I really love this text "Your license does not cover Xbox 360 Publishing, but fear not! There is a way out of your misery. (Contact Sales)" ... I currently don't need Xbox 360 support, or PS3 support, or Wii support ... so I guess that saves me for me ... read more about my current struggles in the Unity forums.

 

Well ... seriously, though ... I've been playing around with Unity 3 and I just love it. I've already ported Traces of Illumination, of course. There's still some issues like the Web player / Dashboard Widget not really working at all, and networking also not really working too well at the moment ... but, I've already integrated some of the new audio features - and that's things that I've been waiting for ever since I started developing Traces of Illumination. So I'm sure you can imagine I'm extremely excited!!!

 

Another really great thing is that Mono has been updated to 2.6.3 which rocks big time ... and PhysX now exposes layer-based collisions (should also be very useful for me - I need that for the game-server to have different game groups play in the same level without interacting; currently, I'm switching off IgnoreCollisions for each individual object which is just really not elegant at all ;-) ).

 

Even though I'm planning to eventually move the networking in Traces of Illumination from Unity's built-in networking over to Photon because that gives me more flexibility in setting up my server-infrastructure, I'm very glad that Raknet is getting updated in Unity 3 and will probably have a big beta-playing session once Unity 3 beta 3 is out (still with Unity's built-in networking).

 

As we're not allowed to publish Web players with the beta versions of Unity, you'll have to download a standalone version of Traces of Illumination ... but that shouldn't be a problem (currently, I'm working on an auto-update feature, so that will be quite nice to get standalones updated whenever there's a new version available ... the auto-update won't be completely automatic but you'll get a nice notification and direct link to the download of the most current version; keep in mind this is a one-man project and I already am WAAAYYY behind schedule ... well, actually not really - but that's just the benefit of not even having a real schedule and instead following the "it's done when it's done"-approach).

 

There's also quite some other interesting news but I think I shouldn't share those, yet.

 

Well, just some really obvious news (not really news ... but ... well, news to share): There will be versions of Traces of Illumination both for iPhone, iPad and iPod as well as for selected Android devices (e.g. Nexus One ;-) ). As those are rather limited devices, probably not all the levels will be available but one thing that will be possible for sure is to play together with Android, iPhone, Mac and Windows. Unity FTW!!! ;-)