Unity 3D – Ciaran Laval

March 3, 2015

More Good News For Indie Game Devs – Unity 5 Personal Edition Is Free

Following on from yesterday’s good news for indie game developers that Unreal Engine is now free, with 5% royalties if you reach over$3,000 in sales per quarter, Unity have now announced that Unity 5 is out and the personal edition is free and there are no royalties. Although if your game or app reaches a sales figure of over $100,000 you are expected to upgrade to pro, and to be fair, you should be able to afford to do that if your sales are in that region!

Now for those who are thinking that there has long been a free version of Unity, that’s true, but with Unity 5 a lot of those old restrictions have been removed to make this the most powerful free release of Unity to date :

UNITY 5 PERSONAL EDITION: ALL ENGINE FEATURES & ALL PLATFORMS

Aspiring developers everywhere: Get ready for Unity 5 Personal Edition, the new free version of the best development platform for creating multiplatform 2D/3D games and interactive experiences.

Unity 5 Personal Edition includes all engine features: everything that’s new in Unity 5, all the top-tier features from previous releases that are loved by the pros, and deployment to all platforms (with the new Personal Edition splash screen).

The pro version, which still costs $75.00 a month (based on a 12 month contract) or $1,500 for a perpetual licence still has more features, but they are now with regards to cloud options, analytics, prioritised bug reporting etc. rather than extra game development features. I’m not suggesting the pro features aren’t worthwhile, but the free version is now a very powerful choice.

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December 16, 2014December 16, 2014

Do Avatar Physics Make Females Feel Unwelcome In Second Life?

Back in April 2011 Linden Lab announced : Introducing the Updated SL Viewer Beta with Enhanced Avatar Physics. In that post they explained the arrival of a new feature in Second Life, that of avatar physics :

In this viewer, you can now configure the amount of movement that you would like for your avatar’s soft body parts, making your avatar much more (ahem) realistic. Since the physics are controlled by a wearable object, you have the ability to easily customize and personalize your settings just as if you were editing any other clothing item. So whether you want lots of movement, or only a bit, you can adjust your settings and they will apply only to your avatar’s targeted body part.

Of course, we continue to smash bugs and make strides in viewer stability and performance, but we figured that you would be much more interested in avatars bouncing and jiggling.

The idea behind Avatar Physics is of course to make parts of the avatar body move in a more realistic fashion. Second Life, being user generated content of course, saw people create some very extreme physics for giggles. However over time things seem to have generally calmed down so that people try and use avatar physics in a sensible fashion. An example of the extremes of these physics was produced by Seraph Linden :

People in Second Life are familiar with avatar physics these days, some people use them well, some people don’t bother with them at all. That’s the same with a lot of avatar features in Second Life, plenty of people still happily go about their business without an AO.

Unity 3D allows avatar physics too, but they have found themselves in hot water because of it. The problems started when Unity Asset Store Tweeted :

Apply physics to bones, joints, hair or breasts! #AssetStore 24 hour deal : 50% off Dyanmic Bone

The offending part of the tweet was that Unity Asset Store had mentioned the word “breasts“, even though avatar physics does actually apply to breasts. The Tweet appears to have been removed and therefore a lot of the conversation is now in picture form or on archive sites.

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November 26, 2013

[Vengeance + Vengeance] Shows Why Machinima Growth Could Be Good For Content Creators

I love the art of storytelling, in all its forms. I’d love to have been able to present a story within Second Life, to direct it with my own vision. There are other places where this is more feasible and I’m currently liking the look of Cloud Party for this sort of venture.

However for a good story you need good content too, especially when it’s visual. This is also true for those who make machinima. I have recently been looking at a science fiction machinima short entitled “[Vengenace + Vengeance]“.

This wasn’t shot in Second Life, although Second Life is home to many good examples of machinima. [Vengeance + Vengeance] was created with the Unreal Development Kit 2010-08-Beta , Autodesk Maya 2011, Adobe CS5 Master Suite and ZBrush 4.0. However many of the props could be used in Second Life style machinima, some of the effects and certainly the facial character animations aren’t what you’d see in Second Life but the content, textures, etc they could certainly be at home in Second Life.

One of the things with machinima, due to the fact that it’s often a short production, is to try and find some background to the story. There won’t be much time for character development, especially in a story that lasts less than twenty minutes. Fortunately this example has a synopsis:

“In a world where technology has leveraged politics and military is controlled by corporations, only the cleverest or most brutal survive. The Resnick Corporation through advanced genomic research stands poised to control weapon development with an advanced soldier prototype. The only problem, the prototype has gone wrong.

[Vengeance+Vengeance], a contemporary adaptation of “The Hunter” by Richard Stark (AKA Donald E. Westlake) places an Asian female in the role of the main character Parker. It’s a world set in a dystopian future where human life is a commodity to be toyed with by the powerful. Science has become the key to domination and those who control it the rulers. Lily, our protagonist is blessed with natural talents of athleticism and intelligence. A research scientist who’s specialization is in nanotechnology and its use in biomimetics and organic synthesis is employed by the Resnick Corporation. We find her discarded in a hostile wasteland where the results of diabolical genetic engineering have produced a distorted population of mutants. Who has put her there and why? Using brute intelligence and raw violence to overcome her adversaries Lily finds that all is not as it appears. Her efforts have been distorted and corrupted. Is she the only one who can set things straight?”

Reading that will help you to get more out of the story if you find the time to watch it, you can view the movie and more about it at the link I’m about to post now:

http://vengeancevengeance.com/index.html

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