Learn Unity 3D’s own Will Goldstone previews some of the upcoming features in the new release of Unity 3.0.
Various new Asset Management features such as searchable asset window, searchable highlighting scene view and asset labelling (think online tagging to match assets together) are all shown off in this video, go watch now on Vimeo.com or use the embedded player below, leave a comment and let the Unity Tech guys know what you think of these awesome new features!
Big thanks from me to Ethan Vosburgh and Thomas Grové for organising this stuff btw!
Unity Technologies have now made Unity 3.0 available for pre-orders, be one of the first to get in on the ground floor of this awesome new development proposition. See our previous post on the new features of Unity here -
In a most unprecedented move, Unity Technologies have announced that with the release of the fantastic new version 2.6, that Unity Indie will no longer be a commercial product, but instead provided as a free download.
Coming from Open Source roots, and using the Open Mono Library as a core part of Unity, the UT team are no stranger to sharing and giving, having a history of fantastic support and an emphasis on community. However, it can only come as a surprise to many that Unity is now available free for the thousands of would be developers that perhaps couldn’t afford it previously – fantastic news, and full credit to UT for this decision, hopefully it will help grow the community exponentially.
Having just written the first beginner’s guide to the software – Unity Game Development Essentials (yes, a shameless plug, but hey), I too am personally very excited as this means my book may prove useful to a lot more people as they can get started with making 3D games for very little initial cost – something that would have been out of reach of many of my own students outside of our games courses previously.
My congratulations to David, Joachim, Nicholas, Tom and everyone in the growing UT family for this excellent pre-christmas gift to the community. Cheers guys, you rock!
Where to start?
Unity Beginners book
To get started in Unity development, why not order Unity Game Development Essentials from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or directly from Packt Publishing, and get started in 3D development today?
Just came accross this excellent 3D game portal with a focus on Unity. Called Muse games, the site offers several playable games and an emphasis on community and giving new developers the chance to get their game seen on the site, and even sold via Muse’s exposure pipeline.
I’m really impressed by the professional look of the site and its staff and the existing content they have placed on there so far is of a very high standard, be prepared to get addicted to the Extreme sledding game! Also really interesting as they put an emphasis on multiplayer games too.
Get over there now and get involved, maybe even submit something to them?
Unity head honcho Nicholas Francis is interviewed in this article by Casualgaming.biz. In it he talks about the development of unity, and their commitment to providing cutting edge web based gaming, a good read for those interested in the focus of the Unity Tech crowd!
For those of you new to Unity, you may be interested to know about the Unity feedback forum. An official resource that acts as a voting system, digg style, for Unity developers to vote for their next most wanted addition / change / fix to be included in the next release of Unity.
Whilst this is not a direct cause and effect – the UT team of course has its own roadmap (here) but this acts as more of a community based focus of attention – allowing you as a developer to see what others are hoping for in the future, and have your say too, good work UT!
The very generous Kevin R of vectorboxgames.com has donated his recent work with Unity iPhone, creating an example Pong project for you to download and pick apart and learn from. Now his game is finished it available on the App Store, Details on the game are here - http://www.vectorboxgames.com/vong/index.html
I know a lot of people have been waiting for this so a massive thanks to Kevin on behalf of all those users for his hard work!
Here is what Kevin has to say about the project download -
This was my first Unity game. I decided to give the project up to the community as another resource to learn from. I currently have it up on the appstore, but as a free download.
It’s a clone of Pong.
The code for this game was written in Javascript. There isn’t a ton of commenting, but the code is relatively clean (for a first project), so it should be a fairly good resource to learn from. If you have any questions, feel free to ask.
It covers the use of menus, accelerometer and touch controls, 2D using 3D elements, and more. It’s a full game.
As far as licensing goes… consider it the same as any other resource in the Unity Resources section. If UT want’s to add it to the resources section, that is fine by me.
An interesting article from Protopop following on from John Grden’s Adobe addressing blog post, stating a more balanced view that I certainly adhere, that Unity is doing well on its own, and that potentially an Adobe buyout would not be pushing innovation by Adobe and could cause the currently thriving culture of Unity’s growth to become bogged down and oversaturated. I may be reading more into the article than intended but read for yourself!
Excellent tutorial from 3D Nemo entertainment on getting real terrain topography from google earth into Unity as a terrain. Awesome! You’ll need access to Google Earth and also SketchUp as part of the procedure, but otherwise its not as complex as you may think.. What are you waiting for? Hit the link..
Learn Unity 3D’s own Will Goldstone previews some of the upcoming features in the new release of Unity 3.0.
Unity head honcho Nicholas Francis is interviewed in this article by Casualgaming.biz. In it he talks about the development of unity, and their commitment to providing cutting edge web based gaming, a good read for those interested in the focus of the Unity Tech crowd!
The very generous Kevin R of 
An interesting article from Protopop following on from John Grden’s Adobe addressing blog post, stating a more balanced view that I certainly adhere, that Unity is doing well on its own, and that potentially an Adobe buyout would not be pushing innovation by Adobe and could cause the currently thriving culture of Unity’s growth to become bogged down and oversaturated. I may be reading more into the article than intended but read for yourself!
Excellent tutorial from 3D Nemo entertainment on getting real terrain topography from google earth into Unity as a terrain. Awesome! You’ll need access to Google Earth and also SketchUp as part of the procedure, but otherwise its not as complex as you may think.. What are you waiting for? Hit the link..
