s possible with Unity iPhone 3&#8217;s upcoming OpenGL ES 2.0 support — shaders add so much visual fidelity to your games — and as always Unity gracefully handles fallbacks to previous hardware generations.</p><p><img
class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-2753" title="ipad-gles2" src="http://blogs.unity3d.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/ipad-gles2.jpg" alt="ipad-gles2" width="490" height="407"/></p><p>For &#8220;cross-resolution&#8221; development as when creating a game for both the iPhone and iPad, Unity 3 makes it really easy to create differentiated builds, where different resolutions of textures are included.</p><p>Another cool feature is that we&#8217;re making it even easier to call into the iPhone OS, and making the native calls feature available to both Unity iPhone licensees as well as Unity iPhone Pro licensees. Thus you can call into all of iPhone OS 4.0&#8217;s new APIs such as the GameCenter, and to drop into ObjectiveC when it makes sense.</p><p>And of course there&#8217;s going to be lots more <img
src='http://blogs.unity3d.com/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_smile.gif' alt=':)' class='wp-smiley'/></p><p>If you haven&#8217;t done so yet, have a look at the <a
rel="nofollow"  href="http://unity3d.com/unity/coming-soon/unity-3">Unity 3 preview page</a>. And there&#8217;s a lot more feature previews coming in these blogs, so stay tuned!</p><p><a
href=http://blogs.unity3d.com/2010/05/11/unity-and-the-iphone-os-4-0-update-ii/>Source Article »</a></p>]]></content:encoded> <wfw:commentRss>http://www.bydesigngames.com/2010/05/11/unity-technologies-unity-and-the-iphone-os-4-0-update-ii/feed/</wfw:commentRss> <slash:comments>0</slash:comments> </item> <item><title>[Unity Technologies] New Copenhagen Office</title><link>http://www.bydesigngames.com/2010/04/24/unity-technologies-new-copenhagen-office/</link> <comments>http://www.bydesigngames.com/2010/04/24/unity-technologies-new-copenhagen-office/#comments</comments> <pubDate>Sat, 24 Apr 2010 22:19:37 +0000</pubDate> <dc:creator>Unity3D News Pipe</dc:creator> <category><![CDATA[Technology]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Rants & Raves]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Unity3D]]></category><guid
isPermaLink="false">http://blogs.unity3d.com/?p=2712</guid> <description><![CDATA[It was almost two years ago that we moved our Copenhagen office to a really cozy house in Frederiksberg. There were just about a dozen of us in the office, and we felt that the place encapsulated the spirit of Unity at the time. We know that over time many of you came to love [...]]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>It was almost two years ago that we moved our Copenhagen office to a really cozy house in Frederiksberg. There were just about a dozen of us in the office, and we felt that the place encapsulated the spirit of Unity at the time. We know that over time many of you came to love that office as much as we did (we all had a lot of fun there, didn&#8217;t we?). Unfortunately, over the last year, it became increasingly apparent that we were outgrowing the space and that a larger office would soon become required. We held out as long as possible, but about a month ago we decided that it was finally time to make the move.</p><p>Here&#8217;s the last peek into the old office as we closed the door behind us. The empty offices bring back fond memories of a constantly growing company, late nights spent crunching on Unity releases and the gallons upon gallons of coffee consumed at my desk.</p><p><img
src="http://blogs.unity3d.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/24851_10150149185240367_729240366_11777990_2180329_n-300x225.jpg" alt="The Old Office" title="The Old Office" width="300" height="225" class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-2719"/></p><p>Without further ado, I would like to introduce our new office with more than ample space and meeting rooms everywhere. Following are some snapshots taken just after we moved in.</p><p><img
src="http://blogs.unity3d.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/photo-300x225.jpg" alt="photo" title="photo" width="300" height="225" class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-2721"/> <img
src="http://blogs.unity3d.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/lunchroom1-300x225.jpg" alt="lunchroom" title="lunchroom" width="300" height="225" class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-2722"/></p><p>At the moment, the walls are a little barren. If any of you have interesting artwork (high resolution screenshots of Unity games!) that we could hang on our walls, let me know.</p><p><strong>Update:</strong> Send any artwork you want us to consider decorating our walls with to <a
rel="nofollow"  href="mailto:wall%2dart%40unity3d%2ecom">wall-art&#64;&#117;nity3d&#46;com</a></p><p><a
href=http://blogs.unity3d.com/2010/04/25/new-copenhagen-office/>Source Article »</a></p>]]></content:encoded> <wfw:commentRss>http://www.bydesigngames.com/2010/04/24/unity-technologies-new-copenhagen-office/feed/</wfw:commentRss> <slash:comments>0</slash:comments> </item> <item><title>[Unity Technologies] Unity and the iPhone OS 4.0, update</title><link>http://www.bydesigngames.com/2010/04/14/unity-technologies-unity-and-the-iphone-os-4-0-update/</link> <comments>http://www.bydesigngames.com/2010/04/14/unity-technologies-unity-and-the-iphone-os-4-0-update/#comments</comments> <pubDate>Wed, 14 Apr 2010 19:40:17 +0000</pubDate> <dc:creator>Unity3D News Pipe</dc:creator> <category><![CDATA[Technology]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Rants & Raves]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Unity3D]]></category><guid
isPermaLink="false">http://blogs.unity3d.com/?p=2627</guid> <description><![CDATA[Dear Unity developers,
I wanted to take a moment today to follow up on my blog post last Friday regarding the recent controversial changes in the the iPhone OS 4.0 beta ToS. The news about this change from Apple has drawn a lot of attention and stirred up very strong emotions in many developer communities, [...]]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Dear Unity developers,</p><p>I wanted to take a moment today to follow up on my <a
rel="nofollow"  href="http://blogs.unity3d.com/2010/04/10/unity-and-the-iphone-os-4-0/">blog post last Friday</a> regarding the recent controversial changes in the the iPhone OS 4.0 beta ToS. The news about this change from Apple has drawn a lot of attention and stirred up very strong emotions in many developer communities, including ours. There&#8217;s also been a great deal of commentary about how these changes will be interpreted and applied by Apple and still more discussion about Apple&#8217;s intent with these changes. Unity learned of these changes with the rest of you just last Thursday and today, there remains a great deal of uncertainty about these changes being final and what we may need to do to comply.</p><p>We&#8217;re meeting with Apple next week to discuss the matter, and our engineers have been discussing possible technical solutions as well. Of course, we&#8217;ll provide you with immediate updates as soon as we have any new information.</p><p>Just in case the ToS changes <em>do</em> end up being a problem, we&#8217;re already working hard to find and implement solutions to maintain uninterrupted compliance with Apple&#8217;s ToS.</p><p>Though any uncertainly about Unity&#8217;s future on this platform is unpleasant, our feeling is that we&#8217;ll be okay. We remain firmly committed to providing you with the very best game engine for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch. Thank you all so much for your patience and support. It means everything to us.</p><p><strong>Update</strong>: <a
rel="nofollow"  href="http://blogs.unity3d.com/2010/05/11/unity-and-the-iphone-os-4-0-update-ii/">Unity and the iPhone OS 4.0, update II</a></p><p><a
href=http://blogs.unity3d.com/2010/04/14/unity-and-the-iphone-os-4-0-update/>Source Article »</a></p>]]></content:encoded> <wfw:commentRss>http://www.bydesigngames.com/2010/04/14/unity-technologies-unity-and-the-iphone-os-4-0-update/feed/</wfw:commentRss> <slash:comments>0</slash:comments> </item> <item><title>[Unity Technologies] Unity and the iPhone OS 4.0</title><link>http://www.bydesigngames.com/2010/04/10/unity-technologies-unity-and-the-iphone-os-4-0/</link> <comments>http://www.bydesigngames.com/2010/04/10/unity-technologies-unity-and-the-iphone-os-4-0/#comments</comments> <pubDate>Sat, 10 Apr 2010 00:39:54 +0000</pubDate> <dc:creator>Unity3D News Pipe</dc:creator> <category><![CDATA[Technology]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Rants & Raves]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Unity3D]]></category><guid
isPermaLink="false">http://blogs.unity3d.com/?p=2620</guid> <description><![CDATA[Hey guys,
I just wanted to thank our forum users for their support and thoughtful analyses about Apple’s new ToS (terms of service) for its iPhone OS 4.0, due to be released this summer. As you are probably all aware by now, the new ToS has led to widespread speculation on blogs and in the trade [...]]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<div
id="_mcePaste" style="width:1px;height:1px;">Hey guys,</div><div
id="_mcePaste" style="width:1px;height:1px;">I just wanted to thank our forum users for their support and thoughtful analyses about Apple’s new ToS (terms of service) for its iPhone OS 4.0, due to be released this summer. As you are probably all aware by now, the new ToS has led to widespread speculation on blogs and in the trade press about how the change in wording could affect products marketed on the Apple AppStore.</div><div
id="_mcePaste" style="width:1px;height:1px;">As is so often the case with “legalese,” the new ToS are difficult to parse with certainty and open to broad interpretation—particularly by Apple itself. Some have noted that the strictest possible interpretation could prohibit many products from being marketed on the App Store. Others have argued that under more benign interpretations of the new terms, Unity and others will be just fine.</div><div
id="_mcePaste" style="width:1px;height:1px;">Apple has built a tremendous marketplace for all of us, and it&#8217;s great for those who successfully take advantage of it. The flipside, of course, is that the power there so clearly resides with Apple.</div><div
id="_mcePaste" style="width:1px;height:1px;">This is certainly not the first time that developers of all types of apps have faced sometimes confusing changes in rules, or their interpretation. It&#8217;s a risk we all run in basing parts of our businesses on Apple.</div><div
id="_mcePaste" style="width:1px;height:1px;">Here at Unity, we are working hard on getting good information, and working to understand whether – or how – the new changes could affect the developer community and others. We have reached out to both official and unofficial contacts at Apple, we are talking to other companies in a similar situation to us, and we&#8217;ve been diligent in reading the ToS to get to the best legal (and business-wise) analysis of it.</div><div
id="_mcePaste" style="width:1px;height:1px;">We haven&#8217;t heard anything from Apple about this affecting us, and we believe that with hundreds of titles (or probably over a thousand by now), including a significant proportion of the best selling ones, we&#8217;re adding so much value to the iPhone ecosystem that Apple can&#8217;t possibly want to shut that down.</div><div
id="_mcePaste" style="width:1px;height:1px;">Our current best guess is that we&#8217;ll be fine. But it would obviously be irresponsible to guarantee that. What I can guarantee is that we&#8217;ll continue to do everything in our power to make this work, and that we will be here to inform you when we know more – as soon as we know more.</div><div
id="_mcePaste" style="width:1px;height:1px;">PS. In the ancient days of the App Store (July 2008), Apple very late changed the kernel to disallow JIT (just-in-time) compilation. What we did instead was spend several months changing Mono to AOT (ahead of time) compile scripts instead (this is why some dynamic constructs in our JavaScript doesn&#8217;t work on the iPhone). It was a lot of work, but we made it work to enable all these amazing Unity games to be sold in the App Store, many of which have gone on to be bestsellers and made their creators rich and famous.</div><div
id="_mcePaste" style="width:1px;height:1px;">Thanks again for your support. We&#8217;re so very proud of you all.</div><p>First I would like to thank our forum users for their <a
rel="nofollow"  href="http://forum.unity3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=48795">support and thoughtful analyses</a> about Apple’s new ToS (terms of service) for iPhone OS 4.0, due to be released this summer. As you are probably all aware by now, the new ToS has led to widespread speculation on blogs and in the press about how the change in wording could affect apps sold on Apple&#8217;s App Store.</p><p>As is so often the case with “legalese,” the new ToS are difficult to parse with certainty and open to broad interpretation – not least by Apple itself. Some have noted that the strictest possible interpretation could prohibit many products from being marketed on the App Store. Others have argued that under more benign interpretations of the new terms, Unity and others will be just fine.</p><p>Apple has built a tremendous marketplace for all of us, and it’s great for those who successfully take advantage of it. The flipside, of course, is that the power there so clearly resides with Apple.</p><p>This is certainly not the first time that developers of all types of apps have faced sometimes confusing changes in rules, or their interpretation. It’s a risk we all run in basing parts of our businesses on Apple.</p><p>Here at Unity, we are working hard on getting good information, and working to understand whether – or how – the new changes could affect the developer community and others. We have reached out to both official and unofficial contacts at Apple, we are talking to other companies in a similar situation to us, and we’ve been diligent in reading the ToS to get to the best legal (and business-wise) analysis of it.</p><p>We haven’t heard anything from Apple about this affecting us, and we believe that with hundreds of titles (or probably over a thousand by now), including a significant proportion of the best selling ones, we’re adding so much value to the iPhone ecosystem that Apple can’t possibly want to shut that down.</p><p>Our current best guess is that we’ll be fine. But it would obviously be irresponsible to guarantee that. What I can guarantee is that we’ll continue to do everything in our power to make this work, and that we will be here to inform you when we know more – as soon as we know more.</p><p>PS. In the ancient days of the App Store (July 2008), Apple changed the kernel to disallow JIT (just-in-time) compilation. We worked around this by changing Mono to AOT (ahead of time) compile scripts instead (this is why some dynamic constructs in our JavaScript doesn’t work on the iPhone). It was a lot of work, but we made it work to enable all these amazing Unity games to be sold in the App Store, many of which have gone on to be bestsellers and made their creators rich and famous. We’re so very proud of you.</p><p>Thanks again for your support.</p><p><a
href=http://blogs.unity3d.com/2010/04/10/unity-and-the-iphone-os-4-0/>Source Article »</a></p>]]></content:encoded> <wfw:commentRss>http://www.bydesigngames.com/2010/04/10/unity-technologies-unity-and-the-iphone-os-4-0/feed/</wfw:commentRss> <slash:comments>0</slash:comments> </item> <item><title>[Unity Technologies] Unity 3 coming soon!</title><link>http://www.bydesigngames.com/2010/03/09/unity-technologies-unity-3-coming-soon/</link> <comments>http://www.bydesigngames.com/2010/03/09/unity-technologies-unity-3-coming-soon/#comments</comments> <pubDate>Tue, 09 Mar 2010 20:38:27 +0000</pubDate> <dc:creator>Unity3D News Pipe</dc:creator> <category><![CDATA[Technology]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Rants & Raves]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Unity3D]]></category><guid
isPermaLink="false">http://blogs.unity3d.com/?p=2510</guid> <description><![CDATA[In the Unite 2009 conference keynote we promised you that Unity would be picking up speed, and it has: Unity has become a powerhouse in the game industry and beyond. Nobody else is as active in democratizing sweet game technology to as many developers, and enabling them to target as many consumers. Unity has been [...]]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span
style="font-family:Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;line-height:15px;color:#352f28;"> </span></p><p>In the <a
rel="nofollow" style="color:black;text-decoration:underline;"  href="http://unity3d.com/support/resources/unite-presentations/keynote-presentation-unite-09">Unite 2009 conference keynote</a> we promised you that Unity would be picking up speed, and it has: Unity has become a powerhouse in the game industry and beyond. Nobody else is as active in democratizing sweet game technology to as many developers, and enabling them to target as many consumers. Unity has been used by well over 100,000 developers of all shapes and sizes to create thousands of games and other interactive 3D content that has touched over 40 million people.</p><p>We’re moving fast. Our engineering team now consists of 36 people (up from some 12 or so a year ago), and they are firing on all cylinders. We’ve continually released major updates with tons of features over the last years. We also started working on an <a
rel="nofollow" style="color:black;text-decoration:underline;"  href="http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=25840">Xbox 360 port</a>, and recently blogged that our iPhone team is <a
rel="nofollow" style="color:black;text-decoration:underline;"  href="http://blogs.unity3d.com/2010/02/01/unity-and-mobile-pt-2-the-ipad-cometh/">working on iPad support</a>.</p><p
style="text-align:auto;">But those teams are just a handful of our people! So what else <em>have </em>we been up to? Thousands of code check ins have been done, many subsystems reworked, leading technologies integrated in Unity, and a massive automated testing suite implemented so that we can move as fast as we can.</p><p
style="text-align:auto;">In fact, here&#8217;s a historical graph of our code checkins:</p><div
id="attachment_2516" class="wp-caption aligncenter" style="width:668px;"><img
class="size-full wp-image-2516 " title="Unity development progress" src="http://blogs.unity3d.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/commits-timeline1.png" alt="Unity development progress" width="658" height="363"/><p
class="wp-caption-text">As a project grows developers tend to check in less frequently, so the actual slope of work being done is much steeper.</p></div><p>Until today it was all hush-hush, but now we&#8217;re finally ready to announce our plans. Let it be known: for the last year we’ve been working on the next major release: the uber-cool Unity 3: <a
rel="nofollow" style="color:black;text-decoration:underline;"  href="http://unity3d.com/unity/coming-soon/unity-3">unity3d.com/unity/coming-soon/unity-3</a></p><p><img
class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-2519" title="unity3" src="http://blogs.unity3d.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/unity3.png" alt="unity3" width="600" height="258"/></p><p>So far the only time frame we’ve promised is “summer 2010″, but we’ll be giving early beta access – and a discount – to anyone who pre-orders.</p><p>Also, we’ve just announced that Unity will add support for iPad, Android, Xbox 360, and PS3! That’s the kind of &#8220;author once, deploy anywhere&#8221; that has remained a developer’s wet dream for years. And not just from “one codebase”, but from one heck of a unified and polished IDE paired with the industry’s best asset pipeline!</p><p>I hope you’ll stick around with us, we&#8217;re only just getting started!</p><p>PS. Because we&#8217;re unifying the core Unity products with Unity iPhone (and all the other deployment targets too) the upgrade rules are a bit complicated and we haven’t done the best job at explaining them. We are working on this, please bear with us as we are inundated with questions – we will sort this all out and make it as clear as it can be in the near future.</p><p><a
href=http://blogs.unity3d.com/2010/03/09/unity-3-coming-soon/>Source Article »</a></p>]]></content:encoded> <wfw:commentRss>http://www.bydesigngames.com/2010/03/09/unity-technologies-unity-3-coming-soon/feed/</wfw:commentRss> <slash:comments>0</slash:comments> </item> <item><title>[Unity Technologies] Unity and Mobile pt. 2 : The iPad Cometh</title><link>http://www.bydesigngames.com/2010/02/01/unity-technologies-unity-and-mobile-pt-2-the-ipad-cometh/</link> <comments>http://www.bydesigngames.com/2010/02/01/unity-technologies-unity-and-mobile-pt-2-the-ipad-cometh/#comments</comments> <pubDate>Mon, 01 Feb 2010 21:20:18 +0000</pubDate> <dc:creator>Unity3D News Pipe</dc:creator> <category><![CDATA[Technology]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Rants & Raves]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Unity3D]]></category><guid
isPermaLink="false">http://blogs.unity3d.com/?p=2267</guid> <description><![CDATA[Ok, so the iPad is now officially old news. Let me get something out of the way, first: yes, we will support it. Yes, we are aiming for 0-day support. If we get there or not basically depends whether on if Apple can get us early access to the device.
With that out of the way, [...]]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img
class="alignright size-medium wp-image-2272" title="Moses-Jobs72" src="http://blogs.unity3d.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Moses-Jobs72-273x300.jpg" alt="Moses-Jobs72" width="218" height="240"/>Ok, so the iPad is now officially old news. Let me get something out of the way, first: yes, we will support it. Yes, we are aiming for 0-day support. If we get there or not basically depends whether on if Apple can get us early access to the device.</p><p>With that out of the way, here&#8217;s what I actually had in mind &#8211; Looking at the event, Apple unveiled pretty much what most of us expected &#8211; but it wasn&#8217;t until a bit later that it hit me what is so great about this:</p><p>I&#8217;ve never before seen a computer that is so designed for consumers. It goes straight into the stream of iPod, iPod Touch, etc. Sure, it&#8217;s using general-purpose chips behind it, so it&#8217;s not like it can&#8217;t do &#8220;real&#8221; apps, but the focus is here 100% on consumers. That means games.</p><p>Apple has been taking games more and more seriously &#8211; I guess that started happening when they realized games were one of the main movers of iPod Touches. This means that as far as we&#8217;re concerned what we&#8217;re looking at is the launch of a new console. For indies it&#8217;s even better: Apple actually gets the whole &#8220;make life sweet for developers&#8221; &#8211; so it&#8217;s a platform that you can make games on and you can even earn money &#8211; all major console&#8217;s stores are simply embarassing compared to the AppStore. In short, on iPod/Pad/Phone the hoops you have to go through to develop, publish and get paid are crazy low. If you&#8217;re one of those people who think the submission process is slow/bad/bloated, just try becoming a registered developer with Sony or Microsoft <img
src='http://blogs.unity3d.com/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_smile.gif' alt=':)' class='wp-smiley'/></p><p>Naturally, we want to be there the moment it happens. Whenever new and exciting platforms come out, we want to be there. Our goal is to let our users publish anywhere. We can&#8217;t support all platforms instantly, but Apple have had an uncanny ability to produce hits. With the iPad I think they&#8217;ve done it again.</p><p>So we are scrambling like mad to get support for it. On the iPhone our guys worked round the clock to get it out &#8211; hopefully that won&#8217;t be neccessary this time, but we&#8217;d always rather burn some midnight oil than end up like the large behemoth we&#8217;re currently seeing on the sidelines &#8211; 18 months after iPhone launch with no shipped support for this platform mumbling <a
rel="nofollow"  href="http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-10443465-17.html">OMG! The Net Is Broken</a> <img
src='http://blogs.unity3d.com/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_wink.gif' alt=';)' class='wp-smiley'/></p><p><a
href=http://blogs.unity3d.com/2010/02/01/unity-and-mobile-pt-2-the-ipad-cometh/>Source Article »</a></p>]]></content:encoded> <wfw:commentRss>http://www.bydesigngames.com/2010/02/01/unity-technologies-unity-and-mobile-pt-2-the-ipad-cometh/feed/</wfw:commentRss> <slash:comments>0</slash:comments> </item> <item><title>[Unity Technologies] Granny Theft Tofu</title><link>http://www.bydesigngames.com/2010/02/01/unity-technologies-granny-theft-tofu/</link> <comments>http://www.bydesigngames.com/2010/02/01/unity-technologies-granny-theft-tofu/#comments</comments> <pubDate>Mon, 01 Feb 2010 14:28:02 +0000</pubDate> <dc:creator>Unity3D News Pipe</dc:creator> <category><![CDATA[Technology]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Rants & Raves]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Unity3D]]></category><guid
isPermaLink="false">http://blogs.unity3d.com/?p=2280</guid> <description><![CDATA[This past weekend was the Global Game Jam, where teams from all around the world worked tirelessly to create amazing games in a single weekend. Here in Copenhagen, the local branch of the Global Game Jam is the Nordic Game Jam that was held at the IT University of Copenhagen. The cool things about the [...]]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>This past weekend was the <a
rel="nofollow"  href="http://www.globalgamejam.org/">Global Game Jam</a>, where teams from all around the world worked tirelessly to create amazing games in a single weekend. Here in Copenhagen, the local branch of the Global Game Jam is the <a
rel="nofollow"  href="http://www.nordicgamejam.org/">Nordic Game Jam</a> that was held at the <a
rel="nofollow"  href="http://www1.itu.dk/sw5211.asp">IT University of Copenhagen</a>. The cool things about the Nordic Game Jam are that it&#8217;s the &#8220;original&#8221; jam, and Unity&#8217;s old office is inside the ITU itself! So of course we had to be there. Six of us from UT presented talks on using Unity as an Artist or a Programmer.</p><p>You may have heard about <a
rel="nofollow"  href="http://blogs.unity3d.com/2009/11/18/fridays-are-for-fun/">Fun Fridays</a> here at Unity HQ. Those of us who were giving the talks thought it would be a good idea to spend some Fridays to make a small game that we could use as a visual aid. This turned out to be a great idea. We created new material to help teach new Unity users, and those of us who worked on it have a really fun game to share with friends, family, and the community! I&#8217;d like to share this game with you now&#8230; We call it <strong>Granny Theft Tofu</strong> and you can play it in the embedded webplayer below.</p><p><em>Please view the full post to see the Unity content.</em></p><p>The goal is to get yourself to the Tofu shop and back home again before time runs out, all while causing as much traffic carnage as possible. Arrow keys will move Granny around. And there&#8217;s an easter egg in the game too; an Amiga graphics mode. See if you can find it!</p><p>I&#8217;m incredibly happy to have helped create this game! I think everybody on the team learned something about Unity that they didn&#8217;t know before. It was also nice to sit down with Unity as a user once again, and help others learn what it is and what makes it so special. I hope you&#8217;ll all enjoy the game, and perhaps walk away inspired.</p><p><a
href=http://blogs.unity3d.com/2010/02/01/granny-theft-tofu/>Source Article »</a></p>]]></content:encoded> <wfw:commentRss>http://www.bydesigngames.com/2010/02/01/unity-technologies-granny-theft-tofu/feed/</wfw:commentRss> <slash:comments>0</slash:comments> </item> <item><title>[Unity Technologies] Unity and Mobile</title><link>http://www.bydesigngames.com/2010/01/20/unity-technologies-unity-and-mobile/</link> <comments>http://www.bydesigngames.com/2010/01/20/unity-technologies-unity-and-mobile/#comments</comments> <pubDate>Wed, 20 Jan 2010 18:55:32 +0000</pubDate> <dc:creator>Unity3D News Pipe</dc:creator> <category><![CDATA[Technology]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Rants & Raves]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Unity3D]]></category><guid
isPermaLink="false">http://blogs.unity3d.com/?p=2237</guid> <description><![CDATA[I wanted to take a moment and talk a bit about how we see mobile platforms here at Unity.
Any talk about mobile will start with the iPhone &#8211; it&#8217;s the device that really showed even disbelievers like me that you do want a general-purpose computer-like device in your pocket. The iPhone has been great for [...]]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>I wanted to take a moment and talk a bit about how we see mobile platforms here at Unity.</p><p>Any talk about mobile will start with the iPhone &#8211; it&#8217;s the device that really showed even disbelievers like me that you do want a general-purpose computer-like device in your pocket. The iPhone has been great for us &#8211; we got in on it early and let our users publish to it &#8211; adding &#8220;quite a few&#8221; users in the process. We&#8217;ve now shipped 6 versions and over 500 Unity appstore games have been launched. Pretty much whenever anyone does a list of top-something-or-other on iPhone games, you can spot a couple of Unity-powered games.</p><p>What games are people playing on the iPhone? From what I&#8217;ve heard based on data from ingame ad networks, an interesting trend is surfacing: iPhones are typically used for play sessions of around one hour &#8211; mainly in the evenings. If iPhones are really giving traditional consoles a fight in their own turf, this means that mobile devices have a huge future in the gaming space as well.<br
/> So how will all this play out? I expect that over the next few years we&#8217;ll see a bunch of mobile platforms appear. Some of these will stay and quite a few more will die &#8211; in the end, I wouldn&#8217;t be surprised if we ended up with iPhone, Android and a third player. Obviously, we want our customers to be able to deploy their games to as many platforms as possible &#8211; this means that we could be adding support for some that will possibly go away in the end &#8211; that&#8217;s ok. While platform fragmentation is annoying to us, the ease of targetting multiple platforms is something we&#8217;ve always held close to our heart. Maybe we&#8217;ll suffer a bit when porting, but at least it&#8217;s only us and not all the people that just want to get creative. It&#8217;s our unofficial slogan: We suffer, so you don&#8217;t have to.</p><p>Some of you have probably seen the announcement that we&#8217;re going to support NVidia&#8217;s Tegra 2 chipset. This is the first of various things we&#8217;re ready to announce and also says something about how we see the world: there&#8217;s chipsets and OSes (and then there&#8217;s the physical devices). We work on supporting a chipset (like SGX/ARM for iPhone) and we work on supporting an OS (Windows, MacOSX, iPhoneOSX). Behind the huge range of mobile devices mentioned above, there&#8217;s a somewhat smaller list of stacks: Broadcom, Qualcomm, Apple, NVidia Tegra &#8211; with an OS on top: iPhoneOSX, Windows CE, Linux, Android, etc. those are the ones that are real work for us to support &#8211; but once we have some more of these, adding new devices shouldn&#8217;t be that hard.</p><p>And then there&#8217;s the Apple tablet (sure, there&#8217;s others &#8211; but who really cares?). I expect it to be OSX-based, probably some SGX/ARM chipset &#8211; while I know as little as anyone else, I&#8217;m basically thinking of an oversized &amp; clocked iPhone 3GS. Supporting it will be some pain, but nothing major (these things are hard to say &#8211; half the time on the original iPhone port was spent on one single issue).</p><p>Either way, I think gaming on mobile platforms are going to be huge, and I think we&#8217;re small and nimble enough to be among the very first with support for many of these platforms. If any of you are going to GDC, I&#8217;d love to meet up and chat about these things &#8211; drop by our booth (or failing that, there&#8217;s a wonderful comment thingy below this post).</p><p><a
href=http://blogs.unity3d.com/2010/01/20/unity-and-mobile/>Source Article »</a></p>]]></content:encoded> <wfw:commentRss>http://www.bydesigngames.com/2010/01/20/unity-technologies-unity-and-mobile/feed/</wfw:commentRss> <slash:comments>0</slash:comments> </item> <item><title>[Unity Technologies] 2010 Trends</title><link>http://www.bydesigngames.com/2010/01/14/unity-technologies-2010-trends/</link> <comments>http://www.bydesigngames.com/2010/01/14/unity-technologies-2010-trends/#comments</comments> <pubDate>Thu, 14 Jan 2010 21:43:25 +0000</pubDate> <dc:creator>Unity3D News Pipe</dc:creator> <category><![CDATA[Technology]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Rants & Raves]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Unity3D]]></category><guid
isPermaLink="false">http://blogs.unity3d.com/?p=2239</guid> <description><![CDATA[2010 Trends – Unity Technologies CEO David Helgason
We&#8217;re living in exciting times, and in some ways we here at Unity Technologies are in a unique position to be part of them. Here are the trends that we think are most important for the Unity community as a whole in 2010 along with what you can [...]]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<div
id="_mcePaste" style="width:1px;height:1px;">2010 Trends – Unity Technologies CEO David Helgason</div><div
id="_mcePaste" style="width:1px;height:1px;">We&#8217;re living in exciting times, and in some ways we here at Unity Technologies are in a unique position to be part of them. Here are the trends that we think are most important for the Unity community as a whole in 2010 along with what you can do to be part of</div><div>We&#8217;re living in exciting times, and in some ways we here at Unity Technologies are in a unique position to be part of them. Here are the trends that we think are most important for the Unity community as a whole in 2010 along with what you can do to be part of them.</div><p>Without further ado.</p><p><strong>The Year of Gamification, Part 1<br
/> <span
style="font-weight:normal;">We call the adoption of game technology and game design methods outside of the games industry &#8220;gamification&#8221;, and this is a <em>really</em> broad trend.</span></strong></p><p>Unity and other game technologies are being used across more than a dozen sectors that have little or nothing to do with games. Architectural visualization is an obvious and older example. But apart from that we have some of the world&#8217;s biggest engineering and manufacturing companies, as well as several actual armed forces as our customers. TV production companies use Unity and other game engines to produce live TV shows and Machinima videos. Big corporations make employee training and simulation applications using Unity, and some of our customers have gone into online meeting and collaboration. Game technology being applied to all these areas means that Unity users are valuable to many and not everyone has to make a living from games.</p><p><strong>Action item: </strong>Sell your skills outside the games industry. With a knowledge of other industries, you can create new and innovative products or businesses servicing these industries. The sky&#8217;s the limit.</p><p><strong>The Year of Gamification, Part 2<br
/> <span
style="font-weight:normal;">A second aspect of gamification is that game design methods and strategies are being used outside of games to design better products and user experiences. A boring site like Mint.com has experimented with turning personal finance <a
rel="nofollow"  href="http://www.stoth.com/2009/04/28/mint-turns-personal-finance-into-a-game-it&#x002019;s-not-as-bad-as-it-sounds/">into a game</a>, social networking experiment <a
rel="nofollow"  href="http://foursquare.com/">FourSquare</a> maintains high-score lists for people who bar-crawl, and natural-language search startup <a
rel="nofollow"  href="http://siri.com/">Siri</a> hired an accomplished game designer to design their user experience.</span></strong></p><p><strong>Action item:</strong> Learn game design and apply it to everything – how people sign up for a website, how people &#8220;succeed&#8221; in using your product, how customers share it with their friends and become leaders of user groups/clans, etc. Game design can be used for all of this.</p><p><strong> Another Golden Age for Garage Developers<br
/> <span
style="font-weight:normal;">We are definitely going to see even more quality games done by small teams in 2010. With very little risk and by mainly investing their own time, a small team of 1-2 people can make a hit game that will sell millions of units. More importantly (and what makes this different than 4 years ago), there are now many more channels through which to distribute and sell such a game. Many such games are receiving world-wide acclaim.</span></strong></p><p><strong>Action item: </strong>Find an awesome partner and go create!</p><p><strong>Publishers Continue to be Valuable<br
/> <span
style="font-weight:normal;">With casual, online and mobile games requiring smaller production budgets and eschewing retail (and thus expensive and slow) distribution in exchange for digital, the game industry was expecting to get rid of the publisher as a concept.</span></strong></p><p>But as the iPhone ecosystem clearly proves (as well as the web somewhat less clearly with portals like <a
rel="nofollow"  href="http://Shockwave.com/">Shockwave.com</a> and <em>distribution</em> companies like Zynga and RockYou), the publishers stay. Though they may not be forwarding cash and fully owning the game IPs, their expertise in marketing, game design and online distribution metrics and strategies make them a valuable, if no longer totally required, partner to the game developer.</p><p><strong>Action item:</strong> Consider working with a publisher. Fortunately with publishers&#8217; leverage lessened, they are typically less demanding with regards to what they have to own (IP, sequel rights, revenue share). Or become your own publisher by building that expertise. This is not a simple task, but has been done by some of the top online game developers.</p><p><strong>Everything Becomes a &#8220;Console&#8221;<br
/> <span
style="font-weight:normal;">This one is somewhat controversial. It seemed that with the move towards mobile and web, the closed ecosystems of the console world would be under siege and eventually collapse. What game developer (except perhaps the ones most entrenched in with the Nintendos-Microsoft-Sony trinity) hasn&#8217;t fantasized about this walled garden having its walls rammed down?</span></strong></p><p>Well, welcome to the new world. The iPhone has proven that given the right amount of &#8220;openness&#8221;, neither consumers nor developers really mind closed platforms.</p><p>Even on the anarchic web (regions of which remind one more of a Mad-Maxian post-apocalyptical cyberspace than an enlightened utopia), Facebook is in the process of creating a closed environment within which consumers and game developers can meet and exchange fun and money (more or less) safely.</p><p>This section could also have been labeled &#8220;the Rise of the AppStore Model&#8221;, since it&#8217;s more the App Store than the gaming console which inspires this megatrend. And framed like that, it might have made people happy. But this is a problematic trend (to say the least) that should make us stop to think.</p><p><strong>Action item: </strong>Make use of this. Or if you&#8217;re brave, build your own!</p><p><strong> Facebook Wallet, Apple Tablet, Unity on Facebook<br
/> <span
style="font-weight:normal;">And then are the obvious ones. </span></strong></p><p><strong><span
style="font-weight:normal;">Of course Apple will launch its tablet. We even know the screen-size and CPU make. The only uncertainly left is what day it launches. And its price.</span></strong></p><p>Surely Facebook will launch a payment platform which in tandem with Facebook Connect will dramatically transform the face of microtransactions on the internet. If they do this right, it will finally enable the web-wide microtransactions which we&#8217;ve been dreaming of since the dot-com era.</p><p>And of course Unity will be big on Facebook. Several major games will get launched on Facebook, offering awesome games to <em>hundreds </em>of millions of people (not to mention significantly moving the needle on adoption of the Unity plugin).</p><p><strong>Action item: </strong>Left as an exercise for the reader <img
src='http://blogs.unity3d.com/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_smile.gif' alt=':)' class='wp-smiley'/></p><p><a
href=http://blogs.unity3d.com/2010/01/14/2010-trends/>Source Article »</a></p>]]></content:encoded> <wfw:commentRss>http://www.bydesigngames.com/2010/01/14/unity-technologies-2010-trends/feed/</wfw:commentRss> <slash:comments>0</slash:comments> </item> </channel> </rss>
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