iDevGames

Unity Technologies, the developers of the Unity game engine, have announced that they are releasing the indie version of the game engine for free.

Today at the Unite Conference, Unity Technologies, the leading provider of the multi-platform game development platform for Web, PC, Mac, Wii and iPhone, announced that version 2.6 of its Unity Platform is available and that the feature-packed Unity (formerly known as Unity Indie and priced at $199) is now available at no cost at http://unity3d.com/unity/download to make it possible for all developers to get access to the best development platform available. Unity Pro will continue to be priced at $1,499 per license.

Addition info can be found in the Official Press Release.

Registration for Unite 2009, the third annual Unity Developer Conference, is now open to the public. This year’s conference, running October 28 – 30, will be held at Fort Mason, San Francisco.

Once again it’s time for developers, artists, publishers and anyone else interested to come together for a few days to learn more about Unity and how to get the most out of it. Unity’s larger and broader than ever before: we’re now offering a four day event that starts with an optional day of advanced hands-on classes, followed by three more days of technical sessions.

The conference features keynote and roadmap presentation, over a dozen one-hour technical sessions
5 hours of hands-on lab time, a bonus day of hands-on technical classes and more. On October 27th, they will be offering a free “Unity for Flash Developers” introductory course and a “Unity for Unity Developers” masterclass. For more details and pricing info, visit the Unity website.

Perfect for Lone Wolf Developers

If you are a Unity3D user and have ever felt the urge to do a character animation demo, play with ragdoll physics, tweak particle emitters, or even just put a flag on the moon, the FroGames Protopack is for you. The name pretty much says it — it’s a package of art for rapid prototyping in Unity3D. If you are a programmer who can’t draw stick figures and doesn’t have a dedicated artist, but wants to learn Unity, the protopack is for you.
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Develop Mag, a UK-based website for game developers has a series of articles that rank the best game engines for game development. The article kicks off with a look at the console market amid the current economic situation with Start your engines.

Each of the 10 engines featured in this month’s round-up (starting over the page) has, in its latest release, improved its toolset to enable rapid iteration (if it wasn’t using that as its USP anyway). Gone are the days of twiddling your thumbs waiting for the latest build to tick along and then almost inevitably fail; now designers, artists and programmers can instantly change object placement, parameters and even whole scripts without requiring a recompilation.

The top 10 thus far are:

1. TBA
2. TBA
3. TBA
4. Unity 3D – PC, Mac, iPhone, Wii
5. Blitz Games Studios – PS3, Xbox 360, Wii, PSP, PC
6. Infernal Engine – Xbox 360, PS3, PC, Wii, PS2, PSP
7. Vision Engine 7.5 – PC (DX9 & 10), Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Wii
8. Bigworld Technology Suite – PC, Xbox 360, PS3, iPhone, PSP, DS, mobile devices
9. Vicious Engine – PC, Xbox 360, PS3 (VE2); PSP, PS2, Wii (VE)
10. Torque 3D – PC, Mac, Xbox 360, Wii, iPhone, PS3, PSP

With Unity 3D only making number four in their list, it will be interesting to see the top three engines.

Related Links:

• Start your engine
• Blender Game Engine
• Crystal Space 3D

Cube 2: Sauerbraten is a free multiplayer/singleplayer first-person shooter, built as a major redesign of the Cube FPS. It’s been almost a year since the last release and there have been many changes:

• new playermodel, IronSnout X10K
• new weapon models
• new sound track
• new splash screen and logo
• 28 new multiplayer maps!
• 1 new singleplayer map
• new “protect” and “insta protect” game modes
• bots that work for both MP and offline play
• ragdoll physics
• texture blending and new flame/smoke particles for map editing
• in-game movie recording and also PNG screenshots
• new engines features like ZIP archive support, better grass, pre-compressed DXT1/3/5 textures for faster loading, fixed-function shadowmaps & dynamic lights, low cost blob shadows, particle culling, faster shader loading, revised post-process effect system, and more
• support for custom server ports, server passwords, public key crypto, and server-init.cfg for easier server configs

The engine supporting the game is entirely original in code and design, and its code is Open Source (ZLIB license, read the docs for more on how you can use the engine).

Related Links:

• Download for Mac OS X (352 MB)
• Amazon.com – 3D Math Primer for Graphics and Game Development
• Unity 3D – Game Development Tool

How it all started

The development of “Surrounded by Death” started with our passion for first person shooters and zombies! We always wanted to make some kind off mix between tower defence and the invasion of horrifying brain eating zombies. We from Wooglie were developing games on Unity for about half a year now and just recently set up our own gaming site. We read about this competition on the Unity3D forum and we thought it would be an excellent opportunity for us to create a cool game and win prizes with it! So we brainstormed on what to make for this competition. After a long brainstorming session we came to the idea of making a zombie invasion game. We called for help from the Verdun-Online team(which is also a project Wooglie is participating on) to assist us with the art and the sound. Leonidas, Stone Lion joined our team and we then consisted of a team of four enthusiastic developers to make an awesome game for Mac!
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Avoid All Contact

The game I chose to work on for the 2008 uDevGames contest was one I’d had in my design notebook for awhile. I picked it because of its simple gameplay and simple graphics, making it something I felt was doable by the contest deadline.

The game idea involved maneuvering through levels of narrow, twisty passages, filled with static, animated and/or free-floating obstacles while trying to avoid contact with almost everything. Controlling your avatar would be accomplished by simply dragging it with the mouse, and gameplay would be at a methodical but hurried pace.
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Unity iPhone 1.0.2 has been released and some of its highlights seem very impressive. The Mono runtime, and memory usage by textures and uncompressed audio have been reduced by about 50%, and they improved the script call optimizations significantly. This makes your games take less memory and run faster, while still looking and playing like the state of the art. New and improved splash screens were added — five splash screens are included in every built Xcode project (3 portait, 2 landscape). Unity iPhone audio playback has been significantly revamped, all significant memory leaks swatted, several low-level .NET things like threads and sockets have been made to work, and the scripting reference has been updated across the board.

Getting Started

I entered uDevGames ’08 because I needed motivation to get something done. The three month deadline gave me something to work to. Boston was developed by a team of three — Nathan was in charge of story and music, Micah did the comic art and character design and I took care of the 3D art, level design, and all programming.

December

The first task was to get a story. I rounded up Micah and had a meeting with Nathan. After about ten minutes, we had a basic story line. I went back to trying to familiarize myself with the game engine while Micah, the artist, worked on character design for ‘Boston’. The next day, after another consultation with Nathan, the writer, we had our main character drawn out.
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Unity 2.5 for Mac and Windows available now!
Unity Technologies are extremely happy to announce the release of Unity 2.5. For the first time Unity development is now available for use on both Mac OS X and Windows! True cross-platform development with Unity has now been realized.

Windows Editor Support
Unity 2.5 adds full support for Windows Vista and XP with full feature parity and interoperability with Mac OS X. The Unity editor has been rebuilt to look, feel and function identically on both operating systems, each running the same underlying engine. The best part? Unity on either platform can build games for either platform!

Tabbed Interface
Taking cues from the best designed applications, the rewritten editor has received dozens of improvements. The most visible change is the tabbed interface, where every part of the interface can be moved, undocked to a secondary monitor, and even stacked to achieve logical grouping.
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