Unity Unite: Nobody will embrace the immense!

Let's face it without any prefaces: we were mistaken. Unity Unite live - this event is so wide that it is almost impossible to tell about it in detail, to lay out the summary of each report, and it is unnecessary. Each of them can be viewed in the record (most likely, this link will work ).

It is also quite difficult to convey the atmosphere of the holiday and the thrill of networking (why, in fact, industry conferences are necessary).
Therefore, we decided to share the conclusions and general results of the conference, which were fully and completely anticipated by the opening performance of the founding fathers of Unity (under the cut - the full timeline video).


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And yet, for those who do not know what Unity is , and who are too lazy to read everything. This is the “cartoon” on the new version of Unity, which is demonstrated in real time : each scene can be rotated and viewed from different angles. You can also take and change with one click the character's hair color immediately to the entire movie.



Those key things which we carried out from all conference concerning the future of Unity:

• Unity is committed to becoming the best engine for creating any interactive 3D content . At the same time, game developers are the main target audience of the product.
• Mobile games - one of the main directions of development.
• The key challenge voiced by David Helgason is to comply with the “Build once, deploy everywhere” concept. Emergency support for Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 has already been announced, and a partnership with Intel has been concluded, with the result that games can be ported using Union to Android devices running on the Intel Atom.
• For reasons that have been voiced, Unity pays a lot of attention to increasing performance : for example, support for DirectX 11 has been announced.
• The active development of Asset Store , the store of all-all-all under Unity: from plug-ins to textures, sounds and music.
• Because of sharpening igodelov, Unity will pay more attention to the development of GUI tools .

In general, Unity is developing in leaps and bounds - and, perhaps, this is more important than specific techniques for working with sockets, customization of the editor or a GPU profiler for mobile devices.

Unite 2012: Keynote Timeline

And now, as promised, we save time and post direct links to interesting moments of the opening conference.

• 00:00 h : David Helgason greets the crowd and talks about the history of Unity from the first game, Goo Ball, to entering global markets and recognition in various countries, including Russia.
• 04:45 : Unity today is more than 1.2 million developers and 300 thousand active developers every month. 53% of all mobile game developers polled use Unity. A bunch of top games on the Apple Store and Android Market is written in Unity.
• 07:31 : Asset Store is one of the best initiatives of the company since the creation of Unity. Developers can share models, textures, music, sound effects and extensions for Unity, greatly simplifying and cheapening the development. Asset Store also provides online services from 14 selected partners - mainly for game projects.

• 16:24 : Joakim Ante talks about Unity 4. The first thing I’m talking about is Mecanim , a character animation system bought by Unity a year ago and finally embedded in the engine. Mecanim will be available in the free version of Unity .
• 16:18 : Demonstration of Mecanim, which allows you to easily create character animation patterns and at least easily reuse them for other characters, including those with different proportions. Patterns of movements will also be distributed through the Asset Store. Create a moose tumbling - now no problem!
• 23:58 : The ability to easily manage the transitions between character animations, for example, to switch between calm, running and jumping. This whole story works without brakes in the presence of 250 moving characters on a regular laptop.
• 27:57 : Development of Shuriken , a particle animation system introduced in Unity 3.5. In Unity, we worked on speed and collision accounting — now 10 thousand particles, thrown on a bronze statue of Apollo with a sledgehammer, fly away from it without brakes.
• 29:20 : Improved performance wherever possible and a huge bunch of other goodies : dynamic font rendering, mobile shadows, bumpmapped terrain ... Thousands of them!
• 31:52 : DirectX 11 support and a freaky demo - the studio that made the clips for Gorillaz created a cartoon on Unity that is being rendered in real time! Tadaaam ...
• 32:57 : Render in real time, “Butterfly Effect” , and for those who want - standalone-video on Youtube-channel Unity.
• 35:43 : The audience lifted their jaws from their knees and listened to which decisions were used in the video. Character animation, work with skin layers, procedural generation of hair and explosions , quick changes (for example, repaint the hair of the character throughout the video at once).

• 42:56 : David Helgason introduces Amy Juan , director of games for Adobe. It proves with numbers that the whole world uses Adobe Flash, and if you publish something for the web, then it should be done under Flash.
• 45:30 : An example of the integration of a three-dimensional shooter ShadowGun, written in Unity and published in Flash, on Facebook. Now players can shoot at their friends and happily spend money together.

• 46:47 : David Helgason talks about Unity's multiplatform and announces fast support for Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 . The audience throws their caps into the air. Helgason says that they will strive to maintain the maximum possible platforms.
• 49:22 : Helgason announces Union : a PhoneGap in the Unity world. The developers send the game to it, Unity port it to 7 (today) accessible platforms. Today, 50 games have already been published, and only 120 have been proposed for publication. The developer doesn’t have to do anything to publish - just send the project .

• 52:56 : Nicholas Francis continues the story of the future of Unity.
• 54:00 : Means of rapid development of scripts on the example of a door moving aside.
• 58:05 : More cunning work with prefabs, with the possibility of putting them one into the other.
• 1:02:14 : wiiii !!! Alpha version of GUIiiii !!! The only big spoon of tar - so far, little functionality, and that will appear at the earliest in 3 months.

• 1:08:45 : The mighty Peter Moulinho appears on the scene and teaches game start-ups with a competent approach to development, including mentioning the upcoming mysterious Curiosity , also developed on Unity. Interested in watching is worth it entirely.

All topics from the speech of the founders of Unity were subsequently disclosed in the conference reports:

• Using the New GUI System - speaks for itself.
• Road Map & Wish List - .Net Framework 4 connection, more convenient customization of the editor, memory profiler, GPU profiler for mobile devices, Linux build, development of prefabs and a lot of other little things.
• Performance Optimization Tips and Tricks for Unity - performance optimization, as Joakim Ante talked about.
• Creating Retargetable Animation Assets with Mecanim - quick setup and copying of character animation, node system for setting blending and transitions of animations.
• Unity, Network Code, and You - simplicity and ease of use of the built-in network based on RackNet. About sockets and WWW requests are almost nothing new, except for loading and using as plugins written from outside the project classes and methods Assembly.Load (bytes) from downloaded dll. They also talked about using JS and SendMessages for communication between Unity and the browser.

Instead of a resume

This long unnumbered list, perhaps, did not describe even a quarter of the diversity and magnificence of the conference (including sponsored reports, where without them!). The venue (oh, Amsterdam!), The party and the Unity Awards - we will leave all this behind the scenes.

The most important thing that we received from participation, besides dense networking, is inspiration . I feel most myself that a huge number of people around the world use Unity for gaming and non-gaming projects, thanks to which the engine develops faster and faster, and in close cooperation with the developers, this is the most life-giving motivation to stay true to the product.



If you have not yet joined our crowd, try the new features of Unity 4. Suddenly hooked.