BETA | UNITY
Above: One of the smaller sessions at Unite 2009. Inset: Cartoon Network used Unity to create its FusionFall browser MMO.
what’s going on on the forums.’ It was all hours of the day. I think they recognised that, and then those customers we had started evangelising it for us.” Nevertheless, there were very few around in those days, admits Helgason. “Aside from a few indies and hobbyists – the smaller end of the market, those with less to lose – no-one was stupid enough to buy it. Because, of course, it took a while to prove to anybody that this would get supported, updated, and developed further by us. “For all they knew, we could have followed the pattern: game company makes a game, game doesn’t do that well; so they try to sell the technology behind it until they get bored and move on. So we had to kind of prove to people that that wasn’t what was going on here. That actually took about two years.” WORLD WIDE WANT What did capture people’s attention was the web player: coming as the casual gaming scene exploded into popular consciousness, suddenly browsers were capable of going beyond Flash’s attractive-but-sluggish vectors and into hardware-accelerated 3D games. Do they feel like they kickstarted the 3D-in-browser revolution, something that’s now being ratified into proper internet standards? “No, not really,” answers Helgason. “Virtools was already in the browser space, and Director too. So we weren’t the first, we were just way better. Director had gone stale – for 2001, when the 3D stuff released, it was quite good, but they didn’t follow technology and they never got the tools right – it was all driven from code. Virtools just never got their polish together; the plug-in was big and clunky. On paper they looked formidable; we were scared of them. But nobody really mentions them anymore.” Part of the reason that both those technologies are now marginalised, while Unity flourishes, may be that aiming at games – and therefore at the top – has left the door open for other uses, Francis suggests.
22 | DECEMBER ‘09/JANUARY ‘10
“In the past few years people have realised you can take game engines and do all sorts of stuff with it, but it doesn’t work the other way. It’s completely natural for architects to do pre-vis in a game engine, or scientists to do data visualisation with a game engine, but you’d never make a game from a CAD program – and certainly not a browser-based MMO or something. So I think that, in that sense, it’s been really good for us to focus on
Aside from a few indies and hobbyists, nobody bought [the first version]. It took a while to prove that it would get supported and updated by us. David Helgason, Unity games – it really makes you push the bar technology wise.” And if your eyes are glazing over at the the thought of non-game applications and their overall relevance to the business at large, EA has also adopted the tech for its in-browser Tiger Woods experience (adultery not included)
Helgason is ready with a surprising statistic: according to a recent audit of its customers, a third of them aren’t making games with Unity, with applications ranging from data visualisation to interactive art installations. THE MACS FACTOR But, in truth, there was something holding Unity back: the development tool was still only available for Macs, and although they were attracting customers, having to spend as much on hardware as a Pro licence was proving somewhat of a stumbling block. “If you look from about early 2008 to spring 2009, so many of our customers were buying Macs. It was so clear that people were being convinced about the technology, but had to buy this really expensive ‘dongle’,” laughs Helgason. “They weren’t super thrilled. Some of the big studios that bought Unity were having problems because their IT departments were saying, ‘No, you can’t connect Macs to our network. It’s outside protocol.’ So there were several studios where they’d have a special router going out through the wall, but they couldn’t access company e-mail or anything.” So it became clear to the team that they really needed to support the PC, but that meant rewriting the whole editor from