Unity 2.1 is OUT!

Awesome. Shadows on Terrains. w00t!! Just in time for gamejam!

FTA:

Streaming Terrains

A seamless world is key when making an MMO. With Unity 2.1 you no longer are limited to a single terrain. Immerse your user in an endless landscape, based on streamed data.


Real-Time Shadows on Terrains

For extra kicks, lights and shadow projectors make terrains more distinct. And with Unity Pro, real-time shadows make them even more dazzling.

http://unity3d.com/unity/whats-new/unity-2.1

What Rocks?

Owning and running a public site (gamejam.org) which people are actually (almost) using.

I've spent a week of spare time hours building and adding features, which has been quite refreshing. In my day job(s), I need to worry about lots of problems which simply don't exist on a simple site designed to serve a few hundred people.

So far, I've implemented these features:

- Signup / Verification by email
- Diary / Twitter style microblog system
- Atom feeds
- Etag caching (only used for non-authenticated clients)
- Chat system
- Screenshots
- Team creation, invites
- Polls, comments
- Member profiles

I'm planning to add a trust graph, file uploads and... whatever else pops into my head. I don't know where this burst of development energy has come from, but I hope it lasts.

27 GameJammers!

So far, I've had 27 legit registrations for gamejam.

This provided sufficient motivation to add some more features to the web site.

gamejam.org now has member profiles, polls, comments, teams and developer diaries. There is also an atom feed for diary entries.

It's all written in Pylons, with help from jQuery and js-kit.

First steps to GameJam!

Registration is up and running at http://gamejam.org/.

There is more to the web app to be developed, but I'll hold off until enough people register their interest.

Software is an Approximation.

Software is never correct. It is only any approximation of what we believe the solution to be.

Programmers can never be perfectionists. Compromise is inevitable.

What Sucks?

When you're struggling with a tough problem...

you google some keywords...

and the first page of results are your own blog posts... :-(