Macintosh Triumphant

I have had the luxury of receiving an executive tour of Visual Sports Systems facilities in Concord, Ontario. They really impressed me not only with their core game asset, which in many was both prefigures and superceeds the Nintendo Wii, but also with their knowledge of my favourite, Rapid Prototyping IDEs. So, the big news is,

Unity

Unity Game Development Tool
The Macintosh never had so much market equity as it does now. Unity gives every appearance of being the Virtools for the visual artist. The framework is very similar: graphical IDE, web player and plugin, reduced development time, rapid prototyping that leads to objective C development. The license is cheaper; certainly not as much support. But the idea that it is Mac based is the most interesting one of all, because to date game development on the Mac has been an inordinate chore.

Flash forward: the work group that will make a slick 3D composition IDE for the mac will follow it up with a slick modeling app.


So, dive in. Did I mention you'll need a Mac? Killer app. I love them all.

http://unity3d.com/unity/download
System Requirements

* Mac OS X "Panther" 10.3.9 or later
* Radeon or GeForce graphics card with 32 MB of RAM
* Will run fluently on any Intel Mac
* On PPC based Macs, we recommend a 500MHz G3 processor or faster
* Games will run on Windows 2000/XP and Mac OS X "Jaguar" 10.2
* Games will run on a Rage 128 graphics card or better, depending on complexity.

More on Visual Sports Systems

The day of full-scale in-home gaming is dawning.

Today Was the Busy Day

Today, online, I created my first (and hopefully only) Facebook group: the Virtools Users Group. It is for people interested in doing interactive 3D, animations or games on the Web. Even on Facebook.

Russet Letter Day

The other major thing I did today online was build my first Facebook application. Nothing special, mind you. The traditional "Hello World". Worked great. Take a look.



Now, the only thing I will need from all of you is to install the 3D Life Player plug-in to your browser. This takes about three mouse clicks in Internet Explorer; about six in Firefox. Don't worry, it is no more complicated than installing the Flash plug in; it just that you haven't done it in so long. If you don't want to install the plug-in, that is OK. We are going to be working in 3D; we'll provide you screen shots to keep you updated.