Entering the Asset Store

We have been active in Second Life since 2006. Browsing through the seven years in business, there's a long row of successful products and satisfied customers behind us. We have also provided thousands of designers the resources they needed to incorporate into their projects. Counting Bytegang's complete production today, we're past the 700 pieces mark - from simple prefabs to complex autonomous systems, some even with server side programming.

With our numerous brands we've touched virtually every area of creativity. We've done avatar design under Dirty Lynx and our apparel, skins, hairstyles, accessories or complete avatars are widely spread and loved. Hanzo Blades although not very active lately is still perceived as a benchmark in weapons production and probably every cyber samurai owns at least one of our blades. We run a lively airport with automated traffic control, where air pirates fly the airplanes powered by our sophisticated flight simulation system that has yet to find a par in terms of realism. The Corse GP racing track is a legend of it's own among the racers. Not only do we produce some of the best looking vehicles and invested huge efforts into their operating systems, we also run a racing track that is tightly bound with them in an organic synergy. And certainly - Prefabrica - our most successful brand. It has literally become a synonym for stock creative in Second Life. Our 3D models, textures or sound effects have become the foundation of a huge and wonderful collection of products. Prefabrica was always a guarantee of quality and assurance in the wild waters of free creativity of Second Life. We've been here for the creators for a long time and we mean to stay so. However:

It's an important day for Prefabrica today. We're taking first steps into an uncharted territory. It's the realm of Unity Asset Store. The store provides seamless in-Editor access to resources for the thousands of Unity game developers. And we see it as a great opportunity to cooperate with other teams and designers. We were able to bring some of our meshes from Second Life as well as put together a few new sets. We're entering the market in modest way with six initial packages but the wave is coming. There will be our complete line of textures available soon, and, for the first time really Prefabrica CODE is coming with some snipplets you'll love to use.

Flufee goes Android - and Bytegang too!

I've decided to post a little bit after quite some time. There's a good reason for it and the reason is Flufee. Namely it's Flufee's new adventure - and this time outside of Second Life.

Flufee was the pioneer of mesh in Second Life. We've made the character along with Yobee during the mesh beta era, and it was available at the Dirty Lynx store just as the mesh imports hit the main grid. Being one of the first mesh avatars out there at the time it was greatly successful. During the following year many thousands of Second Life users have purchased the avatar, either in regular or the later introduced tiny size, in one of the many colours. Some do even wear the Flufee apparel which we added to the product line in 2012. Although Flufee and Yobee were the first ones, soon there came friends to join the gang - and it totals almost two dozen characters today. Flufee even got his own website at www.flufee.com.

It's time for the next step. Flufee for Second Life, although wonderful and charming, suffered from a few limitations and although we love the metaverse, we decided it's time to bring Flufee and the gang to another platform as well. Actually not just one platform. We're heading towards all the iPhones, iPads, Nexus tablets, Galaxy family smartphones, and Chinese overnight miracles... soon even the TV in your living room. What allows us to do that is Unity.

Because Unity Rules!

We've been playing with Unity game engine for some time now and it's a wonderful dev environment. It's not even that far from our Second Life expertise and that's really handy. The most important thing for us is that it exports one project to multiple platforms (I mentioned some of them above). This opens up the wide world of various devices we can port to - and we see that as a great opportunity to show our stuff to more folks. Much more folks actually.

Another great feature Unity has is the Mecanim animation engine which allows seamless blending of animations and their targeting.  Moreover it is really easy and fun to use (important factor!). And this is where Unity meets our mesh avatars. We've been playing with Flufee in Unity and the outcome is our first Android application! It's certainly very modest, but hey ... "It's Something!" :) Flufee gets real time animations, reacts to your voice and if you manage to find the right triggers it even dances. The app itself is certainly free and you can support us with a payment that unlocks some extras. It's being first released onto Android devices on Google Play, but we're busy fine tuning the iOS version too at the moment. Check out the video we've just published:

There's more to Unity and Bytegang than just Flufee apps. We will be releasing first Prefabrica products for creators on the Unity Asset Store pretty soon. And, really, that's just the beginning. I will have some truly wonderful news for the Second Life creators concerning Unity. But for now - Let's go, pirates!