Aw, this was getting another draft starting to remain forever a draft. So certainly no news for many of you, but for the rest, here we go:
More and more people are involved into interactive real-time 3D. Actually not so few articles of mine (like this one here) are dealing with this aspect, so I am kinda repeating myself … I hope you don't mind too much, hehe
😉 8)
Interactive real-time 3D is getting easier to use and even produce – games are driving the hardware and software industry intensively. Like other technologies that are initially only affordable for few, over years things may become part of the everyday life of many people.
Besides products and platforms of big companies, solutions like Torque and Unity3D from smaller companies are playing an interesting role in all this …
Gamasutra reported early this month that Criterion Co-Founder Lau-Kee joined the Unity3D team as adviser. He says:
The last several years has brought a plethora of entrants into the video game tools & middleware sector, but Unity is the only company I have found that has the technology, the people and the strategy to be truly transformational
Moreover
Mark my words, the democratization of the games industry has begun
For additional information you can read this interview or David's blog, where he also states
[…] our userbase tripled, there’s probably more than 10 times more games out with Unity now than in 2007 […] we could afford to more than double the team […]
There is another interesting interview at developmag, entitled 3D ehr One-For-All.
😉
I like this passage:
[…] they absolutely understand that they are answerable to the community of Unity users. You just need to take a look at the Unity forums – what you see there is a true community, vibrant, thriving and creative. […]
[…] in this sense Unity is more like using, say, Photoshop than a game engine […]
This is also visible in Unity3D IRC user channel as it peaks now at 50 people! Compare this to #virtoolsdev's peak which was around 16!
On Virtools forum someone once said, that real-time 3d tech is not like i.e. photoshop. But if you consider where Autodesk is aiming for, we will probably have more real-time 3d applications that will be like i.e. photshop! In Silverlight/Blend 3D is one type of asset like any other. Real-time 3D slowly becomes a standard media asset like video or photos!
Harrison from Atari said last year:
[…] from an Atari perspective… I think we would want to work with creators of all types, and that's why I'm so interested in Unity, because it does democratize development
He also says:
Managing the funnel of recruitment, training, educating, and getting the skills shortage, skills gap closed, is kind of an industry-wide problem…
This is interesting, because I had the same idea for a while about Virtools as I thought that Virtools once was in the position to do the same. Although I intentionally started to post less suggestions, feedbacks, bug-reports etc. – due my frustrations of how one-sided this all turned out to be – I still suggested Dassault Systemes on their board last summer to use Virtools to get people in the boat, for that there is a recruitment pool for 3DVia mp!
You know, just the idea of democratizing 3D via mass and not premium markets – basically what the user-base actually understood under 3D-For-All!
The GarageGame guys share the vision:
In 1999, myself and my partners started GarageGames with the goal of democratizing development, and brought a low cost game engine to market. We started calling shareware authors Indies, and changed the landscape of Indie and low end development.
I already mentioned InstantAction, the web3D game portal. It's something that once would have been possible with Virtools too – in theory – but the vision lacked and pricing model was not permitting 3rd party teams to do so. Now InstantAction has
[…] managed to cross the 1 million members mark only 9 months after we covered their launch […]
[…] 2009 will be a big year for this service. IA will increasingly become a great place for Indies to make money