Interactive 3D Development

Code Quality on the rise: How to create better applications in Unity 3

With the days of small games and applications generating enough revenue to make a living from them being gone, even in the mobile space (be it android game development or iOS game development), its unavoidable that our projects grow in size and often also in code complexity. But as natural as this step is for development, its very unfavorable for us that Unity is not exactly helpful when it comes to maintaining code quality and ensuring that regression is prevented. The root of this problem is widespread, but one of the largest problems is that the debugger tends to have some more or less ugly problems, partially due to Unity Technologies refusal to finally provide mdb files to include their own closed source in proper debugging and by the lack of proper unit testing support.
UPDATE: Unity 3.5 finally added the MDBs for the engines assemblies!

While the first two problems are completely out of our control, at least unless we license the source version of Unity, the unit testing problem can finally be approached, thanks to Test Star, a Unity extension available at a fee of $50 on the Unity Asset Store.

Test Star combines the benefits of the nunit testing framework, in a modified version to run, with Unitys editor focused approach, building upon this to even allow you to unit test your scenes and runtime behavior, not only code with 'in and out' parameters. Instead of wasting time with a long text on how it works and why its great to use it, I would like to point you to a little video on YouTube that shows it in action:

 

What I personally love about it is that its error reporting is much more sophisticated than Unitys own integrated one which pretty commonly lacks proper information on what went wrong, replacing it with a generic and basically useless error.

I've decided to write this blog after using and experiencing it myself for quite some time now and I can only recommend to EXPERIENCE IT yourself if you are looking for a way to rise your application or games quality.

I've never been disappointed by it, but the biggest gain so far from it was on a project where I had to port a whole host of DB functions and a DB management class from MySQL to SQLite which without Test Star would have taken multiple times as long as it did in the end due to Unity eating away proper errors, hidding them or simply crashing when Test Star was not handling it, while Test Star gave me precise informations on what went wrong.

Visual Scripting - Holy grail or apocalypse for game development

Visual Scripting has gained a lot of attention the last years, by various indie designers that don’t want to learn coding its considered to be kind of a holy grail to enabled them to do things they would otherwise never have been able to do.

The likely widest known usage in the game development is Unreals Kismet which is powerfull and well integrated and especially makes cinematics creation very easy. But its also Kismet that shows the limits compared to going with UnrealScript, there are just things it can not do or things that look that clumsy that you really don’t want to do it there. So lets talk about the pro and con in detail.

 

The raw potential

The main benefit of visual scripting is a simple yet important one: Its not text! All the limited functionality they normally provide are easy approachable, making it possible for people without knowledge in one or more coding languages to create interactive functionality. But it requires that simple yet powerfull nodes for the specific tasks in question are available.

Through Nested nodes (sub graphs) its additional possible to raise the readability of a graph and make parts of it easy reusable.

 

The problems 

The largest problem that anyone will unavoidably hit within hours at maximum is the ubiquity of the information. A functionality written in code taking 5 lines of code can easily lead to a graph spanning dozens of nodes and more to be represented in visual code. As an example of this problem of readability and „just beeing“ please see the following simple graph (done with uScript Retail Beta3) that does nothing but bounce a game object by a given Vector3 over time and back again. The screenshot shows just the small part of it handling the position forward backward handling

 

Enumerating collections is another thing in visual scripting that basically is a pure nightmare. Even if there were any visual scripting technology that would be able to represent this process in a LINQ alike form, it would still be very hard to grasp for designers.

As mentioned under the raw potential, one of the benefits of graphs is also a drawback and thats nested nodes (subgraphs), which if used right offer an easy way to reusability and making a graph more readable. But unhappily when not used right they can make it near impossible to maintain a graph at all. Especially if the designer uses nested nodes within nested nodes and even deeper hierarchies it becomes impossible to handle them any longer.

 

The options in Unity

 

PlayMaker

Not a visual scripting technology per se as it does not allow to create free form code, its an editor to design Finite State Machines, and important and very easy to grasp concept as we use it all day long without knowing about it.

Out of my view the best solution for pure designers with no coding knowledge because it is not only easy to approach and backed by piles of tutorials etc, but first and formost its not „just code“ that the developer will create but a clean and solid interaction broken down into states. Other solutions as well as pure code in the hands of non coders often lead to messy code and spaghetti code, while PlayMaker does not allow that, it requires that the designer thinks about the interaction and how it „plays out“ to create corresponding states and transitions.

The result will be code that he can maintain much easier and which is much more readable as only the states end on the ‚graph‘, which will enable him to get more done and especially done in a working form.

A usefull feature to make this even easier is the capability to visually debug the FSM, so you see in which state it is and where it transitions etc.

 

uScript

  uScript is the youngest of the 3 solutions, approaching its release version (Retail Beta 3 at the time of writing). It follows the design principles that are applied in other technologies too, especially Kismet from the Unreal Engine / UDK.

It has well done and polished visual appearance that not only helps being productive but especially being able to grasp the meaning of a graph with a glimpse or two.

One unique feature it advertises to have is that the graphs actually generate C# code, which makes it platform independent. But to be fair, out of my view that generated code has relatively little meaning cause its impossible to work with it beyond „looking at it“ and being granted to work on any platform as its not designed and written for usage in a pure code form. Also when the corresponding graph is resaved, it will be overwritten!

Its major drawback compared to the competition at the time is the lack of visual debugging, which brings back one of the main problem for designers on normal coding to uScript too and thats that you need to know what you do and where an error comes from to fix it basing on educated guessing.

 

Antares Universe

Like uScript its a full visual scripting solution, which unlike uScript does not base on the Kismet style of working but a more „programmer style“ approach without the temporal variables for transfer or the coroutine yielding directly on the connectors (the + buttons along the lines)

It clearly loses on the front of visual appeal and easy graspability due to the graphics and the layout of nodes and connectors, but it compensates for that through two major benefits over uScript, which are the visual debugging (like PlayMaker) and the possibility to create GUIs in realtime within the editor basically.

Also it offers many very high level and high usage nodes out of the box (LoD node for example) and at least from a subjective point of view a clearly higher execution performance than uScript.

 

Conclussion

Its neither a holy grail nor the apocalypse. It surely has its good points and when used correctly, for example to expose high level logic in a designer friendly form to allow them to create that code on their own while the programmers focus on the low level and core systems, then it surely can turn into a diamond for a project.  

But on the other hand if a designers with no programming knowledge has the hope to create whole games purely on it, I personally consider this completely unrealistic and a major source of frustration for the designer more sooner than later, because there will be limits which he will just not be able to solve without a programmer.

None the less visual scripting can enable a talented designer to create a simple game or a prototype to grasp the interest of others or an investor, so its not per se bad or deal breaking at all

Summary of this years ZHDK Game Design Bachelor projects

Today I want to invite you to join me on my summary on the some of the most interesting Unity projects I've seen in a long time, some being commercially very interesting, others being very special in their artistic and game mechanics nature.

These projects were all presented as part of the Bachelor project presentations of the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHDK), more specifically in their game design course which originally used Torque for its project but moved on to Unity some years ago.

 

Mangrove

Mangrove was one of the games that at first seemed totally trivial on what they do, reminded me of a game I played some years ago. You collect creatures with specific abilities that attach themself to you in form of chains. You are able to change the order in changes and position and even detach them  to act along you. There is a creature allowing you to fly, different once or multiple time attackers as well as one that for example allows you to steal enemy creatures and more. Your target is to control the 6 Volcanos which are protected by other being like you with their own chains of creatures.

After the third or so try when I finally got the hang of it, I realized that the game and its mechanic are extremely addictive due to its flexibility and tactical depth with the positioning and resorting of the creatures you can collect and their abilities.
The only sad thing that the game has no downloadable version at the time so all can experience it but I've good faith that its creator finishes the game and releases it in some form!

This game likely my favorite game of all.

 

The Lost Books of Calon

The easiest and fastest way to describe this project would be to call it as a brother in spirit to the good old Creatures games with the norns, but on a whole new graphical level with very lovely graphics and nice new concepts.

The game definitely had to suffer from the short amount of time available for the bachelor projects as it shows a lot of potential for a really great and successful indie game with the needed and development time and I'm pretty sure they will continue on it.

 

Attrack!

As a total Tower Defense addict, this game naturally struck my interest right away and this game has a lot in common with tower defense concepts as you build towers that attack, towers that collect energy to build and support further towers and defense as well as powerlines basically. Its very simple to grasp but a real nut to master it :)

Normally likely this game would have become my favorite, but it has some serious problems on balance and visualizing the relevant informations which lead to too many frustrating loses. But if those things get worked out and it gets more content, I'm really looking forward to buy and play it!

 

ID: Ich, Du (und alle anderen)

 

Umami Relish

Umami Relish was a game in the "normal definition" of a game with you as player playing a tofu block, which defends itself with all required measures against Piratecooks and other things that try to get you as meal and that in a very colorful world. A very funny idea and could definitely be brought up to a sellable product.

 

TapKick

TapKick was the only mobile title in the round, more specifically an iPad title.
Its a 2 player oriented simplified table kicker with lines of 1, 2 and 3 players on each side and the target is the common one: Score goals!! :)

TapKick is a lot of fun to play if you have a friend at hand that does not want to lose either!!

Definitely a title that after some small anomalies on the input get fixed is qualified as a nice iOS appstore title 

 

Semiramis

Semiramis is not that much of a game in the "game sense" as we know it today, its more a piece of art and up to a given degree a denunciation of our style of living today out of my view as it tries to bring a very special, colorful interactivity into our "gray world of city living" with its guerilla gardening.

 

Kinect Games

Kinect naturally is not only for MoCap and indie games very interesting, its also interesting for art forms of games and I loved the prospects these two projects have shown and the non-game topics they picked up and brought closer to us as audience!

Listen

We all think to know that it is not easy to life without eye sight. But Listen is a title that really makes you understand that fact! Instead of having a visual game, the game totally bases on kinect input for movement as well as a headset to listen to your environment. The game featured a story where you were kidnapped and tried to flee.

Due to the large number of attendies for the vernisage on the first evening, kinect suffered seriously, but this is a very interesting concept. Unsure if its usable as a game of any form, but I'm 100% sure, that it is very usefull as a way to allow people to experience the world out of the view of people that lost their eye light and understand each other better . I'm sure similar things could be done for other forms of losing one of our relevant senses.

 

Catatonic

Catatonic was one of the visually more interesting title with a rather simple mechanic which though has a lot of potential for thriller - horror titles.

The game used the left hand to let you move and the right hand to move and target with a flashlight, while you tried to navigate out of a relatively dark valley with a great looking night sky and other things. The title in its current form didn't have a real target aside of reaching the end, but with such an intuitive control and a similar atmosphere, a resident evil alike title or also a title to therapy the fear of darkness or being followed would be very well thinkable as usages!

 

 

There was also a master student project that was presented but that wasn't an interactive application to experience, it was a theoretical thesis on feedback systems towards the player in different sandbox alike titles. Its exact content is hard to explain here, but should I find the thesis online I will add it as it was a very interesting read.

Conclusion

I've been stunned by the large variety of projects I found there and I really enjoyed being there, talking with some of the devs and others that experienced the titles and gain some insight on the matters.

I will definitely attend next years bachelor and master project presentations!

OSX Lion, iCloud and iOS 5 and what they means to us as users and developers

Today Apple held its 2011 Keynote and they talked about the stuff we expected them to talk due to all the rumors and leaks but unveiled many new things.

 

OSX 10.7 - Lion

Yes its that time again where a new wild kitty cat is approaching us from behind again, this time in form of a Lion

Where I think Apple did the right decision

1. Lion Pricing and Licensing: The once $30 upgrade price tag for all your machines will definitely make Microsoft pretty unhappy as that puts some serious pressure on them to rework the licensing model for Windows again for Windows 8 as the $150 upgrade per machine and stuff like that don't work out in their favor anymore as the price difference from OSX to Win machines is shrinking more and more on the "mainstream boxes".
2. Pause and Resume: The application and even OS level pause and resume capability sound like a great way to preserve battery time to a level where the previously not working "deep sleep" aka hibernate (OSX never seems to really hibernate, neither did it on my 2008 MBP nor on my 2011 MBP) was seriously missing. Finally the users are no longer punished for using their macbooks as advertised with "just close the lid and ..."
3. The new Timeline and "smart backup": This is a thing I've hoped for for a long time as there just isn't enough data storage on earth to compensate for the totally inefficient way TimeMachine on 10.6 works. As a large time windows user with Acronis installed, I know the benefits of delta / incremental backups just too well and I'm really looking forward to the gains on that end on the backup end but also the storage saving end.
4. Auto Sync: This looks like a very powerfull and usefull feature that many of us Dropboxers have known for quite some time in a similar form already. It will be interesting to see what other applications beside their own are going to make use of it though as I still don't feel like using my iPad and iPad2 for Office software work so their "primary use" shown doesn't really add anything for me. 

Where I think Apple went the wrong way

1. What we saw so far on Lion looks great, but I'm a bit worried that Apple might come around a major "break applications" round again soon to enforce their "new cool stuff". Also I dislike that they are making OSX a dummwitt OS that tries to remove any complicated aspect to allow any 1 cell organism to user their machines. I've nothing against offering the option to use it in "1 cell organism" if you want, but for me it also has to offer the really productive stuff. Luckily I'm not alone on this at least at the time, cause at least Mail will keep its really productive surface as an alternative one (at least by whats the state right now), but I'm still worried that this might not remain like this. Perhaps Apple should introduce a 2nd desktop OS or alternatively another user type for the users you create: "iOS User Profile", where it behaves like an annoying, timewasting candy toy box, just like iOS.

iOS 5

 

Where I think Apple did the right decision

1. I'm sure nobody will disagree that the notification system on iOS was the by far worst in the field and the fact that even Cydia offered a better one made it just to obvious even to the blind eyes of Apple so they got the corresponding dev to revamp the official pile of trash. I'm looking forward to using it and see how it stacks up against my Android 2.3.3 TouchWiz 4.0 on my Samsung GT-I9100
2. I'm just as sure that nobody will disagree that 120CHF ($165 USD) per year was a total rip off for calendar and contact syncing and its great to see that Apple finally realized this as well, just some years after all of their competitors.
3. The App data syncing through iCloud is great news to me as a gamer and game developer as it means that now even games that don't use cloud game saves finally transfer their game saves over to our other devices. This is a thing I wanted since the first games when I got my second iOS device as its just a major pain to take more than 1 device with you just due to the game saves. (yes as a dev you happen to have more than one, I know thats geeky for all others :))
4. OTA, Remote Activation & Delta Patches: Finally you can activate your device without a computer and you can update it without a computer. Out of my view, this was long overdue as the 250mb bombs you had to download to your pc or mac, the hours to backup and upgrade etc just were not acceptable anymore in 2011. So I welcome this motion

Where I think Apple went the wrong way

1. iMessage: While it sounds great in theory, I really fail to see why they needed to create something proprietary to their platform again thats basically a WhatsApp clone instead of grabbing WhatsApp and building upon it and its existing eco system. They are fragmenting the mobile world again as they did in the first 2 years of iOS where their OS was that stone age and crap that it didn't even support 1995 technologies like MMS. Apple really has a skewed view on end user needs and their own "what we need to dominate the world" needs and in this case I think they definitely did a bad decision. FaceTime should have been enough of proprietary trash if one askes me, as I don't know a single iOS user that uses it and I doubt many of you do.

Where Apple still fails to cover basic needs

1. Apple still thinks that its iOS users are dumb like straw. Thats at least the conclusion I draw from the fact that a simple dropdown or task bar icon outlet to enable and disable WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS and Syncing is still not present even in the 5th iteration of iOS, although Google needed mere 2 iterations for get there with Android. Thats just such a large difference for me, I hate nothing more than wasting eternities in settings menues and "7 view deeps" nesting for simple and pretty often used day to day tasks.
2. They still refuse to accept basic standards (DLNA) to force their own proprietary, protected and licensed standard AirPlay. Its 2011 and Apple finally needs to be law forced to act according their near market dominance - they have to support standards in the field, independent on if they want or not, thats just basic responsibility.

 

 

Naturally there is much more to iOS5, Lion and iCloud than just that.
This is just the first blog on the matter and I will dive into the three topics in dedicated entries in the future once the things are settled more or as aspects become "legally known" so its allowed to talk about them.

 

A final word of displeasure

All thats all "light" and great, I'm forced to also talk about Apples more and more emerging "we are god, we can steal other standards and innovations but you aren't allowed to use standards we defined with our market dominance" attitude, which is an upgrade from their previous "we are god, what we do is good" attitude they patent enforced in the past, which they try to use to stall all competitors innovation.

Just mere weeks after starting a court case against Samsung for "stealing design and technology innovation" and a year after trying similar crap against HTC, they have the nerve to present iOS5 which is a blatant ripp off of what Android has been in general since 2.0 and additionally going around and stealing HTCs newest innovations on HTC Sense 3.0 on the not even released HTC Sensation.

I think the guys at Cuppertino definitely need to get their head straight and learn how patents, innovation and "standards" work, they still life in the dream world where they are a minor minority with 2% marketshare and try to protect themself as back then while at the same time claiming to have a 44% mobile OS share with iOS and being #1 on the digital music market, which makes them a defacto "standard defining entity", which means that stuff that works for them is something they are no longer in the position to "protect against bigger opponents" as there are no bigger single entities anymore. But as I see it, the US government is well enough payable to not make this happen unless HP, IBM, Google and Microsoft join forces and break Apples neck a bit at a devastating court case, so they learn their position and the responsibility and rights they have as they are, for my liking, bending the existing law a bit too much with their billion dollar force.

Schweizer Unity User - Zürich

Heute geht es hier für einmal nicht um Neuigkeiten aus dem Bereich der Spieleentwicklung als solches, stattdessen wende ich mich an alle Unity Entwickler hier in der Schweiz, um einen Dialog zu starten und uns besser kennen zu lernen, denn ich denke das die hiesige Entwicklergemeinschaft ein grosses Potential hat wenn wir zusammen arbeiten und vorhandenes Potential besser zum einen erst einmal besser kennenlernen um es später auch besser nutzen zu können.

Als Vollzeitauftragsprogrammierer mit Unity gehöre ich (Dreamora in der Unity Community) leider auch zu denen die hiesiges Potential kaum nutzen, da ich für gewöhnlich leider keinerlei Einfluss auf die Zusammensetzung der Entwicklerteams habe und überdies für vor allem für Teams und Firmen in den USA, Australien, Neuseeland und Japan tätig bin, nur selten bis nie überhaupt für Firmen im deutschsprachigen Raum zb.
Umso mehr möchte ich jedoch durch meine persönliche Aktivität dem entgegen wirken und die lokale Entwicklung fördern, denn Spieleentwicklung oder die Entwicklung interaktiver Medien im allgemeinen wird hier immer noch viel zu sehr belächelt dafür das wir ein Dienstleistungsland mit einer unbestreitbaren "Sucht" nach modernen Medienformen sind. Als besonderes Erlebnis in dem Rahmen möchte ich zb erwähnen das ich im Rahmen einer meiner Jobs im letzten Jahr eine Lösung mitentwickelt habe für eine US Firma die im Endeffekt in einer schweizer Unternehmung zum Einsatz kommt und mit dem hiesigen Potential problemlos umsetzbar gewesen wäre.

Um so erfreulicher war es, als ich kürzlich erfuhr, dass Unity auch in der Schweiz langsam aber sicher seinen Weg in die Lehre findet. Wie direkt das mit der Lehre zu tun hat, kann ich leider derzeit noch nicht abschätzen, jedoch konnte ich verschiedene, fast wöchentliche Veranstaltungen der ZHdK (Züricher Hochschule der Kunst) ausfindig machen seit letztem Jahr in welchem Unity in irgend einer Form vertreten war. Wie man zb an den letzten Projekten von Michael Burgdorfer ( http://people.zhdk.ch/michael.burgdorfer/ , ehemals oder immer noch an der ZHdK) sehen kann, resultieren daraus durchaus interessante Projekte. Besonders Krautscape gehört definitiv nicht zur 0815 Flut wie wir sie normalerweise erleben. Solltet ihr weitere solche Beispiele schweizer Entwickler & Studenten kennen, würde ich mich freuen wenn ihr mich davon wissen lassen würdet.

Solltet ihr das ähnlich sehen wie ich oder einfach gerne Kontakte mit anderen Entwicklern knüpfen wollen, so würde ich mich freuen wenn ihr euch bei mir meldet!

 

Wer Kontakt aufnehmen möchte mit mir, kann dies gerne hier durch Kommentare, via PM in den offiziellen Unity Foren an Dreamora, via Twitter an http://www.twitter.com/gayasoft oder via http://www.gayasoft.ch machen

iOS 4.3 - The future has landed

That iOS 4.3 and a new iPad 2, if it then were to happen, would happen at the same time was expected, but what not everybody (non beta users) would potentially not have expected is how it landed.

The all new development IDE

With the iOS 4.3 SDK, Apple officially pushed XCode 4 onto the big stage, pushing back XCoode 3.2.x one which was used as the XCode version for the iOS SDK on any previous build.

XCode 4, which has been available as public preview and beta for many months now, adds a few very usefull features for productivity enhancements, if you happen to develop native applications with Object C and C++, as the integrated interface builder, the much better integrated SCM support and what Apple likely would call a simpler, cleaner, more productive interface and out of my view as user of Visual Studio who never understood how Apple can still be stuck in developers stoneage: XCode 4 finally does realtime code checking that goes through the real compile process behind the scene basically instead of good guessing by an artificial checking which had a tendency to end on code that seemed right until the compiler or linker touched it.

As usually with Apple, this all new great world that we have entered comes at the price of basically relearning all we knew, because XCode 4 really deserves its new major number, nearly nothing is where it used to be, some things are not even available anymore.

Along XCode 4, iOS 4.3 officially favors now the LLVM 2 based GCC instead of GCC 4.2 which was previously the standard one.
I would recommend anyone who has no good reason against this compiler to use it, your compile time and performance will thank you for doing so!

 

Dropping out the the "old devices"

The second big thing about future that landed is that iOS 4.3 unlike many know from its presentation, not only supports the today released iPad2. In addition, iOS 4.3 also removed support for any of the ARMV6 based devices (iPhone 2G, iPhone 3G, iPod Touch 1st and 2nd Generation), which for Apple likely is a first timer, that they did a major hardware cutoff on a software / OS midway the same major version. We have seen feature limitations already along iOS 4, so the shock is not that large but the impact is still not to underestimate as the consequences on ARMV6 supporting builds done with the 4.3 SDK are not known yet, there are reports of strange performance problems with iOS 4.3 SDK based builds and alike though.

For end users that are on the 3rd generation or newer this naturally is great news, not only because there are a host of new nice features, but it also means that the start to focus stronger on ARMV8 devices happens ealier than the expected iOS5, which will benefit 2/3+ of all currently still in use iOS devices, resulting in either better battery runtime or smoother experiences performance wise.

 

This is all an interesting development out of my view for us developers that work for or against iOS to achieve their target, as we can work productively now and soon without having to fight the very slow, OpenGL ES 1.1 only, low RAM devices that pestered us long enough if you ask me.

The iPad 2 and its impact for developers

So for a day, the cat is now officially out of the bag.

We have seen what Apple has been working on to fight the Android 3.0 hype, where they listened to their users and especially devs and how far Apple is willing to drag the fight.
But what do this things mean to me, to you, to probably all developers working on iOS and Android?

 

First off I've to say that I am pretty happy with what we've seen.

The rumors previously indicated, that Apple might not upgrade the graphics chip in the iPad reasonably, after already the original iPad suffered reasonably from it on the gaming end, but the claims they put out indicated that they did not only upgrade the SGX535 to an SGX543 but even to an SGX543MP2 or MP4 gpu (as in Samsungs Enyxos 4210 also used in the Galaxy S II and Galaxy Tab 10.1), while at the same time keeping the screen resolution on the same 1024x768 level the previous iPad had, which would be massive leap ahead.

With power like that, the 2 tech demos Epic put on the AppStore (Citadel and Infinity Blade) will look like last generation games. Still good but they won't compare to the high profile games that we will likely see happening.

 

The first impact of the iPad 2 is pretty clear, with the additional power, the camera, Verizon, the same prices and battery lifetime as the original iPad andstarting on a massive collection of applications right from day 0 on all on native resolution we are talking about a power horse here which Motorola surely didn't want and expect to see that fast when they brought the Xoom to market.
I already considered the original iPad as a rather solid replacement for most tasks I had a netbook, but the new iPad 2 (as the Tegra 2 / Enyxos 4210 Android 3 tablets) make netbooks obsolete if you hook them up to bluetooth input devices at home.

 

The second impact the iPad 2 will have for us developers is that the competition on the Android side will not be able to get away with its dream pricing.

Yes we all know that Tegra 2 tablets are fast, but we have also seen their shocking, unreasonable prices. Prior to the iPad 2, they had room to say that it is for the sake of power as they were ahead of the iPad by a fair leap.
But now with the iPad 2 coming up in weeks (March 11th in US, 26 major countries planned for March 26th, I'm reasonable and expect them by April 9-16th ie 2-3 weeks later as on the original iPad), at the same price as the original iPad, this excuse will likely no longer work out.
This baby will force them to cut their margins and get their prices in line with the iPad prices or they will kick themself and even more so the chances for Android 3.0 out of the game for another 6+ months. With the Xoom prices we have seen we talk about price drops for Android 3 tablets in the range of 20-30% of their original target and initial release prices.

Reaching for the stars: The upcoming Unity iOS 3.2

Unity Technologies recently shared a list of upcoming Unity iOS 3.2 optimizations in relation to OpenGL ES 2.0, the programmable rendering pipeline available in iPhone 3GS / iPod Touch 3gen and newer as well as the iPad.

OpenGL ES 2.0 support has been there since Unity 3.0, but up to now (Unity 3.1 f4) the performance is having some problems that make the use of OES 2.0 a step you commonly want to do if you need programmable rendering pipeline for visual effects that are crucial to your application.

 

Unity 3.2 is definitely going to change this, making it possible to use the programmable pipeline in general without fearing the potential lose of performance!


Responsible for this is, among other things, the much better support for shader precision specifiers will help to achieve pretty significant performance gains for shaders that can make use of it.

This is done by making operations that don't need to run at full float precision, run at a lower precision which requires less time

This performance optimization isn't automatic. You will potentially need to update your custom shader code if it didn't make good use of the corresponding types in CG (GLSL users will have to as the precision specifiers didn't work correctly before), but this one time work is for the good of your applications performance, rather straight forward to do and will yield in significant gains commonly.

 

For all who don't use and require custom shaders, the good news is that Unity Technologies added mobile oriented shaders in addition to the previously built-in shaders according the blog, so if you use those shaders, you take advantage of it right out of the box.

The shader is using more optimizations than just the precision specifiers which is allowing it to run even faster than it would with a simple precision specification based enhancements (mobile bumped specular was mentioned to be 5.2x faster than the 3.1 Bumped Specular which is desktop focused) at the cost of some lost features which you potentially never required on mobiles. This is a pretty significant step ahead for mobile developers, especially such with a less technical background on shaders and mobile hardware limitations.

I'm expecting to see significantly more applications making use of the power and flexibility OES 2.0 offers with the performance these new built-in shaders seem to offer, pushing the bar for competing technology, including UDK, pretty high up.

 

Another welcome enhancements as its one of the most commonly desired and required shader usages, Normal Mapping, got additional love by receiving a better compression scheme that no longer is causing a calculation overhead which was mobile unfriendly.

For those less tech savy, I would like to point out that normal mapping is the way to pretend to have more geometry detail than you have and could afford on a mobile platform. 

All these new enhancements together will definitely bring a lot of joy to all of us iOS developers and that at very little effort.

 

In addition to the things mention on the blog, Aras recently shared (see here) that Unity 3.2 will be also be receiving Antialiasing, a feature Unity iOS devs so far had to add through a more or less troublesome modification of the XCode export from Unity.

Antialias itself is something you don't just want to use in any case as its very taxing on limited graphics hardware like the one used in iOS devices, but if your game is light enough, you can get more visual quality at no effort!

 

The future for iOS game developers is bright :)

iPhone Development with Unity 3

Today, the „new“ mobile platforms - iOS, Android, WebOS and soon Windows Phone 7 - are among the hottest platforms for software developers.
But unlike past mobile platforms, thanks to the powerfull graphics hardware in these new generation of smartphones, these mobile platforms are especially interesting to us, the game and media developers out there, as they allow us to unleash realtime graphics in a quality previously restricted to the closed handheld platforms from Nintendo and Sony.
These new, powerful mobile platforms are only beaten by the web, especially the social monster platforms like Facebook and MySpace or platforms like BigPoint which are gaming focused social platforms that are no short from stunning.

So its no wonder that more and more developers try to push into these fields, some with more and some with less experience.
That brings me to the core topic of todays blog which is about how to get into this field, create stunning visuals if you aren’t among the gifted ones with a deep dark art ninja background in 3d math, shaders and engine programming, because today, all is about developing iPhone games using the Unity 3 engine with its iPhone Platform addon, what it enables us to do but also what has changed compared to the previous version, Unity iPhone 1.7!


Unity 3 builds upon the base that Unity 2.5+ created for the desktop side last year with a much stronger and more powerfull editor framework and some serious enhancement to productivity. Unity 3 took that and added various new powerfull features to further raise the bar on this end like the possibility to make objects snap to any polygon surface by just pressing a button while dragging it, by unifying the various editor versions that the different platforms had in the past and make it all happen from a single editor through the possibility to define the target platform of a project.
Unity 3 also kept those things alive that already in the past made Unity outshine its competition: A very fast, productive workflow which has a significant impact on your development! Be it the time required to create an early prototype of your game (which is commonly a matter of days at maximum), which you can test over and over on the fly without waiting for the lengthy iphone deploys every time thanks to the Unity Remote application. The new graphics emulation options help you getting a pretty good feel on how it will look in the end on the device.
Also the art pipeline is still as simple, powerfull and straight forward as it always has been. Drop in, wait for it to be processed, reconfigure the import settings and use it. Simple as that.

What is new to this streamlined and performant environment is that Unity 3 adds MonoDevelop to the equation, likely the best C# editor available on OSX. But UT went further than just supporting it, they made it capable of being used for UnityScript as well but much more importantly: Unity 3 adds debugging, a long requested and awaited things, handled through monodevelop and its rather major environment for this purpose!

These things together make Unity 3 one of the most performant, powerfull yet still easy to use platforms for iPhone development available to date and that without sacrificing performance on the application as the engine is highly optimized and feature packed.

For users of Unity iPhone 1.7, these features definitely will add some serious extra value because although you thought you could do fast before, you will rethink your definition of fast once you used Unity 3 :)


But thats by far not all that Unity 3 gives us on the iPhone platform, many other new things found their way in.

One of the most important changes over Unity iPhone 1.7 is related to the iOS platform and the power it offers if you can unleash it meaningfully.
With iPhone 1.7, unleashing this basically required you to own the Pro version of the license, simply because Plugins (native C code binding to talk directly to UIKit etc) were a pro only thing.
But with Unity 3, Unity Technologies has reconsidered this feature delta and I’m pretty happy to let all those of you who don’t keep a close eye on the things know that with Unity iPhone 3, both licenses give you the power to unleash the iOS in your application through native function calls!
Yes you read right, with Unity iPhone 3 you can use plugins in your iphone application, independent on if you own the Unity iPhone or Unity iPhone Pro license, giving you access to various previously „unusable“ third party systems and giving your programmers the tools they were waiting for to give your game its very unique iOS treatment!


Unity iPhone 3 also introduces more features on the architecture end.
Where you previously always targeted ARMV6 and OpenGL ES 1.1 only, unity 3 allows you to make your application target ARMV7 + OpenGL ES 2.0, which gives you access to the new iDevices (3GS and newer, including iPad) programmable graphics pipeline, which grants you access to those advanced graphics possibilities that enabled the big companies out there to push the visual quality of their games to where are. Epics „Citadel Tech Demo“ among Carmacks own tech demos show what you can achieve through using this programmable pipeline combined with the required artistic talent, but also realtime toon shading would be an option as well as naturally rather trivial things like pixel lights :)

This visual quality is further enhanced by the new Lightmapping System Unity 3 has integrated which is using the Beast technology, a widely acknowledged standard for lightmapping in game development on Desktop and Next Gen consoles, hitting the iPhone for the first time through Unity 3 basically.

To help you keep a good performance with all this new blinky from OGL ES 2.0 and Beast, Unity 3 Pro (and iPhone Pro) got a new powerfull backup system, Umbra, a widely known and used top notch occlusion culling system that ensures that your game only sends objects to the system for rendering that are also visible to the camera at the time instead of flooding it bruteforce style. The PVS data to do this are all generated offline in the editor, they won’t kill your performance at runtime through realtime calculations of it!


For fellow developers coming from Unity iPhone 1.7 as I did I would also like to add a few words of warning on things you might be used to and „think to know“: As you might have read, Unity 3 iPhone no longer batches skinned meshes, the batching works differently and alike.
Unlike iPhone 1.7 though the performance consequences of batching and not batching on Unity 3 are totally different.
So don’t fear seeing higher numbers of draw calls as it does not mean that it will perform worse. Actually in beta prior the reactivation of the beta, the Unity 3 iPhone engine outperformed 1.7 with 3 times the number of drawcalls from Unity iPhone 1.7

What you should work with to base your decisions on if something is performant or not is the in-application profiler on the device, that will give you a solid idea what is really the bottleneck. Don’t do it basing on drawcalls unless they really go totally out of scale


This is just the tip of the iceberg basically, there is more to come from me on Unity 3, in relation to web development, iphone development and likely as well in relation to android development as I recently got a HTC Desire to get in touch a bit more with the „dark side of the mobile platforms“

It landed: Unity 3 has been released

There are such days which you awaited for a long time and once they really happen, you are unsure if the day is real.
Today is such a day, long awaited by many independent game developers, awaited like no other this summer: Unity Technologies pushed the red button which rockets Unity 3 out of the beta right into its release, which you can find on Unity's website

Unity 3 is introducing many new things, from new powerfull editor functionalities like „drag align to surface“ for any type of surface (including freeform mesh objects), over long awaited enhancement of security standards on the webplayer (crossdomain access xmls) up to the two top class middleware technologies Beast and Umbra which power Unity 3 and offer a serious raise on the visual quality and performance level when utilized correctly.

With the release of the new board and the new website in the past days upfront this release, the unity environment went through a solid overhaul.
The page overhaul also updated the feature pages and the license comparision pages, so all interested upgraders can get an idea on what they would get for upgrading.


What also is of interest for many is that as with the previous generation of the awarded Unity engine, there is a free version of it available again that lets you experience and use large parts of the technology for free, be it for private, for educational or for commercial usage!


Right now, jumping the download would likely not help you all that much, because the large interest in the new version has its impact on the licensing server, in short you have only a restricted chance of activating your license.