Unity 2.6 Free to a Good Home

Well if you were ever on the fence about buying Unity3D... you no longer have to be! Happily announced at the UNITE09 conference this past week, the version formerly known as UnityIndie... is now FREE! Yes, that's right, free. Now known just as Unity, (the "indie") was dropped, it has all the features that UnityIndie had. For no money. The game engine that has "made people millionaires" is opening its doors to the students, hobbiests, and other less fortunate folk who couldn't afford this awesome program before.

Used by EA to develop their new Tiger Woods online golfing game, now able to build to the Wii system, and one of the most popular iPhone development kits... Unity is just a whole barrel-full of awesome. Check it out.


And while we are all very excited about the "freeness" of Unity, don't discount UnityPro either. This newest release, Unity 2.6, has some fantastic upgrades. Including a new Profiler to see exactly where your bottlenecks are, and an Animation editor that lets you graphically see and edit your characters. Or anything you feel like animating, really. But don't take my word for it. They have all of their new features laid out on their website, of course. But really, have I mentioned Free yet?

UNITE Conference

So, I've been fairly remiss in not talking about this wonderful program known as Unity3D. A 'step up' from Papervision3D in that in actually handles 3D meshes rather than a Flash mock-up of 3D, Unity3D is a comparatively inexpensive game engine used by both indie designers and larger companies. The editor runs on both the Mac (OSX) and Windows platforms, thankfully. It also outputs games for multiple platforms - a Windows exe, a Mac program or widget, Wii game, iPhone application (actually a separate Unity3D engine designed specifically for iPhone development), and web-based browser games that run off of a plugin (supported by both Mac and Windows).

I've personally done a small amount of work in Unity3D (and hopefully will get more done... but work has me extremely busy so we'll see). If you know JavaScript, beginning to program within Unity seems to be fairly simple. It also accepts Boo, and C#. The JavaScript is slightly different than the JavaScript used on the web - I liken it to the difference between American English and British English. There are also tutorials by Ethical Games for the change over between Flash and Unity3D. In any case... it's a great program to work, at least in my personal experience.



There is also a conference coming up, in San Fransisco, called the UNITE 09 Conference. Being in San Fran this year, and since I recently moved out to the West Coast, I am super excited about it. I plan on catching at least a couple of days, if not the whole conference. As I said... busy with work, unfortunately. The Agenda looks great - everything from an intro to Unity3D, to Unity for Flash Developers, to a Post Mortem look at some games, shader analysis... I'm very excited, to say the least. More once the conference actually starts!