Chicken or the egg?

Or in this case, which comes first – the gameplay or the asset creation. In the case of the folks at Digital Roar, it looks like they’ve gone the route of pursuing asset creation first, and initial impressions are that the game has some promise from a visual standpoint: http://www.ascensionwar.com/media/screenshots/default.html And from the Unity Forum post, it looks... Read More

Flipping Meshes Inside Unity

Another developer Shane at Cogmation showed me this today, and it’s worth mentioning as it may come in handy, if at a cost. To flip an imported 3D mesh along any axis, just change the scale to a negative value. Sometimes it’s the simplest things that make you slap your forehead. I realize all the 3D people are shaking their heads at me right now, but yeah, it’s... Read More

Undocumented Unity Function

So, you’ll find the childCount property documented, but what you won’t find in the documentation is GetChild(). According to the forums, the reason it’s been left out is because of unpredictability – the array of children is not guaranteed to be in a consistent order. However, that’s not to say that it can’t still be useful – you can get... Read More

Fun with Exposed Variables in Unity

At first I wasn’t thrilled about public variables being exposed in Unity’s editor – it seemed to be a bit dangerous, burying variable within GUI elements. Reminded me too much of hunting through Flash MovieClips for code snippets. And if you’re not careful, you will get burned. For example, public int exposedInt = 100; at the top of your class rather than... Read More

Adding RoboNova to the Simulator

RoboNova in the Unity Editor So I’ve begun work on bringing a humanoid into the simulator, starting with RoboNova. It’s a good humanoid to start with, no ball joints at least. I have to admit, the robot in real life is pretty impressive and functions well. Adding the humanoid means a new set of challenges – specifically the weighting of individual pieces could... Read More

Casual Games and Adver-gaming

This past week I’ve released a beta/demo version of Big Air – an on-line 3D car jumping game. It’s using the Unity 3D Web Player, which if the world co-operates should start taking a firm hold on the on-line 3D market and serve as some serious competition for Adobe’s Shockwave. Shockwave is tired technology, and it would be nice to see a more robust tool... Read More