Unity Technologies announced earlier this summer an effort to boost the top-notch resources available to Unity users and, of course, showcase the capabilities of the Unity game engine.

The first project to be completed and made available is Detonator, created by Ben Throop. It’s a set of assets and tools to help developers very quickly create incredible explosion effects. The result, I have to say, is incredible. Great particle effects here and enough flexibility to quickly make explosions that express your own unique personality. It’s even fully documented.

Check out this video for a little demonstration:

For even more info and a sample scene to play around in, read the announcement post on the Unity Technologies blog.

What else can we expect from the Unity Summer of Code?

• A terrain erosion tool (really looking forward to this one)
• A cutscene editor
• A tool for integrating Unity more closely with 3ds Max

Unity Technologies surprised everyone today by skipping version 1.1 of Unity iPhone and going right to 1.5. I don’t know why they did it that way, but 1.5 is big enough that I don’t think I really care.

Unity iPhone 1.5 boasts huge performance improvements, better documentation, and, perhaps most important, provides “full support for native Objective C and C++ code,” which “opens full access to the iPhone 3.x APIs and custom plugins.” This is a big deal because, as powerful as Unity iPhone 1.0.3 was, it had some serious limitations when it came to interacting with some iPhone features.

There’s a lot to digest about the new release, but the performance improvements alone should be a welcome enhancement. We may even be able to address one of the biggest complaints about Cornhole Pro: that real cornhole rules require the two teams to alternate throws and for all bags to be present on the playing field at once. All our attempts to implement those rules led to a ridiculously slow frame rate, but Unity iPhone 1.5 may have just the performance enhancements we need.

About a month ago, EA Sports announced that it was foregoing a PC version of Tiger Woods Golf this year in favor of a full-featured, browser-based game, Tiger Woods PGA Tour Online. There are more details on the Tiger Woods PGA Tour blog.

Why is this a big deal? EA is using Unity as the front-end engine for the game! Not only is this a huge deal for the good folks at Unity Technologies — since there are likely to be ridiculous numbers of people playing this game — it’s potentially a giant leap for browser-based gaming.

Browser-based gaming has historically been dominated by Flash and Shockwave games of the casual variety. Quake Live and Cartoon Network’s Fusion Fall (which also uses Unity) brought us a browser-based MMO, but I don’t know of many more large-scale, 3D games that operate within a web browser.

According to EA, Tiger Woods PGA Tour Online was born when the company realized that sales of the PC version of Tiger Woods Golf were lagging and that they could reach potentially millions more people by making the game web-based. My guess is they also realized Unity would give them a way to present a graphically rich game within a browser. It also means no more platform compatibility issues, thanks to the Unity web player plugin.

It’s not clear yet how EA is going to make money from the game. My guess is it will be subscription-based, which may cause a lot of gamers to balk. They might pay anyway, though, if the game is regularly updated and enhanced. Other possibilities include an ad-supported model or a one-time fee to play. The one-time fee option seems unlikely to me, considering that EA has left off any sort of numerical identifier like “10″ or “09.”

The cynic in me thinks the people at EA may be saying, “Hey, most folks pay for a new Tiger Woods game every year anyway, so charging a subscription fee for TW PGA Tour Online is the same thing, right?”

I have signed up for the beta test of Tiger Woods PGA Tour Online, so we’ll see if my name gets called (EA, I would be a great beta tester, I promise!). I’ll report back if I can. Nevertheless, if this game catches on, not only could EA start releasing more big-budget browser games, other major developers might jump on the bandwagon.

Who knows, in a few years, we might be looking at web browsers as a primary way to play on the PC.

Ok, this news is pretty stale at this point, but it’s worth posting anyway. Unity Technologies released Unity 2.1 on Friday. This update was a long time coming (about nine months I think), but it’s a doosy. The message around this update is that it finally makes Unity MMO-enabled. How? Well…

• Endless streaming terrains. Yes, that’s right, Unity now supports as large a world as you want to create. You can build multiple terrain tiles and stream them in to create truly massive worlds. Anyone following TGNM the last month or so knows I’ve been working toward a home-grown version of the same thing. I had a feeling the Unity folks would throw something like this, but I couldn’t be happier. Ok, I could be happier: I haven’t figured out how to make these nifty new features work yet. The documentation is noticeably lacking so far.
• More realistic terrain lighting. Terrains in Unity 2.0 would only work with directional lights and lightmaps, which severely limited things. You couldn’t, for example, light a road with torches in any realistic way. Terrains also now work with projectors, which means better shadow effects (for poor indie owners like me–terrains support real-time shadows for pro licenses) and the possibility for projected spell effects or selectors.
• Procedural control over characters and animation. Unity always had a really flexible animation scripting system, but now it’s possible to create even more advanced effects like on-the-fly creation of skinned meshes. This stuff is pretty advanced, but it seems to open the door for really flexible MMO-style character creation. You can also sync scripted events with animations, making it easy to spawn things like footprints, footfall sounds, impact effects, etc.
• Streaming assets. This feature, alas, is reserved for pro licenses, but you can now pack up any group of assets in Unity into a bundle and stream it in as the player approaches.

All in all it’s a pretty amazing release. There are still plenty of things huge things that would be required to build an MMO with Unity, like all the back-end databases and server configurations, but this is a major step.

Sure, I suppose I could feel annoyed that I spent so much time doing things the hard way with terrain, but who am I kidding? I always do things the hard way.

As a way to settle on my next project, I decided to do some character prototyping. It’s something I haven’t done in a while, and it seemed like a good time to try a more in-depth 3D modeling project.

The human form is, as you might imagine, a fairly complex thing to model. It’s easier with a solid reference drawing, but I’m not a particularly skilled artist either. So, armed with a basic line drawing enough skills to be dangerous, I set out to figure a way to cut some corners.

After some digging for a free alternative to Poser, I stumbled on a relatively new, open-source product called MakeHuman, a free piece of software designed to help people create 3D models of the human form. Turns out it’s not quite complete, but I think it’s going to be pretty effective for my purposes.

Upon first opening the program, though, my first thought was, Wow, that’s quite an androgynous figure. This might not work at all. The model had kind of a masculine face and a vaguely female body. It turns out, though, that MakeHuman takes an interesting approach to body shape. Rather than selecting “male” or “female” when you start, you get to adjust the values along several continua, including male/female, age, muscle mass, body shape, and weight. The default model happens to lie right in the middle of the male/female spectrum.

After tweaking parameters for an hour or so, I had a character that I thought looked decent, so I exported a model to fine-tune in Cheetah. I’ve been working the last few days to dress it and simplify the mesh.

The only hitch so far has been that MakeHuman outputs a fairly high-resolution model with about 12,000 polygons. I ultimately want one that has four or five thousand, which should provide plenty of detail. Though Cheetah doesn’t have a method for polygon reduction, Blender has a good one, so I used that first to get things down to a reasonable level. Despite the extra step, I’m hoping to end up with a decent model that doesn’t require building a human form (particularly the head and face) from scratch.

It remains to be seen whether MakeHuman provides a shortcut that’s actually shorter, but so far it looks like it will be a huge help in modeling.