Unity cancelled

**James** · 12 Dec 2004, 01:21 AM

I actually did expect this to happen simply because it's Minter's strong suit- releasing killer games for dead systems. It's what he does best, and frustrating as it is to see that he'll never get a crack at wide recognition because of it, I've still gotten to play some great games.

Ah well, nothing to do but wait to see what he does next, I guess. Hopefully this won't be another two+ year long project on a system with a limited lifespan for anyone who isn't Nintendo.

James

**Frogacuda** · 12 Dec 2004, 02:20 AM

He didn't release games for dead systems, he released games for marginal systems. His games were probably the biggest releases on the Jaguar and Nuon, and those platforms needed his support. It's different than a once-relevant system with a shrinking market share.

**James** · 12 Dec 2004, 02:45 AM

Fair enough for Jaguar, but after this Christmas season I'm equating the Gamecube with them. Much as I love my Gamecube the writing is, if not on the wall, then at the very least somebody's shaking the spray-paint to put it there. As for Nuon, I'm sorry but there's no way that system was anything but DOA.

Unity follow-up from Yak, off his forum-

Meh.

Tough couple of days... obviously i have known this was coming a bit in advance, and it's made it all the more difficult being around of late hearing so many comments about how people were looking forward to Unity and knowing myself that it was approaching a stage of, er, Game Over...

We tried, we tried our level best, but in the end it just took too long to be viable on this iteration. Unity needs to be a fusion of many things - light, gameplay, audio - and in the end although it *was* working, it *was* coming together in ways that were pretty much how I hoped they would be, there wasn't *enough* of all those things for it actually to fly, and we ran out of runway... and in the end, better to abort the takeoff rather than go too early and end up crashing and burning.

You can walk away from an abort in one piece and have another try...

It's a really complex process trying to do something like Unity. *Much* of the job is research, but it's research done against the clock... you're not just plugging things in to a formula iterated one more time with better graphics, you're trying out genuinely new stuff. Sometimes you work for a month and you produce something extraordinary. Sometimes you work for a month and then throw it all away because it wasn't leading in the direction you'd hoped. It's hard to do that, and come in on schedule with something that you're happy with inside a commercially viable timeframe.

And in the end if a job's worth doing, it's worth doing well; and in the timescale we had I alone couldn't deliver. I'm truly sorry about that and I owe my apologies to everyone who waited for this with such enthusiasm. I'm gutted too, I really *wanted* to make Unity so that I could play the damn thing. I'll still not be satisfied until one day I do.

But it's not been a bad thing. Research is research; I've done a lot in the last couple of years, and I've learned from it; I'm quite happy on whatever graphics hardware falls to hand, after having had time to find out for myself how it all works. I'm comfortable in 3D . If and when there is another attempt, I'll be much better prepared than I was before.

And I'm not the only coder at the barn now. Goat knows I never thought I would ever find anyone I could share the Llamasoft vision with, but hey, it happened. And Giles is way better than maths than me as well as being an all-round ninja coder. And with two beasts to share the load instead of just one, I think things will work out much better in the future. We work pretty well in parallel .

And to be completely honest, I still believe that the best thing to come out of Llamasoft in all the years of its existence isn't Unity or any game at all or even a lightsynth: it's what we have right here, this community that just aggregated around some old coder's site and became something excellent and unexpected, a place that we all somehow call home, something that doesn't "belong" to me or to Llamasoft but something that is shared equally by all of us. This place, and you guys, helped to change my life in enormously positive ways. There is great goodness here, and I am happy and proud to be a part of it.

Many thanks to all of you who have said such kind things despite the disappointment of what happened, and don't worry, I'm not going to give up, and the day I retire is the day they pry the compiler from my cold dead hooves . There's lots more good stuff to come, that I promise you .

Thanks, all, iz all.

\
(:-) - Yak
/

**Frogacuda** · 12 Dec 2004, 10:28 AM

Originally Posted by James

Fair enough for Jaguar, but after this Christmas season I'm equating the Gamecube with them.

Yeah, but I'm saying releasing a game at the peak of a marginal system's life is different than releasing a game after the commercial life of a once-mainstream system. Nintendo will be moving on by then. Unity won't matter then. Tempest 2000 and 3000 did matter alot to the Nuon and Jag. They were the best selling games on those systems.

**JefmcC** · 13 Dec 2004, 12:25 PM

Originally Posted by James

VLM isn't dead, you just don't like it. There's a difference.

If I don't like it so much, why do I have a Samsung DVD player that takes forever to load movies, and is non-progressive scan? Oh, maybe it's because I bought it for the VLM and Tempest 3k?

Yes, I like the VLM, but it is dead. By dead, I mean the market doesn't really care about it. I like it just fine, so I guess that makes me a technological necrophiliac.

Originally Posted by PBMax

A one trick pony? Maybe, if that one trick includes incredible psychadellic graphics and some of the best shooting gameplay ever.

That's right he's a one-man team, and he's coded some of the best shooters on the face of the earth. Who else does that?

Well, yeah that's the one trick I speak of. It's a great "trick", no doubt.

I still have my Jaguar and Tempest 2k and Defender2K, NUON and T3K, and I have the Gridrunner demo on my work and home PCs.

I'm just saying that Unity looked pretty much like the same old VLM/plasma effects, only this time wrapped around a crappy looking game. Almost as if the effects WERE the game. The fact is, REZ beat him to the punch.

Whatever, I'll look forward to whatever he puts out next. Actually, I'd even take T3K on any system at 60 fps in a heart beat. In the mean time, maybe I'll purchase the full version of Gridrunner.

**James** · 13 Dec 2004, 04:56 PM

I'm sure he'd appreciate the cash, so by all means buy Gridrunner++. However, you can also get the enhanced version free.

I really don't think VLM is dead, I just don't think it's ever had a chance to be shown off. It was included free with the Jaguar CD and the Nuon, and there's just no way it can be argued that either of those was a fair showing to the public. At the time Unity was announced I think Gamecube would have been that fair showing, but right now it'd be a niche game on a dying system.

James

**Frogacuda** · 05 May 2006, 10:48 AM

So yeah, evidently Minter has revived some of the idead from Unity for a new game. It's not Unity per se, but it is a new shooter based around next-gen light synthesis (which is really all we ever knew of Unity to begin with), so enough of a revival for me. I understand there was much more to the unity concept, but since most of that was never divulged to the public, I can't feel bad about what we're missing.

Super-early, still. 360 and maybe PC seem to be the target platforms.