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!

At the end of the week it could do this however:

This is our Bootcamp demo, running in D3D11. So lots of the stuff is working: meshes, textures, shaders, shadows, deferred lighting, Image Effects, particles, skinned meshes, terrain and so on. For the reference, Bootcamp running on DX9:

As you can see, some of the stuff is not working on D3D11 yet. Fog is not working; there’s some lighting difference on grass. Some other things are not working, like fixed function shaders (VertexLit ones or any shaders that use SetTexture) but you can’t see much of those in Bootcamp.

Awesome? Yes and no.

For basically a week of work, I’d like to think this is very good progress.

Is our D3D11 renderer teh awsum yet? No. Currently it’s running slower than D3D9, and does not implement all the features of D3D9 one either (fog, fixed function etc.). And I haven’t even started exposing D3D11 specific things like Compute Shaders, Shader Model 4/5, Tessellation etc. And there are some unsolved workflow issues, for example: when someone is making a game on a Mac, how would we compile shaders for D3D11 renderer? With D3D9 we can do it because NVIDIA’s Cg compiler works both on Windows and Mac, but no such luck with D3D11 shader compiler…

So this is not shipping quite yet. Performance is not great at the moment – which is to be expected. D3D11 potentially can be faster than D3D9, but the path of getting there is not an easy one. We also need to actually expose compute shaders, tessellation and other goodies. And then think about how/if equivalent features would work on other platforms like Macs (DirectCompute on Windows, OpenCL on Mac? etc.).

But, so far it’s promising! Stay tuned, maybe someday we’ll ship this

The idea behind this project is to make use of the Webkit integration that was used for the Asset Store in order to give easy access to learning resources, news and more.

We still have a few more NinjaCamp tricks up our ninja sleeves so keep an eye on the blog.

One of the most popular newcomers is NeoPax’s VIZIO, which has taken off like a rocket! VIZIO is a node-based logic editor which will feel quite friendly to anyone who has ever used Virtools. Their motto “Imagination + Create Art + Draw Blocks + Create the Game” pretty much sums up the workflow VIZIO brings to the Unity developer. VIZIO is the second node-based editor on the Asset Store, preceded by Hutong Games’ popular PlayMaker, another top-selling visual node-based-editor.

If the reactions on the forum and in-store reviews are any indicator, both editors appear to be quite successful already. If you’re looking for an alternative to text-based scripting, check these two powerful new tools out!

One of my personal new favorites this month is iGui by Avam Studios, the first true WYSIWYG gui editor on the Asset Store. With iGui, you create user interfaces the visual way– dragging and placing GUI elements from the iGui toolbar directly into the game window. It features nested containers, various alignment settings, draggable windows, drop-down menus, buttons, ready-to-go mobile slider panels and much more. When a user interacts with these elements, it calls events which you specify right in the inspector window. Truly fantastic for UI artists, iGui allows you to create great interfaces without ever having to touch the OnGUI event in code– and if you don’t know what OnGUI means, this is UI tool for you! Once you have it, you’ll never imagine UI design in Unity without it. It’s completely compatible with UnityGUI skins, so you can easily customize the UI style as you please– and don’t forget, we have a growing assortment of UnityGUI Skins on the Asset Store too!

Edy's Vehicle Physics

Also on the incredibly-hot-asset-list is Edy’s Vehicle Physics, by the mysterious content provider known simply as Edy(tm). Whoever he or she is, Edy has done a fine job creating a vehicle editing system with results which (according to some reviewers) surpass the driving experience in the GTA(tm) series. Quite a claim! Personally I find it quite a lot of fun and relatively straightforward to create realistically behaved vehicles– from slow, lumbering, heavy school buses to slick, high performance sports cars. Not only does it provide a great framework and editor for designing your vehicles, it also comes with four well-made prefab vehicles which you can adapt to your needs. Definitely one of the best vehicle editors on the Asset Store. If you’re making a game with any kind of land vehicle, Edy’s Vehicle Physics is going to be a huge timesaver.

Mixamo’s in-editor plugin continues to be a popular way for animating characters right inside Unity. Simply drag your rigged character from the Hierarchy View right into the Mixamo plugin window, you might have to do a bit of bone retargeting with a few clicks (easy), and suddenly your character is tapped into terabytes of animation data on the Mixamo database! With some adjustment to sliders, you can procedurally adapt the animation’s movement and cadence to suit your character, right in the Unity editor, whether it’s a lumbering, slow moving giant or a little mouse!

Don’t forget– if you’re a modeler, artist, sound designer, scripter, or hardcore programmer, you can sell your content to nearly 20K registered Asset Store users. Submit your masterpiece to the Unity Asset Store!

For our NinjaCamp project, Levi, Vytautas, and I (Na’Tosha) decided to pursue our passion for GNU/Linux — we thought we would invest our time into getting a web player up and running on an Ubuntu workstation. It’s turned out to be quite the endeavor, but, after a few days of poring through the Mozilla Developer’s Reference, the OpenGL documentation, the X11 documentation, and countless stacktraces (not to mention pouring ourselves dozens of caffeinated beverages), we do have something to show for our efforts:

Our Demo shown at GDC running in Firefox 4.0 on Ubuntu 10.10.

Despite the fact that Firefox 4.0 has not been released yet, we chose to use 4.0 and leverage some goodies from the new API.

It’s completely unpolished – we can’t even reload the unity engine in the same browser instance, and it of course lacks niceties like a splash screen, etc. Although it is just a demonstration that we put together in a week, and it is not an official Unity project, all in all, we’re quite proud of ourselves.

About the Game:
The game is a 2.5D adventure game called “The Adventures of Steve.” Steve is just a casual guy who has stumbled upon a temple which has some evil traps set for him. His only wish now is to get out so that his life can return to normal.

We’re adding a context menu item in the asset window to “Filter References in Scene”. Selecting it will apply a filter to your hierarchy window to find all GameObjects or their children that reference the selected asset.

Alternatively the filter can be specified manually by using the “ref:ASSET PATH” syntax.

With two days of NinjaCamp to go we expect to finish the “Filter References in Project” option too. It will help you find other assets (prefabs, scenes) that use the selected asset.

Take care, Uniteers!

The current way to make a new behaviour for a GameObject in Unity is like this:

• Create the script in the desired folder.
• Rename the script.
• If it’s a C# script, rename the class to match the file name.
• Drag the script onto the GameObject.

With the solution we’re working on, you can instead just choose “New Script” from the Components menu, and you’ll get this:

This is a work in progress, but much of the base functionality is already there. While the window is open (which will float on top) you can optionally click any GameObject or Prefab to make the script be attached to that, and you can click any folder in the Project view to save the script in that folder. You can also pick which of the built-in callback functions you want included from the beginning (we only have four right now but we’ll add the others as well).

When you click “Create and Attach” the script will be created with the right file name and class name, compiled, and then added to your selected GameObject or Prefab if you chose one.

We’re also adding this partially related button:

 
The idea here is to just make it more obvious and simpler how to add a component to a GameObject – no need to reach for that menu anymore. And no, the button is not part of the AudioSource component, it’s below it and is still missing some style work and a separator line above it. It’s a work in progress!

We’re still missing more work on the script template building options, but I can already see that this thing will save me time in the future, if nothing else.

So, what are we working on? We started the day by compiling a preliminary list of projects and forming teams. Naturally this list could change, new projects could form, and projects could evolve. It is important to remember that this week is experimental — a weeklong extension of Unity’s “Fridays are For Fun” process — some projects will end up in the future versions of Unity… and some will crash and burn.

• Cheap colliding particles on the GPU
• Webkit-based welcome screen
• One-click web publishing
• Collaborative editing
• DirectX 11
• Vertex Painting
• Install Analytics
• Multithreaded Renderer
• NVIDIA Performance Profiling Extensions
• PhysX 3
• AI Sandbox
• Web camera support
• New Script dialog
• New terrain engine
• Supporting any .NET compiler
• Scene creation tools
• Assets Store game project
• Timeline editor
• Dynamic mixing of sounds based on dB
• Blendshape implementation

For more information during the week, head to unity3d.com/NinjaCamp, follow the #NinjaCamp hashtag on Twitter or check out updates on our Facebook page.

As you may know, the Unity editor environment is at its core incredibly extensible. An over-arching part of the design philosophy is to allow and encourage talented developers to create new features, integrated at a level deeper than the simple plug-in architecture you find in other software. Editor extensions can sit so tightly and integrate so directly in the environment that you might think they were new features in the tool from our own internal development team. I’m not just saying that—see for yourself! We have two new Editor Extensions in the Unity Asset Store which both radically change the Unity workflow and exemplify the power of Unity’s plug-in architecture.

First, the Mixamo Animation store plugin, which allows you to procedurally animate your character inside Unity, within minutes! Once you’e downloaded the free plugin, you’ll find a new Mixamo pane under the Window menu item. Drag your rigged model from the Project Pane into the Mixamo window and go through a quick retargeting process. Once that’s in place, you can browse Mixamo’s enormous animation archive right in Unity. Press preview and watch the animation play on your character directly in the Unity editor! With a few sliders you can adjust various animation parameters, so that your animation perfectly suits your character’s body—no hands penetrating the head, for example. You can make a walk surly and aggressive, or fine tune it to a quirky jog. This is the kind of thing I myself, as an armchair animator, have slaved over in Motionbuilder for my own game. Those days are over! Cut your animation budget and schedule dramatically with this revolutionary new tool. Mixamo has put up a how-to video if you’d like to get a head start.

As much of a paradigm shift as the Mixamo plug-in, the ingenious Playmaker Visual Logic editor has arrived to change the way you code! This kind of editor is something I’ve personally wanted in our product for some time—and in true Asset Store rock star form, Huton Games beat us to it! With Playmaker, you can visually script game logic using nodes, transition events, and access to nearly the entire Unity API in an elegant finite state machine.

You can literally program without… er.. programming? From simple trigger-based events to extremely complex and sophisticated gameplay behavior, you can do it with Playmaker. Since you can augment its library of methods and actions with your own standard Unity scripts, you can pretty much do anything with it!

Playmaker revolutionizes how you program. Mixamo, how you animate. Both of these new extensions offer so many powerful new features that it would practically warrant a new version number for Unity, if we had created them ourselves. They’re here to save you time and offer you great flexibility. To take advantage of this new power, launch the Unity Editor. You’ll find the Asset Store listed under the Window menu.

You’ll not only find editor extensions like Playmaker and Mixamo, you’ll also find (*deep breath*) racing cars, aircraft carriers, MMO networking templates, grand pianos, animated cats, rats, wolves and horses, water buoyancy simulation systems, electronic magazines, zombies, goblins, PHP scripts, social media integration APIs, toilets, terrain tools, web serialization kits, asset bundle management tools, dragons, node-based shader editors, c# programming tutorials, Javascript to c# converters, dungeon templates, rifles, explosion and particle collections, pathfinding systems, Baroque French bath tubs and a heck of a lot more.

Over the last week, there’s been some awesome new additions which I personally find very exciting… my favorite currently being Object Cutter by Teimuraz Kokiashvili. It slices and dices meshes dynamically in runtime like a ninja wearing a suit of razorblades! Simply define an object as a cutter, another as a slice-able mesh and it produces a clean slice right where they intersect– breaking a single mesh into multiple pieces. It works and performs surprisingly well, and also features optional automatic gory effects! Perfect for dynamically slicing zombies/players/trees/giant tomatoes. Also worth noting, VisGames has been tearing up the Asset Store with some amazingly high-quality and affordable models– from trains to gravestones to.. what could be described as my ex-boyfriend’s bathroom.

EzGui by Brady Wright puts GUI elements directly in your game.

We also have a very moving announcement: the Asset Store will soon feature packs containing thousands of motion capture files, completely free and right at your fingertips! (Get it? Moving announcement?) Derived from motion capture data made available by the Carnegie Mellon Motion Capture Library and the Advanced Computing Center for Arts and Designs (ACCAD) Motion Capture Lab, this data has been converted by the amazing Jennifer Longe to a Unity-friendly FBX format and will work immediately and directly inside Unity with any Character Studio skeleton! Thanks, Jennifer!

If you’ve never heard of the Unity Asset Store, you’ll find it right inside the Unity editor! Just choose Window > Asset Store, create an account (a few steps) and check out what we offer! If you’re a content creator and interested in submitting your work, show us what you’ve got!

We would like to thank all the wonderfully talented and creative people who have chosen to share and sell their content on the store, and developers everywhere who are using and hopefully finding meaningful benefit from the Asset Store! We’re not just here to sell models and scripts, we’re also here to create momentum and empowerment for artists, programmers, dreamers and designers who are passionate about game design.

We’ll be presenting more information in person about the Asset Store at the GDC in San Francisco– feel free to look for us there! If you have any other questions or comments, feel free to contact me! Thanks!

This year’s Unite 2010 is less than two days away, and I can’t wait to see those of you who’re attending in Montreal! This will be our biggest and baddest conference so far, with some 600 of the coolest people from the Unity universe coming together for the usual three intense days of learning, sharing, and partying (in awesome Montreal, but that’s secondary).

We’re all but sold out, but we’ve worked hard to expand capacity, so you can still make it if you hurry – and don’t miss the sweet hotel deal too! More info and booking here.

The program contains over 25 sessions with over 50 speakers, including some of our top engineers and community experts; the Unity Awards will feature some of the best content created with Unity; the business speed dating aims to connect developers and opportunities; and much more! And of course, there will be a huge big party Thursday night!

If you can’t attend the event, you can still be a part of Unite 2010 experience by viewing our keynote, where renowned visionary and game designer (and Unity developer) Jesse Schell will be this year’s guest speaker. The keynote will be streamed live at 10am EST (GMT-5) on our front-page. We got some pretty wild announcements to share, so stay tuned!

View the keynote here! (but not until Wednesday)

Finally I wanted to give special thanks to our sponsors, including Intel, NVidia, Design3, Electrotank, Exit Games, Mixamo, and the Panasonic Cloud Entertainment Company – it’s really important for us to have good friends that support the cause.

Incoming
When you submit a bug report it goes into our Incoming Bug Queue. From there we do what we call sweeping. We weed out bug reports that contain nothing at all – no description, no information and no attached project, and we weed out the spam.

Investigation
All other bugs go into our Investigation Queue. In there we look at each case and simplify it until we get the cleanest scenario possible where the bug happens. If the steps are too unclear for us to reproduce the bug, or if we need a test project, we reply back to you asking for what we need. It’s also often a matter of the user doing something wrong or needing some help. In that case we respond with the assistance needed and add an entry to the documentation or answers.unity3d.com if needed.

Test Creation
The cases from investigation that are actually real bugs are then moved to our Test Creation Queue. Now what does that mean – didn’t we already test it? Well, it means that we take the simplified reproduction case and implement it in one of our automated test frameworks, depending on where the case fits. We have a few of those including our awesome Regression Rig. When the test is written, it will continuously run on multiple platforms. Whenever new code and functionality is committed, it will be held up against the growing list of tests. In theory this ensures that once a bug has been fixed and added to the automated tests, it will never show it’s ugly face again.

Fixing and verifying
From the test creation queue we end up with either writing a test or in some cases where this is not feasible, we make sure that the steps to reproduce the bugs are crystal clear. Then we assign the case to development. One of our highly specialized developers will take the case, fix it and send it back to us for verification. At this point the test written should always pass and the test department also verifies the fix manually. If something is not right, it’s back to the developer until we are sure the bug is really fixed.

It has taken us a long time to hone these processes – Unity has grown immensely since the early days when there wasn’t even a Test department but just a handful of programmers making the product, testing it and providing support. Unity is now vastly bigger in terms of features, users and people working on the product. This also means, that there was a time when our capacity for handling bugs and support cases was lower and we didn’t have the same processes. The test team is bigger now and armed to the teeth with sharpened minds, rockstar programming skills and a work horse mentality.

Onwards!
One of the ways we’re moving along now is drawing a line somewhere in the backlog of cases from when our capacity was lower. We have a bunch of old cases where the majority are duplicates of already fixed cases, cases with no information or cases that are obsolete because of changes in Unity. We will be focusing on the newer bugs, but there will also be something in that old pile that still has relevance. Chances are that these issues will have been reported again with Unity 2.6 or 3.0, but if you are sitting with an old bug report you submitted, that you believe is still relevant then you can help us get to it by submitting it again.

We are aiming for a workflow where we process each and every relevant case that gets opened and provide feedback as soon as possible. I hope you’re up for the task of helping us by submitting high quality bug reports and that you will continue to have a little patience and love for the Test Team – cause we love you!

As you can see, we released Unity 3 to the world today. It’s a an incredibly awesome release: both in and by itself, but also in what it means in terms of our broad vision of bringing the best game technology to everyone. And you are part of that group… well, we all are!

There’s loads more to say, but today I’ll make it short: as the release came out of the blue this morning at 8.30am California time (GMT+8), we are extending the “pre order” rebate for 24 hours. So it’ll expire at 9am California time tomorrow.

So if you were planning to make use of the pre order rebate then hurry on over and order Unity 3 now: https://store.unity3d.com/shop/

Lots of love!

It’s been 5 months since Apple announced the new iOS 4.0 Terms of Service which seemed like they might block out Unity (as well as similar technologies) from their AppStore.

We commented on this right away (in a first, second, and third installment), and after some deliberation we even invented a workaround that we might employ in case Apple ever stopped approving Unity-base apps.

All along Apple kept approving every single Unity game submitted to the AppStore – several per day – and even featuring some of them highly, so it was clear that Apple never stopped liking the results of what Unity developers have been doing. And neither did the gamers by the way: they’ve downloaded tens of millions of copies of Unity-based games, more often than not without knowing or caring if tools or middleware had been used or not.

We never felt it right to shout out complaints, even if many of our friends and customers asked us to. We were after all in a precarious situation where Apple could have started banning Unity apps any day, and our responsibility for our thousands of customers weighed heavily on our shoulders. But it felt weird to speak in such a soft voice while under pressure, and we say sorry to those that felt we weren’t being proactive enough.

Now we couldn’t discuss publicly during the last months that Apple stayed in touch with us all along, and that we had conversations with them every few weeks. And after what we must assume has been deep deliberation and soul-seeking inside Apple, they finally came out with a response early this morning California time: they’ve simply decided to stop worrying about how applications are made.

We think this is exactly the right approach: it’s possible to make incredibly bad applications using just Xcode, and it’s possible to make just as amazingly excellent applications with a tool like Unity. The focus of a platform owner should obviously be on enabling its developers to do great work and so to give millions of users fun, thrilling, cute, enlightening and lovely experiences… wherever they may find themselves and whenever they want.

Apple has been in an accelerated learning process, and even though they’re some of the smartest people we know, figuring out how to operate the world’s most successful online marketplace can’t be easy. We have been frustrated with them along the way (and we have told them so, in a few more words), but we kept the channels open to work on a positive result. Today we respect them for coming to the right conclusion and in our eyes it’s best to let bygones be bygones!

So from all us in Unity Technologies to all of you: feel free to keep doing awesome work!

Roald Høyer-Hansen

Beast lightmapping – no doubt 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’ll see after 3.0 will look 10x as good as the ones we see today

Charles Hinshaw

There are BIG features, but I’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.

Aras Pranckevicius

Personally, I’m quite happy with all the behind the scenes stuff that went into 3.0 rendering – 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

Obscure features that are awesome: XOR operator support in JavaScript! XOR is cool because:

• It’s exclusive – very exclusive.
• No short circuiting semantics with this guy.
• It appreciates differences in people, or at least in operands, which is almost the same as people.
• It has an X in it. Everything that has an X in it is cool. And this one starts with an X.

Samantha Kalman

I’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.

Nicolaj Schweitz

I love the new audio features, especially the possibility to use audio to affect any runtime variable. I can’t wait to see what people get out of this.

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.

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.

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.

Rune Skovbo Johansen

A few things that are exciting to me, and haven’t been mentioned yet:

• 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.
• A few very typical basic math functions have been added that you’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.
• Lots of small bug fixes all around that improve stability and performance.
• Full debugging capabilities

Joachim Ante

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’t do it workflow wise and feature wise when they were doing a high end production.

There is a bunch of stuff that contributed to it, in order of importance:

1. Being able to lightmap from within Unity
2. Static batching
3. Being able to place things with the vertex snapping & raycast snapping
4. Occlusion culling so you can get performance out of big scenes
5. Being able to quickly find assets with the object picker
6. Being able to search stuff in a super awesome looking way

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.

Rezzable brings Unity & Open Sim together.

As our resident virtual world enthusiast, I’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 based client which works with OpenSim, 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 sculpted-prim geometry right into Unity in real time.

Rezzable is using virtual worlds to teach real world history.

Rezzable’s innovation promises to blend Unity’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’t scrap their existing body of work in order to take advantage of Unity’s next-gen functionality.

A Monumental Milestone - Unity, Rezzable & Opensim!

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!

(No image effects were applied here – just a Unity-lightmapped scene with crossfade to deferred rendering up close for max performance)

I have some big news to share with you this week: today, we’re showing two new branches of our technology to the world at Google’s annual developer conference, Google I/O. The first is Unity Android, which we announced this spring. Though we’ve shown some sneak peeks at our Android support in private and at GDC in March, we’ve not yet shown all anything like what we’re showing this week.

In the Developer Sandbox at the show, we have several Android demos running on two different devices. On Google’s Nexus One, we have both Penelope and Star Troopers. We’re also showing a couple demos running a new tablet device sporting Nvidia’s Tegra 2 chipset: the alien shooter we demoed on the iPhone 3GS GDC and Star Troopers.

The Developer Sandbox also includes a station showing another Google technology which, experimentally for now, we’ve made Unity support. That technology is called Native Client and we think it’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’s explanation in this video.

If we really cut to the chase for why this matters for Unity, it’s because what we’re showing is Unity running in Chrome with no plugin at all. That’s right, there’s no Unity Web Player installed on the machines running Unity content in Chrome. Rather, with Google’s clever technology, we’re running Unity content in Chrome using just default access and no additional installation or user interaction. It’s kind of wild!

Chrome’s market share is already growing like a weed, but it’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.

Unity’s Native Client port got some very prominent attention outside the Developer Sandbox as well, appearing in the keynote by Google’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’re sure that it can be yet another great channel for Unity developers to reach large audiences.

Some quick, semi-blurry shots from the keynote (captions are mine):

The Web is where people spend their time…

…but it’s often really tough to find the best apps.

The Chrome Web Store will help organize the web’s best content with an open marketplace and tools for rating and discovery.

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 content games win

I want to take a moment to say how fantastic it’s been to collaborate with Google. For a giant company famously populated with geniuses, the people we’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.

In that vein, it’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’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’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!

At Unity, we also believe there’s significant value in targeting multiple devices. Bigpoint had a great demo at GDC this spring, using Unity to create a game that could be played head-to-head, phone and browser. Whether it’s offering complementary experiences between the web and mobile devices, or a truly seamless experience across both, we think it’s valuable for developers to offer entertainment this way. And we’re beginning to see that proven in many more cases by big and small developers alike.

We’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’s very important to continue to support all major browsers and as many mobile platforms as possible, we’re very excited by the technological openness of Google’s platforms and by the frictionless marketplace they’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!

As I’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’ll keep up to date on the latest and greatest. If you’re attending the show, come by and see us in the Developer Sandbox. We’re happy to answer questions at the show, or in the comments below this post.

First I want to thank all of you who have expressed support for us in the past weeks. While we can’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 Armada: Galactic War, RPG Snake, Roswell Fighter HD, and Zombieville HD 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.

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’re also obsessed about polish, so we are also adding features like vertex snapping. Small and large, these features most Unity developers will benefit from regardless of which platform(s) they’re targeting.

A major focus of this effort is Unity iPhone 3, where we’re rolling out some very specific (and cool) improvements for iPhone and iPad developers.

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’s possible with Unity iPhone 3’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.

For “cross-resolution” 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.

Another cool feature is that we’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’s new APIs such as the GameCenter, and to drop into ObjectiveC when it makes sense.

And of course there’s going to be lots more

If you haven’t done so yet, have a look at the Unity 3 preview page. And there’s a lot more feature previews coming in these blogs, so stay tuned!

Here’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.

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.

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.

Update: Send any artwork you want us to consider decorating our walls with to wall-art@unity3d.com

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, including ours. There’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’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.

We’re meeting with Apple next week to discuss the matter, and our engineers have been discussing possible technical solutions as well. Of course, we’ll provide you with immediate updates as soon as we have any new information.

Just in case the ToS changes do end up being a problem, we’re already working hard to find and implement solutions to maintain uninterrupted compliance with Apple’s ToS.

Though any uncertainly about Unity’s future on this platform is unpleasant, our feeling is that we’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.

Update: Unity and the iPhone OS 4.0, update II

First I would like to thank our forum users for their support and thoughtful analyses 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’s App Store.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Thanks again for your support.

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 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.

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 Xbox 360 port, and recently blogged that our iPhone team is working on iPad support.

But those teams are just a handful of our people! So what else have 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.

In fact, here’s a historical graph of our code checkins:

As a project grows developers tend to check in less frequently, so the actual slope of work being done is much steeper.

Until today it was all hush-hush, but now we’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: unity3d.com/unity/coming-soon/unity-3

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.

Also, we’ve just announced that Unity will add support for iPad, Android, Xbox 360, and PS3! That’s the kind of “author once, deploy anywhere” 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!

I hope you’ll stick around with us, we’re only just getting started!

PS. Because we’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.

With that out of the way, here’s what I actually had in mind – Looking at the event, Apple unveiled pretty much what most of us expected – but it wasn’t until a bit later that it hit me what is so great about this:

I’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’s using general-purpose chips behind it, so it’s not like it can’t do “real” apps, but the focus is here 100% on consumers. That means games.

Apple has been taking games more and more seriously – 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’re concerned what we’re looking at is the launch of a new console. For indies it’s even better: Apple actually gets the whole “make life sweet for developers” – so it’s a platform that you can make games on and you can even earn money – all major console’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’re one of those people who think the submission process is slow/bad/bloated, just try becoming a registered developer with Sony or Microsoft

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’t support all platforms instantly, but Apple have had an uncanny ability to produce hits. With the iPad I think they’ve done it again.

So we are scrambling like mad to get support for it. On the iPhone our guys worked round the clock to get it out – hopefully that won’t be neccessary this time, but we’d always rather burn some midnight oil than end up like the large behemoth we’re currently seeing on the sidelines – 18 months after iPhone launch with no shipped support for this platform mumbling OMG! The Net Is Broken

You may have heard about Fun Fridays 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’d like to share this game with you now… We call it Granny Theft Tofu and you can play it in the embedded webplayer below.

Please view the full post to see the Unity content.

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’s an easter egg in the game too; an Amiga graphics mode. See if you can find it!

I’m incredibly happy to have helped create this game! I think everybody on the team learned something about Unity that they didn’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’ll all enjoy the game, and perhaps walk away inspired.

Any talk about mobile will start with the iPhone – it’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 – we got in on it early and let our users publish to it – adding “quite a few” users in the process. We’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.

What games are people playing on the iPhone? From what I’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 – 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.
So how will all this play out? I expect that over the next few years we’ll see a bunch of mobile platforms appear. Some of these will stay and quite a few more will die – in the end, I wouldn’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 – this means that we could be adding support for some that will possibly go away in the end – that’s ok. While platform fragmentation is annoying to us, the ease of targetting multiple platforms is something we’ve always held close to our heart. Maybe we’ll suffer a bit when porting, but at least it’s only us and not all the people that just want to get creative. It’s our unofficial slogan: We suffer, so you don’t have to.

Some of you have probably seen the announcement that we’re going to support NVidia’s Tegra 2 chipset. This is the first of various things we’re ready to announce and also says something about how we see the world: there’s chipsets and OSes (and then there’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’s a somewhat smaller list of stacks: Broadcom, Qualcomm, Apple, NVidia Tegra – with an OS on top: iPhoneOSX, Windows CE, Linux, Android, etc. those are the ones that are real work for us to support – but once we have some more of these, adding new devices shouldn’t be that hard.

And then there’s the Apple tablet (sure, there’s others – but who really cares?). I expect it to be OSX-based, probably some SGX/ARM chipset – while I know as little as anyone else, I’m basically thinking of an oversized & clocked iPhone 3GS. Supporting it will be some pain, but nothing major (these things are hard to say – half the time on the original iPhone port was spent on one single issue).

Either way, I think gaming on mobile platforms are going to be huge, and I think we’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’d love to meet up and chat about these things – drop by our booth (or failing that, there’s a wonderful comment thingy below this post).

Without further ado.

The Year of Gamification, Part 1
We call the adoption of game technology and game design methods outside of the games industry “gamification”, and this is a really broad trend.

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’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.

Action item: 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’s the limit.

The Year of Gamification, Part 2
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 into a game, social networking experiment FourSquare maintains high-score lists for people who bar-crawl, and natural-language search startup Siri hired an accomplished game designer to design their user experience.

Action item: Learn game design and apply it to everything – how people sign up for a website, how people “succeed” 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.

Another Golden Age for Garage Developers
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.

Action item: Find an awesome partner and go create!

Publishers Continue to be Valuable
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.

But as the iPhone ecosystem clearly proves (as well as the web somewhat less clearly with portals like Shockwave.com and distribution 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.

Action item: Consider working with a publisher. Fortunately with publishers’ 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.

Everything Becomes a “Console”
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’t fantasized about this walled garden having its walls rammed down?

Well, welcome to the new world. The iPhone has proven that given the right amount of “openness”, neither consumers nor developers really mind closed platforms.

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.

This section could also have been labeled “the Rise of the AppStore Model”, since it’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.

Action item: Make use of this. Or if you’re brave, build your own!

Facebook Wallet, Apple Tablet, Unity on Facebook
And then are the obvious ones.

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.

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’ve been dreaming of since the dot-com era.

And of course Unity will be big on Facebook. Several major games will get launched on Facebook, offering awesome games to hundreds of millions of people (not to mention significantly moving the needle on adoption of the Unity plugin).

Action item: Left as an exercise for the reader