In a move that is causing a small bit of Déjà vu, Blackberry and Unity released the following to the press today:

 

BlackBerry (NASDAQ:BBRY)(TSX:BB) and Unity Technologies today announced that they are working together to create a Unity deployment add-on product for BlackBerry® 10 smartphones, empowering Unity's over 1.5 million strong developer community to publish their games on these powerful platforms. The deployment tools will also be available for BlackBerry PlayBook™ tablets when they run the BlackBerry 10 OS.

BlackBerry 10 will now be one of the premiere mobile platforms supported by the market-leading Unity Engine. The deployment tool is currently in development by Unity Technologies and BlackBerry, and will be released as an add-on option for Unity.

"Unity developers have an extensive catalogue of incredible mobile games, many of which are award-winning. We're excited to offer Unity developers easy access to the new powerful and rich BlackBerry 10 platform," said David Helgason, CEO, Unity Technologies. "We're eager to provide them with another exciting avenue to have their games devoured by an audience hungry for entertainment."

BlackBerry will also seed the Unity development community with BlackBerry 10 smartphones for testing to provide developers the best possible environment to create amazing games for the new platform. Unity and BlackBerry will hold developer meet up events in Europe and North America and will give qualified developer attendees Unity Pro and BlackBerry 10 smartphones. Details are coming soon, so stay tuned to BlackBerry Developers Blog.

"One of the driving forces for success for a mobile platform is a strong games offering. BlackBerry customers have already shown their hunger for mobile gaming, with games being one of the strongest categories on the BlackBerry World storefront and continuing to grow in popularity," said Alec Saunders, Vice President, Developer Relations and Ecosystems at BlackBerry. "We are thrilled to work with Unity and to propel the momentum we are seeing in games on BlackBerry even further. Soon Unity developers will be able to use this deployment tool to quickly and easily offer their games to BlackBerry customers."

Availability

A free beta version of the Unity add-on will be made available to a limited number of qualified developers in the spring. Unity is expecting the final release to be available in the summer of 2013.

Looks like a good opportunity to get your hands on some Blackberry hardware if you are already a Unity developer.  Or you hands on Unity if you are a Blackberry developer.

Myself, I actually have a Playbook which is a pretty nice device and went to buy a Z10 for my wife today and they were basically sold out everywhere I checked… most places laughed and said they sold out in minutes.  So, say what you will about Blackberry/RIM, they might actually be back in the game.  The device itself is quite capable, with a dual core 1.5GHZ Snapdragon processor.  Let’s not forget too that BB10 is actually QNX, a wickedly fast embedded OS that’s been in development for many years.  On top, I have to cheer for RIM er… Blackberry, they are just down the road from me and full disclosure, I own some stock ( which I’ve really enjoyed the past few weeks ), but then, almost every Canadian owns a bit of RIM stock, directly or indirectly…

I will certainly say, Blackberry Developer support is certainly better, as is their focus on gaming, with the Gameplay library, involvement in a few open source game libraries, the portathon they held a few months back and now bringing Unity on board.

Now the déjà vu part…  I SWEAR Playbook was already one of the supported platforms for Unity as part of UNITE.

News RIM, Unity

Rim have released Gameplay 1.6, a 3D cross platform library for writing games for Blackberry 10, Playbook, PC, Mac, Android and iOS devices using C++.  This is a project we have been following here at GameFromScratch for quite a while, and given the complexity, its amazing just how fast you can get up to speed.

If C++ is your language of choice ( or LUA for that matter ), you really should check out Gameplay, it’s completely free and open source.

The following are the release notes of the 1.6 release:

• Adds file Stream interface for reading/writing files instead of using fread/fwrite.
• Adds Terrain class to support for heightmap based terrains featuring LOD, multiple surface layers, loading from PNG, RAW8/16, full transform, physics, patch culling and verticle skirt for cracks.
• Adds object-space normal map generation to gameplay-encoder for terrain normal map generation.
• Adds scene support for loading .terrain files in .scene files.
• Adds scene support for inline cameras to .scene files.
• Adds suppoft for defining .scene files without 'path' to gpb. New node can not be create in .scene file.
• Adds static Scene::getScene(const char*) to query currently active scenes in a game, helpful for script access.
• Adds support for multiple translate, rotate and scale commands in a single node entity within .scene files, processed in-order they are defined.
• Adds scene support for material auto binding scene ambient color, light color and light direction.
• Adds support for setting the depth compare function on materials.
• Adds support for texture/sampler arrays being passed to materials.
• Adds support for loading uncompressed DDS textures for the following formats: R8G8B8, A8R8G8B8, A8B8G8R8, X8R8G8B8, X8B8G8R8
• Adds improvments to prefer higher quality mipmap generation.
• Adds improved Gamepad API support for button enumeration, triggers and some mobile Gamepad support on BlackBerry.
• Adds additional gameplay-tests for billboards, forms, gamepads and lights.
• Adds support for launching the browser via launchURL(const char*).
• Adds physics support for setLinearFactor and setAngularFactor on rigid bodies.
• Adds methods to PhysicsCollisionObject to allow conversion to subclass types (i.e. PhysicsRigidBody, PhysicsCharacter, etc) from script.
• Adds option for fullscreen without width/height config to use native desktop resolution.
• Adds Linux support for OpenAL PulseAudio back-end.
• Adds support for latest Bullet Physics 2.81 with NEON optimizations for mobile targets.
• Adds support for preprocessor directive NO_LUA_BINDINGS in the gameplay project to omit inclusion of generated lua bindings in compilation for developer mode value.
• Adds optimizations to Lua generator to only write generated files if they differ from existing files, reducing both build times and committing of unchanged script binding files.
• Adds changes to Slider for setValueTextVisible, setValueTextAlignment, setValueTextPrecision and getters.
• Adds Microsoft Windows 7 64-bit support.
• Adds Apple iOS 6 support.
• Fixes to external-deps to reduce the size of the libraries on Windows.
• Fixes for Android to no longer need to copy files to the SD card before reading them. None of the Android samples require an SD card.
• Fixes for animation of opacity on UI and fonts.
• Fixes in UI for removing controls and also setVisible(bool).
• Fixes for UI controls missing on MacOSX.
• Fixes for setting UI alignment programmatically.
• Fixes for lighting shaders.
• Fixes to the texture minification mode from GL_LINEAR_MIPMAP_LINEAR to GL_NEAREST_MIPMAP_LINEAR for newly created textures with mipmaps.
• Fixes minor memory leaks and possible access violations when calling Game::exit() from script.
• Fixes physics debug drawing for large scenes causing the internal MeshBatch to grow to an enormous size.

This release certainly makes Gameplay on the desktop seem much more viable.  Terrain support is certainly a nice new addition as well.

Good job Gameplay team.

News, Programming RIM, Engine, CPP, LUA

RIM is hard at work on Blackberry 10 and they continue to focus heavily on making sure there is plenty of software available at launch.  Now they are targeting game developers with the newest promotion.

Got game? Get Rewards.

The BlackBerry Got Game Port-a-Thon starting on November 16th is a 36-hour event dedicated to helping you get your gaming apps launched for BlackBerry 10. Since it’s a virtual event, participating is simple and hassle-free. You just register and log in from the comfort of your own space. You bring your existing gaming apps or build new gaming apps for BlackBerry 10, and we’ll have experts on hand around the clock to help you get your gaming apps up and running on BlackBerry 10.

So, why would you want to?  Well of course other than supporting an additional target, there are additional incentives:

Getting your apps into the BlackBerry App World storefront before BlackBerry 10 launches means that you can be among the first to benefit from the universe of app-hungry customers out there. You’ll also get rewards for porting and building.

• Get one or two gaming apps approved – $100 per eligible app.
• Get between two and five gaming apps approved – $100 per eligible App and one (1) BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablet
• Get between five and ten gaming apps approved - $100 per eligible App + one (1) BlackBerry PlayBook tablet + FOR THE FIRST ONE HUNDRED (100) QUALIFIED PARTICIPANTS ONLY one (1) Dev Alpha Device
• Get more than 10 gaming apps approved - $100 per app + one (1) BlackBerry PlayBook tablet + FOR THE FIRST TEN (10) QUALIFIED PARTICIPANTS ONLY one (1) Dev Alpha Device + trip to Game Developers Conference in San Francisco March 25-29, 2013

So, port 10 apps over you get 1,000$ a Playbook and a dev Alpha device.  Of course, if you were looking to port your game to Blackberry OS 10, having the resources available on demand could prove invaluable.

I have a Playbook myself and have long since intended to look into game development on this device.  I really want to see RIM bounce back this generation for a number of reasons.  First, they are really moving in the right direction from a developer perspective with good developer tools ( WebWorks and QNX ), sponsoring projects like the Gameplay SDK, the next generation of software and hardware seems to be really good and finally, they are in my own back yard, I live probably 45 minutes away from their world headquarters.  Oh, and I own RIM stock, so I suppose I should mention that.  Then again, indirectly pretty much every Canadian owns RIM stock.

So… go RIM.

News News, RIM