MacMegasite

COPENHAGEN, DENMARK, JULY 2005 — With Unity it has finally become possible to use your Mac in the youngest creative field: game design. OverTheEdge announces the release version 1.0.3 of if its game design platform Unity.

“We have always wanted to change the way the game industry looks today where it requires a ridiculous amount of money to make PC and Mac games. With the release of version 1.0.3 of Unity, our flagship product is finally ready for the mass market,” says CEO David Helgason.

Unity features a host of powerful technologies: Fully physics based gameplay is made possible by the Novodex(TM) Physics Engine. The graphics engine supports graphics on par with Doom3. Game scripting is done with an open-source implementation of .NET. All this is put at the fingertips of content developers whether they are professionals looking for up-to-date tools or designers wanting to express themselves in the medium of games.

“In the future, those of us who grew up playing computer games want to create what we grew up consuming - exactly as the ones before us are making films today. We’ve basically created the DV-camera for games. We’ve lit the torch and are dying to see where people will take it,” says Game Director Nicholas Francis.

The basic principle in Unity is that games should be fun to make. With Unity fresh ideas can be tested fast enough to maintain the creative flow. The final product can easily compete with anything on the market. Unity is an application for Macintosh OS X, available at a fraction of the price of any competitors.

The Product: Unity

Imagine if the world’s greatest painters had to paint their work blindfolded, only to look at the painting once a day. This is how game development has been so far. No more. With Unity, just hits the play button to test the game straight away. The game world can be even modified and studied while the game is running.

What You See Is What You Ship

When a game is ready to ship, or when one needs to send a demo out, one just selects Build Game. The whole game is assembled into one standalone program - ready for burning on a CD or sending in an email.

A Flying Start

Unity includes a host of stock game logic: first-person-shooter behavior, car behavior, marble-rolling behavior. Demos and how-to’s ensure an easy start so the only thing required is commitment.

Who’s Using It?
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[*] Game Developers

As expected, Unity’s fastest adopters are game developers wanting to update their toolbox. Several independent projects have started using Unity.

[*] Education

Game design education is the fastest growing curricular area at the moment. Many are Mac based and all lack good tools to learn and experiment with. Unity’s first customer in this field is Parsons School of Design in New York, where renowned game designer Katie Salen is running a two semester graduate course using Unity. In Parsons wake several schools are trying Unity out.

Unity has recently also been discovered by primary schools and will be used in several classes this autumn.

[*] Advertising

Unity is being evaluated as a tool for advergaming by several companies interested in creating captivating branded content for web distribution.
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Highlights
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[*] Interoperability

Intense effort was put into making sure Unity works with all major art packages. Unity integrates with all major 3D apps. It will just work. Should one need to work with a PC based 3D Studio Max user, that doesn’t pose a problem either. By working on a shared drive all members of the team can save files straight into the project. Someone saves a file, Unity updates it. Simple as that.

[*] Get Physical!

Use physics. Instead of scripting and animating the behaviors of every single object, Unity contains the leading Novodex(TM) Physics Engine, also used in Unreal 3. Not only is it easier, it is a stepping stone towards getting truly emergent behavior into games.

[*] Go Into The Light

Unity’s lighting system is way ahead of the pack. Instead of settling for static lightmaps and dull pointlights it is possible to create a gothic feel by attaching cookies to the light coming in through the windows, precisely tailoring the shape & feel of the lights. Want that space station self-destruct countdown to be felt? Simply add rotating alert lights with cubemapped cookies for the ultimate panic. It all just works.
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Background

OverTheEdge released Unity 1.0 at WWDC. Apple’s VP of Platform Experience Scott Forstall highlighted how fun it is to use on-stage at the first session after Steve Jobs had left the stage.

This spring OverTheEdge proved that Unity can improve productivity by creating their first game, GooBall, containing 60 varied levels and acclaimed graphics with a 3 person team over the course of just 4 months. GooBall was published by the proven Macintosh publisher Ambrosia Software. Now the content creation package powering it is ready for the world.

The next game production of OverTheEdge is an educational title about the Israel-Palestine conflict produced in collaboration with Electronic Arts and the United Nations

Visit OverTheEdge at http://otee.dk

This entry was posted on Friday, July 15th, 2005 at 11:32 am and is filed under Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.