Mono in Games

I have talked about Otee's Unity3D in the past. A company that is building a game runtime and development environment.

Their game runtime provides physics, 3D rendering, audio streaming and execution of developer provided code. Developers can write code in C#, Boo or Javascript, the code gets compiled into CIL, and the Mono runtime turns that into native code, so your javascript is actually compiled down to x86 code.

The guys at Unity have a few interesting updates:

Global Conflicst/Palestine: Global Conflicts is about to be released. This game is not a point-and-shoot game, in this game you play a journalist and its your job to interview the players in a conflict.

CNN interviewed the game developers here and discussed the game:

WolfQuest: A network based game in which you are part of a wolf pack.

A video for the wolf-hunting game.

Libraries: Starting with Unity 1.6 it is now possible to use externally developed libraries, in the past all the code had to be bundled and managed inside Unity.

This will be incredibly useful to have game widgets that can be reused across multiple games (on-screen keyboard entry, scores, buttons, scrollbars and all the rest).

BigBrainz: an educational game vendor is moving their games development to Unity.

More: Unity's updated gallery has many other games and applications (including the new Freeverse games for the Mac):

We are currently trying to find a collaboration with the Otee guys so the Unity runtime is available for Linux. What we would want is that every game produced with Unity would run unmodified in Linux.

Today they offer a great "Build for..." button in Unity that today generates game executables for Windows and Mac. Either as standalone programs, or as "web plugins". What we want is for them to be able to add Linux to the mix.

I would personally love to see MonoDevelop running with Gtk+/Quartz so that game developers could use a more advanced IDE than the current text editor that they are using with Unity.

Update: Otee is hiring.

If you live in Denmark, and you have experiences with games, low-level coding and consoles, you might want to apply to their job posting. They are looking for Nintento Wii developers.