Wonderful news: Unity 2.1 is out! For details, see the news on unity3d.com!

... to find out: That's not really news anymore. It was actually announced 5 days ago. Almost one week in the past. Well, sorry about that! Usually, there would be a little marketing department that handles the blog full-time, while the development department focusses all their energy on creating the actual game, and the quality assurance department making sure most bugs are found before any beta release. Not to mention departments managing the legal and business affairs, IT-infrastructure, of course, and some others I'm not thinking of right now.

But hey!: This is currently still a one man show, so please be patient when there's six weeks of no blog entries and you get the wonderful and extremely relevant news of a new version of Unity almost a week late. Currently, I need to distribute myself onto making a living (= generate immediate income), developing TRaceON (one huge task), creating promo-materials (soon-to-be-published ;-) ), keeping the Website up and running and enhancing it every once in a while and many many other things I don't want to burden you with right now.

I'm hoping that eventually, some people will find as much enthusiasm in this as I do (or at least half as much - which will still be more than average people could handle ;-) ), so at least the community around this will hopefully soon be supported by a few more people than just myself ;-) ...

David Michael names 3 key traits of The Indie in his book The Indie Game Development Survival Guide: Passion, pace and perserverance. I'd like to add another one (which is, by the way, one of the Qualities of Divine Intention): Patience.

Anyways, the Unity 2.1 release simply rocks! Unity is now moving into the MMO-territory big time, which is incredibly great news for me because that means that by the time the actual development of RaMtiGA is starting, this field should be pretty much a rock solid part of the game engine I'll be using. Right now, some of the key features for me are being able to create a solid build system (which will make my development and deployment process much more efficient - in other words: I'll need to spend less time on stuff that's not very creative, anyways; let the computer do the boring work); much improved control over networking (don't tell anyone I haven't integrated this into TRaceON, yet, as I had originally planned it - they might kick me out of the beta program ;-) ... I'm truly sorry, Larus... but I feel that stuff is solid, anyways); and rendering with shader replacements because that allows for some effects you'll very shortly get to see in TRaceON.

So it's an amazing release, and it's also special because that's the release my very first game will be released with: TRaceON V1.0 will be built with Unity 2.1. Soon! (I'm hesitating to announce the date I have planned for the V1.0 beta1 release because you'll think I'm nuts ... and ... I guess I am ;-) ).

Now I need to head off to some serious Web Service development, so I can pay my bills. ("Contract-first WebService development", if that means anything to you - it only will if you're a tech-person ... for those without such a specific background: it means "making a simple thing complicated in order to be a little more generic").

And sorry to the German folks:

Diesen Blog-Eintrag werde ich leider nicht übersetzen. Aber ich hab das nicht vergessen, und es wird wahrscheinlich in absehbarer Zeit ein "echtes deutsches Blog" auf dieser Seite geben...