As I already mentioned, the Unity docs are not quite what I would call helpfull. I think they cover a lot and most of it will solve your problem, finding the right info in them is what really is the hard part.

Take the GUI scripting guide for instance "Reference Manual > GUI Scripting Guide", this covers everything you need to know to build a GUI. My mission currently is to create a simple form for the game I talked about earlier.
For the salutation I needed a drop down list, so I had to do it on my own, because that's the one usefull control I missed.



The form is dynamic (you can turn of the salutation for instance) and already has a working validation, but it's dead ugly. So the next task was to skin that up ("Reference Manual > GUI Scripting Guide > Customization").

Yet again the manual does a good job to tell you what you can do, but fucking lacks some basic examples on how to deal with the textures to skin up buttons for instance. That's where I got a bit pissy (although I must admit that I hate searching in boards or wikis when the solution should be in the manuals).

So the key to skinning the buttons (and the rest of the UI elements is the GUISkin file or for single use the GUIStyle. I knew that there has been a psd file with "templates" of the default textures used, but alas I still havent been able to find it again, though I know I saw it while playing with Unity for the first day (and I was like wtf?).


I found the most valuable (and yet again MISSED info) in the scripting guide (after just testing it with a basic psd file) ...
So I looked at the default values of a new Skin and saw this:

And I wondered why (and how) it'll become this: .

What the manual is missing badly is the info that you can set a "fixed" border for a texture in a skin that isn't stretched:

var border : RectOffset
Description

The borders of all background images.

This corresponds to the border settings for GUITextures. It only affects the rendering of the background image and has no effect on positioning.

Why do I need to find that out by testing? (I guess no one reads through the scripting guide until he needs a specific info, I for sure do not)

By default the border values are set to:
left: 6, right: 6, top: 6, bottom: 4 ...

After knowing this it was oh so easy to just do this: to get to the buttons used above.

Oh well.

I hope that saves some ugly searching for you,
nGFX

We've made no secret of loving Unity. We cuddle up to it. We watch rom-coms with it and feign interest. Hell, we'd lick it if we could.

But as we've fallen more head over heels it's just highlighted the fact that there's no tried and trusted business model for it yet. There's no mochi, there's no big ass portal wanting to pay for that shiny shiny 3D gameplay, shit there's not even sponsors with their $500 plus source code offers.

The handful of Flash game studios like ourselves who are looking to Unity I assume are following a similar pattern, knock out some nice generic games with some added wow, and then offer it as an alternative [ To Flash ] to clients with the added carrot of an iphone version of the game. So in effect you take a hit on the costs of making the actual game ( Unless you're lucky and can get a decent budget ) but make that back via the iphone version ( One code base, one set of assets, two games to charge for ).

Flashbang have a different idea via their Blurst site, and to be honest it's a real epiphany moment reading about it.

The full article is on the Wall Street Journals site ( Which is quite a wow in itself ) and can be found here.

To cover the key points before you go shooting off over there, the idea is that you have "True fans", the fans who really dig your stuff ( A great article which is linked to in the above article can be found directly here )

"A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author - in other words, anyone producing works of art - needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living."

They have calculated that by using a subscription based model they only need 5000 people signing up every six months. That pays for their 6 staff.

In theory that's so simple it's brilliant. Ok it's nothing new, but it's just seeing the maths laid out so simply just makes it feel viable.

We've touched on downloadable versions before, and the general feeling was that very few people will pay for Flash no matter how good it is, because there's just so much free stuff out there and Flash games demographic in terms of indie players seem to be the younger end of the market ( Although that could be skewed due to the younger end of the market being the most vocal ) who
a) Don't have as much disposable income.
b) Have the mindset of "If it's on the net it should be free".
But with Unity your downloadable game can be so much more. Enough to encourage people to subscribe to get it ? Maybe, maybe not. There are more alternatives to just giving a exe version of a game though. Subscribe to gywGames and in our racing game we'll let you design your own livery, and you can take a snapshot which all your friends can see when you're logged on to the site, hell, they can even vote for it.

It's that divergence of media that will sell a subscription. The level editor that's unlocked once you join. That comp to win a psp when you're subscribed. It's allowing players to be that little bit more than players, to let them have a direct effect on the game they're playing, that sense of community. It doesn't have to be heavy handed, it's not all about achievements and gamerscore, it's about putting a little bit of creative power into peoples hands and seeing what they can do.

That to me is the business model for Unity that we've all been searching for.

Squize.

Hi folks,

most regular readers will have noticed that we've jumped onto the Unity wagon after it finally came out for the windows world and so I think it's time to write down a few of my thoughts ...

What it is:
an easy to use development platform for 3d games (although easy, well, I'll cover that later)

What it is not:
Simply put: easy.
And it is not flash.

So?
The best part of it is, that you can do a decent 3d based game with it quite quickly, that is if you know how to code unity (I might have twittered once or twice that the docs are not one of the strong points) and (what's more important if you or someone in your team) can do low poly 3d.

So?
I really can't stress enough that it is NOT flash, not at all, when you get started with Unity all is nice and straight forward, but once you hit the point where you really would like to do a quick tween for the main menu, or use a fancy drop shadow on your font ... you'll probably start cursing and wish you could use a timeline and some keyframes.

One of the really big letdowns for me was to discover that a quick, easy and nice UI is not going to happen fast in Unity. You can get away with it if you don't need dynamic text to appear, but I need to do a lot of stuff with that, because nearly all of our games are prepared to be played in at least two languages.

How does all that relate to the title?
When I first got in touch with flash (6 I think) AS was really nothing more than a scripting language, coding for the best part was ... shit and most of us messed with onEnterFrames per movielclip. Then AS2 hit the light of the day and with AS3 it came very close to real coding ...
But when I entered the Unity world it seems like the old distributed scripts came back to haunt me. You've got the choice of using a set of different languages: javascript like, c#, boo and some others.

JS on the one hand is easy to use, ridiculously lose typed and commonly used. I really don't like lose typed coding, so for me it was c# ...
Anyway something that commes very close the the old MC based onEnterFrame is Update ... so a script that would move the object 1 "unit" (since we have no pixel) to the left would be:

function Update () {
    transform.position.x++;
}

(or something very close to that, I said I use c#, oh and I'm sure I saw some other methods to do the same)

Save that as a ".js" text file, add that to a cube on stage and viola (there you have the back to script part covered).

I hope you won't be doing that for a complex game, but ... thinking back ... I knew people who did that with flash  ** shudder **.

As I already mentioned, I hate lose typed coding and as I used c# for some years now for coding anyway it was a logical choice (that and the fact that I could continue using Visual Studio).

Oh and did I stress that there is NO timeline?

Everything you want to have animated either needs to be coded (ie for dynamic text) or already be animated in a 3d app ...

Oops, I think I need to get back to work ...

nGFX

ps: just to have something to look at a screenie of the menu (the start of a camera move) of my "test" game to see how I get along with Unity, if everything works well, I might be able to invite for a private beta test on Friday (give me a shout if you want to) ...

Hey my beauties. Sorry I've been ignoring you all, I've just been pretty ill the past week or so ( I was going to say I've been sick, but I used that joke up last post ). It's me not you, honestly.

Just a short post to go with a small experiment. I've done the plasma effect to death in Flash but it's a nice little effect to play with when trying out a new language so I thought I'd see how straight forward it would be to port to Unity.

The answer is... fairly. If nothing else I've discovered that for...in is nasty slow in Unity ( All these new coding caveats to learn, joy ).

Anyway I still feel like crap, so I'm going to cut this short. The effect is hiding behind this link and it's really nothing special, I just wanted to show something after being away for a week or so. If anyone would like the source just ask in the comments.

Squize.

PS. I'm so sorry to everyone I owe an email too, I will catch up, and let's be honest you should know how crap I am by now.

Anyone who hangs around Flash boards for any length of time will see a pattern ( Usually around school holidays ) of script kiddies turning up, asking a million lazy questions, telling you that in spite of a lack of knowledge right now they're going to see their project through 'cause it's the best idea ever ( It's like Mario, but with guns. And tits. And rpg elements. And zombies ), that if you can just help them with the character select screen the rest of the game will be all but done, and how much can you earn via mochi again ?

I just like to push back on my rocking chair, spit out some of ma there chewing tobacky onto ma porch and grin like a hog that found the shit.

Tweening a zelda sprite isn't going to produce the best game ever ( From the best idea ever ).

So look at me now, I'm playing with Unity3D and I don't know what the hell I'm doing. I'm guessing it's not far away from the Unity equivalent of tweening a zelda sprite and yet I'm really confident about turning out a complete game fairly ( Relatively ) soon-ish.
Unity has it's quirks, and the javascript code is no as3 ( All those posts bitching about as3 being a pain in the ass, well it is, until you get a couple of games out of the way, then it becomes as natural as yawning in meetings ) but... already, 6 days into the trial, I have no desire to go back to making games in Flash again.
To me it's like going back to as1 and publishing for F7 only, it's such a step backward that it holds no appeal at all.

Now hopefully I'm not too much of an idiot to release I can just up and leave Flash. Unity may not be the pot at the end of the rainbow, for all the very lovely demos there still aren't a lot of complete games, which does ring some alarm bells, and perhaps it is a world of difference between having a nice mesh with some physics running on it all at 60 fps in your browser and making that full game ( The gulf between tweening zelda and making a game could be huge ) but... fuck me it's so good.

I've never been a Flash evangelist. I think a recent post I made on FK.games was the first time I've ever really bitched about what Adobe are doing ( And that was in the light of the windows release of Unity in comparison with the upgrade cost to CS4 ).
Basically I couldn't care less. I do like using Flash, but it's just a means to an end, it's a way for me to make games that can generate an income, a tool to do a job.
I'm not passionate about it.
I am passionate about making cool games though, albeit doing that within business constraints ( It is my job, so I can't just go off and do some GBA homebrew just for the hell of it ), and Unity seems to be far and away the best solution to that.
( I'm so glad I've not spent money upgrading to cs4, which is quite an indictment really seeing how I'm professional Flash game developer )

As a quick update to X++, nGFX was sick last week ( Well he was in bed with his nan, and that's pretty fucking sick ! Thank you ) so he's behind on things which means we're a little bit behind on where we want to be, although it'll be in selling limbo for a while even when it's done so I think the next update may just be a "Look it's live, tell us how much you love it" post.

Squize.