happy new year with a new demo

what? new year?
march 21th is the norouz day and it's the first day of year in Iranian calender.
we would love to create a game for norouz just what others make for western new year and christmas but we did not have the time to do so. so just a small demo that has some information for you and also is beautiful.
to know more about norouz see this
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nowruz
to see my demo go to this page

http://gcsoft.persiangig.com/zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.html
technically the code for the demo is simple and the code without function and class definitions is less than what i want to write here :) the modeler guys did their job well but i did not have the time to make something good out of it. it's small app that shows you and introduce 7sin to you.
what i learned
even in this small project that took less than an hour to complete i learned important things about unity.
1 remove every component and code that you don't need or use. unity will choose used assets (meshes and textures and materials and ...) for you but it compiles all of your scripts so remove what you don't want if you are publishing for the web. remove all components that you don't need too. i decided to play music on this demo and made the code for it but later it changed and when i removed all the stuff the size decreased 7 k. you might Say "hey it's not much". let's say you have 10,000 visitors and 7000k is about 7MB of your bandwidth and it can be important for you and if you remove 50k from one project you will buy 3 or 4 seconds for low speed connection users and some bandwidth for yourself. so always do this
2 always use mesh compression for web games. it compress your meshes well. my game was 1.56MB and now it's 992K so use that even if it takes time to change all mesh settings. if you have unity pro, you can create editor scripts for this too.
3 always write editor scripts for things that you do more than one time. i wrote a small 3 line script after doing something 5 times and saved myself from doing 30 more times this night and much more in other days.
i'll go to vacation so i'll not be here to answer you but email me any feeedback at ashkan_gc@yahoo.com
here also i want to thank sobhan and hossein for their great job. i will create something better with their models this summer.
hopefully the next year would be a better one. god willing!

interactive destructible objects and meshes

did you think about them before? what are they good for? can they add value to your game's gameplay? are they good design tools? are they bad rocks that designers of AAA games hide themselves behind them?
I can not stop my creativity when i think about them. my imaginations go wild and i can not get it. you saw many destructible meshes in games developed with UE 3 but when i think about destructible meshes i don't think about rocks and wholes in them or braking stones and ... i don't think about war or anything action. did you think about a cooking game that you can cut onions in any way you like? i thought much about it. it's not completely possible but for many foods it's possible to use really random destructible parts. for some of them you should create meshes of complete grocery and also create pieces yourself.
however there are some problems in your way. texturing of destructed mesh in the way that you want is not always easy. think of a potato and an onion. if you try to cut them, texturing the internal parts of the potato is rather easy but what about the onion? is there any possible solution?
what about game performance? physx tries to do it's best for you and you'll not have any problem in a normal cooking simulator but a vegetable cutting machine with 5000 tomatoes is a different story. i think performance will not be a big issue because in most cases you don't need many rigid bodies.
there is another important factor. did you think of gameplay of your game? isn't it too hard to cut the onion freely? can you make a casual game with free destruction of meshes. a very casual game, i don't think so.
i think there are endless possibilities. using destructible meshes with project natal or wiimote adds much more to it. a cake cutting game? lumbering? oh maybe! tell me what you think. i added a feature request to feedback site of unity and want to invite you to vote for it.
http://feedback.unity3d.com/forums/15792-unity/suggestions/536687-destructible-meshes

the biggest problem against unity

there are some features that they are not that hard to implement but unity guys don't add them to the engine. did you think before about it? why they don't add soft body physics? why should not they add a HTML browser inside unity GUI? there is a big problem that they should think about it. i am not sure if it's a problem in their vision or not. i am not much experienced to be sure about what i say. the web player size is something important. unity's web player is not as popular as it needs to be so the size should be as small as possible. adding all physx features will add about 12 MB to the player size. there are two approaches available. they can add some features as web player add ons. this will add the problem of game size. the games will become so big. the second approach is to rely on users. you should tell them to install physx and install x and y and ... what is the best approach? maybe none of them. should they add features one by one? should we wait for the web player to penetrate more? there is another problem too. some new versions of third party libraries that unity uses are available but they are not backward compatible and adding them will break the compatibility of older games with new web player. this is not something good even for big giants like flash that most users of computers have. I would be more than happy if someone from UT put a comment on this blog post. i might email it to them.

future of unity

what do you think about the future of unity? what would be available in unity 3.0? just 2 or 3 big features that are not important to you? just %10 of what users want? should you wait your whole life for the feature that you want? no no no!!!! take a look at past years. it's what i always do when i want to predict the future. take a look at what unity 2 and 2.1 and 2.5 and 2.6 offered to us. with unity 2 they introduced DX renderer and raknet networking with 2.1 many procedurals added and in 2.5 they introduced windows editor and in 2.6 the profiler was the big feature. oh i forgot about real time shadows of 2.0. there was many small features that i think brought more value than these big ones. so if i want to guess, hmm, unity is a bigger part a much bigger part of the industry with much more money and many developers. so what i guess is: they might add many MMO features and many social features. a dynamic sky or complete weather system might be added. some new physics features and more features for in game ads are also possible. what do you think? they might add some features for making 2D games. the enigne performance surely would be much better. any or all of that might happen but unity is a great product with or without those features. i know that they'll add DX 10 or 11 renderer and update mono. mono update will happen soon so don't worry. the good thing about unity is: at first they don't wait for major releases to add features. they constantly do it. secondly they don't leave some parts of the engine untouched for ever. they always improve and optimize what they have and they are really open to ideas and really listen to us.

none technical factors

when you want to choose a game engine, you should compare many factors. the most important factors are technical ones. what physics engine does the engine use? how fast iteration time is? what about asset importing? how much customizable is the engine? these questions and many others must be answered if you want to understand if a game engine is good or not. but hey there are factors that they are not technical but they are important in development. i think you should review everything from personality of engine developers to their vision and their openness.. i can easily say guys at UT are the coolest guys in the game engine industry. i am sure that they don't sell the engine to Google and don't kill the useres ideas for more money. they always do what you want because they are passionates about what they do. the other factor is the amount of democracy. not more not less, does developers listen to you? a more important factor is community. how helpful the community is? what tools are available? for example unity answers is a unique tool for unity. all of your questions will be answered in less than 2 days and most of them will be answered in less than 10 hours. having a gallery for user created assets is a good thing too. unity don't have this. they made unify scripting wiki but there is not a place for models and textures. I think they should make a asset site for user made assets. i don't want to talk much about unity much in this post but i can not control myself. :) the number of developers is another important factor. an engine with more than 50 developers can make many features in a year. what about 3 guys? many of the engines just have 1 or 2 developers. you might say: "unity had a small number of developers at first too." yes! you can make a good product in a room smaller than a closet and with less than 3 passionate developers but 50 guys can do a 10 times bigger job if they can not make a 30 times bigger. big game studios and publishers are another factor, if EA or activision or ubisoft use something it means it's better than their own tech or they just don't see any reason to develop something that is available.

first blog post

My name is Ashkan Saeedi Mazdeh. I am a programming student in one of Iran's universities. I love game development but i still need to learn many things and have a long road to go. I write my ideas about Unity and community around it.i tried many engines and found unity the best in overall. surely other engines like torque, shiva3d and dx studio all has features that unity don't have but unity is the best for what i imagine to create. currently i work with my closest friend Sina. fortunately or not we are both programmers and we don't have a modeler friend. this prevented us to make great looking games. we previously worked with game maker for creating 2D games. then we tested many engines from dark basic to 3dgamestudio and from torque to unity. we chose unity. we did not have the money to buy the engine. in our country piracy is a common thing but we are not common people and it's more than a year that we don't use pirated software. when the cool guys at unity technologies announced that their indie license is not available anymore i could not sleep for one night.it was the first time that i was happy because something chip is not available anymore! :) i had a feeling like something i had never before. i can not describe it easily by words. i was about 5 kg and my creativity was coming out of my brain wildly. with this amount of love and also logic, I'll talk about all aspects of unity. it's good features and also problems. I'll talk about it's future and possible feature sets. why should you read this? we can talk together about it. also I'll share my experience with unity and problems in development. if you love to team up with us, we would be more than happy. at last i should say my English is terrible. sorry for that.