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==Democratization Initiatives==
==Democratization Initiatives==
To bolster their democratization of game development, Unity Technologies invests in initiatives that are seen as avenues to help empower developers by expanding their capabilities and customer reach.
To bolster their [[democratization]] of game development, Unity Technologies invests in initiatives that are seen as avenues to help empower developers by expanding their capabilities and customer reach.


===Asset Store===
===Asset Store===

Revision as of 20:27, 6 November 2012

Unity
Developer(s)Unity Technologies
Stable release
3.5.6 / September 2012
Written inC++
JavaScript
Boo
C#[1]
Operating system
Creation and Deployment
Deployment
TypeGame engine
LicenseProprietary
Websitewww.unity3d.com

Unity is a cross platform game engine and IDE developed by Unity Technologies, targeting web plugins, desktop platforms and mobile devices.

Unity Technologies

Unity Technologies was founded in 2004 by David Helgason (CEO), Nicholas Francis (CCO), and Joachim Ante (CTO) in Copenhagen, Denmark after their first game, GooBall, failed to gain success. The three recognized the value in engine and tools development and set out to create an engine that any and all could use for an affordable price. Unity Technologies has received funding from the likes of Sequoia Capital, WestSummit Capital, and iGlobe Partners.[2]

Unity’s success has come partly due to the focus on the needs of independent developers unable to either create their own game engine and tools or purchase licenses to use fully featured options available. The company’s focus was and remains to “democratize game development” and make development of 2D and 3D interactive content as accessible as possible to as many people around the world as possible.

2008 saw the rise of the iPhone and Unity was one of the first engine developers to begin supporting the platform in full. Unity is now being used by 53.1% of developers (according to Game Developer’s mobile and social technology survey[3]) with hundreds of games released on both iOS and Android devices.

In 2009, Unity began offering a version of their product for free. The number of registered developers began growing quickly following the announcement. In April 2012, Unity realized new heights of popularity as their count of registered developers hit 1 million, 300,000 of which use Unity on a regular monthly basis.[4]

Unity Development Platform

The first version of Unity was launched at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in 2005. It was built only to function and build projects on Mac platform computers and garnered enough success to continue development of the engine and tools. The latest version of Unity, Unity 3, was released in September 2010 and focused on beginning to introduce more of the tools that high-end studios usually have at their disposal in order to capture the interest of bigger developers while providing independent and smaller teams tools that would normally be fiscally out of reach in one affordable package. Unity 4, due out in 2012, was announced in June 2012 and includes additions such as Mecanim animation and DirectX 11 support.

Unity supports integration with 3ds Max, Maya, Softimage, Blender, Modo, ZBrush, Cinema 4D, Cheetah3D, Photoshop, Adobe Fireworks and Allegorithmic Substance. Changes made to assets created in these products automatically updates all instances of that asset throughout the project without needing to manually reimport.

Graphics engine uses Direct3D (Windows), OpenGL (Mac, Windows), OpenGL ES (iOS, Android), and proprietary APIs (Wii). Support for bump mapping, reflection mapping, parallax mapping, Screen Space Ambient Occlusion, dynamic shadows using shadow maps, render-to-texture and full-screen post processing effects.

ShaderLab language for using shaders, supporting both declarative "programming" of the fixed-function pipeline and shader programs written in Cg or GLSL. A shader can include multiple variants and a declarative fallback specification, allowing Unity to detect the best variant for the current video card and if none are compatible, fall back to an alternative shader that may sacrifice features for broader compatibility.

Built-in support for Nvidia's (formerly Ageia's) PhysX physics engine, (as of Unity 3.0) with added support for real time cloth on arbitrary and skinned meshes, thick ray casts, and collision layers.

Game scripting comes via Mono. Scripting is built on Mono, the open-source implementation of the .NET Framework. Programmers can use UnityScript (a custom language with ECMAScript-inspired syntax), C# or Boo (which has a Python-inspired syntax). Starting with the 3.0 release, Unity ships with a customized version of MonoDevelop for debugging scripts.

Unity also includes Unity Asset Server - A version control solution for all game assets and scripts, using PostgreSql as a backend, Audio system built on FMOD library, with ability to play back Ogg Vorbis compressed audio, video playback using Theora codec, a terrain and vegetation engine, supporting tree billboarding, Occlusion Culling with Umbra, built-in lightmapping and global illumination with Beast, multiplayer networking using Raknet, built-in pathfinding navigation meshes.

Unity 3.5

Unity 3.5 was one of the biggest releases ever to come out for the Unity development platform and added a slew of new features and improvements to existing technology. These included the Shuriken particle system, navmesh for pathfinding and obstacle avoidance, linear space (gamma correct) lighting, HDR rendering, multi-threaded rendering, light probes, Native Client deployment, re-written occlusion culling, built in level of detail support, Adobe Flash Player add-on preview, GPU profiler, and directional lightmaps.[5]

Unity 4

Unity 4 was announced on June 18, 2012 and includes several new additions to the technology in the initial Unity 4.0 release. The Unity 4 release cycle will, like previous releases, include several updates with additional features over the course of its lifespan, such as the new Retained GUI, which is due in a future 4.x update.

Mecanim

Mecanim is Unity's animation technology that has been in development for years, first by the company of the same name, and then at the Unity Canada offices following the acquisition. The technology is built to bring fluid and natural motion to characters with an efficient interface. Mecanim includes powerful tools for creating state machines, blend trees, IK rigging, and automatic retargeting of animations, all inside the Unity editor.

Additionally, an array of retargetable animation will be available in the Unity Asset Store upon launch of the tool. Many of these animation files are motion capture and provided at no cost by Unity Technologies. Other providers on the Asset Store will also be providing animations for use with Mecanim, either for free or a nominal fee.

DirectX 11

Unity 4 fully supports Microsoft's DirectX 11. This offers developers the ability to take advantage of the GPU in new and exciting ways: increased shader capabilities with shader model 5, tessellation for smoother models and environments in game worlds, and compute shaders for advanced GPU computation.

Mobile Graphics Enhancements

Unity 4 features real-time shadows on mobile, skinned mesh instancing, the ability to use normal maps when baking lightmaps, and a refined GPU profiler. It's easy to make extremely high-end visuals that scale across the best of what's available on modern PCs and the most advanced mobile graphics chips.

Unity add-on for Adobe Flash Player

The Adobe Flash Player deployment add-on will also be released with Unity 4.0. While deployment has been possible for those with the Unity 3.5 compatible beta tool, the final release of the deployment add-on will require Unity 4.

Linux Publishing Preview

Unity 4 will also include a preview of a new deployment option to publish games to Desktop Linux[6][7][8]. While the deployment add-on can potentially work with various forms of Linux, development is primarily focused on Ubuntu for its primary release[9]. This deployment option will be provided to all Unity 4 users at no additional cost[10]. Engineer's unity 3D company work with Ubuntu in the canonical's team for games.[11]

Additional Unity 4 additions and enhancements

  • Shuriken particle system supports external forces, bent normals and automatic culling
  • 3D texture support
  • Navigation: dynamic obstacles and avoidance priority
  • Major optimizations in UnityGUI performance and memory usage
  • Dynamic fonts on all platforms with HTML-like markup
  • Remote Unity Web Player debugging
  • New Project Window workflows
  • Iterative lightmap baking
  • Refined component-based workflows
  • Extensible inspectors for custom classes
  • Improved Cubemap import pipeline
  • Geometry data improvements for huge memory and performance savings
  • Meshes can be constructed from non-triangle geometry—render points & lines efficiently
  • Search, live preview and buy Asset Store assets from the Project Window

Platforms “Author Once, Deploy Everywhere”

Unity supports quick deployment to multiple platforms. Unity lets you target all platforms and switch between them instantly from a single tool. Within a project you have complete control over delivery to all platforms including mobiles, web, PC/Mac, and consoles. Unity makes it simple to keep your code working across many devices by abstracting away the majority of platform differences while maintaining the option for precise control when needed. Unity also allows specification of texture compression and resolution settings for each platform a game supports. This means a single hi-res Photoshop file will work for all targets. By taking the pain out of the development process and doing all of the background work, Unity allows developers to focus on making games.

Currently supported platforms

Windows, Mac, Unity Web Player, iOS, Android, Nintendo Wii, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360

Upcoming announced platforms

Adobe Flash Player, Linux, Windows 8, Windows Phone 8, Nintendo Wii U

Licensing

There are two main licenses: Unity and Unity Pro,[12] with the Pro version being available for a price and the non Pro version being free, although it originally cost around 200 USD (now $1500). The Pro version has additional features, such as render-to-texture, occlusion culling, global lighting and post-processing effects. The Free version, on the other hand, displays a splash screen (in standalone games) and a watermark (in web games) that cannot be customized or disabled.

Both Unity and Unity Pro include the development environment, tutorials, sample projects and content, support via forum, wiki, and future updates in the same major version (i.e. buying Unity Pro 3 gets all future Unity Pro 3.x updates for free).

Unity for iOS, Unity for Android, Unity for Adobe Flash Player, and soon Unity for Windows Phone 8 are add-ons to an existing Unity purchase. A Unity Pro licenses is required to purchase an iOS Pro or Android Pro licenses. The regular Android and iOS licenses can be used with the free version of Unity.

Source code, PS3, Xbox 360, and Wii licenses are negotiated on a case by case basis.[13]

Educational licenses are provided by Studica with the stipulation that it is for purchase and use by schools, purely for education.[14]

For a complete list of feature comparisons for each license, visit: http://unity3d.com/unity/licenses

Democratization Initiatives

To bolster their democratization of game development, Unity Technologies invests in initiatives that are seen as avenues to help empower developers by expanding their capabilities and customer reach.

Asset Store

Launched in November 2010, the Unity Asset Store is a resource available within the Unity editor. Over 150,000 Unity users access the collection of over 4,400 asset packages in a wide range of categories, including 3D models, textures and materials, particle systems, music and sound effects, tutorials and complete projects, scripting packages, editor extensions and online services.

The store is home to many extensions, tools and asset packages such as the package NGUI: Next-Gen UI by Tasharen Entertainment,[15] and the visual scripting extension uScript by Detox Studios, Tidy Tile Mapper,[16] a 2D/3D tile-based game design extension by Doppler Interactive and the input scripting package FingerGestures.

inXile Entertainment has been vocal in its extensive use of the Asset Store for production of Wasteland 2.[17]

Union

Union[18] is a division of Unity Technologies dedicated to syndicating Unity games to mobile phones, app stores, tablets, set-top boxes, connected TVs and other emerging platforms. With the goal of democratizing games distribution, Union works with Unity developers to license games for release on new devices.

Union includes a portfolio of over 125 games that have generated a cumulative 120 million downloads in their collective releases. Examples of Union titles include Shadowgun, Super Crossfire HD, Frisbee Forever, Falling Fred, and Cordy.

Union provides platform partners access to high quality games while empowering Unity developers with new distribution opportunities. Union is free to join and provides an 80 percent revenue share to its developers.

Union platforms include Intel, LGTV, Roku, BlackBerry, Nokia, Sony, and Lenovo.

Uses

See also

References

  1. ^ Meijer, Lucas. "Is Unity Engine written in Mono/C# or C++?". Retrieved 2011-04-26.
  2. ^ "Unity Technologies Lands $12 Million in Series B Funding Led by WestSummit Capital and iGlobe Partners".
  3. ^ "Mobile game developer survey leans heavily toward iOS, Unity". Gamasutra.
  4. ^ "Unity Technologies marks one million developers for its game development tools". Polygon.
  5. ^ "Unity 3.5". Retrieved 23 September 2012.
  6. ^ http://video.unity3d.com/video/6420694
  7. ^ http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/140299-Unity-4-Details
  8. ^ http://video.unity3d.com//video/6481739/unity-4-linux-export
  9. ^ http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/915-Linux-Support-D?p=957830&viewfull=1#post957830
  10. ^ http://unity3d.com/unity/licenses
  11. ^ three engineers from games company Unity 3D
  12. ^ "Unity License Comparison". Unity Technologies.
  13. ^ "UNITY". Unity Technologies.
  14. ^ "Unity Pro 3 - Education - Academic Software Discounts for Students".
  15. ^ "NGUI: Next-Gen UI kit". Tasheren.
  16. ^ "Tidy TileMapper: Streaming Maps - the update!". Doppler Interactive. 4 September 2012. Retrieved 23 September 2012.
  17. ^ "The Wasteland Chronicles".
  18. ^ "Union website".
  19. ^ http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-10-11-jagex-says-carnage-racing-brings-triple-a-graphics-to-facebook

External links

Template:Unity engine games Template:IPhone video game engines

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