Unity Technologies Blog

It’s been an exciting year for us at Unity Technologies and it’s only getting better. Not only are we on the doorstep of the release of our Unity iPhone Publishing support, but we’re also on the doorstep of our second ever (and now yearly) Unity developer conference, Unite 2008. Then to cap it all off we’re now thrilled to announce a guest speaker that will help deliver the opening keynote presentation, Phil Harrison! w00t!

If you don’t recognize that name then maybe you live in a cave or you’ve just been a bit too busy these last few years to take note of a prominent figure in the gaming industry. He’s the President of Atari for starters, but you can go here on Wikipedia to learn more about who he is. Otherwise go here to learn more about Unite 2008, I hope we see you there!

Oh man, after months of hard work we’re finally able to announce a release date, pricing & licensing information and some background on features for Unity iPhone Publishing! I know that it’s been a long wait for folks out there in the community that have been thirsting for news and even more, the functionality, so thanks for hanging in there. Now all you have to do is wait a few more weeks and you too will be able to get your hands on Unity iPhone Publishing yourself, rawr! Read more:

Unity iPhone Publishing

The guys at Flashbang Studios are a smart and hard working crew that continues to churn out lots of cool ideas and content. For those that missed it they recently went live with their own Unity-centric game portal website, blurst.com:

So far they went live with a soft-launch as the site isn’t completely filled out just yet, there will be community features and hopefully lots of cool games. Give it a look and stay tuned future updates from Flashbang. Keep it up guys!

So I’m finally back to do a little wrap-up on our Austin GDC effort, now that I’m finally caught up on everything else. In short, the conference was fantastic, unbelievable, a total success, <insert many other superlatives here>! The conference itself covered three days (Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday), but the expo floor was only open the second two days (Tuesday and Wednesday), and both days saw our booth jam packed with folks stopping by to learn more about Unity.

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Spotted today in the lobby of the Hyatt Regency Austin was a pack of four wild Unity Technologies employees working the day away:

From left to right you’ll spot me, Amir, David and Sam, we’re all here for the Austin GDC conference and so far each time we’ve made our way outside we’ve run into folks that recognize us or that want to ask questions about Unity. That includes last night, while standing along a bridge in the dark to watch bats fly about below us, David managed to get roped in by someone asking questions about Unity! Today has been no different, we had folks chat us up while registering, while walking around and even during breakfast!

The conference calendar has today as a sessions-only day and exhibitors don’t get to attend those, bummer! But tomorrow the expo floor opens up and we once again expect to have a super busy booth and thus the extra muscle (last year we only had Sam and I here). Anyone that’s in town for the conference should come by and say hello (booth 130), everyone else should stay tuned for updates as I hope to post more photos and let everyone know just how well it goes.

Almost a month ago I said we’re preparing reports of Unity Web Player hardware statistics.

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

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

Enjoy!

Pretty much everyone knows Valve’s hardware survey - it’s a very valuable resource that shows what hardware the typical “hardcore PC gamer” has (that is, gamers that play Valve’s games).

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

Lo and behold - we have a glimpse into that data.
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I know it’s been a while since I last posted so I figured that it was time to get back to blog posting and provide some updates as last week was rather exciting for us. Here’s the latest from our end…

Casual Connect Seattle
Unity 2.1 Released
Press Release News: 2 In-Browser MMOs in development using Unity!

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One of the coolest things about working at a tool company is the chance to see the interesting, innovative and exciting things people do with that tool. This week I got to take advantage of that benefit by visiting the San Jose office of NeuroSky. These folks have developed a group of products based around bio-sensors that pick up on your brain waves and then translate those for use as input in a variety of applications. The idea of “thought based input” appeals to a variety of industries and use cases, whether for medical analysis, development of assistive devices or of course use in next generation game content.

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People have been asking: why built-in shadows don’t work on Unity’s terrain? (here, here, …) Yes, right now (Unity 2.0.2) they don’t. Why - because we didn’t have time to make them work yet. Both terrain and built-in shadows are new features in Unity 2.0, and those two don’t happen to just work together.

Here’s a glimpse into what is needed to get it working. Read the rest of this entry »