Unity’s New Developer Tools
September 28, 2011, Unity Developers Conference, San Francisco–David Helgason, CEO of Unity Technologies opened the Unite 11 developer forum by noting the changing business models, infrastructure, and development efforts in the company. Unity is growing and now has world-wide presence. There are now over 200 games on Android and 2,000 on iOS using Unity technology. In addition, they are on all of the gaming consoles.
The Unity Asset Store is a one-stop-shop for all of the Unity assets that game developers need to make their games, from 3D models and textures to advanced AI scripting .The asset store now has almost 1900 packages and is generating over $140K per month. The Asset Store plus has many tools from the developer community, and an announcement that Massive Black’s art on their newly opened seller’s page in the Unity Asset Store. In addition, Massive Black is also happy to announce they are currently developing an interactive art demo to showcase many of the art pieces that will eventually be included on the Asset Store. Most of the packages in the store are available with previews before you have to purchase and download.
Some of the major infrastructure changes include payments through PayPal, and social APIs. Analytics are now on-line to enhance game and time, track gamer progress, exits, failures and zero-day analytics. These analytics are integrated into the platform and hosted by Unity. In-app purchases are now cross-platform and tied into the analytics and social functions. These functions are now integrated into the editor.
They announced the acquisition of animation technology startup Mécanim. The addition, now known as Unity Canada, further reinforces Unity Technologies’ commitment to democratizing game creation and delivering cutting edge technology. All of this is an extension of their efforts to reach out to the high-end developer communities and improve their internal technologies.
Along the same lines, they demonstrated new features in Unity 3.5 to improve scalability, enable larger development teams, and speed up rendering. Joachim Ante, CTO of Unity Technologies introduced the features. Included in the update are a variety of performance enhancements, new workflows, and visual improvements. Among the Unity 3.5 features that are being shown at Unite 11:
• Multi-threaded rendering
• High-performance designer-centric GUI system
• HDR rendering with gamma correction
• Native level-of-detail support
• Radiosity Normal Mapping lightmaps
• Shuriken — a completely curve driven particle effects system
• Improved occlusion culling
• Integrated GPU profiler
• Pathfinding and crowd simulation built in
• Integrated version control support for Perforce and Subversion
• Asset cache server to accelerate import times 100x or more
• Improved workflow for editing multiple objects and working with prefabs
• A massive stacking up of optimizations have made Unity 60% faster
All of these features and upgrades are currently in beta. Full release is expected in December.
