Unity 2.5 for Windows - sooner than you think

Start saving up that pocket change because the BEST fricking game engine is finally making its way to Windows, and probably a lot sooner than you think.

With its Mono component based architecture and amazingly hardcore api written by the very best brains from the old school demo scene, it's going to rock your world.

Of course I am biased. hehe.

while this is problably the baddest moment (concerning my wallet) its really great news!

how sooner? in terms of months?=

Out understanding

CANT WAIT...

This is interesting. And it can really change the indie world. There is a very hot discussion running at GarageGames:
http://www.garagegames.com/blogs/83134/15952

Torque3d (the evolution of TGEA) should become more expensive (maybe 1500 $) and many people are ready to leave the ship now. Unity3d and C4 are the alternatives they mentioned most often. And if there is a Windows port of the Unity toolset then this will happen very fast.

I really do think that 3DGS needs to get "Realtime Game Editor" done ASAP BUT it needs to be up to speed of the Unity3D Editor.

I would have done it like Unity did - employ a C# programmer to code the editor that wraps the core engine API plus all the other stuff like shaders into the editor.

But it does not matter really if 3DGS's "Realtime Game Editor" is pure C++ as long its as the same features as Unity3D Editor.

From Forecast page::
"Realtime Game Editor
A WED plugin for placing objects, editing multitexture terrain, and painting texture masks on terrain in an engine window in real time. 10%" - it's going quite slooooow

Yes it is going a bit slow.

Plus I would hope that it blows other GUI Editors out of the water - but I bet it does not

Unity gets better!

unity

It's a nightmare of Conitec I think.

Interesting link, MaxF. I found this very interesting:

"The company launched support for the latter two platforms (Wii, and iPhone in addition to PC and Mac platforms) in 2008 and also tripled its userbase. The developer more than doubled its staff in the past year as a result."

So it pays if you support more than one platform. Very interesting. But I also read that most of the Torque users are PC users even if other platforms are available.
This also means that many PC hobbyists are there at the market and could switch to Unity if it is available.

I think Unity has some weaknesses (e.g. scene management, no source code), but the tools are probably the best at the market and this helps to get fast into it. I don't know about the scripting learning curve.

if UNITY will be available many other engines will die..
So lets just wait.... Cant expect to buy it...

Wii support is very interesting, but I'll jsut wait a little longer when the first opinions of new users are available to see if I should invest more time into it.

@Machinery_Frank; weaknesses = "scene management"

When I email the company about the windows version they said that scene management was very easy to code and many people have done their own.

I do think Unity totally rocks - its more to do with workflow as well the engine.

they plan end of feb..

where do you have this info from? end of feb? That would be great

As long as I could read from the link MaxF posted, the Windows port already has been presented at an Unity-conference. So it must be existent:



I am looking forward to that.

beautiful :D, i can afford a new engine but not a new mac :P

End of Feb? It seems they had been working on it more than a (few) year ago. How come they can so quiet?

Unity News

Unity CEO Dave Helgason that we realize quite how important this step is to the company, and to the future of its impressive engine.

I bit old news but good

I just asked them..



"
We will be releasing soon. As we don't have a hard date published, we are looking to launch 2.5 by end of Feb. For updates and the latest and greatest, please signup for our newsletter at: http//unity3d.com.

More to come!
"

So if they don´t want to lose a lot of customers, Conitec has 1.5 months to replace ODE with PhysX, implement some high quality shadow mapping, a C# wrapper, a web plugin and a WYSIWYG replacement for WED. :P

i skimmed throuch the unity web site and it seems like you have to own the PRO license($1500) to be able to build windows standalone exe files.

with 2.5 will it be possible to create windows executables with indie license?

anyone has any idea.

@amy: yeah, sort of. i mean not all these should be done in 1.5 months but, process should speed up. tools and editors(and some engine features) are aging and not so attractive for artists and beginners( over other engine's tools.). Conitec may hire some new guys to speed things up.

Yes, it will be possible to publish to Windows and OSX with Unity Indie. They stated this several times on their forum. This limitation wouldn´t make sense anymore.

...I just have noticed that in Euros the price difference between Gamestudio Pro and Unity Pro isn´t that big...

Yes, and it looks like it is worth the higher price. You get better and faster workflow and thus you can prototype or finish a game faster.

And there are so many Max and Maya users around, they can easily afford such an engine

And what say JCL and Conitec to this?

Warum meldet sich bei so einem Brisanten Thema keiner von Conitec.

Immerhin könnte Unity mehr User abziehen als Conitec lieb ist. Laut der Homepage sieht es einfach geil aus! Und das ist der Preis mehr wert als Gamestudio.

Sorry für die harten Worte.

Aber Gamestudio bräuchte eine Generalüberholung, was die Benutzerfreundlichkeit, vor allem aber die veralteten Editoren angeht.

What shall they say?
If they could have done a complete resetting of Acknex with the implementation of several platforms etc., they would have done it. Anybody can only do what he can do. That's it.

I think that the Unity3D success is based on a unique financial and organizing setting with a big investment. And with their concept they are several years ahead.

Gamestudio ist ein Klasse Authorensystem.

Aber der Stand ist einfach schon so weit veraltet, dass mit Sicherheit die meisten früher oder später wechseln werden.

Die meisten Engines, die zur Zeit auf dem Markt sind, bieten weit aus mehr, als es GS kann. Und die Preise sind alle erträglich.

Ich würde es schade finden, wenn durch Unity andere Engines aussterben.

Aber fakt ist: Wenn Conitec seine User, bzw. Kunden, die teilweise viel Geld dafür bezahlt haben, behalten will, müssen sie Gamestudio aufbohren.

Versteh mich nicht falsch. Als ich mir die Commercial gekauft habe, für 200 € und die Editoren gesehen habe, dachte ich ob mich Conitec verarschen will. Denn selbst damals, war der Worldbuilder von Half-Life 1 bei weitem besser.

Heutige Engines liegen meilen weit voraus. Das ist leider so.

Aber ich muss sagen, dass ich Gamestudio lieb gewonnen habe.

Ich gebe zu; es ist nicht einfach, eine bestehende Engine komplett von vorne an neu zu schreiben. Also müsste eine neue her, mit einer Upgradeoption. Sozusagen, die, die schon ein GS haben, bekommen die neue billiger.

Warten wir einfach ab, was die Zukunft bringen wird.

Also die Indie Lizenz kostet 149 Euro, ist ja echt klasse, nur finde ich es inakzeptabel 1099 Euro dafür hinzulegen, um executables für Windows zu generieren (naja gut, hinzu kommen noch andere nette, aber notwendige features).

Wenn das generieren von ausführbaren Dateien für Windows selbst mit der Indie Lizenz klappen würde, würden die Geld machen ohne Ende! Aber so... erstmal nicht, wollte dieses Jahr noch Urlaub machen

Well, Conitec needs to replace the ODE engine to PhysX, and make Gamestudio works in Mac, and a webplayer.

HeelX , with 2.5 you can make win executables (from a windows system) with the indie version...

While I don't want to start another discussion about pro/cons of Unity, I'll just throw an interesting fact in here:

This whole discussion has been going on for years.
Quest 3D, Genesis3D, Vulpine, Jamagic, Irrlicht, Ogre, <insert any other competitor tool here>

Still, Acknex has existed well over 10 years now and it doesn't look like it's dying soon.
Sure, some users will switch engine, that has happened before and some people disappeared almost completely.
But other users have joined instead and the user base has grown remarkably over the years.

Apart from that: Conitec has to make the best of their current situation. Maybe the gap is too high, but this can't be changed now.
Recruiting more and more people is a question of money as well.
I know they buy useful stuff done by users or grant them a pro edition to save some work time for other things.

We'll see...

but in my opinion unity is the most similar product to gamestudio so far. so it probably will be the most serious competition conitec has ever seen.

unity has the same scripting and general ease of use philosophy, it's a complete and mature authoring system with everything you need, it's in about the same price range,... but in contrast to gamestudio unity does most things right and not just halfheartedly.

the a7 engine isn't that bad. the needed improvements (better physics engine, high quality shadow system,...) wouldn't be that huge but progress always takes way too long. jcl shouldn't always hope and wait for user contributions to fill the gaps.

i see absolutely no future in WED and MED though. they are FUBAR and i find them unusable. (i don't want to insult wlad. i think the code base of the editors is very old and hard to work with. it goes back to some quake editors conitec bought.) a new editor which uses the engine in the viewports would have to be rewritten from scratch. probably it would make sense to use C# for it instead of C++ and MFC.

i am really looking forward to unity!

Those tools have their weakness and I never see they are a competitor of GS.

I remember GS price is quite expensive in the era of A4 and A5, which is more than $12xx.

Unity is different, the tool set, the quality of render, the opportinunity of multiplatform publishing (with extra fee), are worth the price.

What about Unity performance with outdated platform ?

I made some comparative tests : 3dgs, DXSTUDIO, C4 using an old graphic card ATI RADEON 9500, which in any case supports direct x 9.0
Well, 3dgs was definetely much faster

how exactly did your tests look like?

since unity also runs on very limited hardware like the iphone i can't imagine that it is more wasteful with resources than other engines.

I had in mind to develop an RPG with many characters on the screen

I used 12 human animated files and a basic ambient
The poly count was abt 4000 tris each model
Shadows enabled

No shaders, no complex geometry, nothing else
The focus was on the characters

I got a much higher fps with 3dgs particulary vs DXSTUDIO 2.31

DXStudio 2.31???

a very up to date version. Congrats to this test...

What a silly remark

did you do your tests with unity too?

when i tested the unity trial for a while a few months ago performance seemed to be great. gamestudio could have an advantage with BSP when it comes to huge indoor levels. but who likes to still work with BSP in 2009 anyway?

and many of the webplugin games and demos i came across run fine even on notebooks with crappy intel graphics. of course it also depends on the complexity of the game though.

No , I did not test Unity

In case of DXSTUDIO the bad performance were not due to the lacking of a scene management system since I used animated models only
Anyway the difference was impressive, not just 2-3 fps, I mean

I wonder whether new engines are not optimized for old hardware

An other potential problem
I use Fragmotion and MilkShape same as many others hobbyiest programmers ,I suppose
Unity support none of the file formats exported by the low priced animators
I dont like Blender
I should use a converter but I have alwayes had a lot of problems with converters particulary with complex file formats such as FBX

I tried 2 demos a day ago:

Meridian Core, made with DXStudio

Avert Fate, made with Unity3D

The difference in performance and complexity of the levels is huge.
Additionally you can choose in Unity3D a wide range of low settings of quality and screen resolution.

Meridian Core is only a demo from a winter 2008 competition, while Avert Fate is a promotion game of Unity3D.
Nonetheless, Meridian Core is an economically very well designed small level, it should run much faster.

Hiya.

I'm looking forward to Unity as well.

That said...

The A7 engine is pretty damn good as far as capabilities is concerned. Where it falls over face first into the mud, then thrashes spazmodicly while screaming "Aggrighdl-liggg-norggirinnn-stashh-blinng-patooie!" is asset pipeline.

What Conitec needs to do is 'simple': make it so one can build a model, uv it, texture it, and animated it. Then open MED and hit "Import". Choose the fully uv'ed, textured and animated model. And have it show up in the engine; fully animated with color, bump, spec, transparency, luminosity and normal maps intact.

Next on the list: the engine tools need to be able to figure out where needed assets are, or at least ask the user for them. ONCE. After that, it remembers the path to the folders. I want to import that animated normal-mapped model and, if one of the textures isn't in the models structure, ask me "Hey, I can't find cooltexture_nml.bmp. Where is it?". I find it, using the normal windows file dialogs you see in other windows programs, and that's that.

Last on the list: GOOD TUTORIALS AND MANUALS IN PDF FORMAT! The ones supplied with A7 are out of date and thusly confusing. That they aren't in an easily printable format just adds insult to injury. Oh, and when the PDF's do get made...set the permissions to allow copying of text and pictures. Oh yeah, one more thing about a PDF...on the front put "(C) Conitec ###. Permission is granted to photocopy/print this manual for personal use only". That way we can easily take it down to Staples/Kinkos/Whatever and get it printed ourselves, hassle-free.

Wow. What a digression! Sorry guys...but, yeah, I think that is one thing that is making Unity such a tempting morsel. It' looks good, and promises customers the ability to simply hit "Import" and see a fully textured, normal-mapped and animated character in the engine.

dont forget the lightmap/lightmap UV set

Here's the official announcement:
http://unity3d.com/unity/coming-soon/unity-2.5

and a forum thread on the subject:
http://forum.unity3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=18127&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0

Hi

Was just going to post that

Looks HOT

Hey guys, where can i find feature comparison between the Unity indie and Unity Pro?

thanks

http://unity3d.com/unity/licenses.html

thanks man

http://unity3d.com/company/people

...and caitlyn is listed here now!

Anyone else a betatester here?
I´ll give a description on how it feels to work with Unity for windows.
So far I´m very impressed, but I don´t have the time / leisure yet to
dive fully into it.

I'm excited, and I'm a dyed-in-the-wool 3DGS fan.

Me too. And I am fully planning on getting an indie license for this when it is released for Windows. According to the forum, I believe they said before March, if possible.

It seems to be very stable atm, so I think we can expect a
release soon.

Conitec: Take care.

Seriously: It depends on the project. You can not really compare GS and Unity.
They offer a completely different approach imho.

FULL ACK

Unity looks nice for FPS and other first person stuff but I suppose for games like puzzle games or unconventional approaches (like Heelx's a7titude for example) 3DGS is the right choice

Just because the approach is different (and, I admit, I am not sure what you mean by this) does not mean that you cannot compare the two engines (Unity and 3DGS). For example, if both engines can be used to create similar games (FPS, strategy, etc) then they can be compared and contrasted. They are both tools.

Yes, you can compare them.
But you can compare apples and pears as well.

GS: Bsp / ABT based, Mesh / Model mixture
Unity: Model based without any Scene Management

GS: CAD like editors
Unity: Realtime Editors

Two absolutely different basics. Both not bad. It depends on the project if
you really want to compare them.

Further: You would have to do the same project with both engines, if you want to compare. But that would be no fair comparison, because it depends on the project. For some projects Unity is the way to go, for some projects
you would choose GS, and for another one Unreal.

I am sorry. I have to disagree to some degree. This is not an apples and pears or apples and oranges comparison at all. Comparing 3DGS to something like Wintermute would be, but not Unity and 3DGS.

What you just did was compare the TOOLS (editors) and the methods the engines use to manage a scene. But both engines are real-time 3D engines. Both can be used to create FPS games (for example) and, as a result, both can be compared on an "apples to apples" basis. In the comparison, the exact things you brought up would factor in: the tools that come with it (editors, etc), the programming languages used and scripting language (if any), the type of scene management, if it includes things like a physics engine, etc.

If comparing Unity to 3DGS is an apples to pears comparison, then 3DGS cannot really be compared to DarkBASIC, Torque or any of the others out there either and, as a result, 3DGS will end up being the only "apple" in the cart.

And, no, you don't have to create the same project in the same engine to compare them. Not at all. The engines can be compared BEFORE HAND to determine if any engine can be a candidate for the project at hand. Else a development team would have to purchase several engines and recreate their project over and over again in each one in order to meet your criteria for comparison.

You see, you can compare them against the background of projects, but not in general.
You can´t say Unreal is better than Torque, because Unreal would suffer when it comes to casual games.
On the other hand, GS sucks when it comes to multiplayer.

You can drive with a Mercedes from Paris to Vienna.
You can do that with a Smart, too, but it won´t be that fun.
Is the Smart now worse than the Mercedes?

If you arrived in Vienna, you would be glad about a small car
that fits into every parking space.
Is the Mercedes now worse than the Smart?

I believe we are inline, but we are talking past each other.

Btw, no need to excuse.
I think this is a really interesting discussion.
We should even make a new thread, because it doesn´t really fit in here.

Edit:
"The engines can be compared BEFORE HAND to determine if any engine can be a candidate for the project at hand."

A lot of developers here in the forums are trying to do that, but they have no success.
Insteat of that, they are hopping between the engines, just to determine (after a year of hard work)
that they´ve choosen the wrong engine.

You would have to do at least one project to know all the bells and whistles of an engine.

without any scene management? unity for sure uses something like an octree or abt too (octree and abt are very similar approaches). i don't know any 3d engine which doesn't. it's needed for front to back sorting and so on. actually i wouldn't call something without scene management a 3d engine.

I agree. There must be a scene management. Otherwise they could not run this big terrain. But you indeed cannot find information about this in the feature list.

Hi

I think Unity3D users PVS-based occlusion culling and Streaming of Assets and Terrains.

The thing I like about Unity3D is it's easy of use for things like adding lightmaps to models from most 3D Apps.

SEE following http://www.geartechgames.com/GearTech_Games/Unity_Tutorials/Unity_Tutorials.html

The above is modo to Unity3D - how easy is that..

Maybe we should ask them about their scene management.

Their asset management is absolutely hammer!
You just drag and drop, and it works immediately.
You can even exchange assets between windows and mac with
no problems.

The more I see from Unity the more I get to like it. I've bought the commercial version of 3DGS some time ago and I'm not so shure now if that was the right way to go for me.

Don't get me wrong, I like this engine and I learned alot especialy because it is much more basic programming and having to deal with different tools and filetypes gives you a good insight. But having a realtime editor for me is something that feels so natural, I'm shure it speeds up processes a lot. Having to build a map, compile the code and then see that you've done something completely the wrong way around can be very frustrating.

And second, I was blown away by the lightdemo that runs within the browser. I would like to have that, beeing able to show progress to others like that is fantastic. I think it adds a lot of falue to the whole package, and the MAC and Iphone support, too.

All in all, the very things that I would like 3DGS to have, but who knows, maybe Conitec is closing up soon, I would like to stay with this engine and the community.

In the case you did not read the official news about Unity 2.5:

http://unity3d.com/unity/coming-soon/unity-2.5

As far as I know octree or bsp are not anymore so important as they were in the past
At the time the bottle neck was the graphic card
Nowadays it is better to render many tris rather than losing CPU cycles to loop through the octree

BSP (like in quake) really isn't important anymore (actually it is counterproductive) but i think simpler spatial structures like octrees/ABTs/AABB-trees still make sense for rendering. with them you can do hierarchical frustum culling for example and front to back drawing which is nice for the hierarchical z-buffer of modern gpus.

Yes ok but in the classic octrees management system your CPU must create on the fly and go through the hierarchy
If so ,you must pay an high cost in terms of CPU cycles while even a low level modern graphic card can easly render milion tris per second
Unless for octree you mean a simple precompiled " zone " management system
This is at least what I read

This is true for simple shaded objects. But if you use expensive shaders and many dynamic lights then it is the other way around. It is better to create many smaller objects instead of one big and to let the engine do a good culling to calculate only the needed lighting, shadows and shaders.

Polygons do not bring a modern GPU down, but fragment programs (shaders) do and modern games use them very intense. So a good scene and light management is still needed, maybe even more than before.

And because of that optimized engines like C4 will be able to run more detailed and better illuminated/shaded geometry than other ones, especially indoor. There you can use zones and portals to render only what you see on screen. And there is still some visibility culling and intelligent culling of shadows even through portals. This is not trivial.

I miss something like that in the feature list of Unity. So it might be a good alternative for casual games but not for beauty indoor games with bigger levels. Though they proved that they can render outdoor very good with LOD and streaming of terrain chunks.

Interesting but why should zone and portals be more efficient than octrees ?
Also with octrees (or ABT ) you can render only what you see in the screen
However modern engines seem not to use it anymore

no, they render not only what you can see, they render everything in your view frustum. There will be some z-sorting and maybe culling this way. But it could be that it has to check a lot of geometry, even behind the walls.

A zone and a portal can do culling right to the point. There you have maximum influence in the design of culling.

yes octree render also items behind the walls but not bsp , as far as I know
However my question was
The extensive use of zone and portals in the new generation game engines have something to do with the fact that the bottle necks , nowadays, mainly depend on the number of shaders , rather than on the number of tris or they are simply more efficient culling algo's ?
I mean, as long as , you reduce the amount of data to be sent to the render pipeline than you should get a benefit, I suppose, in any case
On the other hand you must take into account the cost of the algo itself in term of CPU cycles

Yes. Polygons are not the problem in modern hardware. But shaders are. And CPU-cycles should not be wasted for scene-management only. It needs good optimization to do all that can be done on gpu (graphics, skinning, physics) and leave enough room for AI, game logics, controllers and other stuff on cpu.

frank, what are you trying to figure there? i just dont understand it. unity proved more than enough that it IS capable

just my 2c

Yes. You got me wrong. Unity can render great terrains and uses lod and streaming. I already mentioned that. I just dont know about indoor scene-management. That is all I said.

I will make some testings soon and will compare different engines with the same indoor geometries and we will see more clearly then.

And I am sure Unity will have the best work-flow and tools of all indie engines. But this is still guessing from my side. I had no chance to test Unity so far. I have to wait.

Actually you do scene management for saving cpu cycles, as you also need it for example for collision detection. If you dont do it you must always go trough the complete entity list, with a tree you already knew which objects are near and you only need to test these. Finding an specific object needs c*n time (where c is an unknown contant, and n the number of object in the level) without scene managment, with a tree it is c*log n, or something similar.
You can always implement zone management in every engine on your own, thats not that difficult.

yes, ok for scene mamagement in general, but the question is :
Why zone \ portals instead of the traditional octree \ bsp ?

bsp is said to slow down the cpu too much - I guess, it is, because today the scenes are way bigger than the levels where bsp was the first choice.

another drawback is that you have always compute the level before you can test it realtime - it slows down the workflow.

You probably did not see all the issues that come up with zones and portals. Let us take shadows. Some shadows have to go through portals, some others dont have to. Some lights might be switched on even if they are not visible on their own but they create shadows and lighting behind a portal. There is geometry scissoring and maybe background streaming.

It is not a trivial task if you do it right.

But it gives more freedom than compiling BSP maps for hours or days.

This sounds to me as a valid explanation of the reason why zone \portals are getting more and more popular
Even though it is definitely true that the number of tris is not anymore that issue it was in the past



Ok the drawback for the workflow but I wonder
3dgs can take plenty of time to compile a map
What is it doing while I am getting nervous ?
I have alwayes supposed that it is storing a lot of precalculated data
Should I not expect any advantage for the frame rate, as a compensation of my patience ?

I am not the designer of the map compiler so I cannot say for sure. But you dont place your portals manually in GS. So the map compiler has to find portals on his own and finds much more than you would place manually. Probably it creates a huge amount of data to traverse.
All this happens on CPU. This also explains why exchanging a graphics card did not speed up rendering BSP levels made with GS, only exchanging CPU could help there.

the a7 map compiler primarily calculates the static shadow maps. i think most users don't use the old BSP mode anymore which also takes a lot of time for visibility calculations.

According to a question asked by a user of Unity and according to the answer by one of the developers, Unity does not have LOD (except for terrain) and will not in v2.5. Here is the link to the page:

http://forum.unity3d.com/viewtopic.php?t...3c0375060c135a9

Here is the quote:

can anyone post some links or pics of Unity scripting langauage please? i cant find anything where i can see the syntax - i know i maybe didnt look hard enough but still....

i read it has 3 possibilities: java, c#, or python and... like languages but still i'd like to see how it really looks like

Hello Dan,
Some Game Engine users (from many Forum threads) expect so much from "Unity".All of the sudden many users decided "Unity" is the solution to everything "Indie Game development".Well;it's not and will never be;regardless of the Windows platform. Oh yeah!,Unity is hot but so is many other Engines out there.These Engines all have their own places of importance;for example: 3DGS A7 vs Unity:

3DGS Price tag Unity Price tag
///// ///////// /////// /////////
1)Excellent < $1000 Excellent > $1000

2)3DGS?;User friendly Unity?;Some learning curves

3)3DGS?;Graphical fedility
a)UnityGraphical fedility?;run blazing fast basically high end tool set up.
a)3DGS;Runs fast but not blazing
fast


The lists of simple tools available and not available in both Engines goes On and on.....it doesn't really matter much in terms of the best "Indie Engine",There was a time when "Torque" was the top of the list and 3DGS was not "so-called" good enough......,that came to pass;now it's "Unity"...OK!...we shall see!.3DGS will always win because of the expectations people look for that's just a wet dreams....it's always come to pass and users run back to 3DGS (Silently)...hoping no one notice!....0__0

I suppose you 've been through all these pages and everything they have listed there:
http://unity3d.com/unity/features/scripting

been there(your first post)
thnx(your second post)

You welcome

I see more and more Gamestudio users on Unity's beta list.

The Unity manual contains some information about how to set up occlusion culling for indoor levels. I haven´t looked into it in detail but i think you can have optimized indoor levels in Unity too.

This is interesting. I have to check that out. Thanks for the info.

where can I find th ebeta page ? cheers

3dGS - Realtime Game Editor - is up to 70% - very exciting

Unity as Culling Mask




So you can have objects in different layers and cull them based on script

Competition is always good for customer

Isn´t this the third try already? Maybe it will stop again at 95%? The WED plugin thing also sounds a bit clumsy to me. Gamestudio needs a new WED not a WED plugin.

*giggles*

FusionFall has been created with Unity. Hard work, Conitec. Hard work.


Needs for GS:

Web Player.
Mac OSX support.
PhysX support.

where did you find this information ?

If you could list the 3 top reasons why a ** new ** user should choose Unity3D 2.5 Indie in preferance to 3DGS 7 Commercial, what would they be ?

In the forecast page.

web palyer and the editor. This 2 could make me choose unity over 3dgs.

<though im still happy with gamestudio.>

Easy of use - Unity is VERY EASY to use and just works (shaders just work drag and drop, its works in the web, on mac, PC, iPhone and Wii ).


I do love 3DGS its great, that's why I keep pushing them to add stuff, I think if they add the following:

1) Web player (coming)
2) Editor (coming)
3) Maybe add kick ass rendering stuff - better then other engines or same as AAA engines - see (http://www.leadwerks.com/engine_rendering.html)

The down side of Leadwerks is it a bit header to code for.

OMG, leadwerks sanbox looks nice. sorry for o.t.

I know; hope 3DGS will be the same - shit hot

Maybe i might look into this engine myself good pricing toooooo!!!!

my all around packages are almost complete.

The new GED looks really nice too.

Can you please tell us (if you have tried) what shaders are actually available in Indie version of Unity? I have been going through some forums to even their docs on the site but still haven't found a list or any info on which shaders are Pro only.

What I do know is that you can't get simple stuff like reflective water out of the Indie version without using some 'tricks' (or hacks).

Hi

I'm not 100% sure

But water for Indie yes with hacks

http://unity3d.com/unity/licenses

The post shaders are pro, just email them - they will reply

Render-to-texture is only in the pro. So you cannot have post processing that relies on renter2texture. But shaders like normal, spec or parallax mapping are working fine in the indie.

Water works also in the indie but it looks better in Pro.

Good thing i recently bought a macBook pro!

I downloaded the demo yesterday, toying around a bit with it, though im no good at all at it yet :P
we'll see what i can come up with, hehehee.
Who knows, maybe i'll buy that indie license eventually... making widget games for mac is fun (and maybe even iPhone later on that would be wicked..!).

thanks,

They sure are taking their time releasing it.

I am not really impressed by games in web browsers (in-fact, I hate that) so the only thing I want in it are a good Lite-C like programming language for programming noobs. I am actually learning JavaScript but I have so far read how it isn't just the same as implemented in Unity. After that, the only thing left is Boo for me (if all else fails, back to 3dgs). I do want to try their integrated MAX importer and realtime editor.

what about C#? C# is personally my favourite language, the syntax is logical and straight-forward.

Boo is very nice. It looks almost like Python but is as fast as C#.

So, should I assume that Unity3d is slower than 3DGS also for outdoor scenes , particulary with old hardware ? ( ATI Radeon 9500 , for example )
Did anybody make actual comparative test Unity \ 3dgs ?

I dont think it is slower in terms of terrain rendering. Just check the web terrain demo. It scales very good and can even render on very old hardware with automatic lod. You just see less plants on older machines.

I had indoor scene management in mind, portals, zones, controllable culling.

TBH no one has really done the comparison. Everyone is guessing here and most are just saying Unity is better anyway :P

Anyways, just wait for the trial. I don't really see the point in releasing news on 2.5 months ago if there were going to be delays, reminds me of how GG does the business, just annoying.

While I agree with you I still would not compare it to GG. I am quite sure that Unity 2.5 will hit the market faster than Torque3d and it probably will find more customers. Both will share a similar price but Unity will be more beginner-friendly.

Stress tests still have to be done and I think every engine will have a certain area to beat the other ones then.

Um, actually I was just comparing the part about GG releasing news about softwares ages ago with no specific date (not engines or anything else). That just pisses off people. People will be more impressed with the news + software trial download available instead of marketing talk.

I like some news especially if they are excitingly presented like Luxology does as an example:
http://www.luxology.com/modo/401.introduction/

And yes, the new version of Modo is not finished and there is no known release date. But the finished features are just great and I love to hear / read about them.

And there is a difference: Unity2.5 is in beta test for a while. Torque3d as an example is not.

Someone can point me few games made with unity? I think rather than features a finished game is the best advert for an engine.

Can we sell our iphone game on iStore ?

cheers

lots of fun games here

also take a look at this MMO from Cartoon Network
fusion fall

Haven't heard of a single game off that list unlike GameStudio where I have actually bought many games (and read their reviews on major sites).

Probably cause it is Mac only but still, it will be interesting how the tools will work on Windows (remember how Safari turned out on Windows?).

No need to be a total 3dgs fanboy. 3D Game studio does a lot of things right, but there are other tools out there.

I have not heard of 99% of the 3D Game studio games.. Does that make 3DGS any less of a tool and engine?

Up until A6, 3DGS had some of the WORST tech demos ever.. You can not always believe what you see.. You have to try the tools out for your self before you pass judgment.. I know right now you can't exactly do that if you do not have a mac (you can always build a hackintosh ) but don't shoot it down just yet..

As for the whole safari comment.. Really you cant even compare. They are complete different products made by complete different developers.
Plus Unity (the tools) would have to pretty much be rewritten from scratch for windows..


One thing I must mention, this is probably one of the best communities around. I have mainly been a lurker on the unity boards, but many questions go unanswered and the board overall is not very lively compared to here. I think this is one of the strongest points for A7... Right now I am in the process of choosing an engine for a college project and it is between unity(mac version) and A7.. If these forums did not exist my choice would have been made very easily...

Right, I don't even have a GameStudio license. As a gamer I have seen 3dgs games (you aren't a gamer, I can tell, you are just hurt that I said Unity games are in the unknown realm) out there, in Indie sites to sites which carry AAA content mostly.

Safari comment was how Mac > PC port isn't an easy job. Somehow I doubt it that Unity will make a flawless jump when even developers like Autodesk face countless issues with Windows only apps.

So don't get too emotional, I don't care about fanboyism to be one myself.


EDIT: Btw, what exactly has a tech demo got to do with 3dgs having more and better games out there? I am still evaluating 3dgs and waiting for Unity trial as well. I came to 3dgs without viewing overhyped marketing talk/fanboyism and didn't even run a tech demo. I started using the tool since I was already familiar with editors for Quake 3 games (while learning Lite-C of course).

In the end I found this engine not because of fanboy talk in forums (like Unity has here, there is no one recommending 3dgs in countless forums) but after playing games created on it. So I couldn't care less if Unity has a editor that makes games and washes dishes for you. In the end I am just evaluating like a new user. I will look at pros and cons and what has been produced (you can choose to ignore that if you want).

Ok, just by one post of mine (I can tell it is one post, as I think this is my first post in over a year) you know all about me and the fact that I am not a gamer.
As for being hurt about Unity games, I could care less... For me the best tool is the one to get the job done. One day it may be Unity, the next 3DGS. It is a program, I hae no emotional attachment

I know what you meant by the Safai comment, but really it has no real purpose. The two pieces of software are developed by 2 complete different companies, and are in complete different categories. They really cant compare. Also it is NOT a port.. The engine already runs under windows (you can compile games, and the cross platform web browser plug in).. And it runs pretty much the same as a mac compiled version. So they can clearly write proper windows software.
Also as I mentioned already the tools can not be ported over. They will pretty much have to remake the whole thing from scratch.

The tech demo comment was more about how you should not judge the tool set only by other peoples creations.. You know the old expression "don't judge a book by its cover" ? Same concept. You may not have not run any tech demo, but you have seen some compiled 3DGS games.. Just because they are nice (or not) does not mean you will have similar experiences. So hold off on judgment until you have actually tried the product.

You seem to already have the opinion that A7 is better in every way, but have not even tried unity.
The comments by people who support unity are not fanboys.. They are from people who have actually used it (mac version). They are sharing their own experience. Sharing how the work flow actually is better.. You don't need to take it as an attack. Other engines have been discussed on this board since the beginning. The discussions here are from both 3dgs users AND Unity.. They are not fanboys for saying one product is better than the other.

Fanboys are the ones who will love the product they chose to the very end. Denying all fact that there are better solutions out there.

I use Safari and I am very happy with it. It is more stable than IE / Firefox and it simply looks better, fonts are more smooth and buttons do not have colored icons distracting from reading a website. It is just a better product.

Of course it does not have the same market penetration since it came late and because many users are lazy (IE is already pre-installed).
Unity might indeed experience a similar story. We will see.

So, what you are saying is that I should not judge a game engine by the games that have been created using it?

So far I have played a SHMUP, a survival-horror shooter and even a isometric rpg title among others (there are lot more genres produced, mentioning few). All of them worked fine, not a single crash or slowdown, smooth gameplay (obviously the developers did a good job with tweaking that) and helped me see how A6 (they were created with A6) could be used in a range of genres and how it functions on my slow gaming PC's at work and at home.

Playing the content created by not only me but a lot more people than a small community helped me learn more about this engine. Helps you evalutate by showing off features? (ok, not all but according to the genres) I tried the engine after these games, I read the developer comments on forums on how most of them were created by people with almost no advanced programming language.

So after all that, excuse me for sounding like A6 (not 7) is the better engine, even though you are just assuming that I have decided that Unity sucks and is out of the competition.

If you want to learn more about the actual definition of fanboys, look for GarageGames on the net. You can learn a lot from what the 'users' of the tools post all over the net and the end result of the tools over the years.

Also, like I said, Unity was Mac only, and PC users don't suddenly decide to a buy an expensive machine just for a engine (worse if you are a team) especiall if they are Indie. That could explain why it doesn't have any recognizable games on the list (except for Fusion.. and I think Conan). It SEEMS that the Unity definitely has an edge with cross platform compatibility and better editors (esp. terrain). So yeah, I will wait for the trial in the end as well. I only was commenting on the games in the beginning, until you took offense to me.. commenting on games created with a game engine..?

My point was not that you shouldn't look at games with A6/A7 to see what the engine is capable of. The point was to look beyond the games. Sure the games give a rough idea of the capability of the engine, but really can any one create professional quality work?

Give most of the users here the Crysis engine, do you think they can reproduce the same quality as Crysis or Farcry 2? No..

So me taking "offense" (I am not really offended in any way) to you comment was more because you are basing decisions around unknown variables.

I agree with VPrime and we could add that you also should keep in mind how long a technology already exists on the market. A new technology of course cannot have the same amount of games like an old technology.
But if you look closely then you will realize that the growth rate of new games is very high at Unity.

This tells something about how fast new users get into the technology and how fast they can come to a result, not only a little template scene, but a working prototype or even a game.

Newcomers will get quite fast into scripting engines like GS or Unity. Hardcore coders will rather tend to program in C++ (C4, Torque, Irrlicht, Ogre).

And all this has nothing to do with Indies. If you watch the latest Indies especially in Germany creating adventure games then you see that they often use what works best for the project (Ogre, Wintermute). They do not fear a programming language like C++ as a barrier to give up their dreams or to accept lower quality.

But I understand that all this is another story for hobby users with very limited time. Then an easy to understand product with very intuitive editor like Unity is a good choice.

I'll be honest with you, I still have no idea what you are trying to say. I was just commenting on the games produced and the reason for less games on Untiy (for Windows) being that most developers are Windows only (in other words, now that the tools are for Windows, we will see more titles for Windows).

As for Crysis bit, first of all, no one expects studio quality work from modding teams (since the 'users' will only mod, unless they are part of a bigger team with actual license). If you have the actual license for something like Crysis, you have a team of artists and programmers who will create quality work for you as well (if you don't, then.. umm, too much money?). So it still doesn't make any sense what you are trying to say..

Your posts read like you were defending Unity while getting offended at me talking about games out there for both engines (I never said even in first post that 3dgs is better, you assumed anyway). So you are just reading too much into my own comments in the end. I am just here to evaluate, am there on Unity forums for evaluation as well. I am only interested in best tool for the job in the end like you. So we are probably bitching about nothing..

Release Candidate 3 is out now and they only accept Beta-Bug reports till today. So i think they gonna release it soon (?).

BTW my current experience with Unity3D can be checked out on my blog @ Windmillgames.com

Which language do you use for programming with it?

The most time i use Javascript but i'm trying to switch to C# cause i like this language. Actually it's kinda easy to use C# with Unity if you understand Javascript.

we cant particapate in beta right now can we?

I got invited so i dunno how to participate in it and if you can still do it.
But maybe you just want to wait a while and hope its release is soon

So, do you think overall Unity (btw, the engine name is just "Unity", 3D part is for their website) is better than 3dgs?

Can you please tell us in comparison to 3dgs, what are the differences in the workflow. How easy or hard is it to get the scripts working for the objects in the world, etc. etc.

I actually had to smiles reading this line, but short answer, yes for sure.

Well i don't want to write any details, but FOR ME(!!!) the workflow is much better cause the editor is way better than wed. The object management is easy to use and you can easily add components to objects, like physic types (sphere, box, rigidbody, etc), cameras, Particle emitter, scripts you wrote, and so on.

The graphic is much better, or maybe it's just easier to get a good graphic.

Testing the game is easier too cause you just have to press the Play Button and it instantly starts the game, without compiling time. You also can pause it anywhere and step through it frame by frame.

Well there is much more to say but to bless Unity too much right now

I remember reading that it has a terrain editor (it has, right?). Is it anything like the restricted editor from TGE? (with crappy 7 limit textures maqde up of 256x256 png's)

How easy is it to setup normal/specular maps in the editor?
EDIT: How does the water look in the Indie version? (curious cause last I checked water shader was pretty basic in Indie)

Thanks for the details.

I agree with Captain Kiyaku.

Compared to the Unity editor the Gamestudio tools are stone age. The Gamestudio FBX import and map compiler workflow is really annoying.

Additionally I find scripting as easy as with Gamestudio but the languages are more modern. Object orientation can be really useful in game programming.

Gamestudio is cheaper though. It has things like render to texture and video playback in the commercial edition.

Yes it has an build in terrain editor. I didn't use it much yet, just played around with it. Dunno how many textures you can use on it, the max i had were 8. But the size doesnt matter.

The Terrain editor is great, you can easily deform and paint it with different brushes, like in Photoshop. You can draw the trees, grass, etc on it. And you have a button for creating a lightmap.

Normal/Specular maps are easy to set up. Create a Material (rightclick -> Create -> Material) and change the option to Parallax Specular or whatever you want, and choose your texture. Done.

Never used water in indie. I guess it looks normal since you can't use Render To Texture in Indie.

THanks for the info. The editor indeed sounds like a dream come true.

Just a small request, can you please try out the water and post some screenies or info on what it can do? It looks like a water at least.. right? (just worried cause my current project has a lot of areas with water already in place)

PS: I am worried about how good the integration with Max is in the end. I know it dynamically updates the content, but aren't there any stability issues esp. when working with large scenes?

I was exporting a huge level using FBX into 3dgs. It's a slow process, but in the end everything came in as expecting. It's still a pain if you intend to update something, so I guess here Unity wins bonus points. You keep saving/updating in max while it updates inside Unity at the same time. No need to import huge files over and over and worry about placement in the world.

Haha... very funny. Try to create a endless repeating terrain in GS with 6 Textures + Detailmap + Lightmap. Good luck.

When you put a 3dsmax file into your project folder, unity will open the FBX exporter from 3ds in the background, export it to fbx, and close it again. When you change the 3dsmax file then, unity will recognize that and reimport it.
I never had problems using it. You probably have to assign the textures to the materials again, but well it's not that much of work either and you only have to do it once.

That reminds me. Is there a specific material restriction in Unity (materials you use on models in max)? In most engines I have seen that they will only show the models with proper textures when they are using Standard and Multi/Sub (some don't even have this... like Torque).

Are there any specific restrictions when working with materials in max at all? (is there any shader restriction as well? like you are stuck with Blinn or something similar?)

Questions are fun. :P

WOOT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Unity 2.5 is officially live! Unity + Windows = <3

www.unity3d.com

Finally i can publish my projects i made with the beta.

Downloaded it, tried it for 30minutes now - and I already know that I'll definitely never go back to 3dgs. Farewell, 3dgs (Community?) - been nice knowing you

Why do I cheat on 3dgs? Simple - Workflow. It's not even the graphics

Haha, looks like a gazillion devs are busy downloading the trial. Can't open the site at all here (way too slow)..

I'll have to wait for a day or two.. or maybe few hours. Is there another place we can download the demo?

I can't download it in office. What are include in Unity trial?

Unity trial is the Indie version with all features, limited to 30 days.

ahem.... well i thought i had read this somewhere, but was in denial..... now i know the truth and it is this:

I will not be getting unity anytime soon if at all.

I cant believe that a company would charge 7.5x the price so that someone could use a normal map, or have reflective water, or soft shadows. Hell yeah 3dgs is a lot of work to make it look pretty, but Ill keep my $1500 thank you.

Normal maps are available in the indie version.
You´re right about everything that has to do with render2texture, though.
But if you´ve got a deal with a publisher, you won´t worry about 1500,- bucks.

It´s just the same situation as with A6 and render to texture.
You get everything to make a full featured game.

Of course you can use normal maps in indie and I think water is possible with a cube map reflection (but i didn´t test this yet)? Decal shadows are soft too.

Unity is awesome. There still seem to be some teething problems in 2.5 but I think after 2.6 I also won´t go back to Gamestudio anymore.

Captain Kiyaku, please post some web demos!

From what i understand, shaders are not included in the indie version.

hi,

good luck and goodbuy to all who leaves the Acknexengine and turns to unity.

First I had the intension to check the trial of unity too. But after reading the Feature-list (Indie) I decided to let my hands of this and dont start working with another engine.

No RenderToTexture, poor Shadows, no reflection/refraction on water, no video on objects.
No! I had to wait a long time until Acknex give me that in Com-Edition and I'm not willing to change to another engine with the same restrictions like A6 years ago!

If I want to clicking together my gamegraphics and code it with C# ... I would use the NEOAXIS-Engine for that.
Mighty features satisfy my needs more than a fast wokflow.


So I stay with Acknex until maybe "Unity 7" have the above named features in Commercial ...I mean "Indie" Edition;-)

greetings,
gri

Gamestudio has poor shadows too. The stencil shadows are quite useless and the user shadow mapping contributions all are unfinished.

In my opinion Unity is much more future proof. You can easily develop a game with Unity indie and if it turns out well you don´t have to worry about the 1050€ like fogman said. With Unity you then have to possibility to go to Windows, OSX, iPhone, Wii or to a web plugin. With Gamestudio you are quite stuck.

You got that wrong.



Another thing I like about Unity is that its collision system is easier to use and works better than the Gamestudio ellipsoid one where it can be very tricky to avoid "getting stuck" problems and gliding problems.

OK, having tried the trial for an hour or two..

1) I got used to the editor almost instantly without reading any tutorials. I like to mess around without reading with all the apps I use and the editor on Unity isn't complicated to learn (having modded games with similar editors) and get into. Overall, it's pretty good.

2) My guess is that the trial is the Indie version so the Water looks pretty good even without reflection or refraction. I don't really see why reflective/refractive water is Pro only but still, Indie water looks nice enough (from a distance). Again, using the editor to modify the Water on the fly is fun. Changes take place instantly in front of you, no need to recompile.

3) Here's what kills the whole scene and makes this a really lame move that will end up being the reason most people won't buy it. Shadows. The demo Island level SERIOUSLY needs them, esp. the dynamic shadows. The level looks like the island level once posted here in 3dgs forums (made using 3dgs), only except the lack of shadows make it fuck ugly. You'd think that the shadows bit isn't a big deal but trust me, it looks like a Quake 2 level (umm, actually worse.. Farcry without shadows?).

You need Unity Pro ($1500) vs GameStudio's $199 version to get the basic shaders and effects gamers expect out of a 3D Game in the first place.

The Mac support is a bonus but do remember that you WILL need a Mac to test the end product eventually. Add another expense to the list in the end. The editor is nice but nothing I can't live without. In the end you will need all bells and whistles to make your 3D game look current-gen. You can obviously do that with Unity Indie, I am sure, but it will require a lot of hacks and work on your end to make it look good enough.

ANYWAYS, this is just a basic viewpoint. I will still try it out for 30 days before making my final decision at least. To those who already own 3dgs license, please use the trial before purchasing anything (I see on their forum a lot of people have purchased it instantly).

I am definitely interested in seeing how Conitec prioritizes the updates/features after this. If they keep the price less and features (all shaders esp.) available in 199 range, I don't see any reason to jump the ship for most developers.


EDIT: To those who want to know about the splash screen in Indie version (like A7 Commercial). Unity adds the splash screen (startup logo) plus a Unity logo on bottom right of the screen for some time (before fading away).

For those who are curious, here are few Indie version shots..

"good luck and goodbuy to all who leaves the Acknexengine and turns to unity."

I don´t get why people only want to use one tool.
Acknex won´t disappear magically from your HD when you install Unity.
Believe me, I´ve tried it. They don´t harm each other.

These shaders are included in Indie:
http://unity3d.com/support/documentation/Components/Built-in%20Shader%20Guide.html

http://blurst.com/blush/play

In the end it is all about which features you can live without in your game. As far as Mac publishing is concerned, if you are an Indie who can afford only the Indie version, Unity making a Mac exe isn't really a bonus since you can't really test it 24/7 yourself for bugs and all (if you don't own a Mac). Also, good luck finding a publisher that will finance a Indie dev (so that you can purchase the Pro version)..

The editor on Unity is really good though. It really makes your life easy compared to 3dgs editor. Interface is clean and customizable (you can add/remove a lot of tabs).

Hm, even without shadows it looks very good, much better than most of other terrain demos.

And I agree with Fogman: Unity does no harm to other 3d applications. It is nice to check FBX files, to prototype some scenes to play around with it and finally it can even publish to a lot of platforms.

The multi-platform availability makes it more expensive of course. So if you really only want to play at weekends on a Windows PC then Unity is not the right choice for you. Then you better go with 3dgs or free options like Irrlicht, Ogre or Wintermute.

Its a reaction for posts like this:





,gri

A mac mini costs 600€ but it would be stupid anyway if there were platform dependent bugs. I can´t imagine that publishing to OSX needs a lot of testing.

Compared to Gamestudio there are a lot more possibilities to make money with Unity. iPhone games are very popular at the moment or you could do small web based advertising games. It´s pretty easy to afford Pro after your first small indie project.

Oh yes, it definitely looks good and all. But you just know that something's missing. However, like I said, you can always use all the tricks in the book to make it look good.

I'll be honest and say that more I use Unity editor, the painful the thought of using 3dgs editor becomes. :P

So basically, even without the crucial features, the editor itself is like a nail in the coffin for every possible Indie engine out there (esp. Torque).


Going to try out the terrain editing and FBX support now. I also noticed a crazy thing that the demo level models have PSD files with the texture files. I believe updating the PSD files is also a built in feature here? (I messed around with normal map settings and the editor mentioned PSD changes..?)

All in all the editor has definitely been developed by people who were trying to make it easy for the artists out there. Pretty cool.

Assuming if..

1) Your game is good enough for that Mac mini.

2) Every Mac user out there has a Mac mini. If a more expensive (or "advanced") tech is common among users, wouldn't you rather have that to test your game onto? (why would you optimise it for lower end if that shouldn't be the target anyway)

3) If you know nothing about OSX. What happens when bugs are reported? You have to learn ins and outs of OSX now? If you hire someone for that.. well, he ain't working for free.

4) Lot more possibilities? What happens when your game isn't portable? Will you port an FPS to iPhone? What happens when your game isn't for browser based plugins? In the end you pretty much come down to downloadable standalone app.

5) It doesn't cost "600&#8364;" EVERYWHERE in the world (and 600 is still way too expensive, you can buy a pro license for that instead).

i kinda like it, editor and workflow is very nice,i didnt tried any scripting/programming, but i am gonna stick with Gamestudio.

I felt the same.

Then I guess you also buy 20 different Windows PCs for testing your Gamestudio games. You can´t really expect a lone wolf developer to have a huge testing center at home.

A game runs in the engine and has almost nothing to do with the underlying OS. I think you are exaggerating those issues a little.

I don´t really understand this argument!? It´s no big deal to keep the other platforms in mind when designing a game and of course you have a lot more possibilities with Unity. Gamestudio has no ports to different platforms at all.

In europe a mac mini costs 600€ at the moment and as far as I know they are cheaper almost everywhere else. If you are a cheapskate you can also install OSX on your normal PC.

^ Installing OSX on normal PC (Windows, right?)... is that even legal? Still, it's not the same hardware and not being a cheapskate (you wouldn't be purchasing "Indie" if you could afford everything out there anyway).

Actually, buying 20 different Windows PC's is cheaper than 5 Mac's.

You are forgetting that I can just replace my display card with other to test my game on different configuration (just like every other part)..

Seriously though, I know that making for Mac is a plus overall and most developers can find a way to test their games on a Mac (like publishers/portals, they can test it for you) eventually.

Still, they should add proper shadow support in Indie. I can see upgrading for stuff like motion blur but basic 3D feature, dynamic shadows, that's just wrong on so many levels. Removing such features would've worked on Mac but on PC you will be competing with a lot of 3D games with different engines, all with proper shadows..

I think except for the BIOS macs use exactly the same hardware as PCs since they have moved to Intel processors.

With Unity indie you can use dynamic decal shadows.

Yes, but Gamestudio should add proper shadow support too. I haven´t seen a Gamestudio shadow demo like the one on the Unity website yet. At least Unity has nice shadows in pro. Of course I wouldn´t mind having them in indie either though.

There are other engines with proper shadow support (C4 to Leadwerks) than GameStudio (which I am not even talking about as far as shadows are concerned).

Decal shadows look like crap. Unless Unity has some magical way of making them look like actual shadows and not.. well, crap.

Anyways, shadows or not, it is still an impressive package. Just don't expect to create Doom 3 replioa with Indie version though. :P


PS: Can anyone forward me to a good demo showing Indie shaders in action?

You dont need a special demo for it. The shaders are the same in every edition. They are part of the material editing. You apply textures and you choose a shader from a drop-down box. I remember normal, spec and parallax mapping. But there is much more than that.

And the advantage of in-built shaders is: They just work with shadows, fog, different lights, whatever, no need to worry about.

Believe me, we (Indies) can´t create a Doom 3 replica, even with id Tech 4.

Yeah I already know that.. except for the part that they don't seem to change anything. Setting parallax options shader for rocks for example, still looks the same (I generated bump map as well). I guess I should really RTFM at this point but having a proper demo wouldn't hurt.

Any games made with Indie license that are worth looking out there? I mean, there are users following Unity here for sometime now it seems. I am sure you guys must have found few interesting demos.

The coolest game is Nombz!

I use indie for learning purposes.
When it goes serious, there will be enough money for pro.

You can attract publishers with the indie version, should be no problem due to my experience.

You can attract them even with a standard Lite-C project.
What really counts is gameplay.

A quote from a german consultant:
"Every poor devil is able to do shadow mapping nowadays.
You´ve to show unique and addicting gameplay."

Hard, but true.

You probably forgot to add normal, spec and height maps. You have to add data to the alpha channel into your textures. I tried with my sci-fi textures and it worked right from the beginning. I did not read a manual for that. So the information must be available right in the editor.

my mistake




no ones asking for that, but I do think it should cost 1.5k for some dynamic shadowmapping, and to be able to do interesting things with the screen. take that blurbz game or whatever that amy posted. That simple game is not possible without pro, because you couldnt simulate the water. It is very much a part of the game tho because it gives you a relaxing subtle ambiance to contribute to the overall game.

I did not see shadows in the blurbz game and water is also possible in the Indie version. blurbz indeed could be made in Indie. The real interesting part of this game is the artwork, everything else is not at the edge of technology and it does not have to be there.

Im not referring to thw shadows, look at the water itself, its subtle but there is some faint waivering there and some other post processing effects which you can't do without pro. I Also hate when people refuse that the ability to add to the the ambiance of a game adds a great deal to a game. It's not just the great artwork, or the great gameplay but also the ability to pull them together into look that naturally fits together.

That can be done with good lighting. You dont need post processing to do that. Look at an offline rendering software. You can create fantastic images there without a single post pro effect. The same counts for real-time 3d sceneries.

You have to find a good choice of ambient color / light and local lights (dynamic or static). This works everywhere and does not need a magical kit, just some color theory, practice and trial and error.

all the color theory in the world isnt going to make the full scene wave like you looking through a fish bowl.

Someone should recreate this island in A7 to see the difference between the two visually. As far as I am concerned, you need Unity Pro for a game which requires basic stuff like shadows for ambience. Like I said, without all this basic stuff the games would have worked on Mac but on Windows you will compete against a lot more high end games with equal or better engines. When you go 3D, you open yourself to AAA market audience, who are graphics whores, whether you like it or not. Hell, Quake 3 engine will make this island demo look like Quake 2 demo..





SO, the tools are good and will let you create a kickass, fun game, esp. if you are an artist. Just be prepared to actually purchase the pro version before releasing anything 3D using Unity.

BTW, the editor crashes a lot, esp. when working with high res textures on-screen (probably memory issues but this happened when saving/importing/updating as well).

Also a really annoying problem is how the FPS controls just stop working when you try to play the level. I had to exit the program and restart it just to get the FPS controls working.

Same goes for camera. Sometime it would get stuck in specific position whenever I tried to play the level. I had to open and close the program over and over to make it work. In the end I just said "fuck it" and made a build for the game. When I built it, the lighting changed back to default compared to what I had setup in the editor itself, no idea why (maybe a script is doing this? but I didn't find any that controls the daylight)

So yeah, a lot of issues with stability and functioning. I also don't like how there is so much empty space wasted without adding a small shortcut button to hide different panels instantly (without using keyboard shortcuts or menu).

I see a bigger issue with performance then. This Unity island demo scales very well on every kind of hardware. I tried on high and low end systems and it always runs smoothly (sacrificing details, lod appears early on low end).
This is impressive.

I am also impressed by the shader system. It has to generate shaders for many platforms and several hardware, not only PS 3.0, 2.0 and so on, also HLSL, CG and others. This is a very flexible architecture and I believe it will be the best choice for small and casual games all over the world.

For bigger games, like Ortucis mentioned, I would rather use something with impressive scene management like C4.

I noticed the performance script that runs to lower the quality when your system start lagging (I pretty much maxed out quality in the demo, like the screenshots I posted again) due to low FPS. That was really cool (though I wonder if you have to customize the script according to a game or is that automatic for every game?).

I am thinking that I will have to create a small, DARK, level to actually see most shaders (like bump mapping) in action. The Island demo is good enough to show the scale and the vegetation.. I want to see the shaders in action properly though. Oh well, it will help me learn if I do it myself.. :P

I have to agree with Ortucis. I put this engine thru a lot over the weekend including trying to get their tuorial working. I had many hang-ups, glitches and it just wouldn't work without restarting. It was very annoying. Also, as has been mentioned. You are going to need the pro version if you really want to do anything with this seriously. btw: I used a brand new dual core system with 9800GT card to test with. Just not all that impressed.

the windows version of unity altogether is not that good, which is mainly caused by windows being not that optimized as macos.

any pre-2.5 version of the engine was just a dream to work with on mac os, no torque and no A7 came even close to reach the flexibility, performance and the features of the engine. the 2.5 version has a few glitches, especially in the windows version, but also the mac os version got a little slower as the GUI is now completely drawn by the engine (both on win and mac os).

unity is just easy - easy to handle, easy to extend, easy to master.

this engine definately is the strongest package out there at the moment for indie developers and also larger development teams aiming at fast, multi-plattform release-cycles with lower budgets at their disposal.
the engine is cheap for getting started with it and there are no strings attached. the main competitor in this sector will most likely be the new garage games torque release, but as I checked out their first announcement I saw that the licensing model alone is just a mess.

well anyway, i will stop rambling on now. the engine won me over last year after only 2 weeks evaluation. anybody who is fed up with A7 and its limitations, problems, bugs, etc. really should spend the 200 bucks and take a look at unity.

Windows not optimised as OSX? Uhh.. ok.


What about the limitations, problems, bugs, etc. we posted about Unity? That makes it better somehow? Also, do you know how much 200 USD is in other parts of the world? (HINT: Not cheap).


Reminds me of how Torque users go around posting "Torque is best, buy it" on every possible forum.

Yes, there are many fanboys of Torque tools. And if you get into it, it will be fun to work with Torque. Wicht and Kiyaku can tell you stories about it

But even Kiyaku as a Torque "lover" now creates a game in Unity3d. It is just an easy to use tool with great workflow. The upcoming Torque3d still provides the same old DIF, DTS and a new Collada2DTS mechanism. The tools look better but are almost the same. They will not beat the ease of use of Unity.
Torque3d also comes with web publishing, but only in the expensive edition (about $1,000). The cheap basic version is useless, most kits will not work there. But it will be a good starting point to learn this technology and save money for the bigger version.
And if you want to make a multiplayer game, then Torque3d will be a good choice.

The Indie version of Unity on the other hand allows to finish games and has only minor restrictions. It will be perfect for smaller and casual games. You wont need post processing in a casual game.

But if you are dreaming of big ambitious projects then you need something like C4 with great optimized scene management (portals, zones, occlusion geometry) and latest technology, voxel space terrain, full editors and optimized engine.

A7 as a Windows only engine without web player is a bit behind the other ones but is an interesting and cheap starting point to learn 3d and to save some money for students and hobbyists with not too much ambitions. And then it proved to be extendable if you have a lot of experience.

So it just depends on your project and your needs. But I believe that the ease of use will win in the long run and will attract more customers. 3d game dev is hard enough and beginners will take whatever will help to ease this way.

^ Actually, I was saying that posting something like "use this engine cause it'll magically solve all problems the other engines have" is just plain fanboyism.

Personally I don't find A7 editor harder to work with. Unity has a great editor but needs a lot of changes (small and big, like showing what brush and brush size you are using for terrain painting) before it becomes a perfect tool for the job (actually, needs to crash less when working with high res textures).

There are a lot of people who find even Torque easy to work with, but I never take people seriously who go around declaring how the tools they use are the best and better than the other.

There are some teething problems in 2.5 which isn´t very surprising if you consider what a huge release this was and that the editor got completely rewritten.

I am sure most issues will be solved in 2.6 and then I don´t think I will have the need to work with other engines a lot anymore.

Tested Unity now for some days and have to say... I don't wanna go back to Gamestudio... It's just so much easier and faster to produce some nice results.

This is my Test-Project at the moment:
http://www.bysamb.de/priv/unity/rollingballweb1.html



Everything is done with minimum coding. It would take me ages to make something like that in Gamestudio...
I don't need nice graphics or something. Just a working collision-system, so I can make Games.. WORKING Games!

Heh, Gamestudio has "WORKING Games" you know.. a lot more..

Anyways, I couldn't test the trial for more than 2 days. My BIOS god fucked and I ended up with screwed up time settings.. ended up with nice TRIAL OVER after 2 days only.

What I wanted to do was to learn the coding (since I am not a programmer) and wanted to see if UnityScript is like LiteC or not (easy for beginner and non programmer). I asked about any alternative way to learn the scripting in their forum like free version of LiteC but no one bothered replying.

Moving on..

If you want something free then Lite-C, Irrlicht or Ogre will be good choices. In any other case there is not much difference, coding is coding, you need to know the capabilities, the commands, the behavior. You have to do it while working on a project and you will learn it, like Samb or Kiyaku are doing. There is probably no other way to do it fast and efficiently.

At Dexsoft we will buy a license of Unity as well, since many of our latest customers are using Unity. So we can check our models in Unity ourselves.
And the good deal is: 2 people are allowed to work with one license. So we can share the expenses.

OK, Unity is really awesome! Now i have a question.

Is UnityScript easy like Lite-C?

answer to that question would be that you try it yourself and see how it suits you

Machinery_Frank, I wasn't talking about free engine, I was talking about a way to learn UnityScript without purchasing it (like I cn do with LiteC). I was going to just go and learn JavaScript but many people in their forum did just that only to find Unity script completely different.

So yeah, ways to learn one of the easy programming language without purchasing (I am not going to spend 11,000 bucks on a software just to find out that the script it uses is way out of my league).

I've downloaded Unity and tested it. It's soooooo bad! But, there are 4 good things.

1) Export to Mac OSX.
2) Export to WebPlayer.
3) PhysX support.
4) Stencil decal shadows.

I wish Gamestudio contains these features.
In 3 words: I love Gamestudio!

EDIT: Oh and BTW, Conitec didn't lie about Gamestudio's stability.

You can learn C# and Boo but UnityScript only gets used in Unity. So it´s bad luck that your trial doesn´t work anymore. You could contact UT and explain your problem. Maybe they will send you a new trial key.

Learning UnityScript shouldn´t take much longer than a weekend. Learning the language is only one part though. You also have to get used to the Unity API.

So which one do you recommend for an artist (or which one is in the league of LiteC?)?

Now the reason I want to learn UnityScript is that:
a) According to everyone in their forum, it's the easiest to get started with (plus, I am not a programmer).

b) According to EVERYONE, even Unity devs, the tutorials are written in Unity Script (or are US friendly only) so I will end up struggling to learn something other than Unityscript if that's the case (and it seems, it is).


Any recommendations on where to start? I'll be honest with you all, the only reason I am interested in Unity is the Mac compatibility. The editor really isn't a big deal for me so if I can get the scripting thing sorted out, I'll just go for Unity (unless Conitec ports the A7 engine for Mac as well :P).


EDIT: I already emailed them the day the trial expired, no response. Not even a "f**k-off", thought I don't when them to say that. :P

Also, can you tell me what exactly do you mean by "get used to Unity API"? What's wrong with the API? (unless it can become a roadblock when creating a working game) Yeah, I am a noob, enlighten me someone.

UnityScript

a) yes
b) yes

UnityScript

a) no
b) no

Finally. With all my questions answered, I can now go design the bestest best of the best MMO's out there, probably destroy Blizzard in the process.



:P

On the other hand, I should probably post this on Unity forum.

it's like getting used to Unity API itself.

i mean in lite-c there is ENTITies and their pan tilt roll skills this kind of stuff, in unity all this things are diffrent and in unity way, knowing the api is gettin used to this. But i dont think this would be a problem when you start and learn it

hello

Is this " component " based programming system really suitable to code complex gameplay ?
I mean, for people who are more interested in programming rather than graphic ( AI algo's etc)

I have been playing with Unity for some days, a too short period really

Ok I dont mean that Lite_C is the best in the life but I start having a
" nostalgia " for those simple old fashion engines supplying just a bunch of functions and then... it is up to you

Just guessing, what's your opinion ?

I see the potential of the engine already convinced all of you serious about game development

one tipp from my side, I switched 12 month ago from A7/C-Script, I am mainly lead developer/programmer:

DO NOT EVEN bother programming with UnityScript (which is a JavaScript derivate; same syntax, etc.), instead use C# and Visual Studio C# (get the free express edition), you can easily add the DLLs that make up the unity framework (tutorial on the unity wiki) to a Visual Studio project and simply access the managed functions and classes. c# is nice and easy and using Visual Studio brings you all the very nice features of this IDE: auto completion, intelliSense, debugging, etc.

Docking Visual Studio to Unity is one of the most powerful combinations you can get. You will never regret switching from A7 - I promise you.

Oh - by the way - I might have mentioned this already - you can access the whole .Net Framework from any Unity-C#-Project.. this brings you all features of the .Net Library: SErialization, XML files, IO functions, encryption and everything else.

EDIT:
@ AlbertoT:
basically you can do anything you want with the engine. You are not restricted to some lame ass C-Script-style thingy anymore, using c# you can code anything you like. Our lead programmer currently is working on Pathfinding and Object Management for an RTS-style game and is making great progress...
a "component" is just a class attached to a game object acting as a property for the object:
e.g. you have a character that should act as your player... this character is an imported fbx model: you add a renderer, a texture, a basic collider, a physics component, and then you add a class controlling all that, moving the player by input keys...etc.. its really easy.

Hiya.

...I thought you could add anything you want to A7 by using C++, Delphi, etc.? Kinda like using C# to code stuff "into" Unity. Or am I just remembering something wrong again (wouldn't be the first time!).

About C# .... What are the limitations (if any) using the indie version as opposed to the Pro version ?

I mean, can I use the Unity3D engine with Visual Studio 2008 Express ?
Could I write a DLL etc ?

I tried this with Visual Studio + A7 and I found it tricky and there wasn't much official help.

Thanks

It is interesting to read from the experienced users like maybenew, David Lancaster, Kiyaku or Alphastrike that they like Unity. Since all these people made a few games I appreciate their reports very much. I did not test Unity so deeply and this information helps a lot.

Regards

Alright. I'll give Unity an another try.
But how can i make another scene and put it in the code? I mean 2 levels?

And if i'll buy Unity Indie, And maked a game, can i make another one with the same license?
And Is Unity supports Dynamic shadows?

Samb, same here
Game programming is , first of all , interactivity, not " virtual reality "

Should you add a " RPG movement " to your game
You left click on the screen and the ball follow the mouse pointer regardless of the camera position and orientation ( see AUM 36 for example)

Would it be that easy in Unity ?
Did you try it ?

I do not know what the limitations are exactly, but I think indie can't to post processing effects as there is no render to texture.

the ability to use VS with unity does not depend on the version you use.

you can write DLLs using managed code (c#) any time. if you want to write c/c++ DLLs you need to have the PRO version.

this is not about what A7 can and can't do after you spent months and months extending the original feature-set with DLLs and APIs, etc.
Unity does all of it OUT OF THE BOX without any additional effort on your side.

on the whole learning unityscript or c#...
first of all - let's not call it unityscript but javascript because that what it is: javascript with the unity framework tied in so that all unity commands are available.
most of the older samples in the documentation of unity and some scripts on the wiki are written in javascript... but that is no loss for you, as you can use .js script files alongside .cs (c#) scripts... and even if you do not want to do that, you can easily convert java script to c#, it is just a matter of syntax and typing.

Thanks, I have just purchased a copy of Unity3D indie.
Why do they charge 25% VAT tax, where I live, its 15% ??

The scripting documentation seems to be in "JavaUnity" script. I want tutorials in C#. I shall be requesting this.

dracula: look on the wiki and on the board, there are a lots of tutorials on c#... but please consider instead of learning javascript OR c#, learn c# and its difference to javascript, then you will be able to understand what changes need to be done in order to convert a JS to a CS script.

@maybenew

Any ideas where a non programmer can learn C sharp for starters? Shouldn't it be easier to learn UnityScript (are there proper scripting tutorials for noobs?) for an absolute beginner over C#?



@dracula
So it is true, the tutorials are in UnityScript only (well, mostly). I wonder how hard will it be for an artist to try to learn C# for Unity this way, considering that even UnityScript isn't pure JavaScript.

ortucis, first of all there is a difference between learning c# or javascript as a programming language and using the learned language for unity.

learning the language (syntax, commands, keywords) is fairly easy, just google "c# tutorial" or get yourself a book on amazon... they are as cheap as 10 bucks.
EDIT: you can compare this to learning a new language: you learn the grammatical rules first, which tell you how the vocabulary is used to make sense, after that you only need to learn the words.

after that, after having learned c# or javascript, the grammatical rules of the programming language, you need to learn how to use the commands that unity has in the language you learnt... and once you are at this point, you do not need to distinguish between javascript and c# any more.. javascript and c# use the commands in the same fashion..

c# has a few advantages over javascript, the most important of which is that you can use Visual Studio for programming - which - believe me - makes it a lot easier.

Anyone??

you can easily find that information on the unity website and the unity board.

Forget it. I won't change to Unity.

THanks for the reply maybenew. I am going to go search for some C# books to learn the basics (was already doing with JavaScript).

TBH, I want to go with JS mostly cause:
a) I am a website designer. Even though none of my clients know crap about designing sites, it'll be easier to do few things I use Flash for at the moment.

b) Apparently the tutorials for Unity are easier to navigate through if you are using UScript. I don't know how long it will take them to update all tutorials for C#.

But anyways, I will pick one of thse depending on how easy it will be for me to get the basics first.

probably it would be easiest for you to learn programming directly with unity. i could imagine that most c# books contain complicated stuff you will never need and which could scare a beginner. doing some basic c# tutorials you find on the net should be sufficient for getting started.

...
i didn't have time yet to fully dive into unity but i probably will go with boo then since i like the python syntax.

Books aren't the only option, I found the flash video tutorials over at www.joegrip.com good for Java. They do a C# course too for about $40.
I find the interactive/multimedia approach, with someone walking you through it, better than a book myself. I wish there were more courses like this online.

Probably you have a wrong picture of JS. It is just a scripting language, a syntax with a dozen words and identifiers. But if you use it to program websites or games then all the variables, functions and commands do the difference. This is, what you have to learn. And they will be the same in C# at the end.

The same happens with JS and website programming. JS is not a problem at all, some loops and conditional elements. But then you have to learn how to talk to the elements of a browser, of a website and so on. This is what needs learning.

Don't be so scared of programming languages. They are just the tool, the hammer. The real work will be what you do with this tool.

Haha

@ortucis
I program my game in java script. I never used java script before, only WDL, c-lite and action script. C-Lite and Action Script are the closest one to the java script used in unity.
on second thought.. I second action script IS the closest one, cause of the parenting, "this", etc.
but you will get it, it's not hard. do the first steps of the 3D jumper tutorial, so you know the editor, the rest is just learning and try&error

Hm, i'm a bit confused now.
Can i or can i not extend the engine with my own plugins/c++ code? And can i program my games using c++?
I can't find these informations on the website.

Yes you can buy Unity Indie and make as many games as you want. But if you earn too much with your games you have to switch to pro.

Unity PRO does support dynamic shadows. Not the indie version.

If you want to change a level, create a second one, create a script in the first one and write "Application.LoadLevel ("level2");"
That's it.



@maybenew


i have to do disagree and still call it UnityScript. Of course it's based on Javascript, but with some modifications (not just additional functions). Some Javascript function are not equal to the one in UnityScript and sometimes you have to use it in a different way.

So basically UnityScript can be compared to Lite-C concept wise?

UnityScript extends Javascript just as Lite-C extends C?
Is this correct?

@Captain_Kiyaku: So Unity is really bad.
Anyway, thanks for the second level tip. But if i'm gonna put them in 1 script, how can i make a single script file to do that?

Yes somehow, except the few limitations/modifications in UnityScript. Dunno if Lite-C has some limitations/modifications in C too.




...you are annoying. I don't know why Unity is really bad then (dunno the reason for it cause you didn't mention it) but if you don't like it, just don't use it. Go with whatever is more fun for you.

Just create an empty gameobject, assign the script the the gameobject and attach the code to the script. Where is the problem? Don't be so lazy and just read the tutorials/Reference Guide. Everything is explained great and detailed that you won't miss a thing.

Why everyone only compare the programming side? How about the whole workflow, the asset import capability? That's the stength in Unity I think.

[/quote] I don't know why Unity is really bad then [/quote]
well although i think cowabanga goes about saying this the wrong way, i think its bad because there is no ability to do postprocessing effect/ dynamic shadowmapping which also means you cant do ssao either because you can use rtt.

Ok, thanks. And i've searched in the tutorial 1000 times!!! And it's not clear!

Probably because it is so evident that Unity3D is much better than 3dgs as a far as the workflow is concerned that it is not worth while talking about

About the programming side on the contrary I have my doubts, too
At a the first glance this " component " programming approach seems ok but I wonder whether it is actually suitable for complex gameplay

For example, to have to attach components to " empty objects " in same cases ( see previous posts.. ) uhmm...it sounds to me like a sort of "plastic" programming style...just an impression, anyway

However ,in my opinion Lite_c, despite the name, is actually a javaScript like scrpt language , same as Unity, at least for the programming style

P.S.

I wonder also whether Unity set of functions is complete
Apparently it lacks many common ones
For example I did not find the equivalent functions of vec_for_bone, vec_for vertex, etch which I sue very often

Lite-C has that as well (e.g. no enums, but function overloading)

This Gameobject-based programing is different of course, but you have no disadvantage by assigning a script to an empty gameobject. Also it was just an example. If you change a level, you probably have some kind of door you use, an trigger or whatever where you can attach the script to.

It won't be a problem to create any complex gameplay by attaching scripts to objects. It's not like you have to pre-create the object and have it loaded in the level with the script attached to it, before you use it. You can create an object/model, apply any component you need (collision, particle emitter, sound, etc), attach the script it needs, save it as prefab and delete the object again.
So now you don't have the object lying around in your level but create it, with its by you predefined settings, at any time while playing.

That sounds pretty nice as this is the way A7 does it as well (unless I misunderstood you).

If the basic concepts are similar, a engine switch will be easy, in case someone wants to do this.

I find unity Cool , but not extraordinary !
The indie Version of Unity is too limited , they could do an intermedaite version ?

For same price with A7 you have essential visual features (even if A7 have not such powerfull editor).
Some question :
-Can Unity import Blender static and animated model ?
-How do you do lightmaps in Unity ?

Caus i doubt everyone have an official 3DSMAX license and Blender is my favourite

Ratchet: Please look at their website and you find this information easily:

• Maya .mb & .ma1
• 3D Studio Max .max1
• Cheetah 3D .jas1
• Cinema 4D .c4d1 2 3
• Blender .blend1
• Carara1
• Lightwave1
• XSI 5.x1
• SketchUp Pro1
• Wings 3D1
• 3D Studio .3ds
• Wavefront .obj
• Drawing Interchange
• Files .dxf
• Autodesk FBX .fbx

http://unity3d.com/unity/features/asset-importing

A lightmap can easily be added with a model providing a second uv-set. Then you just switch to the lightmap-material and done.

I don't get why "The indie version ... is too limited". The limitations are really small if you make games. You can easily start to make games and use everything you need except of post processing. And if you have a really good game in the end then you still can upgrade before you release it. But if you never finish a game at all then you saved a lot of money.
I like this kind of pricing.

I find it quite amusing that the same complaints were pretty much common in earlier times of Acknex. And the same answers were given.
It's pretty funny how history seems to repeat now

I don't know why people are actually defending Unity Indie as a complete engine for 3D games. It isn't. The toolset is great and the Mac compatibility is great and all (I won't deny that). But the fact:

1) If using Indie, you will have to work around the lack of even basic features like dynamic shadows by having some cartoony (or radical cell shaded.. something like that) look for the game to avoid complaints (which people who play 3D CAN make even for AAA games) about shadows and all (ever heard of Resident Evil 4 port to Windows?).

2) Every "hit" game being linked to for Unity is created by the Pro version. Every tutorial and blog mentioning Unity is by devs using the Pro version. Indie version, simply put, is useless for a "proper" (not cartoony) 3D game (hell, even TGE 1.5 had shadows).

3) When you do 3D, audience expect the visuals to be of high quality or at least come with basic features like dynamic shadows, which games from 6 years ago had. I would like to see Fusion Fall use Indie version. Even NOW lot's of devs have complained about average visuals in the game (and it has nothing to do with art style).

It seems like the Indie version is just a learning version in the end. Good luck creating games like this without the usual features (unless you like placing "cookies" everywhere). Personally, I will invest in Unity only after a proper game has been released using A7 when I can at least afford a Pro version.

BTW, biggest plus A7 has (as far as I am concerned), free Lite-C version to learn. While people trying to learn Unity without UnityScript seem to be struggling thanks to all tutorials written in UnityScript (and few C# compatible), according to the forum goers there (not making this up, just read around).

I don't see anything in the Kubus video that unity-indie can't do...

^ What is funny is that Kubus wasn't even made with A7 and still looks better than what Unity Indie demo showed (just imagine the A7 boost in visuals).

If you base an engine's capability on what a demo you downloaded could do why did you ever start with A6 / A7? I also don't get what should be shown by that Kabus example just as for the visual boost when using A7 (A6 and A7 currently are quite comparable raw feature wise)...

I really don't know why this tends to turn into a bashing thread. Sure - I also think that the lack of shadows of the Indie version is a rather harsh feature to cut out. At the same with a pricing between A7 Extra and Com the feature set is quite fair and also includes a working multiplayer part which you won't find in A7 except for the Pro version. While I'd like to trade multiplayer for shadows - meh that's a decision the devs made plus as I think Machinery Frank said: Right now the Indie version is a great start for pretty much any game to start with and when things turn out great you upgrade to Pro for the final eyecandy features...

In the end Unity is the much more mature engine in my opinion - most certainly because of the manpower behind it (look at the big dev crew it has). At the same time it probably isn't a good solution for lone wolves or beginners in general because of the scripting language(s). I had no in-depth-look but I didn't really hear much about an "easy accesibility" for bloody newbies via Unity...

Having Unity for Windows still is an insane thing though as especially for teams with some experience it's a fantastic engine to work with. I don't see it as real "danger" towards 3DGS although it might take a nap from its pool of really experienced devs who are / have experienced programmers which will love the much deeper access they have to the engine while artists also will have their fun and don't have to deal with the scripting side...

Enjoy your meal
Toast

the same thing we've been talking about the whole thread.........

dynamic shadows.

I didn´t really look at the Kabus demo but if it really got done with A6 then the shadows can´t be that great. A6 stencil shadows were really crappy and A7 stencil shadows aren´t much better. They are slow, the mesh must be closed, they project through everything, they don´t react to lights correctly, they don´t support transparency, self-shadowing looks really bad,...

Even static light maps aren´t that great in A7. The map compiler is slow and produces many ugly artifacts and importing externally rendered solutions often is impossible or a huge pain.

So I don´t see how A7 is that great in the shadow department.



A7 commercial has stencil shadows and render to texture.

Unity indie has full multiplayer, PhysX instead of ODE, a vegetation system and many other nice features which are unavailable in Gamestudio.

I also don't see a problem by making a game in Indie and if you really want to make money with games, just get the pro upgrade for 950 euro. You dom't have to pay more or something. It's the same price as you would buy pro alone.

The price wasn't really different back in A6 times where you only had RTT with the pro edition.

I don't see dyamic shadows... just the old z-buffer ones für the characters and baked shadows for the level...

but it's nice, that the only complaint about unity-indie is, that it doesn't have dynamic shadows and post-processing effects... well, I have no problem with that, as long as the workflow is much better and things like the colission-system just works without workarounds.

unity is for me what I've searched for, easy, fast and useable.

zbuffer shadows are still dynamic, dynamic just means shadows that move according to the silhouette of the character base on some light (zbuffer ones being affected only by the sun angle) no one said dynamic light mapping, but at least some shadows would be nice.

No offense to those who are defending Unity or whatever, but the posts so far have been just comical.

"I didn't bother looking at Kabus example but here's a long rant on why Unity Indie is still better."

"I didn't look at the video at all but the shadows or looks can definitely not be that good if it was made with A6"


BTW, Unity Indie = 11,000 bucks here, not cheap at all for an "INDIE". So telling someone to "oh just buy the pro if you need shadows" is just.. well..

The whole point of Pro license is to start spending big when you are making money with the Indie version. Upgrading to A7 Pro brings sensible updates, like removal of logo and better MP. While upgrading to Unity Pro mean.. well, better shadows and water (and RTT.. among other features).


To all those saying how Indie version can make Kabus like game (HINT: Survival Horror genre). Please do make it, using Indie and release it for review. It'll be really entertaining, the response your game will get.

Also, I am not bashing Unity (read old posts before saying someone is bashing an engine). I just don't think that certain genres will work the same the way they work on A7 version comparable to Unity Indie. I already said it that the editor of Unity is no big deal at least for me (I can work without such editor, nothing amazing) so as far as I am concerned, the only pros is the Mac portability.

Good luck with your games people (I will obviously keep an eye out on the type of commercial games produced with Unity Indie.. so far, none, but maybe in the future).

Hm? Why 11.000 bucks there? Unity Indie costs $199. How can that be much for such an engine?

Well those discussions lead to nothing anywhere, especially not if people didn't really tested Unity. I just "checked" it out one year before i bought it. I didn't like it much back there. So this year i re-tested it again, but with more details. Now i'm addicted to it.

I see no problem in using Unity Indie and make professional, commercial games with it. Many does. Especially with the iPhone License (which i got now too, just waiting for my iPhone to arrive).

So like it and use it, or don't. That's it.

@Machinery Frank :
I doubt all formats will be supported without any glitches.
It's like some Beyo.. Virt.. engine or others listing lot of formats , but having lot of problems.

Does someone have tested Blender animated models import in Unity ?

The Pro version price is too hight for a lone wolf.
But with indie perhaps some casual succesfull games can be made.
For the price i'll buy indie and play with it to see what point i can reach !

What we can see is that the Unity team is lot more people than A7 , that's why it's progressing so fast with support for
iphone and Wii.
What i like is their "All in One" editor like Torque Engine.

I like A7 and i except A8 to have a new totally editor all in one also ; )

While I agree that not looking at the video and then arguing about it is a bit strange the video still does not show anything spectacular. The shadow mapping can be handled way better in Unity than with 3DGS built-in lightmapper as you can use stuff like Gile[s] or even Lightwave or whatever rendering suite you have giving you superb results...

The only thing not ready out of the package would be the dynamic character shadows and that's probably also how that "the shadows cannot be that good" statement is meant towards: The shadows either are stencil shadows or just ye good ol' Z-Buffer shadows (I can't really tell although they don't seem to bend over the stairs in one scene so they might very well be just Z-Buffer ones) and no fancy pants shader based soft shadows. The question now is how far Unity's Indie versions capabilities go in sort of including a feature similar to that (dunno if that's the case - what I read was always about fancy shader stuff & that kind) / how fakable this is with Unity's feature set...


You shouldn't forget about all the other features which often imo are more important than things like multiplayer like e.g. a serious bone animation system you can use in a way your animations won't look silly with today's polycount (-> weighted, esp. for organic stuff) or having some kind of LOD systems or even having a filepacker...

The Indie version of Unity really "just" lacks shadows & the render-to-texture feature (which tend to go hand in hand nowadays anyway).


As I said - with 150 € for me it cost me less than an A7 Com Edition and places itself right between A7 Extra and Com. When looking at the features you can't really complain for that price. Still shadows would be more viable to me than e.g. multiplayer...


So you say if a game has no fancy dark areas below a character it immediately truns into trash? Are you really that addicted to eyecandy? Don't want to sound rude but even if we'd have a game with just blob shadows below the characters - people might see this as "They really should have come up with something better here!" but in the end it's no game decider or anything even close to that...


The reason probably is that if you have done a commercial quality game you should have the 1000 bucks left for your project and the others to come or let the distributor pay that costs. If not - well ... without any profits you won't make it through the months of creating your next project and you thus have failed...

But to get OT again:
When using OpenGL does your app run under Linux?

Enjoy your meal
Toast

well, while its not needed to sell a game for the pc, it nowadays pretty much expected to have some sort of dynamic shadow. Of course I'd like to see what they have for both extendablity and license on that extendability because if you could write a dll for your own custom shadows that would make it redeemable in my mind, provided someone is actually working on it, or providing i had the skill to do so myself.

Man, Unity guys should hire you for marketing..

"Buy our next-gen 3D engine which has everything you'll ever need to make a game. To help the small time Indie developers, we have even removed useless and most basic features which have been seen in games like Thief ages ago. We say SCREW THE SHADOWS, they are afterall but a bunch of dark areas under characters. Your players haven't experienced horror until they see a giant blob that looks like a shadow moving around in some distant light.. NOW THAT IS SCARY!!!"

Also, I really don't see the point in telling me what features are available on upgrading when I already am talking about SOME of them. No offense Toast but your replies just seem generically dripping with fanboyism, more so than some other people (hell, I am not even defending A7 but talking about basic features for a genre which are expected these days).

While you are making your genre bending horror game using Unity Indie, assuming you are keeping the visual style real, please do some research on how Resident Evil 4 port of PC was a huge fuck-up in visual department. It was SO bad that it served as a wake-up call for Capcom on how PC gamers demans best from a 3D game (they are now porting all of their games themselves, like DMC4 and Street Fighter).

Even small things matter and can really make or break the immersion factor for the player no matter how awesome your gameplay is (and it better be if you intent to add blobs everywhere, like RE4.. which was saved by the gameplay).

I didn´t watch the Kabus video but of course I know the Kabus screenshots and I just don´t find them very impressive and a good example.

I am sure the primitive Gamestudio z-buffer style shadows can be faked very easily with Unity indie. Just squeeze a copy of the model or something. That´s how they work after all. You also aren´t limited to using fuzzy blobs as shadows but can use something more accurate (maybe even animated).

Like always it´s really funny how AAA games enter the discussion. You won´t be able to compete by using any engine if you don´t have a multi million dollar budget.

I have to agree with amy here. At my (humble) mind Ortucis and Lostclimate watch this discussion from a wrong point of view.

I see it that way: If you have little budget, as a small studio or hobby-developer, you will not earn much with a game. You need to be fast and efficiently. You have to create small games, casual games, nice ideas. I formerly used to program games in Delphi and I finished most of my Windows 2d games at a weekend. I sold each game for a few hundreds of bucks to a publisher and this was fine. It would not work if it takes years to finish such small games.

And this is the area where the indie license of Unity makes sense. You get it and you make small nice games for iPhone, Windows, Mac. The price is a no-brainer. You can get much more money back.

But if you really want to make a 3d-game with great shadows, shaders, fantastic lighting, then you have to pay a bit more in the Unity department. This makes sense because you also have to pay a lot more for artwork, game develoopment. You will spend much more time on your project, several years, for sure.

But to be honest: If you really want to go this eye-candy way, then I would suggest to use C4. It is even much cheaper than Unity Pro and just looks better, has a visual shader editor, better light sources and a better scene-management especially for indoors.

So we should see it in a more realistic way: Unity as well as Gamestudio is not a id-Tech 3d shader engine at the graphical edge. C4 is a better choice then. But C4 needs more investment in programming time. So if you want to make small games faster then Unity is just the better bet, scripting, the fastest art-workflow and the most platforms available for your game. Actually this is the technology for small indies to grow bigger, for realistic projects.
If you are a dreamer then better get you Torque3d or C4. Both can be used to create very good looking scenery if you have the arts behind it. But at the end you need much time and a big team for a complete project.

So every technology has its place and we should not beat it down.
Lite-C as an example is a good starting point for pupils or students with no budget at all and with no knowledge of C++ (if they had then they could go with free alternatives like Irrlicht / Ogre without any feature cut at all).

Edit: By the way - I found it interesting that Ortucis as someone who uses Max 2009 and Mudbox has a problem with such a cheap price of Unity
These 2 tools are 20 times more expensive than Unity indie.

It's called a "JOB" where an artist can use the softwares purchased by a studio. I know, shocking, makes no sense... just like any other post defending Unity or offering alternatives for no sane reason.

If you have a job then Unity Indie is cheap as well. But then you probably have no time to make a high end graphic game in your spare time any way. Smaller and casual games are still the better bet then.

And if you did not understand the reason I mentioned in terms of development times, project size and technology, then I feel sorry for you. I tried to help but I cannot help everybody. I dont defend Unity. I mentioned a lot of other tools as well because every tool has its place.

It is up to you. Have fun or finish a game!

You still can fake the Kabus style shadows. Not elegant, not without any hassle but it can be done...


Simple - you wanted to argue about what a Pro license has to look like and gave "additional", sensible stuff like the rather unimportant logo and the multiplayer for 3DGS while comparing to the totally important as essential feature of shadows & co on the Unity side. My comment now was about that even with 3DGS you get some precious things that are important to pretty much any project just with the pro version...


I don't see any fanboyism in my postings (heck I don't even own Unity and probably won't buy it with the missing shadows in the Indie version being one reason) - you've just got in your head that Unity (Indie) can't do a Kabus quality game. Then you started mocking people considering to use this engine - telling them to get a game that will be laughed at (or whatever else) and this just because of the shadows. There's not much to say about this argument: A single not gameplay decisive missing feature won't turn your game into something you'll be "entertained by the responses" from (you even admitted that with the RE example). Using another engine for this task still might be wiser - it changes nothing on the Kabus comparison though...

Also I don't get why you're now comparing and telling stuff about Resident Evil? Your whole point was about Kabus vs. a Unity clone and here all what you cannot do instantly in Unity are the dynamic character shadows. I now won't repeat again how a lack of an engine feature for this type of shadow has to be rated - it was told here by numerous guys...

Enjoy your meal
Toast

I am sorry, did you just assume that I was loaded with cash just cause I have a job and get to "play around" with expensive softwares? Just like your sane advice on switching to even more complicated engine for an Indie who wants to use something like A7 or Unity in the first place just so he can get extra shaders.. which are ALREADY present in A7 basic? Your posts don't make sense, at all.

No offense but I have read a lot of posts from you needlessly defending and commenting different engines and softwares (how do you afford to know so much about all these softwares anyway?) on a million threads. I have yet to find a post that made sense and was on-topic to the discussion or contributed more than a load of crap.

But then again, I wasn't taking you seriously because just like other times, you have barely even tried Unity in the first place (which you already mentioned few posts back, unlike you, I pay attention). Considering I am only "guessing" on if some games can be done convincingly on Indie version, your posts come out more as "yes, Indie can do everything as long as you are awesome and cool like me".

Also, where exactly in my posts did you read how I wanted to create a next-gen MMO? So according to you, adding basic features like dynamic shadows in your project is like making a big leap into the realm of AAA games? Oh jeez, I wonder if adding a motion blur means I have to upgrade to idTech 5 going by your genius suggestions. Is it way too advanced for a fraking Indie? Oh god no, not the motion blur..


Thanks for the game development lessons Mr.Machinery_Frank.


PS: Do you think I should license Doom 3 engine because I want some shadows in the game? Thanks for the advice. Don't worry about the price, I have a "JOB" (secret code word for the money tree in my backyard).

No, please dont switch at all. You did not understand. Since I have no idea about your project I never gave you an advice to switch. I just told in general what tool might be better for what kind of project.
But you take it personally. I dont get why.


Hm, there are several reasons for that. One reason might be that I wrote none-sense. The other one might be your willingness to understand. I will not judge this.


I am a beta tester of Unity. I create games for more than 15 years. And I used to work with a lot of tools (Gamestudio, Gamespace, Torque, C4, Unity, Beyond Virtual, Lawmaker, FPS-Creator, Lightwave, C4D, ZBrush, Modo, Fragmotion, Milkshape, Bodypaint3d). We need a lot of them for creating our model packs at Dexsoft. Some tools are only for converting models. We made some games at Dexsoft and we have to test our models in different engines.
And no, I dont use warez. I bought licenses every year.


That is a big mistake. It is better to pay more respect. I pay respect to you, my girl-friend and my kids because they expect this from me. If yo do not, then you are just plain ignorant and arrogant.

I will not comment the rest of your post. It went more and more into exaggeration, emotional stuff and insulting. I am tired of commenting this.

I have no idea why you are so emotional about software. I explained everything clear and without focusing at a certain tool. I try to be objective, not to attack certain groups of users, because I know how fanboys react. But still it happens that some people take it as a personal issue.
This is not my intention to raise such negative emotions.

Have fun with the tool you ever use. Unity is definitely a tool to have fun. A lot of users already told this here and I am thankful for their advice (because I could not test every aspect of this big tool-set, I am not making a Unity game currently, but people like Kiyaku do).
But other tools are great as well. So I often try to mention their advantages/disadvantages to just chose the right tool for the right project.

I think this in not hard to understand.

The reason for this discussion with its huge posts must be an emotional twist, because it makes no reasonable sense.

The persons who used Unity3D are longtime users of A6, and they know what about they speak when they compare the engines.

Kabus works with the dynamic shadow system of A6 only, because it uses extremely restrictions of view and rooms. There are always only very view entities with a dynamic shadow visible. It is one of the very very few games where the makers where able to make reasonable use of the shadow system.

For my more plattformer-like game with a free far view, and up to 30 NPCs it was useless, because everything got too slowly.

or Have fun and finish a game!

That might even be the most important and overlooked point.
Even if some features are still msising, with a bigger team they will make it faster into the engine... or at least... should...

The way I see it on paper A7 Commercial and A7 Pro are pretty much identical in terms of price and features as Unity Indie and Unity Pro.

altough i dont liek that unity vs other engines thing,
a7 commerical has rtt support and dynamic sahodws. unity indie doesnt.

But like already mentioned Unity indie has many features A7 commercial doesn´t have which balances this a bit. Weighted bones, a filepacker, PhysX, a webplugin, OSX support, a powerful foliage system, a much more modern scripting system, a WYSIWIG editor, the possibility to go to other platforms later,...

Like ortucis you could say that everyone will laugh at you with non-weighted bone animations.

You simply have to decide what´s more important to you.

My biggest complaint about Unity indie is the watermark which appears for 3 seconds in the webplayer. I find it a bit annoying.

supported



If you use blender, and you know what features link right with 3dgs using vents plugin, you basically have that too.

No, weighted bones aren´t supported in A7 commercial. I also think that A7 bone animation is a lot slower than in Unity because it doesn´t get done on the GPU.

I agree about using blender. It´s almost as good as having a WYSIWIG editor. Just the material workflow isn´t that nice.

using fbx im almost 100% that weighted bones work with a7 but that is a good point if unity does it on the gpu and a7 doesnt.

Everything here all boils down to this, use the engine that gets the job done, if you dont need decent shadows, use unity, make a drop shadow, or multiple ones (one per joint) or flatten a model. if you need decent shadows and you good at hlsl/working with script between the hlsl and the language your using, use a7, if you need to make a game with decent shadows and you have no hlsl/scripting expirience, go to school, or change your needs, or read tutorials for hours

MED supports displaying weighted models in all editions but the engine doesn´t. You will only get weighting in pro.

Or go with something like Unity pro if you have the money.

hmmm... that sucks, not something i was aware of. meh, i still like my a7 and word yet about the extendability of unity through plugins?

.net dlls can be used with indie but I think C++ plugins which extend the renderer can only be done with pro.

True
A7 Forever!

okay, this has become something of a "A7 fanboys against _maybe a bit more unbiased Developers_ - thread"...

just got unity iphone and built my first iphone games within 10 hours... using resources from another project I did with unity pro... this is just amazing: 10 hours for porting a game to a mobile platform.

Thanks for your very valuable informations. This is astonishing.

Well for the price , the indie version is really good, so i bought it.

What i like a lot :
-I can import easily Blender models (FBX export)
-When you select an object on the editor or hierarchy you have a small 3D preview window in the left panel
and you can see all attribuets : textures, material properties, shaders in the panel.
-You can make a terrain in some minutes (paint and sculpt)
-Free assets that you have access , are really pro quality
-Lot of things are visually displayed : sounds, collisions etc ...

Unity is incredibly good on the workflow point.


In A7 lot of tweaks , and things must be done by code.
Even having to use two tools (MED abd WEDp) is painfull : MED and WED
In Unity you have only one editor.
You can import some FBX models, assign textures , shaders by mouse directly in the main editor

I like my A7 also , and i hope a lot Conitec for A8 will follow same workflow and let down the old interface.

http://blogs.unity3d.com/2009/04/10/unity-roadmap/#more-411



Their team isn´t only bigger, it also contains some of the best people in the industry.

Ya, but do they have a jcl? One jcl is worth about "10 best people in the industry"

Well, Unity3d is a great engine, out of question

However I wonder how they can afford a so big team
This business is not that big
All the other low cost game engines are developed by a small team, except may be Torque
Namely : 3dgs - C4 - Truevision - NeoAxis - Irrlicht - LeadWerk etc

Are these guys free launchers or do they work on other projects \ products ?

and @Alberto..

which engine do you use now for developing?
see you in many forums

you forgot one other important windows engines: Blade3D...

I got started with Blitz3d, a great engine but obsolate
Then I switched to 3dgs , a great engine , getting obsolate
A couple of weeks ago I purchased Unity 3d , a great ( I guess) modern engine

These are the only engines which I use on regular basis

Never tested Blade but it seems to me that kind of bloated engine which tries to make too much for you thus losing flexibility

C4 is also good but not enough user friendly for an hobbyst game programmer like me

I like very much also Truevision but it is not supported anymore by the designer
A good impression of Torque x but for some reason it seems that it is not supported too

I hate Torque

This is my background of low level game programmer

I guess they simply managed to get used by some bigger studios giving them money on the one side and features / improvements on the other. At least it seems some changes made for that Cartoon Network MMOG Fusion Fall are going to make it into the next version as features like multi-threaded streaming level loading...

Enjoy your meal
Toast

They developed a MMO for cartoon netrowk

I'm also working on Game for over 10 years now. Until 2 Years ago i mainly used 3DGS (from A3 on). The last 2 years i was using C++ with Acknex, as C-Script was just too limited for our needs. It worked, but as i'm a .Net-Programmer in my job i realized that programming in C++ is too time-consuming (compared to C#/VB.NET) and i started looking for other engines which support coding in .Net. I've tried many and bought some licences: Leadwerks, which has a great Graphics-Engine (but thats it) and NeoAxis, which i like most until now. Its just a great Framework designed by the same philosophy which i would use for my own engine and impressive Code<->Editor-Interaction WITHOUT any restrictions.
I took a look at Blade3d, DX-Studio and even Unity. These three are quite compareable in my oppinion. They all seem to be some kind of a gamebuilding-playground for me - I can't do things the way i want to do. There are nice ready-to-use-features, but as soon as you try to do something different then a good-looking fps-style-demo you need a greater degree of freedom in programming. Unity (and the similar engines) may be nice for artists which want to prototype their ideas, but these "packages" are just too limiting for complex games.
So i will stay with NeoAxis for the moment, but i would still prefer 3DGS over Unity.

@AlbertoT:
You'r saying "Never tested Blade but it seems to me that kind of bloated engine which tries to make too much for you thus losing flexibility" - i don't understand why you criticize this aspect on Blade3d if you like Unity, which also falls in this category?

give you 10 points..

you are totally right. if you want to have great flexibility then NA is a cool solution.
But I really hope that they will come with more docs. Its hard to understand everything only with reading code.
But the community of NA is also great....

Does betauser now make 3 month vacancy or was it just an april joke?

If you read my previous post you can see that I expressed my doubts also about Unity as far as flexibility of its scripting language is concerned
I said that I have a " nostalgia " for the old fashion game engines where you were given just a bunch of functions \ class and the rest it was up to you, without too many constraints

I like for example Truevision and the new " component " oriented Torque x
Unfortunately they are not well supported
I like also C4 , for the same reason, but it is not a user friendly engine, not the best solution for hobbyest programmer

Never used NeoAxis even though at a first glance I have had a good impression
However I dont have confidence in an engine which is supported by one person only
Probably Unity people are also good marketing people but is is a matter of fact that it is, same as 3dgs, a very popular engine , just match 3dgs, unity and neoaxis forum

I know it may sound unfair vs Neoaxia but that's life


After testing Unity javascript for a couple of weeks my opinion is that it is a 3DGS enhanced version , same phylosophy but without for example those annoying "empty pointers" and a better Object \ Component implementation

I thought c4 was too

Almost all engines are actually one-programmer stories. Beyond Virtual (Game Core), Leadwerks, C4, Neoaxis, Irrlicht and many more. Later some other help here and there, but actually there is almost always one person to maintain the engine code. The same is happening with Gamestudio or Torque.

The risk is the same. If the main programmer leaves then it will be bad for the core engine code.

It is not just a matter of the number of developers

When I was writing this post there were 303 visitors on the 3dgs forum and 193 on Unity
Other engines can have 5 or 6 people max
Right or wrong some engines are more popular than others , thus the risk is not the same

In favour of NA is the fact that it is based on the popular Ogre

@frank yeah but i thought c4 was still only one

ot: Anyone ever find out any info on user made plugins? I'd look myself but some of unities site is a little hard to navigate (or at least get info for) I couldnt even find a indie/pro comparison list.

Hiya.

Unity difference between Indie and Pro: http://unity3d.com/unity/licenses#authoring

Basically, Indie is like buying a sports car without mirrors or windshields. It still goes really fast and looks ok from a distance, but as soon as you take it out on the road or get up close to it, you shake your head and think "What's the point?".

My vote is for C4.

aha, thank you paul, i was looking for a table or something

@Paul_L_Ming:
The problem : C4 need lot more programming, and even C++.

In fact Unity Indie can do it very well depending on your project type and size.

Imagine some Mario Galaxy style game : the art, and simple texture effects make all the difference.
Could be done in Unity Indie ,no need for full screen effects or shadows (simple rounded shadows would do it).
Any casual game can be done with Indie, with subttle effects you can do great things, and the casual game market is growing really big

The templates for collision,cameras are really good and you can use them by a click, to very quickly prototype (before tweaking them or doing your own camera).
Unity is also fast to use as 3DGS ,and more friendly (editor for all things all in one).

i will go for torque 3d,as they have been already on windows platform long time before unity does,i just don't wanna extra headache become first batch of windows 'tester' developer :D,and btw i will got(preorder) 400+$ discount on torque 3d since i already owned TGEA

Well in the end it's just the editors that recently have become Windows compatible - you could deploy Direct X games for quite some time (maybe even since Unity existed - dunno when this actually made it into the engine)...

Enjoy your meal
Toast

Yes, this is almost true. Most of the 2.5 work went into the editor. But there are some other features and bug fixes as well.
But did you see what they are working on currently? This is impressive internal stuff to optimize the engine:
http://blogs.unity3d.com/2009/04/10/unity-roadmap/#more-411



This is really true in the beginning. Since C4 is a very general engine you have to write some structures, classes and controllers for your nodes in the beginning. But then everything is OOP and modular so from a certain point you will have less code for game logic, no spaghetti and better to maintain source.

But I understand that it looks overwhelming in the beginning.

Hi folks,
We've also tested out unity and we are quite pleased with the results.

The workflow and the wysiwyg editor is just amazing and it fits exactly our needs for our interactive visualizations.

The following test-scene was ported from our 3dgs-project "Krönlein". We wanted to see it in a browser

Interactive Visualization in a browser

You have to install the unity webplayer.

cheers

Sinnlos & Zwecklos

Torque 3d seems to be interesting, but 1000$ is way too much for me as a hobby-coder. And the 200$-version is way too limited. I would never buy an engine, where its 'indy'-version is limited in its main-features.

looks nice but i think there are some artifacts caused by the mixing of fixed function and vertex shader materials. i have this problem too in my projects but it should be fixed in 2.6:

How long did it take to port Krönlein?
And, what were the difficult parts?

BTW, the camera movement has an interesting concept, its almost like bending your neck backward and forward. I noticed this, when standing with the back to a wall and looked upward.

Awesome news! We tried to work with anti-aliasing, then those artifacts arnt that bad anymore but then we are not able to use post processing effects. This issue with anti-aliasing and pp effects seems to be an overall problem
Maybe its just to complex to implement it to a commercial engine.



I dont know exactly how long it did take to port Krönlein, we spent a lot of time with experimenting and testing.
But I guess when the 3D Content and all the textures are ready for export, its just a matter of hours. The import/export pipeline from unity is just amazing.

The camera movement is still work in progress. As you said its an interesting concept but it disturbs when you are near a wall and looking downward. The camera then goes through the geometry.

cheers

Sinn- und Zwecklos

To be honest, when I read something like this...

(Random rotation)
http://forum.unity3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=22187&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0

...then I´m a littlebit scared.

The British Army are using Unity for it's latest recruitment campaign online.
There's a couple of missions to play with more to come..

https://www.armyjobs.mod.uk/startthinkingsoldier/Pages/Default.aspx

dould not find anything made with, unity, the 3d game is made with Flash... It's pretty neat for a flash game tho..

Huh? You're scared of some noob? then the beginner-forum in this forum must be a ghost train for you

What's scaring is that a row of answers and tests didn't show any proper result.

No, I´m rather concerned about complicated functions like setting the pan angle of an object to a random value.

This seems not to be very intuitive.

Of course everything is object oriented, but it scares me that
such simple functions are cluttered into more than one line:

var temp : GameObject = Instantiate(prefab, position, Random.rotation);
temp.transform.eulerAngles.y = 0;

I prefer "ENTITY.pan = random(360);" - but that´s just me.

Edit: Pappenheimer has nailed it pretty well.

errrmm...
I done that in my game, so the rotating items won't looking all the same.
this is the code:
transform.eulerAngles.y = Random.value*180;

and it works.

really, it seems that some guys are nitpicking everything just to get something that they don't like about unity...


also, if someone is interesting, this is the last status of my game, made with the unity trial. need yet to buy the full version:

http://www.bysamb.de/priv/unity/rollingballweb1.html


edit:
before anyone cries it out loud: yes, in this version they are all rotated the same, I need to change the code to:
transform.parent.eulerAngles.y = Random.value*180;
but since the trial is over, I couuldn't do that.

nice little game Samb. (though it took time to me to accidentally realize that pressing E makes you hold your breath and you start float, on test3)

(i am teaching lite-c to my borther, he wants do a game like "rollingball" :D, he will start later tonight..)

sorry for of topic.

@Samb :
Why not talking about the workflow or the time it tooked to make your game ?
Or if it was easy to implement physics to make your game ?

I tried it : nice little game
Continue polishing it and you could finish with a solid casual game !

It´s nice that it turns out to work for you and that you are not overhelmed by the different objects.
But it doesn´t answer the question why nobody was able to help him.
It was not intended as nitpicking, it was rather a quick observation.

I don´t have anything against Unity, I´ve bought the indie version.

@quadraxas
Oh, yes, sorry, forgot to say that "E" and "shift" is the action key for the red and green smiley. at irst it was on "ctrl", but internet explorer don't like that...

@ratchet
it was A BLAST. no, really. everything just worked. it was the first time, that I really enjoyed making a game. I love the collission system, based on the physic engine. in every game I made with 3DGS, the coll-system made me crazy and I had to make hundreds of workarounds. in Unity... it just work's.
there is only one thing that I miss... "use_box" in the tracing function
everything else = pure love. the workflow is wunderful and I today I could do the whole game in its current status in 3 days. it's that simple.
I will finish it, first the webbrowser version, than a real version with the 2.6 update, with cutscenes made with the new animation editor.

@fogman
good to know
hope I will see something from you soon

The animation editor really sounds interesting. We could use it for showcasing our models and the web player will be a great option to showcase models at our website with real-time feedback to our customers.

i don't think the webplayer is a good way to showcase models you want to sell. ever heard of glintercept and the like?

Hey, Samb, your game is fantastic. Controlling the ball works perfect and the level1 is very stylish, nice background and great level-design. Congratulation!

You really have to finish this. Wish you the best luck!

Thanks for this information. I just checked the website of GLintercept. They could steal textures with it. But it looks like it cannot save meshes. So maybe it is good to display only a little selection of models online.

there are automated tools that directly copy scene on 3dsmax from dx9/opengl applications.

Showcasing models in realtime is not a good idea, but free(for non-commerical use) sample models thing works.

http://feedback.unity3d.com/pages/unity

i like this feedback system.

http://uservoice.com/signup

maybe we should also open one for gamestudio?

Thanks, and I try my best to finish it

Just make some nice bundles in the next weeks, cause then the game will even look good

What bundles do you have in mind? If you need anything from Dexsoft just write me a message.

Regards

Do you guys know that you can try the Pro version of Unity also? Just send them an email asking for it and they will send you a link with a code that will only work for 30 days also.

Hiya.

I gotta say, the more I use the Unity Indie demo, the more impressed I get. I'm really diggin' it's workflow for artists. I've just emailed the unity guys to see if I can demo the Pro version (my next project will make heavy use of 'special effects'...glows, color-corrections, etc.).

I'd *LOVE* to be able to EASILY do the same in A7, but getting models with diffuse, normal, spec, bump and luminosity maps is...oh, wait, impossible without delving into custom shaders (I assume?). I have no clue how to program shaders, and my C++ is about 10 years out of date.

Maybe when A8 or the much touted, and still ethereal, "real-time editor" shows up things will change...but right now, Unity is looking pretty damn sweet from an artists standpoint.

Just played with the FPS tutorial : Amazing

A7 FPS is far far far from the Unity one in terms of showcase
Let's talk about amazing workflow !
And the very bad old assets of A7 that have more than 5 years could be reaplaced caus they don't make a good advertisment for it



-I added two spots lights to the scene , in the editor when you
adjust values you see in real time how it affects the scene (objects ,ennemies with shaders and level) : TOP NOTCH.
No CODE , no shader problem.
The lights affects ennemies shaders when they pass throught or your weapon , amazing cool !

I added another point light , when you adjust distance and intensity, that 's really two different parameters , not like in A7 where you just have distance !
And the light was so intense that you thought you were near a volcano. It affected level, ennemies with bump maps etc ...
AGAIN No code ...

-The precise collision on ennemies is far more advanced than the very simple collision of 3DGS, And ragdoll is cool.
The ragdoll system is already integrated in Unity !

-There are things i have to dig , like the waypoins :
in the editor that's represented by the letter "W" in 3D and big . There are some sort of portals you can place manually, to optimise frame rate.

Finally , i exported the game, what is cool is the opertaing system choices you have (Window,MAc, window browser ...) , it just works directly, and it automatically zip/pack all media and game. You just go to the folder and launch the .exe

Well, the interface is so sophisticated :
for each object or thing you access is properties(material,textures,shaders,script) in the right panel,and you see thumbnails of textures, normal map, mesh model.
And you can visually edit all that ! Just amazing workflow !

Well i begin to dig it,interface so beautifull ,smooth,clear ! I can't go back to A7, sorry !
Perhaps A8 will make ne return to 3dgs , for the moment
that's two different worlds

No!! Not you, Ratchet!!
At least stay working with A7, and Unity.

No worry, i've been working all day with Unity :
I've been following the 3rd person tutorial amazing.
What amazes me is the possibility to change particles properties, meshes or lights properties with the game playing :
And it can only give ideas for A7

But caus i'm not friendly with Unity script,it takes me a lot of patience , learning , time to integrate all these things.
So i have been back to A7 !

I've exported an animated character from Blender to MED.
I need to talk to Ventilator to improve the export plugin.
With it's great Blender plugin , you must specify manually each frame : But if yo have 79 frames: you must type the numbers from 1 to 79 : AWFULL !!
(even more i could reach the 46 number only in the input box , caus it was full)
I think it won't cost a lot to Ventilator to integrate intervals instead of all frames for the plugin !
Just type 1 and 79 to export all frames from 1 to 79.

Well i msut not forget this is an Unity thread !

ratchet, you can just skip numbers too, you could go 1 3 6 9 12 15 18 etc. since the engine will interpolate in between, you dont really want too many frames in an animation anyways, it will eat your memory up really bad.

It would be nice to have both in the exporter -- use commas to separate individual frames, and a colon ":" to indicate an interval (such as 1:79, if you really need that many -- is this for a cutscene or something?).

I would love to be on-topic, but I don't actually know much about Unity, nor am I particularly interested in it. I like programming, and A7 is a great environment for programmers (Lite-C is great, fast, it's easy to integrate shaders on a per-model or per view basis, etc).

And ventilator's blender exporter means I really don't care how bad MED is.

And I already have A7 :P

Jibb

@lostclimate :
So avoid the engine to interpolate is better. And i perfer to have my real animations, smooth and entire.

Let's talk Uniy: in the panels you can import directly any Blender model by (it is converted automatically by Unity in FBX format , and i've imported successfully an animated model and it's texture from Blender.)

For A7 : Yep Ventilator plugins is just great !
You import your model as it is with it's textures, what i don't like a lot is that this plugin don't like hard edges and you have to separate them.
Well specify the intervall instead of frames manually is just very needed
Blender 2.49 have already in it the plugin from Ventilator to export to A7 MDL.
I've not tried the level exporter from Blender with Ventilator plugin, perhaps tonight : caus exporting characters animated and levels directly from Blender : means LOT BETTER WORKFLOW , you directly go to WED or GED (no more MED) !!
But it's For Blender users only !!

I like this engine. Once i get around all the learning curves i think i could use the engine.

yeah, my exporter is getting a bit old. entering the single frame names kind of made sense for vertex animation when you had to be careful that the model doesn't get too big (this idea goes back to my maya exporter) but now it probably would make more sense to use blender's action data instead of having to manually enter animation sequences. would be some work but adding the 1:79 option should only take two or three changed lines so i will look into it.

what do you mean? use the edge split modifier, then the hard edges should export fine. hard edges always have to be separated for direct3d anyway internally since direct3d doesn't support anything like smoothing groups.

the only disadvantage is that you have to apply the modifier with the current exporter version. better just do it for exporting and don't save the model that way. this is also something i should fix in future versions. it shouldn't be necessary to apply modifiers. another thing is adding support for bone weights.

Thanks Ventitlator if you can put the 1:79 thing

In fact for Hard Edges i talked in terms fo performance !
Caus split Hard Edges means duplicating edges so 3D points, so
more 3D points to apply to math rotations when rotating model ?
Or am i wrong ?
For Bone Weights, i don't mind cau i have A7 Commercial and not Pro and only one vertex per bone is allowed.

Another great idea could be like in Unity : tell WED to import directly a BLender model through your plugin !

vertices always need to be split to achieve hard edges. not matter what. the GPU/direct3d/opengl can't do this in a different way. so blender's edge split modifier is perfectly fine! actually it's perfect because it saves me the work of converting something like smoothing groups to split vertices.

i am not sure if split vertices make much performance difference. there are caching mechanisms which possibly could catch this and cause calculations to be done only once for vertices at the exact same position. probably split vertices are a bit slower with animations though since gamestudio does animation in software and probably doesn't have such a caching mechanism.

It's just the driving portion so far, it says Unity as it's loading. It's not particularly impressive but it works.