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The Ubuntu mobile dream is over
Ubuntu-powered phones and tablets never quite took off the way Canonical, the Linux-based platform's creator, expected. Now the company is finally admitting defeat and ending all its mobile projects. In a blog post, Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth has revealed that the company is killing its mobile software efforts and ending its investment in the Unity interface as a whole. Michael Hall, the developer's community manager, also confirmed to Ars Technica that Canonical is stopping all "work on the phone and tablet," putting an end on "the whole convergence story."
Unity sponsors 50 developers affected by Trump's travel ban
On top of all the other obstacles they face, many game developers from nations like Iran, Iraq and Syria couldn't make it to GDC in San Francisco because of the Trump administration's immigration order. Unity is trying to make it up to them in a small way with a new program called Unity Without Borders. It's inviting 50 developers from the restricted countries (Iraq is now off that list) to its Unite 2017 conference in Amsterdam.
Unity's '2017' game engine will focus on artists and designers
Unity's keynote at this year's GDC was all about the future of its game engine. The company has outlined plans for the next major version of its platform, Unity 2017, which is being designed with creators in mind. Unity says one of the main goals is to improve team productivity and collaboration features for non-programmers, particularly those who are artists and designers -- someone like a cinematic animator, for example. Developers will be able to sign up for a beta in April, marking the end of the Unity 5 cycle that began in 2014.
First Unity-built cartoon proves the engine isn't just for games
As the NBA's eSports league proves, video games are quickly becoming mainstream. Games are having a moment, and so are the tools used to make them. Case in point, the Unity game engine recently reached a big milestone. French animated show Mr. Carton just became the first cartoon TV series made with Unity.
Google's VR art app is open source and ready to get weird
Google's Tilt Brush is capable of some pretty impressive results. But what if those 3D paintings and projects you made while strapped into virtual reality could escape into the real world? That's the idea behind the open-source Tilt Brush Toolkit, available now on GitHub.
Gameroom is Facebook's antiquated answer to Steam
Back in August Facebook announced its PC gaming platform as a partnership with the Unity developer toolset. There are a few more details now, and from the sounds of it, Facebook Gameroom is basically Steam from 2009, but for Facebook games -- both web and those natively built for the ecosystem. The social network is starting small: games can't be any larger than 200MB, although it will "consider" hosting games up to 500MB on a case-by-case basis, according to the service. That automatically rules out something like, say, Diablo 3: Ultimate Evil Edition's 58GB, but smaller fare like Desert Golf's 1MB size would have plenty of room to spare.
Google opens Daydream VR platform to developers
From its debut at Google I/O, Daydream seemed like a much more ambitious smartphone-based VR software platform than the earlier Cardboard system. The countdown clock for the former's public release began after a Bloomberg article back in August hinted at its imminent launch. While we're still waiting for the first Daydream phones to come out in fall, Google's VR SDK version 1.0 supporting it has officially left beta and is available to download on their developer site.
Facebook is launching its own PC gaming platform
Facebook's gaming aspirations didn't stop with Farmville and its $2 billion Oculus VR acquisition. Nope, the social network is also launching a dedicated PC gaming platform today. Said platform will lean heavily on developers using the ubiquitous Unity game engine, according to a release from the company. The partnership's first project is admittedly developer-centric, but it has a direct impact on the folks playing games on Facebook. Zuckerberg and Co. describe it as a new export feature baked into Unity that allows a studio to publish directly to Facebook and the aforementioned Facebook PC gaming platform "with very little effort and few code changes."
Crafting the algorithmic soundtrack of 'No Man's Sky'
While you've no doubt heard of No Man's Sky, the game, chances are you can't say the same of the band that scored its soundtrack. That's fair. UK noise/drone rock group 65Daysofstatic (65DOS) has quietly been releasing records since 2001. Its songs regularly stretch past seven minutes, and if they feature vocals, the singing is buried so deep in the mix that it's almost indistinguishable from the maelstrom surrounding it. All that is to say, the band doesn't write the type of music that gets stuck in your head. Which makes multi-instrumentalist Paul Wolinski's hopes for the score all the more surprising. "We wanted it to be hummable," he told Engadget.
Virgin Galactic poised to start its new spaceship's test flights
Virgin Galactic is ready to put its SpaceShipTwo replacement through a series of test fights, and according to Bloomberg, it will begin sometime in August. The private space corporation launched Virgin Spaceship (VSS) Unity in February to replace SpaceShipTwo, which crashed into the Mojave Desert back in 2014. It was named by Professor Stephen Hawking, shares a similar design with its predecessor and was created take paying customers on a short tour of outer space to the tune of $250,000 per seat.
Oculus wants to help VR avatars look normal when they talk
Remember all those Hong Kong kung-fu movies with really poor dubbing so the actors' mouths would keep flapping after the words had stopped? That was charming. What's less charming is the possibility of stone-faced avatars poorly mouthing dialogue, detracting ever so slightly from the immersive power of virtual reality worlds. That's why we're all slightly excited that Oculus released a beta Unity plugin called OVRLipSync.
Valve's VR technology now works with the Unity game engine
For many gaming platforms, the litmus test these days is whether or not they get official support in Unity's game engine -- land that and many developers (and by extension, gamers) are likely to give them a closer look. Valve just got a big credibility boost, then, as Unity is introducing native SteamVR support. If a virtual reality game runs on Unity's seemingly ubiquitous code, it's that much more likely to work with the HTC Vive and other SteamVR-friendly headsets. And much like the Unreal Engine, teams can edit in VR if they want to know what a scene will look like for players.
Google releases improved Cardboard SDK and adds Street View
Google announced today that its Cardboard VR app is now available in 100 countries for both iOS and Android. The company also stated that the app's software development kit has been improved. According to the Google Developer's Blog, the new SDK now features better drift control thanks to "a major overhaul of the sensor fusion algorithms that integrate the signals from the gyroscope and accelerometer." This should diminish the amount of "drift" wherein the displayed images continue to move even after your head has stopped turning.
Unity Engine working to keep years of browser games alive
One of the big factors to game engine Unity's success is that for awhile it ran on basically any platform be it Oculus, PS Vita or home consoles like the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. But according to the developer, recent moves by the likes of Google, Microsoft and Mozilla are going to put an end to that. The latest version of Chrome doesn't have support for a specific plugin (NPAPI, specifically) that the Unity Web Player relies on, and Unity says that Firefox's support for plugins is going the way of the buffalo while Edge isn't supporting them at all. Most everything is moving toward WebGL these days.
Valve releases a kit for making virtual reality apps
Eager to build a game or 3D modelling tool that takes advantage of HTC's Vive and other SteamVR-friendly virtual reality headsets? It's time to get cracking. Valve has released a software development kit that lets apps use SteamVR hardware, including Valve's controller and room-scale Lighthouse tracking. On top of that, the platform now works nicely with both the Unity game engine (through a plugin) and Unreal Engine 4. It'll be a long while before you can actually run programs built on this code -- the VR devices have yet to reach many developers, let alone the public -- but this at least gets the ball rolling.
Unity Asset Store top sellers earn $30K a month
The Unity Asset Store is 4 years old and poised to have 1 million users by the end of 2014, Unity announced this week. The Asset Store is a marketplace of user-created development assets, services and tools, including environment art, animation tools, sound effects, shaders and all types of technical wonders. The Asset Store attracted 10,000 users in its first three months after launching in 2010, and today the top sellers bring in more than $30,000 a month, Unity writes on the Asset Store blog. Today, the store offers more than 15,000 pieces of content from nearly 3,800 creators. "Unity estimates that the Asset Store ecosystem, empowering Unity developers to create games and apps with a more efficient and effective production process, saves developers 6 million workdays over a 12-month period, which roughly equals a savings of $1.4 billion," the company says in a press release. In October, Unity saw a change in its leadership, hiring on former EA head John Riccitiello as its new CEO. [Image: Unity]
Joystiq Weekly: Titanfall gets co-op, Civ: Beyond Earth review, amiibo impressions and more
Welcome to Joystiq Weekly, a "too long; didn't read" of each week's biggest stories, reviews and original content. Each category's top story is introduced with a reactionary gif, because moving pictures aren't just for The Daily Prophet. With Titanfall getting a co-operative, wave-based mode, Super Smash Bros. on Wii U ushering in eight fighters at once and Halo: The Master Chief Collection just a few weeks (and a ~20GB patch) away, we're ready to spend a substantial amount of time beside our friends. Cunning AI is great and all, but what beats teaming up with or taking down local, equally-frantic friends and rivals? Other than wish-granting sacks of money, we mean. Single player diehards certainly aren't left out of this week's best content though – Rockstar launched a super-cheap, upgraded version of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas on the Xbox Marketplace today, there are reviews for Civilization: Beyond Earth and The Legend of Korra, and we got our hands on amiibos and Sony's horror romp, Until Dawn. All of that and quite a bit more is waiting for you after the break!
Former EA CEO John Riccitiello is now CEO of Unity
Unity Co-Founder and CEO David Helgason has stepped down and appointed former EA CEO John Riccitiello as CEO of Unity Technologies. Helgason is now Executive Vice President in charge of strategy and communications. "Unity has been a hugely positive force in the games industry for years," Riccitiello says in a press release. "Now it's my incredible fortune to have the opportunity to help guide Unity going forward. Unity is more than a great engine or packages of services, it's an amazing and diverse community of developers, many of which are changing the way we think about game design and production. Unity's mission – to democratize development – is an important one that I'm very happy to help drive forward." Riccitiello resigned his position at EA in March 2013, in the midst of SimCity's online issues and shortly after Star Wars: The Old Republic switched to free-to-play. His departure letter noted that the company's financial performance was tracking below expectations. Riccitiello has served on the Unity Board of Directors since November 2013.
Joystiq Weekly: Vib-ribbon launches, Driveclub Review, RE: Revelations 2 preview and more
Welcome to Joystiq Weekly, a "too long; didn't read" of each week's biggest stories, reviews and original content. Each category's top story is introduced with a reactionary gif, because moving pictures aren't just for The Daily Prophet. "Better eight years late than never," PlayStation Network users probably said during this week's return of Vib-ribbon. Sure, we're not exactly in drought season, but what's stopping you from impulsively bailing on 2014's release calendar to revisit a 1999 cult classic? Beyond money and life's responsibilities, anyway. If Vib-ribbon is fair game for a 2014 appearance, can we go ahead and get our hopes for comparably-unlikely surprises? Sure, StarCraft: Ghost's indefinitely-on-hold status is probably irreversible at this point, but if Blizzard felt like continuing development in secret for years and launching it without warning, we wouldn't be upset. Valve, you're more than welcome to do the same with fresh installments in the Half Life or Left 4 Dead series. There was more to this week than feeble wishes though, including resolution news for Halo: The Master Chief Collection and Assassin's Creed: Unity, reviews for Driveclub and Neverending Nightmares, and previews for AC: Unity and Resident Evil: Revelations 2. All those and more are tidied up for you after the break!
Report: Google among potential buyers of Unity gaming engine
Unity, the little gaming engine that could, may soon have new owners, according to a Cnet report. For those unaware, Unity is an increasingly ubiquitous engine on which a diverse cast of developers have built a number of popular, wildly disparate games including hits such as Blizzard's Hearthstone, rocket science simulator Kerbal Space Program and post-apocalyptic roleplaying game Wasteland 2. Though initially developed for OS X, Unity has since been ported to 15 other platforms, making it both relatively quick and easy for games built on Unity to appear on a wide range of popular devices with little additional effort required from their developers. Now, Cnet claims, the Unity team is considering a sale. Specifics on who might buy Unity (or how much they might pay for it) are lacking from the report, but Cnet does name Google among potential suitors. Studios using Unity may find this news alarming, as the engine's greatest strength has always been its wealth of developer support options and there's no telling how that aspect of the technology will fare in the hands of a major corporation. Still, it's a bit early to fret over this deal too much. Cnet's sources aren't entirely sure that the Unity team is actively seeking buyers, only that "either the company has been courting potential deals or responding to interest from its partners and other companies." [Image: Unity]
