{"id":1283,"date":"2011-07-13T15:39:27","date_gmt":"2011-07-13T14:39:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.feedingedge.co.uk\/blog\/?p=1283"},"modified":"2011-07-13T15:40:33","modified_gmt":"2011-07-13T14:40:33","slug":"all-the-pieces-are-falling-in-place-unity3d","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.feedingedge.co.uk\/blog\/2011\/07\/13\/all-the-pieces-are-falling-in-place-unity3d\/","title":{"rendered":"All the pieces are falling in place – Unity3d"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Back in late 2009 I wrote a post saying we had all the pieces<\/a> to start seriously building virtual world toolkits and environments from off the shelf pieces.
\nToday I have seen two releases arrive of new hosted toolkits and services, both using Unity3d<\/a> and some of the other pieces related to hosting a server component. They are both from stalwarts of the virtual worlds industry and both with former close ties to Linden Lab and Second Life<\/a>.
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\nIn not particular order the first is from SecondPlaces.net called Unifier<\/a>. As with all Unity environment this benefits from the browser plugin to let it run on most browsers. According to the site its using smartfoxserver<\/a> to broker the positions of the other avatars and flash voice for VOIP.
\nThe key is that it acts both as a hosted service on Amazon EC2 (i.e. thats where the server will be running for your instance) or as a run yourself service. Smartfoxserver is a relatively simple java application to get going on a server with some config for ports etc needed. The important parts are it knowing what it needs to keep a track of an what clients subscribe too. There also appear to be lots of interaction with other content, whiteboards etc and the sort of dynamic tools needed to interact online. So a lot of work has gone into productising this.
\nThe second offering is from Tipodean which is both a service to run peer to peer unity3d<\/a> (which looks like it uses the unity3d master server) and an OpenSim to unity3d conversion service. So you can pay to get your build moved from prims to the mesh of unity3d and then have some unity3d polish applied to it.
\nIt is not clear how dynamic any of the environments are, as typically, whilst unity3d can load new assests on the fly it is more complicated to set that up than the ability for people to walk around a fixed environment.
\nThe upshot of all this is that there is more choice and scope for the market to grow. These join the other services out there and form part of an SL counter culture, in a slightly different way to the counter culture of Opensim<\/a>.
\nIt’s all good.<\/p>\n