Hi its been quite some time since I was actually able to update the blog. I had a long university summer semester and was very busy digging into the new features of Unity3. I will be updating the blog to the latest WordPress release, it seems I have fallen behind a bit. Sadly we beta users cannot talk about it in details, but let me assure you that every feature works as advertised and I its now very easy to debug with the newly integrated debugger.
I took the time tonight to assemble all the Unity3d tutorials I made so far in one clear section on the top of the site. Let it be known that it is not because I help people out with Unity3d that I ditch my UDK fans, “au contraire”, I still fully support all the tutorial I made so far. There are still known bugs about the state handling in the AI UDK tutorial that I did still did not find why it randomly crashes. Anyhow that tutorial was meant as an educational starting point, not production code.
So hope you like the new section, I will try to add new CSharp snippets here and there. Because my school is taking me some time again, I will maybe post some nice tricks I discovered about general programming and Java.
The CEO of Unity discusses ‘gamification’ — applying game design and technology to real-world applications beyond ‘gamespace.’ The military is using game design theory for some training programs — not just ‘the 3-D, realistic, virtual world experiences, but also the built-in use of frustration and reward.’ (And similar training packages were adopted by Unilever, the giant corporation which owns Ben & Jerry’s ice cream.) Medical professionals have licensed a ‘Google Earth for the human body,’ and game design is also being used to build tax software. (‘It has to be the most boring field, but I mean that’s the point. You can make it slightly challenging and give people little reasons to play these tax tools — beyond, you know, not going to prison!’) While some companies conduct team-building exercises using Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter, others use game technology to standardize their in-house employee training programs. The interviewer adds, ‘I know I’d feel better about job training if it felt more like killing zombies.
Read the rest here
If you are not already aware of the production of Unity3d version 3.o, you can hope for hardware occlusion with Umbra software. At long last there will be debugging support with MonoDevelop on both Windows and Mac. Beast Lightmapping (the same as Unreal it seems). And Deferred rendering for lots of lights.
Unity Dialog Engine has now been updated to support C#. This will effectively reach out to more Unity Developpers. Current version is now 1.3. For those who own UDE, you will receive an email soon with an URL to get the download.
Get UDE Here
Unity3d 2.6 has been rolled out. You can get a full interview with Helgason on the state of things here at gamasutra.One thing to note is that Unity is now offered free for indies. This could spell trouble for garage games that just rolled out their new Torque3d engine. Torque being tailored more at developers who want full control over the C++ source code, may find that Unity, being more user friendly will garner more momentum in academic places. Garage Games will probably counter strike to this we imagine. Although Unity has announced full support for SVN, it is only available in their pro version. The rationale is that people that use it for free will probably be evaluating it or developing as one man army.
Of things to note that is still not available is full support for debugging with Visual Studio. In fact, as one forum member stated clearly, full interactive debug won’t be available until they upgrade their mono backend. Heres the full quote from Dreamora :
“Debugging requires Mono 2.x which won’t happen with Unity 2.x likely but with 3.0 as it was mentioned by a dev on the user voice system, that there are incompatibilities which makes it impossible to use it with 2.x as all webplayer installs need to remain backward compatible.
With the switch to Mono 2.x (2.4+) we will actually get debugging.”
See the thread here