Unity is showing no signs of slowing down in making a consolidated, easy pipeline for game developers and creators to bring their wares to the masses on the top platforms. Already Unity 3D is the best 3d web browser plugin at the current time with export paths to web, desktop (mac and PC), iPhone/touch and Wii. But now we will see support for PS3, iPad (obvious as it is a iPhone/touch) and Android (most likely with the help of the C++ NDK rather than the Java SDK).  XBOX 360 support was announced last year.

This is pretty huge even for such a small and innovative company. I guess it means it will be time to buy an upgrade soon. Unity so far has been giving feature after feature for free for current license holders, this one seems big enough to justify a major version increase.

Gamasutra comments on other great features:

This third iteration will also incorporate Umbra Software’s occlusion culling product, which is designed help performance for games with large, open scenes and complex geometry. The platform’s top-end version, Unity Pro, will include both Umbra and Beast at no additional cost.

Unity Technologies updated its Unity iPhone for version 3.0 to include streaming audio support for smaller build size, Bluetooth multiplayer support, faster in-game GUIs”, and a 2D sprite engine. Furthermore, the company’s iPhone product will offer performance improvements that promise to provide faster frame rates.

The company says that with its new platform support for PlayStation 3, iPad, and Android, it offers developers an opportunity to target a larger install base than any other game engine. Unity’s game engine currently can produce games for Windows, Mac, iPhone, and Wii, with support for Xbox 360 announced last October.

Balder was one of the first 3d prototype engines in Silverlight and it has evolved quite nicely.  Balder by Einar Ingebrigtsen is described as a “Managed GameEngine with both 2D and 3D support targetting Silverlight, Xna and OpenGL.”

The sample browser will show you what Balder is capable of and it has come pretty far since the first version showing a wireframe teapot.

You know you’ve made it as a 3D engine when there are Augmented Reality apps for it.

Here’s a glance at what some of the C# source looks like for a feel of the engine code from the Silverlight4 TestApp:

using Balder.Core.Execution;
using Balder.Core.Objects.Geometries;
using System;
using Balder.Core.Lighting;
using Balder.Core;
using Colors=System.Windows.Media.Colors;

namespace Balder.Silverlight4.TestApp
{
    public class MyGame : Game
    {
        public override void OnInitialize()
        {

            Camera.Position.X = 0;
            Camera.Position.Y = 0;
            Camera.Position.Z = -80;

            var light = new OmniLight();
            light.Diffuse = Color.FromSystemColor(Colors.Green);
            light.Ambient = Color.FromSystemColor(Colors.Green);
            light.Specular = Color.FromSystemColor(Colors.White);
            light.Position.X = 0;
            light.Position.Y = 0;
            light.Position.Z = -130;

            Scene.AddNode(light);

            base.OnInitialize();
        }

        public override void OnLoadContent()
        {
            var teapot = ContentManager.Load("teapot.ase");
            Scene.AddNode(teapot);
            base.OnLoadContent();
        }

        private double _sin;

        public override void OnUpdate()
        {

            Camera.Position.X = (float)(Math.Sin(_sin)*80);
            Camera.Position.Y = 0;
            Camera.Position.Z = (float)(Math.Cos(_sin) * 80);

            _sin += 0.05;
            base.OnUpdate();
        }

    }
}

• Balder Demo Sample Browser
• Balder at github
• Get Balder Silverlight 3D Engine at Codeplex
• Einar Ingebrigtsen’s Post on Balder Release

Tim Knip, a papervision core developer, has brought a pipeline improvement for users of Blender to import blender files directly into papervision and as3. This allows you to get at the blender objects, or blender DNA as it is called, that construct the 3d scene within Blender.

Unity3D has a great workflow that includes this where you can update your .blend file and then it updates in the Unity IDE, this work by Tim creates a similar workflow for Flash (recompile would be needed to show if embedded).

Typically exporters are made from the 3d IDE SDKs such as Blender using Python to export to COLLADA or other formats.  But here Tim is parsing the source file directly.  This also opens up the possibility to make other exporters from more simplified Flash AS3 code rather than learning a new IDE SDK just for an exporter.

I am not sure how much people want to embed .blend files with their applications as there is more information in the .blend file for the Blender app and it will add to the download.  But what this might do it inspire others to create simplified exporters from Tim’s work for Blender to COLLADA, 3ds and more that work well with papervision and flash 3d engines, directly in Flash.  So instead of learning each IDE to build an exporter that is the same, this solution could act as a proxy or middle man to simplify exporter creation, pretty much any Flash coder that understands 3d could build one from .blend files at a minimum.  If it was made as a higher level abstraction so the 3d software source could be swapped out it may open up simplified exporter tools a bit.  Since it is really just reading the binary data in the file, in theory other formats could do the same (3dsmax, Maya, Milkshape, etc).

There is a whole host of opportunities with this new tool! It is definitely nice to have this as I use Blender for Flash 3D and Unity 3D most often.  It will be interesting to see how this evolves.

Note from Tim on the tool:

I created a library to read Blender files (.blend) directly. So no
more headaches with broken exporters!

Grab the code here:
http://github.com/timknip/asblender/tree/papervision3d

Here’s a first example:
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/438592/blender/PapervisionTest.swf

And its code:
http://github.com/timknip/asblender/blob/papervision3d/src/PapervisionTest.as

ASBlender is simply a library which reads *everything* in a .blend file. So in theory you could grab materials, animations, armatures, the works… But its up to *you* to grab the relevant bits, since *all* the data is accessible.

Of course: this means you need to study the .blend format, see
http://wiki.github.com/timknip/asblender/ for more information.

Sample Code Snippet posted by Tim:

[Embed (source="/assets/crystal_cube.blend", mimeType="application/octet-stream")]
public var BlenderData:Class;

var blend:BlendFile = new BlendFile();

blend.read(new BlenderData());

if (blend.scenes.length) {
    // Blender can have multiple scenes, don't know yet how to grab the "active" scene.
  buildScene(blend.scenes[0]);
}

/**
 * Prints out the DNA as contained in the .blend
 */
private function printDNA(blend:BlendFile):void {
  var struct:DNAStruct;
  var field:DNAField;

  for each (struct in blend.dna.structs) {
    var type:String = blend.dna.types[ struct.type ];

    trace(type);

    for each (field in struct.fields) {
      trace(field.type + " " + field.name);
    }
  }
}

private function buildScene(scene:Object):void {

  var obj:Object = scene.base.first;

  while (obj) {
    // grab the Blender Object.
    // The Blender Object defines rotation, scale, translation etc.
    var object:Object = obj.object; 

    trace("Object name: " + object.id.name + " type: " + object.type + " matrix: " + object.obmat);

    //for (var key:String in object) {
    //  trace(key);
    //}

    if (object.data) {
      switch (object.type) {
        case 1:  // Mesh
          trace (" - Mesh: " + object.data.id.name);
          buildMesh(object.data);
          break;
        case 10: // Lamp
          trace (" - Lamp: " + object.data.id.name);
          break;
        case 11: // Camera
          trace (" - Camera: " + object.data.id.name);
          break;
        default:
          break;
      }
    }

    obj = obj.next;
  }
}

private function buildMesh(mesh:Object):void {
  var numVertices:int = mesh.totvert;
  var numFaces:int = mesh.totface;
  var i:int;

  trace(" - #verts : " + numVertices);

  for (i = 0; i < numVertices; i++) {
    var v:Object = mesh.mvert[i];

    var x:Number = v.co[0];
    var y:Number = v.co[1];
    var z:Number = v.co[2];

    trace(" - - vertex: " + x + " " + y + " " + z);
  }

  trace(" - #faces : " + numFaces);

  for (i = 0; i < numFaces; i++) {
    var f:Object = mesh.mface[i];

    var v1:int = f.v1;
    var v2:int = f.v2;
    var v3:int = f.v3;
    var v4:int = f.v4;

    trace(" - indices: " + v1 + " " + v2 + " " + v3 + " " + v4);

    if (mesh.mtface) {
      // UV coords are defined
      var tf:Object = mesh.mtface[i];

      trace(" - - - uv: " + tf.uv);
    }
  }
}

• github repo for ASBlender
• Blog post about it by Tim
• Another great tool, .3ds js parser also released by Tim

If the question is if Unity can do interactives as smooth and stylish as Flash I think you may soon find out.  Carlos Ulloa of Papervision 3D fame has kicked it up a notch in Unity 3D with this interactive very reminiscent of the Ford Focus demo that helped bring in Papervision 3D for flash in style. Gotta say though a mini is much better than a Ford Focus.

Flash is still the leader in web interactives and even marketing interactive 3d, Unity largely replaced Director and tools like it and high-end hardware rendered required interactives and games. This interactive by HelloEnjoy has loads of polygons, unity physics system, lighting, environment mapping, showroom cameras, reflection, skid decals, highly detailed mesh and more.  Just take a peek inside the vehicle and at the rims for the detail that is impossible with the 2000 poly limit of Flash 3D software rendered engines.

Web interactives this heavy aren’t doable in a non hardware rendered player like Flash.  Unity is looking to pretty much own this level of quality in a browser.  I don’t think I have seen another interactive looking this good with Unity 3D.

Unity still is lacking many features that Flash has in support of making interactives for the web such as webcam support, mic support, better video support, better gui system, html support (although flash barely) and a larger install base but Unity could easily take the high-end advertising market in addition to owning highly immersive games that need hardware rendering which it is already doing for web gaming.  It is 2010 soon, most computers have a decent video card.  Put them to use!

• Blog Post on the project
• View the project

If you are looking to get into Unity 3d coding/creating a book is a good place to start to get the full overview. Recently, the first Unity book has been released by Will Goldstone via Packt Publishing.

The book is written in a simple yet rapid pace but starts out from beginner level 3d introductions and really explores all areas needed to give someone the handrails to start tinkering on their own in the dark of their labs with Unity. The book explores an introduction to 3d (the biggest hurdle for most in moving to unity although it also does 2d), terrrains (terrains aren’t supported in iphone yet keep this in mind if those are your aims), moving players and cameras, collision detection with colliders and rays, working with prefabs, creating HUDs, creating menu screens and working with the the GUI system in Unity (which can be strange for people coming from flash with event based user interfaces), loading/instantiating objects in the 3d world, particle systems, physics and lots of examples and minigames showing off these areas.

The book is alot like Unity itself in that it gets up and running quickly, gives the tools to do some damage and then opens the door to developing with Unity. After you develop longer in a platform you learn how to dig deeper into all these areas including scripting to do lots of what the Unity Editor can do for you but there is so much to take in that a good starting point to catch onto is needed.  Unity Game Development Essentials, the first Unity book, fills that role easily.

I have been using Unity as a hobbyist then at work at a game company starting in 2007 since it started to invade and take over from Director in 2007 ish then infiltrating the Papervision 3D and flash 3D developers, even with that experience this book still did a great job of exploring the tools and is approachable for almost anyone with some basic scripting skills and a desire to make some creative stuff.

Even if you have been doing Unity for a while a book is always good to see techniques and support authors and community members that give back to help others learn. Pick it up! (Amazon) (Packt Publishing)

If you aren’t ready to make the leap to Unity just yet there is also a great book from Paul Tondeur called Papervision Essentials for 3D in Flash, he has also done some projects in Unity to Flash communication.

• Grab the Book from Packt Publishing

Torque 3D is out of beta and officially released to the world.  Torque was one of the first indie affordable game engines and they continue that work at Garage Games with a web enabled Torque 3D output much like the Unity 3D player.

The pipeline is not yet as streamlined as  as Unity 3D as Torque has many legacy formats and components such as DTS models, DIF interiors and DSQ animation files that are specific to the Torque Engine.  But they have added support for COLLADA models and the community is strong for Torque 3D. Also, since Torque 3D is built on an older engine but updated for modern uses, the file formats and loading is streamlined for low poly and web based games that need small asset sizes but still have quality.

Like Unity 3D there are many paths to truly get your game published and available to many platforms from desktop on Windows and Mac to web players in all major browsers (and iPhone, Wii and XBox with more $$$). This is an amazing time in game development.

When I initially got into heavier game development in early 2003 after moving from Half-life to Unreal and then the affordable Torque, there were two major things missing, a web player export and a good editor with intellisense.  Torque 3D provides the web player export and Torsion is a great IDE for TorqueScript beyond using Visual Studio or XCode for C++ source editing.

Some really nice tools include the River Editor and Road and Path editor that complement the great terrain editor and scene and asset editors that make production fairly quick in the Torque tool chain.

Road and Path Editor

Road and Path Editor – Torque 3D from TorquePowered on Vimeo.

River Editor

River Editor – Torque 3D from TorquePowered on Vimeo.

The good news is there is now two quality toolsets in Unity 3D and Torque that for about $1500 you can get a good pipeline and engine that will enable you to create great immersive games for many platforms and the web.  If you got the skills the platforms are there to get your game out to the world whichever platform you choose.  Similarly to the Flash vs Silverlight vs Canvas progress, with competition in this area it will keep both platforms innovating and supporting developers needs first.

For more immersive games that require hardware rendering beyond Flash capabilities Unity 3D and Torque 3D are now here for your creations.

So many cool and useful technologies are unveiled at SIGGRAPH every year, this year at SIGGRAPH 2009 was no different.  Khronos Group, behind the new guidance of OpenGL, OpenGL ES, OpenCL, OpenVG, COLLADA etc, came another big announcement about hardware rendering within the browser.  WebGL is now an official standard being developed at Khronos Group to bring javascript control of OpenGL to browsers… Wow!

Ok so this was officially announced at the GDC in March but limited information, but now it has been slated for an official public standard in early 2010. Shortly after the announcement at the GDC we saw Google o3D appear doing exactly that, controlling OpenGL through Javascript in the browser but it was still largely software/harward hybrid rendered. Google, Mozilla, Opera are part of the companies supporting WebGL which is great for browser support, also NVIDIA, AMD and Ericsson are in on it.

Khronos Details WebGL Initiative to Bring Hardware-Accelerated 3D Graphics to the Internet

JavaScript Binding to OpenGL ES 2.0 for Rich 3D Web Graphics without Browser Plugins;
Wide industry Support from Major Browser Vendors including Google, Mozilla and Opera; Specification will be Available Royalty-free to all Developers

4th August, 2009 – New Orleans, SIGGRAPH 2009 – The Khronos™ Group, today announced more details on its new WebGL™ working group for enabling hardware-accelerated 3D graphics in Web pages without the need for browser plug-ins.  First announced at the Game Developers Conference in March of 2009, the WebGL working group includes many industry leaders such as AMD, Ericsson, Google, Mozilla, NVIDIA and Opera.  The WebGL working group is defining a JavaScript binding to OpenGL® ES 2.0 to enable rich 3D graphics within a browser on any platform supporting the OpenGL or OpenGL ES graphics standards.  The working group is developing the specification to provide content portability across diverse browsers and platforms, including the capability of portable, secure shader programs.  WebGL will be a royalty-free standard developed under the proven Khronos development process, with the target of a first public release in first half of 2010. Khronos warmly welcomes any interested company to become a member and participate in the development of the WebGL specification.

Google released O3D this year and there are great strides in 3d within the browser from game engine wrapper technologies such as instant action technology, gaim theory engine (now owned by id Software and runs Quake  Live, hardware rendered Unity 3D (and Torque 3D coming soon), and Flash software rendered  3d engines Papervision 3D, Away 3D, Sandy (Sandy also released a haXe version that exports a javascript version) and others.  But it looks like the movement is to bring OpenGL to the web as a standard under the name WebGL, this would be great!  There would still be lots of times where plugins are better now and in the near future but the path is a good one. Having a software/hardware rendering hybrid like Google O3D for broad video card support (some of the painful older intel cards), or using a plugin like Unity3D, Torque 3D or wrapper technology for bigger engines is a good idea for the time being. But the future is grand in this area.

I think that Google O3D and OpenGL ES success on iPhone games probably combined to get this in motion.  OpenGL and very basic video cards are now standard in most machines out there.  Unity3D actually published hardware statistics on casual gamers (web-based games) ever so kindly and shows that even though there are some older Intel cards out there, for the most part machines nowadays have a video card capable of supporting at least low-poly 3d and hardware supported 2d rendering in real-time for games, user interfaces and more.

This is exciting news, it appears the movement of the web gaming market is getting much more capable and is accelerating the innovation of hardware accelerating the web.

Haxe Sandy is a version of Sandy that can export to an experimental Javascript 3D engine taking advantage of the <canvas> element. There are some great demos that run smoothly in canvas capable browsers and very smooth in Chrome.

Demos of Haxe Sandy:

• Displaying a model
• Getting Started
• Model Loading
• Physics
• Shading
• Tweening
• Skybox
• Primitives

Sandy was actually the first open source 3d engine in flash, maybe this will be a trend building in haXe for export to flash and javascript?  It certainly looks like a great start and would make a very nice platform for 3d on the web allowing Sandy or other flash libraries to run in Flash and Javascript by writing in an abstraction platform like haXe. Other libraries like Motor2, Physaxe, haxe3D, PureMVC and more have haXe versions. Still very experimental but a possible need when Flash and canvas are both in the market in the future.  Right now it is still all Flash.

• Haxe Sandy
• Haxe Sandy Demos
• Haxe Sandy Tutorials by Matthew Casperson
• Haxe Sandy Download
  • Download sources
  • Download API documentation
  • Download all examples to get started

[ via Matthew Casperson at devmaster.net ]

This is a very cool project called V8-GL.  It is an OpenGL engine with 80% of the API converted to run on the V8 Javascript engine, the same engine that runs Google Chrome.

This is exciting as more productive languages like Javascript get speed boosts from engines like V8 and are capable of manipulating more complex systems like OpenGL.  Google is also pursing this in the browser with O3D with javascript manipulation of hardware rendering.  Also, a Google funded project called Unladen Swallow is converting Python to the LLVM virtual machine, so that it can have increasing speeds to compete with gcc speeds.

Making things easier to produce and control with more simplified and minimal languages like Javascript, Python and Actionscript etc that control more complex systems, that typically you would need to invest more time in such as a platform on C++ is the goal. V8-GL has this goal in mind.

V8-GL from the author states:

V8-GL intends to provide a high-level JavaScript API for creating 2D/3D hardware accelerated desktop graphics.

In other words, you can hack some JavaScript code that opens a desktop window and renders some 3D hardware accelerated graphics. Bindings are made using the V8 JavaScript engine.

• V8-GL blog post
• V8-GL source on Github
• Also check out the SpiderMonkey jslibs project with other javascript wrappers for libraries like ode, sdl and more using the engine by Mozilla.

Yogurt3D flash based 3d engine appeared recently and is another flash based 3d engine which is based on OpenGL called SwiftGL and is stated as open source.

The site mentions that OpenGL source can be converted to run in the engine.  You can do this now with Alchemy although it is in very early stages.  It is not clear if it is an automatic conversion or if it simply means it is similar in syntax and method signatures, objects etc.

I definitely will be watching and see how it progresses, there isn’t much other than a single post about the engine so far and no info on the api or sample code.  Looking forward to seeing more, the z-sorting is quite nice.  Doesn’t appear like collisions are there yet but it has a nice look.

Sometimes excellent toolkits come out of the blue like this such as Ffilmation (isometric flash engine) or Alternativa (flash 3d engine flash 10 focused) so you never know.