With so many interesting and varied projects being shared with us at any given moment, whether via direct tags or the #MadeWithUnity and #UnityTips hashtags, it can be hard to keep up with all that’s happening within our community. Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered. Sit back, relax, and enjoy this roundup of highlights that showcase everything you need to know about what the community got up to last month.Each Monday, we celebrate a milestone hit by one of our creators. From new game launches to awards won, we are constantly in awe at your achievements!Throughout August we celebrated the launch of Lost in Play by Happy Juice Games, the launch of As Dusk Falls by INTERIOR/NIGHT, and Dot's Home by Rise-Home Stories Project for winning big at the Games for Change Awards!Tuesdays are dedicated to #UnityTips on Twitter, and last month Massive Monster, makers of Cult of the Lamb, took over @UnityGames to share tips on how to make your 2D Sprites work harder (1,2,3,4,5).Some other great tips that were shared include Ehsan Ehrari’s quick and easy way to neaten up your workflow if your layers end up getting messy and Sunny Valley Studio’s tip on how to fix holes in your shadows.We share tips on our Twitter channels every Tuesday, so keep tagging us and using the #UnityTips hashtag!We love seeing your works in progress, and each Friday we share the projects that have us searching for a playable demo.August was no exception! Rollerdrome by Roll 7 had us mesmerized with a peek under the hood at the prototype to final game transition, Grimm Tales made a pool of water look so refreshing that all we could think about was going for a swim, and François Martineau sent our imagination racing about what other great foes we’d encounter on our hero’s journey.Each time we browse through the #MadeWithUnity hashtag across social media, we’re always amazed at the creativity and love you bring to your projects. Keep sharing!Last month, the Unity YouTube saw a flurry of activity with two new entries into our Meet the Creator series and a sizzle reel for gamescom 2022.Want more? We have you covered with two amazing YouTube playlists you need to keep your eye on.We love #MadeWithUnityMade with Unity Game TrailersLast month on Twitch we:Sat down with INTERIOR/NIGHT, the team behind As Dusk Falls, to gain insights into their development: unique character pipelines that blend 2D and 3D, the use of Unity Timeline, their companion app, and more.Skated into the Rollerdrome with Roll_7 to look at level design, shaders, physics, and more.Spoke to Thomas Brush, creator of Father, who shared his approach to pitching to publishers, crowdfunding, and demoing.Don’t forget to follow us on Twitch and hit the notification bell so you never miss a stream. If you miss us live no sweat, we upload full streams to our YouTube playlist.We kicked off August with 40% off select Asset Store tools and packages to spark your imagination. Then, Daniel Zeller took over the @AssetStore Twitter to share tips on the Fluffy Grooming Tool, and so did Renaud Forestié from More Mountains, who offered insights on how you can use FEEL to level up your game.For even more on assets, see how the smaller teams behind popular game Sable and indie mobile business Tinytouchtales have used Asset Store resources to speed up game development and save time.Each Friday, we also feature beautiful assets made by our publisher community. Whether it’s something new, or a popular tool that has been around for a while, we love to see the assets in action. Check out some of what was shared in August below!InfiniGRASS by ArtnGameGPU Grass by Dan PhilipsScreen Ripple by Steven GerrardElemental Animations by Kevin IglesiasDo you want to show off your work? Make sure to use the #AssetStore hashtag!And finally, here’s a non-exhaustive list of Made with Unity games released in August. See any on the list that have already become new favorites?Big Ambitions, Hovgaard Games (August 1)The Mortuary Assistant, DarkStone Digital (August 2)Two Point Campus, Two Point Studios (August 9)Stereo Boy, Main Gauche Games (August 9)Farthest Frontier, Crate Entertainment (August 9)Lost in Play, Happy Juice Games (August 10)Arcade Paradise, Nosebleed Interactive (August 11)Cult of the Lamb, Massive Monster (August 11)Rollerdrome, Roll7 (August 16)Cursed to Golf, Chuhai Labs (August 18)Midnight Fight Express, Jacob Dzwinel (August 23)I Was a Teenage Exocolonist, Northway Games (August 25)ORX, johnbell (August 30)Immortality, Sam BarlowHalf Mermaid (August 30)Tinykin, Splashteam (August 30)That’s a wrap for August! Want more as it happens? Don’t forget to follow us on social media.

Macworld Super-weird bugs in Messages are nothing new, but this latest one is a real head-scratcher: If you try to send an audio message with the phrase “Dave and Buster’s,” it won’t work. Why would that specific phrasing cause a problem? A coding expert has cracked the case. I won’t say “and the reason will shock you,” but if you’re anything like me, you’ll find it interesting. First, let me explain what happens when the bug triggers. At first, the audio message (“I’m off to eat lunch at Dave and Buster’s,” as an example) appears to send normally. It shows up in the Messages thread to the recipient, along with a transcript of the content. No problem is flagged. It’s at the recipient’s end that we spot the issue. Initially the recipient sees the ellipsis icon, indicating that something is being typed or sent… but this carries on, and carries on, and eventually disappears. And at this point there is no indication that anything has been sent at all: no message, no message transcript, no message failed notification. In fact, if the recipient didn’t happen to have the app open, or had it open but was in a different conversation thread, they never would have known something was supposed to be on the way. This bug is new to me, and the first time I heard about it was when it was discussed on Monday in the blog run by Guilherme Rambo, a coding and engineering expert. Rambo, in turn, heard about the bug on the Search Engine podcast, which devoted its May 9 episode to the subject. Rambo reproduced the bug, guessed the problem must be at the recipient end, then plugged that device into his Mac and started looking at logs. And from that point it doesn’t appear to have taken long for him to work out what was going on: iOS’s transcription engine was recognizing the name of the U.S. restaurant chain, changing it to the correct corporate branding (“Dave & Buster’s,” with an all-important ampersand), and then passing that into the XHTML code used to send a transcript with the audio message. The problem isn’t being caused by the words Dave and Buster’s, but by the ampersand character between them, which has a special purpose in coding and prevents the code from being parsed correctly. The phrase “Dave and Buster’s” doesn’t cause a problem in the U.K. because iOS doesn’t add an ampersand (or even an apostrophe).David Price / Foundry As you can see in the image at the top of this story, a seemingly successfully sent audio iMessage ending with the phrase “Dave & Buster’s” appears as sent but never actually appears on the recipient’s phone. After a while, the audio message disappeared from the sender’s phone, and the recipient was completely unaware that the message had ever been sent. With that in mind, it’s a short leap to recognize that other brands could cause the same issue—they just haven’t been spotted doing so up to now. Rambo notes that “M&Ms” will do the same thing. For U.K. iPhone owners, in fact, “Dave and Buster’s” doesn’t trigger the bug because that chain is evidently not well enough known here and doesn’t get its ampersand added by autocorrect. To reproduce the issue, I had to ask a friend to send me a message about the supermarket chain M&S. Sure enough, this caused the hanging ellipsis followed by an unsent message. At the time of writing, it seems almost certain that any phrase iOS would recognize as containing an ampersand would cause an audio message to fail, and when I put it like that, it’s surprising the bug hasn’t been more widely reported. But here’s what happens when a U.K. user tries to send a message about the supermarket chain M&S, complete with ampersand.Karen Haslam / Foundry On the plus side, one would imagine it’s a bug that should be easy to patch in an iOS update. The transcription feature in Messages simply needs to be told to “escape” special characters so they don’t mess up the parsing process. And as Rambo notes, this isn’t a bug with any security vulnerabilities; indeed, it shows Apple’s BlastDoor mechanism working correctly. “Many bad parsers would probably accept the incorrectly-formatted XHTML,” he writes, “but that sort of leniency when parsing data formats is often what ends up causing security issues. By being pedantic about the formatting, BlastDoor is protecting the recipient from an exploit that would abuse that type of issue.”