Hello everyone!
So Unite 2012, Day 1 (if you don’t count the Training Day!) is coming to a close. It’s been fantastic time and it's great to be able to catch up with all the developers I’ve met since the last Unite.
Today kicked off with the keynote in which a number of cool things were introduced and demoed. I’ll go over some of this now…
First, David brought everyone up to date on all things Unity, opening with a really nice trip down memory lane, showing the evolution of games created with the development tools and going all the way back to the game that started it all.
Secondly, Joachim demoed the Mecanim animation system in 4.0, showing how awesome it is to use motion capture data and spoke about the plans to include lots of Mocap data on the Asset Store: "We are letting people who never had access to mo-cap data to get access to mo-cap data, and really up the quality of your animations.” I’ve played around with some versions of Mecanim and having a background in animation I am really excited to see how this new epic feature is taken advantage of by the community.
Joachim also demoed DirectX 11 that was pioneered by the “Butterfly” project, a short film created by production studio Passion Pictures, and then jumped into the editor to show how the movie was composed and highlighted various features. Unity 4.0 is really pushing the bar for what is achievable in terms of graphical fidelity.
After Joachim showed some more of the many new features in 4.0 including an impressive demo of the improvements to Shruiken it was time for Nicholas to take the stage. He demoed a new timeline function, whereby users can select and manipulate in-game objects, tie them to animations and sounds, and define their behavior in-game, all without a single line of code. "This is a start of an attempt from our side to make time and the world-state first-class citizens in our editor,” he said. He also announced nested prefab support which was very well received by all.
Nicholas also demoed an alpha version of a GUI system for in-game menus. “This is something I’ve been working on for—it feels like even longer than I remember,” he said. It’s editable in real-time, and allows developers to create full 3D interfaces inside the game world.
Finally from the founder-trio we had some awesome new announcements on new platforms we are supporting. We've made a deal with Intel that will see games we've published through Union released for smartphones and tablets powered by the Atom processor. A range of Unity-developed Android titles will be published on Google Play and other Android markets, through Union.
"We want developers to have as many opportunities for distribution as possible," said David Helgason, CEO, Unity Technologies. "We are very excited to bring even more Unity-authored content to innovative new Intel Atom processor-based Android devices."
The current catalog of Union games stands at 120 titles. Air Attack, Samurai, and Frisbee Forever have been selected for the Atom deal, with many more to be added later.
In addition to that Unity games are now set to support Microsoft’s Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 with Unity 4.0. "Our mission at Unity has always been to provide solutions for developers to effortlessly bring their work to as many different platforms as possible," said Helgason. "The Unity community has been asking for access to Windows Phones and have been eagerly anticipating the release of Windows 8. We're happy to announce that we will support both."
After the Trio we had the pleasure of hearing from our guest keynote speaker, Peter Molyneux who showed off for the first time his fledgling studio 22 Cans' first title, the Unity-developed Curiosity. Molyneux’s new project is the first of 22 experimental games from his new studio, all designed to allow participation from millions of simultaneous users. The knowledge gathered from development of Curiosity will then be used in a bigger title a bit further out on the horizon. This future game, the former Lionhead boss and Bullfrog legend’s studio are also developing with Unity.
Oh! … Just one last thing.
we have the keynote live! See it in full
here.
And if you would like a full resolution image of the picture above, let me know in the comments and I’ll throw one together!
Cheers
@Joe_Robins
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