Unity goes free!

In an interesting development at the Unite conference, Unity Technologies, provider of Unity, announced that version 2.6 of the Unity platform is will now be available at no cost. You can find the download here. This is outstanding news for the hobbyist like me. For years I’ve pit Unity against Torque when it comes to the best development platform for me. To date, it has been Torque because you get the source code which Unity does not allow access to and that’s extremely important when decisions have to be made about which middleware to choose. Game Developer magazine recently published results from a survey they conducted that shows backs up that fact. For most, not having the source code is an instant turn-off to a product and I honestly feel the same.

However, a price tag of $0 will make many people overlook that fact. This will bring in a lot more potential buyers and I’m sure that Unity Tech is hoping that this free version will act as a springboard for purchase of Unity Pro.

To echo what someone posted on the GarageGames forum regarding this very topic, “I kinda believe GG and torque3d left the hobbyist market.” Even though I love Torque, I feel the same. As a hobbyist, I’ve started feeling left out when T3D went live. There is no way I’m going to pay $1000+ for software that will see less than 8 hours per day use. I think it’s time to check out Unity.

Regardless, Good luck to Unity, I say.

No commute and BF40K

/emote uncaps a black dry erase marker.
Yet another reason to write up on the whiteboard; no commute. I can't express my disdain for long commutes. I currently drive an hour to my job and an hour home. That's two hours a day that I could be with the family or doing something more productive. I want to be able to see my family during the day. I dream of them dropping by the shop or studio to say hello and even to have lunch perhaps. And if something came up where my wife would need to drop one or both of the kids off due to an emergency or even non-emergency situation, I relish the idea of her being able to count on me.
/sighs
/emote replaces the black dry erase marker's cap.

In other news, a total conversion for the Battlefield series known as Battlefield 40K (or BF40K for short) has always had a special place in my heart. Long ago, I was on the development team for BF40K when it was in its infancy. However, frustration and a general lack of time and patience caused me to leave the team for good. The original lead producer left and a wonderful chap by the name of Lionheart took the reins. Ever since he's done a marvelous job but being a lead of an online collaboration such as BF40K is not an easy role. I feel for him and have seen him endure the same frustration that I had long ago.

I had an IM conversation with him a few weeks back and it seems that he will be leaving the team soon. That will not be good for the team as a whole as Lionheart is a man of many talents and his skillsets will be sorely missed and not replaced anytime soon. But I don't blame him one bit. Here is the email I got today.

Battlefield 40k is short on staff and in need of a brand new development team. We need assistance in finishing the mod for either the bf2 or 2142 mod. We have enough completed art assets (sound effects included) to make an infantry only Tau vs Imperial Guard release. All that is needed is for them to be coded in game and finished. We also have vehicles that are 60% completed for both Tau and Imperial Guard. There is also a large number of Space Marine assets that are only in need of texture updates and coding to get them in.

If you are interested in helping please post a thread in the Developer Recruitment Forums outlining your proposal for releasing the mod.

All assets must remain within the BF40K team and mod development for BF2/2142 engines.

Thank you, Lionheart

So if there are any developers/producers/scripters/coders out there that think they can lend a helpful hand to these fellows, I highly encourage you to do so. I have considered jumping back in but I've been out of the loop for far too long and fear that my lack of patience would spell disaster for me once again.

Best of luck, BF40K!

Ahhh, kids.

It seems that my intention for at least one daily post fell through this week. My entire family has a cold. It isn't the nastiest cold we've ever had but enough to impact our routines as is evident by my lack of posting. In fact, I left work early on wednesday because I was feeling worse by the minute and realized that if I didn't drive home as soon as I could, I wasn't sure I would be able to drive home later seeing as I was getting lightheaded. Also, because my daughter didn't go to school, my wife needed someone to be at out house to watch the kids so she could drive her parents to the airport. It all worked out for the best I suppose.

If someone told me that I would get sick as often as I do before I had kids, I would have been skeptical. However, it's all too obvious to me now. My daughter goes to school and our son will be going to playgroups soon. All of which are little petri dishes full of germs. Inevitably, everything comes homes to infect us. Perhaps, we'll all live longer being exposed to so much at a relatively early age. At least that's that I would like to think.

For now, we're off to clean out the garage and move everything from our storage unit back into the garage which will act as storage for the foreseeable future.

History 101

I told you that this wasn't my first foray into entrepreneurism, so here's the history lesson.

A few years ago, three friends of mine and I had the crazy idea of starting up our own gaming store. We met a couple times to product lines, competitions, the amount of space needed and generally attempted to flesh out the concept. I'm not sure what the cause was but the whole thing crashed and burned. Out of all my friends, I believe I carried the torch the longest. I developed a business plan, did copious amounts of research, contacted vendors for pricing, and my wife and I toured several properties. In the end, the overhead was simply too high to sustain the business model we had chosen.

That was around 8 years ago during what I saw as the beginning of the end of brink and mortar gaming stores. More and more stores were moving their product lines onto websites and closing down their physical stores while most seemed to be going out of business all together. So I took a hint, dropped the plans and fell back on my preordained profession in chemistry. My Navy service and strong background in chemistry have served me quite well to this day. However, it is not where my heart truly lies. So to reiterate those famous words uttered in Shakespeare's Henry V, Act III:

 "Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more"

The Grand Plan as of now

• Research downtown area
• locations
• lease rates
• square footage
• Conduct surveys
• Online
• Flyers

More kindling

What is the best way to rescue a dying fire? Throw some kindling on its hot coals. That’s what happened this past Saturday. Part of my dreams to own my own gaming store roared back to life!!

It all started when my family and I went to an Open House at a place called Mom’s Morning Out (MMO) which is owned and operated by one of my wife’s friends. Her friend had previously been operating out of her home but decided to rent a space on the main street in the center of our downtown area because of her success thus far. It is a great spot within walking distance to schools, the police station and the fire department.

After we left MMO, I drove my son and I down the street to pick up my wife and daughter who went to check out a walk-in art studio. I parked right in front of a store that looked nearly abandoned except for a few collectibles in a plastic display case in the window. It was honestly quite pitiful looking. This made me wonder exactly how much rent was for these properties because I could not imagine that this particular store brought in that much revenue.My wife then said that she would love to see me do something that a friend of her family did in Turkey (yes, the country). He opened a successful internet and game café. Here in the US, his business model simply would not work. In Turkey, the percentage of families that own a computer and have internet access is still substantially lower when compared to US statistics. Regardless, it shows me that my wife knows where my desires lie.

Finally, that night while out at one of my wife's best friend's birthday party, a friend of ours told me that the gaming store he used to run games and competitions at closed down. He had dozens of people looking for a new ‘home’ and the closest place to play was significantly further away in comparison to their past locations. Apparently they would be willing to travel to our town which happens to be a very short drive two towns over.

Each of the above described events acted like kindling, bringing back the sleeping embers of desire. This isn't the first time I've gone down this path but that's a story for another day.

It's someone's birthday today

Today is going to be a busy day. My son, Owen, is turning one and today is his birthday party. He loves Curious George so my wife has created a monkey-themed party for him which consists of monkies, of course, and the primary color scheme they use in the Curious George books and PBS TV show. This should be a lot of fun!

Planetside what?!

I've been horribly lax about keeping up with industry news over at GameDev.net. Actually, I might as well throw in Gamasutra.com and DevMaster.net as being other neglected sites while I'm at it. This is an issue that I plan on resolving and the first step is to set my home page to GameDev for the time being. That will at least provide the motivational poke that I require.

While catching up on "The Daily GameDev.net" column, I read something interesting. Apparently SOE is planning a sequel to the underplayed game Planetside called Planetside Next. This news has met with widely mixed emotions ranging the entire spectrum from love and anticipation to hate and discontent.

In the article on joystiq.com, John Smedley says, "To me, PlanetSide Next means we get a chance to take the essence of everything that was fun in PlanetSide and make it a lot better ... massive battles on a scale no other FPS will touch ... none of this 64-player stuff ... REALLY MASSIVE."

Now, it is no big secret that I am not one of John's biggest fans so I approach most of what he says with trepidation. For a bit of history, I played PS from beta to launch and beyond. As a fan of wargames, what really drew me in was the sheer epic nature of the game. What other FPS-based game could not only support 450+ players all fighting each other at the same time in the same location but also have the player base to supply those massive numbers of simultaneous fights? PlanetSide. Now the fact that my computer could not handle that many people fighting simultaneously was another matter but not the fault of PS. In my 6 months of playing the game on a daily basis I was able to spectate and participate is some "REALLY MASSIVE" battles, as John calls them. How will 450 people fighting in PS Next differ from 450 people fighting in PS Next? I fail to see the difference.

He claims that they will be carrying only the good game mechanics from PS into PS Next but, from my point of view, he does not always have his finger on the pulse of what constitutes good game mechanics. This is evident by changes that, to my knowledge he has championed, have resulted in a drop in subscription numbers and which overall tend to leave a bad taste in the player's mouths. In John's defense (yes, I can still play the devil's advocate), game design is a line of work that you would have to be a bit crazy to enter into in the first place. No one alive or dead will always know what constitutes great game mechanics because it is completely subjective. What is good to one person is horrible to another person sitting five feet away. You can not please all of the people all of the time, so why try? SOE does what any other company would do with the responsibility of maintaining a persistent world while attempting to add in more content and that is to do what will make the most people happy. Because when most people are happy, they will keep paying and filling SOE's coffers.

I can see that I'm beginning to diverge from the topic at hand so I will close out by saying that at some point I will check out PlanetSide Next because it is one of my favorite genres; the MMOFPS. Let us hope that it will be a superior game. At least this time around, my computer will be able to handle it.

First!

I had to do it.

If you are a fan of forums, you should be familiar with people replying to a new thread with "First!" (and subsequent sequentially numbered posts) to show that they have read the post (or not in some cases). I read these monosyllabic posts as "Hey, look at me! I am cool and could not think of anything constructive to say" and consider them to be a cry for help. But you know what? This is my blog and I can do pretty much whatever I want here. Plus, don't expect just one or two word posts from me because that will simply not happen. Now for those that do not frequent forums of any kind or have not run across this behavior yet, you have just learned something that you could have probably went the remainder of your life not needing to know. Now, now, there is no need to thank me. However, I will accept monetary gifts at any time.

And now onto the reason I chose to start this blog. I've always wanted to start a blog but have not for a variety of reasons including lack of time, lack of material and a nagging feeling that no one would care. However, I am getting older and I have found that talking to a wall can be beneficial. I can get things off my proverbial chest and walk away from the experience feeling better. As a father of a 3 year old girl, I have discovered that the experience of speaking to her regarding her behavior is quite akin to that of speaking to a brick wall. I now consider it practice for blogging.

Why blogger? Well, I have a Facebook account, at the request of my wife, but rarely use it mostly because I can not access it from work to check updates or change my status and when I am home, jumping onto Facebook is one of the last things I really want to do. I also do not own a mobile phone like my wife's Blackberry so I lose out on the functionality that one provides with regards to the internet. And even when I do log onto Facebook I find all the updates to be a mess. Because I log on infrequently, I am inundated with a slew of information that I find time-consuming to sort through and that is with less than 1/10th the friends my wife has. I truly don't know how she does it.

What are you going to blog about? Life in general. There will be plenty of posts regarding my family as well as my academic pursuits. One thing that will be abundant here are posts regarding gaming, game design and programming. So let's see where this all leads us. Sit back, check in when you want and give your input. Please. No really, come back.