Richard Leggett on New Media

Over the weekend I received a copy of the first issue of Unity Developer Magazine, thanks to Charles Hinshaw. I had high hopes for this magazine, largely because Unity has an incredibly vibrant community of developers and artists. I was not at all disappointed.

The magazine contains a variety of features, including an in depth look at a big budget Edutainment game “Wolfquest", incredible artwork created in Unity itself, an illustrated introduction to vectors, A* Pathfinding, creating dashboard widgets and a look at some of the hottest Unity productions from a selection of studios and independents.

I’ve lurked on the Unity forums for a long time, and one thing you seem to find with some 3D-coding oriented communities, (and that goes for the mailing lists for Director and Papervision/Away3D too,) is that there are really passionate technical discussions going on along with the layman questions. There are real 3D gurus on these lists, talking about things that are frankly way over my head, but it gives you a sense that there’s real progress being made here, that they are all striving toward improving the platform and hopefully making 3D on the web another staple tool rather than a rare thing to behold.

Having said that, Unity is aimed at making it as easy as possible to get 3D out there on the web, desktop and other platforms, using JavaScript or C# and integrating very well with, free (Blender), low cost (Cheetah) or high-cost 3D tools (Maya). I can’t help but think Unity would be hugely successful if the IDE ran in Windows too (especially as it uses Mono), but I’ve read the reasons the dev team have for keeping it Mac only.

So all in all if you’re into 3D I’d pick up a subscription to this magazine. It completely encapsulates the grass-roots feel of the community, particularly with the regular snapshot of someone’s workspace, yet it remains professional and high quality throughout. Congratulations on getting this first issue out and I wish the magazine every success.