Items tagged with Unity
Back in the 1990s, PC gamers first experienced the thrill of hopping into an X-Wing and engaging Imperial pilots in intense space combat. Now more than two decades later, a group of modders is giving the original Star Wars: X-Wing game a fresh coat of paint by remaking the simulation using Unity engine. A longer than 14-minute video showing actual gameplay footage of their progress has us itching to see the final product. The project is being put together by the XWVM community and is meant to replace the old DOS or Windows executable. To avoid any legal hassles, the mod requires that players own and install the original Star Wars: X-Wing game, or have the GOG or Steam versions of X-Wing Special...
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It looks like Steam is about to get a little bit more competition. Facebook and Unity Technologies have teamed up to create their own PC-gaming platform. The collaboration builds a new functionality in Unity that helps it to easily export and publish games on Facebook.Elliot Solomon, Unity’s Vice President of Business Development, remarked, “Integrating tools that provide effortless access to Facebook’s network is a key part of helping developers find the success they deserve.” Unity Engine - Image from Iwan GabovitchUnity will now be able to reach the 650 million people who play Facebook-connected games. At its peak in 2014, Facebook earned over $257 million USD from mobile gaming. This number...
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The folks at Unity this week at GDC 2016 revealed its stable release of the Unity 5.3.4 game engine along with a beta of Unity 5.4 (you can download it here). Unity is releasing Unity 5.4 as a public beta in the hopes that valuable user feedback will leader to less buggy software for everyone in future releases. There are a number of upgrades included with Unity 5.4 including in-editor artist workflow improvements, VR rendering pipeline optimizations, improved multithreaded rendering, Retina display support, customizable particles which can use Light Probe Proxy Volumes (LPPV) to add more realistic lighting models (this is useful not just for particles, but also dynamic objects), and the ability...
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We had a feeling Nintendo would take notice of developer Roystan Ross's recreation of the first level of Super Mario 64, which he made playable in a browser window. Sure enough, after attracting widespread media attention, Nintendo's legal team sent a takedown notice to Cloudfare, the company that was previously hosting the remake. Ross didn't have any nefarious intentions when he built the level. Instead, it was supposed to serve as a proof of concept demo for his "Super Character Controller" platform that he made from scratch using Unity. He tested the demo with controllers for the Xbox One and Xbox 360, and DualShock controllers for the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4, all of which presumably...
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Nintendo's past is filled with memorable Mario games, one of those being Super Mario 64, a classic 3D platform title that was released a year shy of two decades ago for the Nintendo 64. You've probably long retired that console, perhaps flipping it on eBay along with your collection of games so you could fund a newer system. Ah, but if you're feeling nostalgic, you can relive some those memories right in your browser. Developer Roystan Ross took it upon himself to recreate the first level of the game, which you can now play online or through a browser. Why? We say 'Why not!?', though the real reason is it's a proof of concept demo for "Super Character Controller," a platform he built from scratch...
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A new interview with Assassin's Creed Unity senior producer Vincent Pontbriand has some gamers seeing red and others crying "Told you so!" after the developer revealed that the game's 900p framerate and 30 fps target on consoles is a result of weak CPU performance rather than GPU compute. "Technically we're CPU-bound, he [Pontbriand] said. "The GPUs are really powerful, obviously the graphics look pretty good, but it's the CPU [that] has to process the AI, the number of NPCs we have on screen, all these systems running in parallel. "We were quickly bottlenecked by that and it was a bit frustrating, because we thought that this was going to be a tenfold improvement over everything AI-wise, and...
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For the past few years, as Intel has struggled to gain market share for its Android-x86 project, it's been hampered by software compatibility issues and associated performance degradation. Now, some of that burden is being lifted off the company's products -- the popular and widespread Unity 3D engine has announced that upcoming versions will include native x86 support. That's important for a host of reasons. Currently, Intel has a host of emulation and translation efforts that ensure nearly seamless compatibility with Android applications. The compatibility layer isn't perfect, however, and games are historically some of the hardest content to emulate. Most titles depend on split-second timing...
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In a blog post today, Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth outlined the company’s plans for bringing Ubuntu to pretty much every screen with intelligence that you can possibly have, from your phone to your TV to your kitchen (assuming you have some kind of smart screen device in your kitchen). In the post, Shuttleworth said, “By 14.04 LTS Ubuntu will power tablets, phones, TVs and smart screens from the car to the office kitchen, and it will connect those devices cleanly and seamlessly to the desktop, the server and the cloud.” How might this feat be accomplished? By leveraging Ubuntu’s Unity interface, which is designed to deliver a unified (hence the name) user experience...
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Remember LucidLogix Technologies? They're the ones intent on removing any and all potential roadblocks to configuring a multi-GPU system. You know, those little annoyances like picking the right chipset for your graphics hardware (SLI or CrossFire-X) and only pairing same make/model cards with one another. LucidLogix sidestepped these challenges with its HydraLogix 200 processor, a wonder chip that motherboard vendors could slap onto their boards that would allow system builders to mix and match videocards from AMD and Nvidia, as well as cards from different generations. Quick, name one board that comes equipped with a HydraLogix 200 processor. With a little help from Google, you probably can't,...
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When Apple released a new version of its iPhone developer program last week, it included new eligibility requirements that have serious implications for both advertisers and programmers. Adobe and Apple have been less than chummy in recent months, but the content creation company has always maintained it would bring Flash to the iPhone one way or another—until today. As of now, Flash for the iPhone is dead. Mark Chambers, Adobe's product manager for Flash, gave some insight as to why on his personal blog. One of the sections of the iPhone developer agreement that's causing problems for a number of companies is 3.3.1, which essentially states that app developers are only allowed to use approved...
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As the old saying goes, one man's ceiling is another man's floor. And in every down market, somehow, somewhere, another sector of the market is flourishing. Though many folks out there might not be tapping into that early retirement as early as they would like, troubles in the Financial sector spell opportunity for the geeks in Computer Sciences and IT. Not to mention the fact that the internet is quickly running short of routing resources, so they'll need a few more smart kids real soon, to backfill things with new technology. So if you were college-bound, where would you go? With the flow of course. Randal Bryant, dean of...
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Apparently, Linux kernel creator, Linus Torvalds has no problem expressing his opinion, and did so vehemently via back-and-forth e-mails with the editors of Network World this week. What got Torvalds so heated is his perception of how security vulnerabilities are so incredibly over-hyped to the extent that he calls it a "security circus." What started this whole tirade, was a post Torvalds made to the Linux kernel developer newsgroup four weeks ago where he lobbed his opinions of how the "security circus... glorifies and... encourages the wrong behavior," and where he saved his cruelest and most politically-incorrect statement for the uber-security-minded, OpenBSD developers: Linus Torvalds...
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Apple recently removed the word Computer from their corporate name, and this might very well reflect the mindset of those people who are calling the shots: at the end of the day they have far less than 5% market share when it comes to computers, a far cry from their lofty position atop the world of portable media playing devices.Obviously Apple's core business is not something that they're likely to give up on any time soon, but did the switch in emphasis cause the company to miss a chance to build relationships with new customers?“When the long-awaited moment arrived, Vista turned out to be in as sorry a state of semicompletion as Mr. Jobs could have hoped for. Many pieces of hardware that customers...
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Today the California Supreme Court has ruled that a San Diego woman can not be sued for a libelous e-mail posted on two web sites. The Court agreed with the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which provides immunity to those who publish information on the net that was gathered from other sources, and is seen by many as a victory for internet privacy. "The prospect of blanket immunity for those who intentionally redistribute defamatory statements on the Internet has disturbing implications," Associate Justice Carol A. Corrigan wrote in the majority opinion. "Nevertheless ... statutory immunity serves to protect online freedom of expression...
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