Unity, Flash & 3D on the web

 

These are exciting times. Today, at the Flash Gaming Summit in San Francisco (of which we’re proud Gold Sponsors), Adobe has announced the public availability of a beta version of the Flash Player, codenamed Molehill, that has a very interesting new feature: hardware accelerated 3D support.

Molehill exposes a very low-level shader-based interface to the graphics hardware. Adobe has decided to focus on that low-level part, and do that really well. The molehill pre-release will not be shipping with a 3D engine, scene building tools, model and animation importers / exporters, physics, lighting or lightmap creation tools, etc.

Hmmm….does that list sound familiar? It sounds a lot like what you all love Unity for!

In the past few months, our engineers have been investigating the possibility of adding a Flash Player exporting option to Unity. That investigation has gone very well, and we’re moving into full production.

For Unity users, this no doubt spurs a lot of questions. Questions such as:
Will Unity on Flash support the full Unity feature set?
When will it be ready?
Okay, when will a beta be ready?
What will it cost?
Will it do A, B or C?

These, and many other questions, we cannot answer just yet. We can say that it will be as good as we can make it and we’ll do it as fast as we can do it.

We do however have some concrete answers for you now that shouldn’t wait…

Q. Is this the end of the Unity’s own Web Player?

Absolutely not. The Flash and Unity Web Players both have their strengths. We’re excited by the opportunity to target the Flash Player and all of its features with Unity, but there will be plenty of experiences that the Unity plugin is better suited for. It will be up to developers in the end, to decide whether they want to target only the Flash Player, only the Unity Web Player, or some combination of the two (now things are getting interesting!)

Q. What programming language will I use?

You’ll have two options:
For people with a Flash background:
Target our ActionScript API directly from Flash. Think:
var go:GameObject = new GameObject(“Just normal ActionScript 3 code”);
For people with a Unity background:
Script your content in C# / JavaScript / Boo, like you’re used to, and have Unity automatically translate it to ActionScript when you hit publish.


This is an important development for us, and we hope you’re as excited as we are to see your content reach further than ever.

by Lucas Meijer

Union developers receive extra visibility on the Sony Ericsson Xperia™ PLAY

Greetings Unity developers!

I’m thrilled to join the Unity team as the new Developer Relations Director focused on our Union business unit. My enviable job is to work with our great developers to find and deliver games to emerging and existing markets through the technical, business and marketing services of Union.

In case you missed the big news this week, Sony Ericsson has announced an amazing gaming-centric Android phone called Xperia PLAY. Unity played a key role in their announcement, and you’ll hear more technical details around this partnership at the upcoming Game Developer Conference. As a brief overview, Unity worked with Sony Ericsson to expose their unique PlayStation style gaming controls through Unity’s Android support. Unity developers interested in learning more about our support for the Xperia PLAY in Unity can contact us at union@unity3d.com. You can also read more about our partnership at the Sony Ericsson’s Developer Blog.

Three of our hard working developers jumped at the chance to update their games with these controls and were previewed at the launch event. Our hearty thanks to Angry Mob Games, Luma Arcade and Art In Games for their quick and impressive efforts.

Union plays a unique role in this Sony Ericsson announcement. While all Android games built with Unity will work well with the Xperia PLAY, Sony Ericsson wants to see enhanced and differentiated games. Our developers participating in Union are the perfect targets, as they want their content to be best suited for new devices and platforms. Through the business and marketing strength of Union, we’re able to offer Sony Ericsson a steady stream of optimized games. These Union games will be highlighted to Xperia PLAY owners. And as we all know, titles which get visibility are much more likely to reach game players. It’s a true win-win for Union developers and Sony Ericsson.

The Union team will be attending the upcoming Game Developer Conference in San Francisco, Feb 28 – Mar 4, 2011. Please send us a meeting request at union@unity3d.com, or just stop by our tradeshow booth for a chat. And as always, drop us an email if you want to learn more and get involved with Union. We have many more exciting opportunities coming.

I look forward to seeing what you create with Unity!

by Brian Bruning

Unity 3.2

Unity 3.2 is Available!

We are so happy to announce that Unity 3.2 is now live and available to download!

Here is a rundown of the major new features and improvements:

• Image Effects: New Depth of Field with fantastic bokeh, improved bloom and several other image effect tweaks and fixes.
• New Water: All new Water prefab in standard assets that includes waves, automatically generated foam on shorelines and more. It even has a full fledged editor – make those oceans come alive.
• Graphics: Major performance improvements in OpenGL ES 2.0 (iOS/Android).
• Shaders: Added optimized/simplified versions of some shaders under “Mobile” category (VertexLit, Bumped Specular, Skybox). They work on other platforms as well, but mobiles will see biggest gains. Bumped Specular is 5.3x faster on iPhones.
• Shaders: Added several Unlit shaders that just display a texture with no lighting. They are the fastest textured shaders.
• Debugger: Attaching the script debugger to (and detaching from) Unity and debugging-enabled players is now possible.
• Profiler: you can profile standalone player builds from the Editor. This includes iOS builds!
  
  For a full list of all of the updates fixes and improvements, head over to the release notes.
  

Or simply go directly to the download link here and get stuck in with all the cool new stuff.

by Nicholas Francis

in Unity3D 3.2

Standard Assets Update! part two

So we are finally ready to unveil the second set of pro standard assets, this time we have some awesome new image effects.

Our shader ninja has been hard at work, forging a great new set of effects with a host of exposed settings to allow full customization of your Unity project.

In the scene we have a bunch of awesome new and upgraded effects including:

Vignetting

Depth Of Field (Bokeh)

Bloom And Flares

Sun Shafts

Anyway, enough talk… lets see what you will receive in the 3.2 update!

by Joe Robins

in Unity3D 3.2

Coming in 3.2: mobile graphics optimizations

Last week, we started talking about Unity 3.2 by giving you a look at one of the updated Standard Assets. We’ll have more to show soon, but in the meantime we wanted to tell you about some of the optimizations that have been made to deliver great looking high-performance graphics on iOS and Android.

Precision of Shader Computations

Unity 3.2 makes much better use of different precision shader computations in OpenGL ES 2.0 shaders. This alone results in a 50%-150% speed increase on more complex shaders. Our GLSL Translator & Optimizer has been extended so that float/half/fixed types in Cg map to highp/mediump/lowp precision in GLSL, and we’ve updated all built-in shaders to use appropriate precision.

Normal Mapping

We’ve made several tweaks to make normal mapping faster. On desktops, we use “DXT5nm” compression for normal maps, where two normal components are stored and third is computed in the shader – this works great because it allows using DXT5 on the normalmaps. However, the extra computation is not very good for mobile platforms, so we’ve changed the normal map compression scheme there. We’ve also implement assembly optimized skinning for normal mapped meshes — this is now 4x faster than before.

Built-In Shaders

Unity 3.2 will ship with new shaders that are optimized variants of existing built-in shaders. You’ll be able to find them under the “Mobile” category (but they work on other platforms as well!). These new shaders have a few limitations, but the upside is increased performance — the Mobile/Bumped Specular, for example, is 5.2x faster than the Bumped Specular currently shipping in Unity 3.1 (tested on iOS).

Other Optimizations

There are a number of other improvements that make Unity-created mobile content run faster in 3.2. For example, we’ve optimized the internals of the OpenGL ES 2.0 renderer for lower CPU overhead. We’ve also changed how Unity handles alpha-testing so that those objects are rendered after all fully opaque ones. These and other tweaks and adjustments are all designed to help you get the most out of your mobile game.

by Aras Pranckevičius

in Unity3D 3.2

Standard Assets Update! part one

I just wanted to give you a quick glance at a little something that is in the pipe for an upcoming Unity release. As you are probably aware, Unity Pro includes water with real-time reflections and refractions.

It is a big step up from the Simple Water, but we (and many of you) have wanted a more flexible and realistic prefabbed water that just looks stunning the moment you drop it in your scene. That’s why, for the next release of Unity, Demo Team took the time to give pro water some major love:

Ok, so static screenshots don’t even begin to do this justice. You really need to see it in motion:

by Joe Robins

Если ваша игра на Юнити, то мы ее хотим ...

Oleg Pridiuk

Если ваша игра на Юнити, то мы ее хотим включить в видеоролик для GDC 2011.

В этом году Unity снимает большую площадь на всех GDC, будут проекторы, мониторы, а я сейчас делаю видео, которое будет на них крутиться-вертеться. Собственно, для этого и нужно видео вашей игры.

Я блоге Юнити я уже писал об этом, но, пользуясь положением, хотелось бы и русских разработчиков игр бесплатно пропиарить.

В прошлом году, кажется, только Танат попал в этот ролик.

Если у вас есть хороший видеоролик (игры или приложения, не так важно, лижбы ролик красивый был), то я постараюсь его включить в наш шоу-рил. Единственное требование - 1280х720.

Вопросы и философия в каментах принимаются :)

original: DTF.ru