Unity Indie is... Free? Xbox 360 Support Also Announced

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=25840

...and the unity kills alot of engines.

Wow! Nothing to say but that.

argh... i just got a license a few weeks ago. i like this move nevertheless though.

Are you sure? I don't know its workflow.
Hope, I can use it for workshops with kids as I use Lite-C at the moment, but wait, probably the tool chain from modeling to leveling is too complicating for kids.

You will have to select a 3d modeling app, but Unity is very easy to use once objects are imported. I think your students will get much further along in your workshop.

you see, i bought unity couple of weeks ago. I am still an unity-noob, and did not really tried something on it other than the workshops but it was one of the best $200 i spent along with i did for A7comm. And i am really happy to see that more people have chance to use it.

I still "love" this community and lite-c and a7. IMHO, a7 and unity are on diffrent tracks, but unity is really good too.

I will use both a7 and unity together, for diffrent projects. I probably will upgrade to a8,a9 too, if nothing bad happens to me or GS expect me around 5 more years.

Hi!

i just downloaded Unity and installed it, but when i try to run it, it wants me to register. i tried to register with the "internet activation" funktion, but it didn't work, and i don't know how to use the "manual activation", can someone please help?

- Muhsin Kaymak

I think the servers are too busy. Wait a few hours and try again

yeah wait for europe to sleep and it will be fine i guess.

I think that it's the fault of america. They are coming all back from lunch... ^^

Hehe!

OK, i try later then :-)
thanks for the answers!

Deep insights 'bout what makes the world go round! ^^

guess i'll have to play with this soon too... gs is a pain if a few areas

If you purchased Unity Indie within the last 60 days, you're eligible for a full refund. Everyone else will get $400 discount toward Unity Pro or $250 off iPhone Basic.

Awesome! Thanks for the info!

Enjoy your meal
Toast

Oh , no we paid money for somehting now going on 2.6 and free !!

But big big news for all people wanting a complete 3D engines with all tools , power, easy shaders etc ...

Don't know What A7 commercial or Pro will can do against such complete engine having complete World and tools and easy import and to apply shaders and textures !

I think they take the right decision indeed !
All people playing with indie version will find incredible powerfull editors and tools ; and will not hesitate for some to buy the Pro Pro or Iphone versions indeed !

wow the list of features is incredible! for the first time in many years gamestudio may have to take a backseat at my computer
. im not even done downloading it yet , and im in love.

i agree gamestudio will have a hard time competing with this

Unity is a beautiful engine, with an incredible interface , and unparalleled publishing features. It is as good as it gets within the indie world.

Oh, I AM gonna use it. But Gamestudio won't have a backseat. It's gonna be there and in front of Unity.
Though, I'll have to use Unity more to learn.

good for you cowabanga , and i dont blame you , you have com or pro i think right? you already have the features i crave and cannot afford with gs right now , i have a6 standard and free lite c . so unity will blow my versions of gs out of the water

but like i said im just gonna move the acknex pot to the back burner , not take it off the stove

From my experience, the development process using Unity has been much smoother than gamestudio although gamestudio can accomplish all that Unity can, using gamestudio it took me more work, more bugs and more frustrations to use.

Yes, i have Commercial.

Yes, and besides, I'm already making a project, so i'm not gonna change the engine right now.

Hey, nice saying

Hell,

they want with full force that everyone use their UNITY -thing.

I hate this monopol building like Microsoft or Google did.

And buying the "PRO" version to get the RenderToTexture feature is like Gamestudio in the year 2003.

Further only Version 1.1 of the dotnet framework is supported until now. And if I want to use C# there are restrictions (dont use namespaces , dont use constructors).

So better wait till Unity is grown up a bit more.

I'm satisfied what my A7 "com" can do , but will keep an eye on Unity.


,gri

It's time that 3D on the web becomes more ubiquitous so I like this step too. I don't think it really will become a monopoly. There are enough other free engines out there and on the web there will also be stuff like Google's O3D. Don't worry.

hm I still have a6 extra and lite-c free, I think I will try it out. For me the main reason for using a product is not wheter they are building a monopol position thanks to erveryone which uses their products but for me the main reson is if a product is good. And Unity is definitively really good. I didn't buy a7 because nowadays competitors have for the same money the same and often more good features too. and I think twice before giving my money out(due the global financial situation and first my situation comes then the one of companys sincerly), I see what it gives for it, and compare with others. And the respect apart that I have for acknex, there are a lot of things which makes me wanna work with unity right now that it turned free. hope that conitec adds more fetaures for a7 extra (i dont say that they have to do it with the lite-c free edition) so guys like me, would spent the money for the extra. It's still better for the company if they go more for the users money, than bringing the user to use another engine for free with the same or easier workflow. I mean you can see It as a monopoly building thing, but I think they just react to the global financial situation. Big Names also turn theri games sooner than a few years ago into a budget game after some months, engine developers can only make the price lower or add more fetaures to their engines...It's hard to add ne features but nowadays hobbyist programmer, think twice before giving out money, because they knew they will probably never have a game been published...so if they spent money than only if they get a lot for it. but I will use untiy only like i did with a6 just for playing around as a hobby, but sincerly I see more potencial for untiy. and acknex remains my favorite one for prototyping. this said by not a professional one, but just a wanna be gamedeveloper maybe the goal customers of conitec...
but acknex still rocks and I would not turn back if it would not be this way hehe

there is only one reason why i might switch to unity sooner or later and thats rather simple, LEVEL LIGHTING, blocks are so out of date and the radiosity takes decades to generate, i went to bed leaving ma pc on, radiosity on minimum setting and when i woke up, about 62% wat tha!! come on, i love everything else about GS, but damn man, its like they dont expect us to make more than a room size demo, or to use some external app... so, i may be visiting unity to see if they do better level lights

Unity doesn't have a light mapper at the moment (except for terrains). But you can use gile[s] which also is free now and much better than Gamestudio's light mapper.

oh, then might as well use gile[s] with gamestudio, when as far as i am in my project, i cant just switch engines thanks for the reply, blenders interface is like a retarded monkey speaking spanish to me while i'm in a crowd of shouting ppl [you get the idea]

[edit]
where can i find the gile[s] site? the one i found is on "thegamecreators.com" and thats nowhere near free

[edit]
found it:
http://www.frecle.net/index.php?show=&section=giles&sub=download

its not taking over really but ya, its competition, lol, i can only imagine what torque will do in response..

some weeks ago torque seemed to be taking over, now its unity, GAMESTUDIO its YOUR time to SHINE... dont let darkbasic be the next one -bawls-

unity is taking over the indie market.

http://www.frecle.net/index.php?show=&section=giles&sub=download

Though last time I checked, it was quite tricky to get gile[s] results into Gamestudio.

seems i made the edit as you were writing this post, anyways, we'll just have to experiment, will never know

i dont think its hard, just did it within 5 or so minutes on a test scene, i'll just get the artist to learn the other features of giles and i think we may be good to go, thanks again for bringing it up

whats tricky about it?

How do you do it? What format do you use?

It was about a year ago when I last tried this and found it to be quite cumbersome then. But maybe there is a Gamestudio exporter in the meantime or does Gamestudio support import of lightmaps now?

naah, just use the max asii format

If you like 3DGS, DON'T download Unity. You will never come back to it.

You've been warned.

dracula, not really. Unity is definatly great, but GameStudio has also several great sides just no one want to see. And as far as I know, shader support is a unity pro feature, only. The great thing about GameStudio is that programming wise there already is a function for everything and if not, you can easily add it yourself. I didn´t yet got to know a simimlar good designed engine which feels as flexible and free as A7 does. Of course the engine can still improve, but it would be boring if it couldn´t and I am sure that unity can also improve some things.
Unity is definatly the better choice for artists but probably not for coders.

That's wrong. Render-to-texture is pro only but shaders are supported in the free edition too. And in contrast to Gamestudio, shaders are a joy to use in Unity.



The problem of Gamestudio isn't so much the engine (except maybe ODE and the problematic ellipsoid collision detection system which also is based on parts of ODE) but more the studio part.

...and of course you are stuck with Gamestudio once you have done a great game. With Unity you have to possibility to go to the web, OSX, iPhone, Wii, 360 and more in the future.

from what i can figure you can only use predefined shaders??

and yes, i really like unity and will start to use it but i still use(and will use) a7 too.

If you like 3DGS, DON'T download Unity. You will never come back to it.

Yeah, i think so !

I use it and some points that you will find big :
- Cross Platform
- Browser support for 3D games with big power : island demo
- Simple physics and properties on a object by clicks on a
panel properties in the world editor : big workflow !
- shaders : No coding , No shaders search etc ...some
clicks apply to the mesh , textures assign graphically and
it's running
- Ambient occlusion as a built-in feature
- All complete terrain tools included in world editor really
rocks !
- Iphone version rocks a lot : lot of selled titles !
- 360 coming !
-choosen by Funcom for their next mmo !

It's like having very advanced versions GED, MED, WED and lot more in a one world editor : all very polished and user friendly.

And Free :
I think also 3DGS can't compete with it's commercial version !
Why paying when you have lot more advanced , lot more professionnal for free ?

Wow! great news! GS would have hard time competing on it...

I've been learning 3DGS for a months now, and some areas in the engine are so blurry... even debugging the code is a pain.. what the...

anyway, still have to finish my current project in 3DGS.. and i'm looking forward to lerarn this Unity engine

Hope 3DGS would also update their development tool SED.. it's really a crappy software...:(

Thanks for the info..

Here's a useful link: License comparison. Custom shaders can be written, and from the documentation it looks decent (not fantastic, but decent).

A feature I really like is to emulate the capabilities of older hardware.

I'll probably download Unity to experiment with later when work is thin, but quite frankly the free version's lack of Render to Texture and full-screen post-processing holds it back a lot.

"Yeah, but Unity's FREE!"
My response: "Yeah, but I already have A7 Com, and thus can use/write virtually any shader conceivable."

The tools look great, and that'll be the reason I'll download it later on.

As stated by some others, it's more for artists than coders.

Jibb

I think It can be for coders too as it supports c#, javascript and boo. This is something I really like about it. Sure for you who already have 3dgs commercial or professional version it makes no sense to break with it during your current projects. I felt to give a look into it and I like what I've seen so far and it's really a nice workflow. design -> create-> code (or not ) and play it live...but it's surely not the engine that will kill every other engine in the indie world, competitor should see it as an motivation to improove more.
fact is this can be super duper good for us users, because this is a competition like in every scene too. fast food, sport every scene has is big and little names...I'm sure acknex will not go under, I'm really curious about the updates that will follow during the development time of this game project of conitec. I think conitec will give good responses

It's a big strategy and good from Unity !

Yeah the engine will not make AAA characters,levels , effects for you indeed !

But tools are essential to make a game !
You need a terrain in your level , just use the tools under world editor : why coding it again and again ?

Maybe Unity could be used as a level editor for Gamestudio? I am not sure though if the free edition allows to write exporters.


http://unity3d.com/company/news/sequoia-capital-press.html

you beat me to it, the writing is on the wall, i too am gonna check this out, heard their multiplayer coding can be simple well, simpler than GS

atari?

didn't atari invest in gamestudio which resulted in the free atari lite-c?

...and now there is a free unity... hm...

Maybe they (Atari) are dropping Lite-C and not funding it anymore.

I don't think it is about dropping. I guess that the funding was only a single payment, because when I asked JCL about updates of Lite-C, he said that it will be updated once in a while, probably within a time frame of a year or so.

I thought a while about this. While I understand your feelings I also think, it is not the right decision from the business point of view.

Monopoly:
Using tools from the leading (monopoly) company never is a bad idea. Most customers are using it, many developers are using it. You have a good base, a big knowledge base.

C#1.1 only:
While this is only a little issue for a programmer, it is no issue at all for your end user. The gamer, playing your game, is not interested in namespaces. The game matters in the end. And C# 1.1 is still better than all these script languages.

let it grow up:
I see no other indie engine with more platforms supported. And there is probably no better workflow.
It will grow up but then it will be more killer than it already is.

At the end it is really hard competition to all indie engines. GarageGames and Torque is comparable to it and now they get free competition. Even free engines like Irrlicht and Ogre3D get quite impressive competition with much better workflow.
This will change the market for sure.

At Dexsoft we have to support Unity models and packages more than we did in the past. Most indie developers will be there in the future.

I was surprised to read the reasons why they are giving Unity for free
It seems that the cash flow generated by the the Indie version was negligible
In other word a lot of the Unity3d users own the Pro version
Strange, I guess that for 3dgs it is the other way round

Apart form that Unity has still a main issue , in my opinion,
It supports FBX file format only
I have been replied by the moderator tha it is not a problem
"We have many happy clients ",he said," our FBX importer is perfect"
"If you go trough your " external tools " forum ", I said," you see that you have also many sad clients "

If you check the 2.6 bug list you can see that also some FBX
issues have been fixed

I hope tha now the FBX importer really works
On the other hand I am sorry for 3dgs
It can not really compete unless it dramatically improve

I have alwayes been on 3dgs side, but this is the plain truth

I love acknex It brought me to game development as a hobby I really hope that all this good comments about unity brings the acknex engine team to improve, it's sad to see that an engine who was originally just for mac now is getting a big piece of the win users to use their engine. but hey conitec exists so much years now they will not give up so easy I'm sure A8 will be a bigger thing and maybe more modern oriented to the way of gamemaking today, go with the time or better more than that
but sure unity is far away from the "perfect" engine. But as long as they have more customers that are happy than sad, everthing is fine for them. And most indie developers don't even need all those state of the art features, all they need is a good workflow with the software they work and a nice game idea, because they make often something different than most of fullprice games.

JCL wrote in the Conitec forum section, that A7 will develop a bit slower because Conitec is part of a MMO game production now. They will concentrate on this customer project.

I still have no 100% clear opinion about this mmo game production, if it ends good ( and I hope it will) than it will be a good publicity for this engine, if not than time will become a problem. But maybe this could led them bring to redesign the engine itself for the further Version, soon or later it should be the goal to make a rough change to the engine. Maybe after the project they have more money to pay new engineer experts and we get a better product in future.

Maybe I´m to dumb but I can´t get the hang to unity.
I´ve bought Indie in the beginning of the year, but it´s not my world.

I got the hang to flash, in two weeks. A lot of people consider flash to be a nightmare.
Well, maybe I´m just strange.

seems JCL is releasing the extra version as freeware, good move, but if the community members increase, they'll just get alot more complaints about not the limited engine features but the quality of the features

Well Gamestudio is about as good as dead. The ONLY way gamestudio could at this point compete with Unity will be by offering it's Pro version at a very discounted price , maybe something like $199 , where Unity is still over $1000. Cuz NOBODY in their right mind would buy Pro Gamestudio over Pro Unity , but maybe if Conitec offers Gamestudio Pro for $199 some (not me) people could be "fooled" into buying it. Still , I think most indie game engines are going to fall , xept maybe Torque (they have Xbox 360 support ect...) , but I think this move by Unity is going to be devastating to most other indie commercial game engines. Just my 2 cents , from somebody who's used GameStudio and various other engines for some years now.

Unity is full of nice features but I can't compete with ogre for example in terme of optimisation and speed. You are limited to some small game and iphone app and maybe I4m the only one to think that way but iphone app s***. anyway this is not the point. Gamestudio could compete with unity just by making a more powerfull game engine and give up on lite-c. Nobody want to learn a syntax just for one engine, there is many other way. MAybe scripting should be limited to lite-c.

People would say ease of use is important yea you are right but if you can achieve something incredibly nice most developpers aren't that relectant to put some effort. A7 is not my first choice beacuse even if you put a lot effort in developing your game won't change the fact the graphics will be kind of poor or the engine will be unoptimised.

So yeah why not bright it to next level a next gen engine like c4 but using something else than c++ c# for instance.

"Gamestudio could compete with unity just by making a more powerfull game engine"
Well yeah , Gamestudio could beat Unity if it were to release A8 and it were some kind of beast full of new and handy features that would make Unity feel outdated. Only problem is , Unity did that exact same thing to Gamestudio a couple of years ago , and now it has given it's indie version for free , obliterating most of the current competition (I would say all), a very strategic and smart move by Unity I would say.

But could Gamestudio stay competitive with A8 ? Of course.
Do I think it will ? Of course not.
Is Unity the new king of indie engines ? In my opinion , definitely , for the time being at least , as no one knows what the future will bring.

Lite-C is a strength. Being a programming language instead of a scripting language, it should be faster than Unity's scripts (although the Unity devers reckon their script (used properly and optimised well) can be as little as 50% slower than a compiled language), and since Lite-C supports just about all traditional C syntax, it is no obstacle to a programmer beginning with the engine whatsoever.Hmm... there's a fine line between comparing A7 with another engine and going off-topic talking about A7's capabilities. I would call this particular chunk off-topic simply because it is unsubstantiated. If you want to talk about A7's capabilities in this thread, it should only be done in comparison with Unity, and those comparisons should only be made if they are also backed up by feature comparisons between the two. This isn't some rule I'm pulling out, it's common sense.

Similar to you, WDID: It's all well and good to discuss the impact of Unity Indie going free on Gamestudio, but most of your two posts here is paying out A7 without any reason behind it. I'm not going to say you're wrong; I'm just saying no one is going to take a seasoned A7-hater seriously if there's no "this is why I say this"

Jibb

I think there are 2 groups of customers to consider if you want to sell an affordable game dev technology (like Unity, GS, C4, Torque, Shiva, Leadwerks):

- hobby users
- experienced developers with commercial projects

Hobby users want to have fun, want to learn and want to have fast feedback. So they need good tutorials, easy to use tools, fast response (play it while developing it) and they want an easy way to generate the final game. They are interested in already prepared effects, shaders and some model and texture libraries. So they need a good and documented studio.
They will not look at technical features like scene-management, lighting-approaches or speed. Often they even dont know some of these concepts.
This is what Gamestudio and Unity advertises. This is what FPS maker does perfectly.

Experienced developers will look at features, options to extend the technology, power, speed and available platforms to increase the final success.
In the end the project matters. If they want to make a 2d game, then they would use TGB, they would use Wintermute for a 2.5d game and for casual 3d games on different platforms they would prefer Unity, Shiva or Torque3d. For a bigger project with a team, bigger game worlds and scene management they use C4.

What about Gamestudio? It is very similar to Unity, it is designed to be a good value for beginners and pro users. To satisfy the beginners, it needs an aggregated tool (med, wed, sed and real-time editor in one application). It needs some very good documentation, and an integrated new material editor with real-time feedback and shader support.

To satisfy the pro users it needs some optimization, an indoor scene-management (e.g. portals and zones) and more available platforms for publishing.
At the moment it is a good choice for friends of scripting, for web-developers, experienced with HTML, JavaScript and similar, people who are not experienced enough with C++, C#. They will like LiteC and will feel comfortable. In most cases they will be hobby users. And they could easily wander to Unity.

So it is indeed a dangerous situation and GS needs a niche, like TGB with its 2d approach. It needs a feature to prove that it is unique at the market.

I think the makers of game dev suites can learn a lot from 3d modelling and rendering applications. There is a similar situation: many hobby users and some pro users. The ease of use of these tools steadily improved. Documentation and video tutorials are often integrated parts of new features.

I agree, machinery

there is no difference between "scripting" and "programming" languages. that's a totally arbitrary distinction.

mono uses jit compiling and is very optimized and lite-c is not very optimized. lite-c also only has about 50% of the performance of really optimized c-compilers like the microsoft one.

i would say mono and lite-c have about the same performance but with mono you can use more modern languages (like c# and boo) which will result in more productivity.

I agree

I'm not sure where you got that but that is completely wrong, most of the people who use gs use either comm or pro. so its not the other way around. one of the other forum posts about unity was just talking about that.



it did not devastate the other engines, gstudio com kills unity indie still and as far as ability, with enough skill, it can do as much as unity pro. I'm not sure where people keep acting like unity indie is a threat to people that were planning to buy a7 comm or pro, unity indie blows about as much as lite-c blows. yeah unity pro might have some reallllly crappy predefined shaders, but at the very least lite-c free can be extended which is wayyyyyyy better in my opinion.

You wrote some false comments in your last post, lostclimate. Here is an interview where you can read that the indie version did not made too much money for the Unity makers:
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=25840
"Unity Indie isn't generating a significant portion of our revenue, and we've always had this vision of democratizing our tools."

And here is a blog about it:
http://blogs.unity3d.com/
"Unity Indie was a cool product... But also it’s not been a significant part of our business at all: Unity Pro, Unity Wii and Unity iPhone for the bulk of our (rapidly growing) livelyhood."



Yes, and the same pro users can make it with Ogre, Irrlicht or Unity Indie, while not spending money.
The point of spending money is: getting a better work flow or a more powerful engine, better documentation and access to more platforms for your final product. You get what you pay for.

I think the 50% efficiency are valid for C-Script.
Lite-c should perform faster, but I doubt that it has the speed of a grown up C compiler which has been improved and optimized for many years.

But imho the speed of the scriptinglanguage is not that much of an issue for a 3d engine unless you do sth really cpu intensive, like pathfinding.

I fear I have to agree. I just can't imagine any way they can compete with the Unity team which in the meantime consists of about 80 people. And this team contains some of the best people in the industry and basically the whole Ukrainian demo scene.

I made a short test with my textures in Unity Indie (right click to zoom or click here: http://www.dexsoft-games.com/transfer/unity_test.jpg):



It is not as good as what you can achieve with C4 but it is similar to my tests I did in Gamestudio.

I've often seen the terms used to distinguish between an interpreted language and something compiled to machine code, but I'll take your word for it about the performance.

Jibb

EDIT:
Actually there's a misunderstanding. lostclimate was saying that GS's sales are mostly Com and Pro, not Extra, in response to AlbertoT saying GS's situation would perhaps be the opposite of Unity's.

EDIT2:
To me that is a big deal. A lot of games need pathfinding, to continue your example. Even if you don't do something super cpu intensive, a faster language at least means you can run it on older computers (though I guess that could be a stretch, since graphics are usually the bottleneck).

EDIT3:That's not true with Unity Indie, given the lack of Render to Texture (huge these days) and PP effects.

yes, sometimes the terms get used like that but i think it doesn't make much sense. interpreted languages are programming languages too.

and with jit compilers and stuff like that there often is no clear line anymore between interpreted and compiled.

i think "scripting" often gets used kind of deprecatingly. like it is something lesser but actually many "scripting" languages are more powerful than something like c.

Yes, you're right. It wouldn't have been hard at all for me to say "interpreted" instead of "scripting" and compare it with "compiled" instead of "programming", and I'll try to remember that from now on as there's much less ambiguity there

I certainly think of it almost in that way -- though from a speed point of view, not power (if "power" means features). To me Python is the most powerful language I've ever played with, but I'll never make a whole game in it because of the speed (that's not to say I wouldn't use a mix: using a language like Python to make triggers and story/level events easier and more natural to deal with).

I hadn't heard of "jit" compilers; I'll wiki it tonight. I guess I have a relatively old-fashioned view of interpreted languages, and should educate myself about that

Jibb

yes, you are right about python and its speed. there are languages like boo though which are a very good power/speed compromise.

by the way, there are jit compiler projects in the works for python too (google's unladen swallow and pypy). with them it should be possible to speed up python a lot but because of the very dynamic nature of python it's unlikely that the speed of statically typed languages like c# and boo will be reached.

I agree. And this is the point where there business starts. They want to sell the pro and this is one of the incentives to get it. So if you need this feature you simply have to buy one of the commercial engines or get deep into Ogre.

But if you do some prototyping or learning, then the free ones (including Unity Indie) are very good alternatives.

"They want to sell the pro and this is one of the incentives to get it."

Yeah , and they are actually being very clever , as a lot of people are looking to dev for the Iphone , and you used to be able to buy Unity Indie and then buy Iphone Basic , which would total in like $600 or something to dev for the Iphone , where as now , if you want to use Unity for Iphone you need Pro plus Iphone kit , which totals now to like $1900. Works out very well for them if you ask me.

I dont think so
Lets say

Unity Indie == 3dgs Com
UnityPro == 3dgs Pro

Apparently most of Unity revenues come from UnityPro
Assumimg that the member's share is 50/50 than about 13 % of the Unity incomes should be generated by the Indie version,
It is not an negligible amount of money , in my opinion, such as to justifiy a free version
I must suppose then that , let's say 80 % of the Unity members own the Pro version
I dont think thatthis is the case for 3dgs

There is something strange

Their business of course

C-Script has a JIT ("just in time") compiler.
It is compiling on startup, where all those dots in the startup window pop up.

Lite-C also features a JIT compiler, it is running every time you run your game in debug mode.
But it also allows pre compiling, and according to jcl this will result in faster code execution.
In this case you don't have to deliver the source code with the finished game as it is the case for C-Script without using resources.

Most likely they are leaving away certain optimizations for the JIT compiler to keep the startup speed acceptable.

Still I think that the speed of the language is not the most critical point.
Whenever I had problems with the frame rate it was because of level/object rendering. Personally I never ran into a problem where a script was too slow.
Bad coding which performs poorly can be done in every language.
Back to the example Pathfinding: Why is it so slow? Well you have a lot of linked lists, but the slowest thing are all the traces for obstacle detection. And this is an engine function, not a script issue.

Okay, I did know about "Just In Time" compiling; I thought "jit" was something I didn't know about. Thanks for that.

About the pathfinding example: Apart from reducing traces as much as possible by giving each node a linked list containing every node it can see (and only recalculating these lists when obstacles change), I have optimised my pathfinding by writing my own ray-trace.

Now, to expect to imitate an engine function and then out-perform it is ridiculous. However: my particular situation allows me to reduce the trace to something performed in 2D space with far simpler obstacles, I can have all sorts of different groups of obstacles so that the trace only considers obstacles that are only relevant for entities of certain sizes, and since all I'm concerned about is the PASS/FAIL of the trace (rather than the normal, the distance to the point of contact, the position of the point of contact, among other things that c_trace automatically does for you) each trace can terminate as soon as an obstacle is found instead of searching for the earliest contact.

I like how all that comes out really fast and I don't have to look at making a DLL or anything to make it worth using over c_trace.

Although, I don't think many users will go that far, and so like you said: it won't be an issue for most.

Jibb

i am not sure if this really is jit compiling? c-script compiles ahead of time. it just does it every run.

i think with most jit compilers the code first gets run by the interpreter and then a code analysis happens which tries to find the hotspots that make most sense to be compiled. the machine code results also often get cached for further runs.

theoretically this should be an advantage because the jit compiler has more information about the code and its runtime behavior than a normal compiler. better optimization should be possible because of that. it's just that normal compilers are around much longer and still have many more years of research invested into them but eventually jit compilers will catch up.

Ah ok, then I guess I mixed up something.

Let's call the thing C-script does compile at startup.

I never said the indie brought them in much money at all, I'm not sure where you got that, and as far as getting a better workflow or more powerful Im just saying that unity indie vs lite-c is trading power for workflow, where everyone keeps acting like unity indie is the ultimate, and beats gstudio, really its just a trade.


EDIT:


where do you get that comparison at all,
unity indie == gs extra
unity pro == gs comm

is a wayyyy more accurate comparison.

Only if you solely base it on the render-to-texture feature. Unity has a lot more to offer over Gamestudio like the better physics engine, the terrain and vegetation system, unlimited multiplayer, c#/boo/unityscript,...

Or the position within their price range.

Unity Indie and GS Extra --
Both were each company's cheapest product.
Both became free, both citing their respective products contributing very little to their overall profits as the reason.

Jibb

what about plugins and expandablity?

You can use any .NET library with Unity. C/C++ plugins are for Pro only though.

The strong point of unity is the workflow that is profesionnal tools !

In world editor : import a model, assign textures (or load from directory) , choose shader , edit animations names and length for animated models :
All that in the world editor : Just big

-Want to edit terrain just do it right here in the same world editor !
-Want to edit physic properties , just do it in world editor also.

Caus all core have been written in modern interface graphics, it look clean and allow all sort of things like panels, drag and drop elements on others.

Unity's workflow blows GS's workflow, anytime, anywhere. From designer point of view, i dont think GS is an option when there is Unity free.

But you can't say same thing about lite-c. Maybe because i am very new to unity's scripting concept, but i'd prefer lite-c over unity's scripting choices. Lite-c Feels more free, i prototype faster(programming wise) in lite-c. Not talking about being corss platform, since more than two thirds of user postin itt are only hobby developers and dont have/wont have commercial concerns, and highly possible that anyone other than their family/frineds wont see what they made.

Even so, You did not get the point
Apparentely Unity3d has a lot of Pro users ( 1500 usd) while I dont think it is the case of 3dgs

sorry for reviving this topic but i was playing with unity and i realized that if 3dgs was to implement WED into GED, then it'd stand a real chance, the major drawback of this engine is the art pipeline [level design and such] most dont know this because most never have to complete a full level...

and i just opened GED today and first thing i tried to make a terrain and it said open terrain, instead of create new.... not that i cant do it or am lazy but that immediately showed me something.. oh well, i'll continue playing with it, hopefully it can give me a level design pipeline

[edit]
and another point, when i finished editing my terrain with painting and such, it becomes another pain to make it look the same from your script, once again, this isnt about my ability to do so, i just started GED, didnt care of it before, so am comparing to what i saw in unity

[edit]
video window problems, annoying [this isnt a multitext terrain popup] but its looking ok

[edit]
tried importing a model, it reset my terrain painting for some reason so am too bored to care

[edit]
tried deleting a texture, it deleted the terrain, oh well, now i know what to do so i click undo to bring my terrain back annnnd:
script error or something
error1105 or something
GED now needs to be closed [dude, wtf]

oh well, guess i'll have to try something else, on to blender
-mumbles-

Well already said lot of times
WED, GED, MED : All in one should be !

Unity 3D editor, is professionnal like Far Cry one.
-Want a terrain, just create it in the editor.
-Want to choose a model, texture, just download (.fbx) it from the editor

And the team is not the same Size : sure
Team

But A7 remains very easy, and direct for new indies, or programmers. you could use both.

Like Fran_G said it :
The engine depends on your goals, taste,fun , projects etc ...
Lot of people like the simple programming and fast creation on 3GS (i like it a lot also).
With Unity : You must learn interface, tools , physic panel attributes, how code works.
With 3DGS : less features, that what's make it lot more fast to use, and the documentation (magazine ,tutorials etc ...)
is UNMATCHED : SURE !!

less features... i doubt that. editors may have less features but not the engine.

I think the showcase of an engine really shows all !

Look at unity showcase forums , new games every day, and all looking better than 3DGS showcase :
Unity Showcase

Not incredible games sometimes, but sometimes really great ones, and fast made !

Yeah Unity workflow is direct, no time loosing on basic things. Need a shader , just select it, need physics : add it and adjust it in panel editor !
Well just what 3D artists needed !
My dream personnal dream : A8 becoming artist friendly and not programmer friendly, new panels and tools each beta instead of commands ! Just a dream !

I hope that a8 Is going to rock We are this cool community, small but effective i also tried unity and its easier yes, but I didn't manage to do cool things. Maybe just because I don't like this click and drop where ANYTHING IS SOOOOO EASY. I like to work with acknex, hell yeah, there are errors but u are learning sooo much with them that I like those little annoying things.


Acknex, I love you

I don't think one can say Unity3D is 'click and drop' any more than 3DGS's WED editor.

The problem with Unity3D for the most part is that it is able to crash and inflate objects for no reason. In short, it has some bugs that make it quite annoying to work with at the moment, even for a free tool.

The editor also has it's weak spots when it comes to adding assets, transforming them and comfortably previewing things.

There's a lot it can do even better, although I do like the WYSIWYG approach.

On the flipside it has great webplayer support and a pretty cool 'all-in-one' editor workflow (the stuff that does work, the fact that it opens external programs and updates changes made) ...and all the flexibility one would ever need programming-wise, granted you are able to program in one of the supported languages.

I think the latter is the biggest obstacle for 3DGS users when considering a switch. Many people do not know Java etc. or any high level programming language, but are used to C-Script and Lite-C.

If you're prepared to learn Unity3D, it can be very awesome to work with! I haven't totally lost my interest in 3dgs just yet though. One reason being that quickly prototyping game ideas still goes incredibly smooth and fast with it and I've gotten used to it's quirks.

I know university-level object oriented programming(c++,java) and used them in large projects, then i know c and other self-thought scripting languages(lua,php,javascript)...

But there is something in lite-c that i can't quite put my finger on it that makes it more preferrable over all other engine's way of scripting/programming. It could be the wait(); , the lite-c itself, the manual or it could be the flexibity.This could be something personal.

On a side-note i used Unity for about 4 months with a group for a fps/tps adventure with small mini-game puzzles and programmed major parts of the game. It's a great engine, but from sole-programmer point of view i would have preferred lite-c and a7, maybe because i am more experienced with a7, i dont know. Unity is also a great package though, i may choose to use it in the future depending on the project.

I think it is simply because it's a pretty comfortable language to use and read?

When it comes to what can be done with it, it certainly has it's limits, but nothing I've ever truly got annoyed by.

Oh and it obviously has a smaller learning curve.

Did anyone read any news about whether it is save or not to program an iphone app with unity?

as far as i know as long as you are on a mac, you are fine?

The current situation looks, like it is safe. Apple probably has no problem with game developers. They are only afraid to lose control over their operating system.

By the way: I just bought Unity Pro to get Unity 3 for discount price. The beta version is already shipping to first customers.

I am really looking forward to it. The latest shadow mapping images and the shooter demo with static and dynamic shadows combined looks very up to date.

I kinda like Unity, but my current project using it, heavily uses file dialoques, which unhappily are tending to crash it. And that isn´t really a lot of fun, as this means restarting Unity every 15mins or so.

Are you working on an iphone app/game?

Nope, at least not only.

I btw found out that Unity renders each light in a new pass, which should actually be quite slow...

Unity 3 uses deferred rendering, so this behaviour will be history then.
The Beta is already available.

Deferred rendering is not everything. It is very hard to implement in a flexible way, if that is even possible at all. But well, I was told that the shader system was improved a lot, so I am looking forward to the free edition of 3.0 And I could imagine that the free Unity 3.0 does not support deferred rendering, at least not if they don´t make post processing effects available in the free edition .

But they advertise that hundreds of lights are possible with the new deferred rendering approach. Since I have license of the pro edition now, I will check this extensively.

that is the point of the deferred shading -hundreds of lights- but it comes with the expense of the losing flexibity.

What flexibility do you have in mind?

As far as I saw all big (and expensive) engines (including CryEngine 3) use deferred rendering, so there must be good reasons for using it.

flexibity of rendering process and using shaders. It does not affect the artist in anyway, only the shader programmer.

but as Nils said, it's "very hard" to implement "wihtout" losing flexibity. Crytek makes hard things real... I used cryengine3 for a week about 7-8 months ago, integrating custom shaders was dead-easy almost didnot required an extra step compared to forward rendering. It is also up to the user to use deferred shading in cryengine3.

Well, one for example have to deal with transparency, refraction and reflection, as you only have some textures for deferred rendering, which for example contain the depth or the normals of the scene. And you can only have the normal of of one surface at one pixel and not the one of several surfaces. Because of this, deferred rendering is often not used for such surfaces, which means that you will always need a second shader for everything. There are some alternative solutions, but they have drawbacks as well. The whole thing is very pixelshader intensive and thus won´t work at acceptable speed on mobile devices, so they for sure don´t remove the possibility for forward rendering, which would be stupid anyways, as one may wants to transform vertices or put some extra information into an extra texture or transforming the normal and diffuse texture for parallax mapping.
The problem is, that the whole pipeline is kinda complex and everything has to fit together. While with a forward rendering approach, you just have one shader per object and they just don´t influence each other.
The whole stuff will be perfectly fine, when sticking to the builtin shaders, but something custom probably doesn´t get easier.

I see what you mean. And I also think, that they will have other rendering options available.

Currently you already have lots of rendering options. You can render with no lighting, with vertex lighting, with shadow maps, with pixel lighting and with a combination of shadow maps and pixel lighting. Probably deferred rendering will be just another option.

The built-in shaders can be changed currently. There is a cross-platform shader language in Unity. But we will see how this changes in Unity3. I am very curious about it.

Well, I just wrote some shaders for Unity and this actually also showed me the ugly sides of the current system. My biggest problem at the moment are some very strange artifacts, that occour with any shader. Seems as if there is a pass rendered, I didn´t define in my "shader": http://forum.unity3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=56563
You can find some more information about the current shader system here: http://forum.unity3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=56396

Thanks for the links. This is interesting, especially:
"Note again: all the lighting related stuff above will change in Unity 3.0, in a way that's hopefully much simpler & more future proof."

Ive been using Unity for the past month, and I just finished a minigame today. A8 will have to be something spectacular if it wants to compete in a world where solutions like Unity exist.

I'm curious. Can specify a bit what sort of minigame you did?
Is it 3D or 2D, puzzle, break, match3, memory, action, jump and run...

Today I found some interesting information about Unity3.

There is a new PhysX version included. It supports layers and cloth animation among other new features. Here is a video of a destroyable cloth in action:
http://vimeo.com/12833414

And there will be a tree generator:




The new lightmapper can even handle hdr images. So you can light your scene via background image as an example. Or you can store the lightmap as HDR and do some professional post work.



The lightmapper is told to work with each shader available in Unity.

Here is some volumentric light effect:
http://vimeo.com/13012305

And they told that mod files (audio tracker files using very low memory) are supported in 3.0 as well:
http://blogs.unity3d.com/2010/06/29/mod-in-unity/

This sounds all very exciting to me.

Awesome - thanks for the info! Although the .mod part probably only is useful for iPhone and maybe Wii developers...

this came from the toxic rendering engine!

Yes, it might be interesting for small games for the web or for phones. But actually the first Unreal game also played tracker music in background. I still have these files and listen to them occasionally. I think this is not a bad alternative to have great music in a game.

.MOD is an old format. But there are more advanced tracker formats (xm, s3m) which work in a similar way. Great music can be produced with those, in fact better quality than with MP3 and a lower file size (when working with the limitations, not against).

They support these modern variations of MOD also.

By the way:
Here is a Unity real-time scene lighted by a HDRI image:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1412178/hdri_test.zip

Wow, that was f'ing awesome! Ahh... can't wait for the release of Unity 3.
(BTW Frank, is the gym in the scene just a skycube or it's a real 3D gym with DoF shader applied?) Oh sorry, you didn't made that demo.

The background is a HDRI image, some skycube with more precise lighting data and a larger light range compared to standard images.

This image is the only light source for the scene.

Reminds me on those old graphic cards tech demos But there you could play around with bloom and tone mapping parameters .
It is basicly just some environment mapping I guess? Where and how does the tone mapping happen?

Those lighshafts are nice, but they seem to be based on a too low resolution, which results in them being a bit jerky.
But this and the above are basicly already possible?

I love physics an wonder how easy those cloth physics will be to use. I also wonder about the lightmapper and the new shader system. Those screenshots and demos and videos are all nice, but they don´t show much. The most important is not that something is possible, because everything already is possible, but the question is how. How fast and how easy.

Yes, I am also interested in this, just like many people asking in the Unity forum. And the links above are some fast-made demos from Beta-testers. They are not from the Unity-guys. So they are probably not perfect, dont have much sliders for tone-mapping and other nice-too-have.

But I find it exciting anyway and I am looking forward to Unity3. This Beast-lightmapping integration together with HDRI can create some beautiful stuff alone. I already saw some how-to-use demos from Beta-testers and it looks really easy to use.

Yeah Unity 3D is very artist oriented, that why it has such succes on some 3D artists forums where there are AAA artists

I think , like usually, new features will be really easy to use, by some simple drag and drop or on a special panel.

Unity actually isn´t easy to use. While I like their code system, it is probably more demanding than gamestudios.
But their editor is nice of course, that just isn´t enough to create good games .
I btw just added a shader to their Wiki .

I think this is just a matter of the point of view and the historical background of each one.

I have read some reviews from C++ coders coming from C4 or Torque and they find Unity quite easy.

I programmed a lot of business tools in my past (Delphi, PHP, C++, Java). And I like C# much more than a limited scripting language. And since I bought lots of components for my business projects, I am also used to a components approach. It indeed differs a bit in Unity, it is not the same like in Delphi for example, but the idea is the same and integration in a project is just drag and drop in the end.
I know from experience that components are a very good approach for rapid application development. I can plugin new technology very fast this way without losing my existing solutions. And I can even exchange such components against new versions without adapting a single line of code.

From my point of view this is absolutely a future technology.

Yeah i guess its a matter of taste too.
I find Unity much easier than any other engine i used before and i love that component style too, and i just fell in love with C#, it's a wonderful language.

In principle I agree with Slin
The "components" based programming model has become more and more popular in the comunity of professional developers so it must have some advantages over the traditional hierarchy based model, I suppose in term of code reusability and efficiency
However I find it a non intuitive and non elegant programming style
First of all you must instance abstracted rather than concrete objects
Take for example the object trasform as an instances of the class Transform
Moreover I dont like the use of auxiliary function for data exchange among components attached to the same entity or even worse attached to other objects
How ugly it is :

transform.Find("Hand").GetComponent(OtherScript).DoSomething("Hello");

Unity supply a relatively user friendly version but if you consider a pure component based engine such as Torque 3d I am sure that many components supporters will change their mind

I actually consider it kinda elegant and I am really getting used to it, but it just is not easy. I am very sure that the gamestudio way is a lot easier to understand for a beginner than the way it is in unity.
I am not talking about more experienced programmers, even though I´ve got the feeling that those often also don´t completely understand how things work. Which btw doesn´t mean that I do.

By the way: Slin mentioned in another post that Unity does not light grass correctly in Unity. This is true. Also detail meshes dont get correct lighting in terrains. Trees get some ambient occlusion to fake lighting.

But today I have read in the Unity forum, that this is no longer the case for Unity3. Grass, trees and terrain meshes get correct lighting and shadows now.

But anyway, I even like how it looks in Unity2, but it is good to know, that it will be even better in 3. Here is a shot from Unity2 from our latest character pack and one of our vegetation packages:

Another news from Unity beta (maybe interesting for Slin and Kiyaku). It looks like they heavily improved the documentation:

Nice and nice model btw .
I hope they release Unity 3 soon and to find a possibility to get Unity 3 for free

I btw just added a planet shader to their wiki: http://www.unifycommunity.com/wiki/index.php?title=Planet
And some 3 side projection a few days ago: http://www.unifycommunity.com/wiki/index.php?title=3SideProjDiffuse




The code for those is actually quite ugly and they would run faster in gamestudio, especially with a higher number of lights, but at least it is possible in Unity as well . And it is actually fun to play around with sliders and switching textures without having to code them yourself and still getting feedback instantly.

beautiful shaders, Nils. i played with unity today. i have to get used to the interface, it a lot different from A6, but if its as powerful as it looks from the island demo, wow. i am no programmer, but i think if i had some money lying around, i wouldnt mind owning the pro version of unity in addition to gs.

I am a Unity user, and in my opinion, Unity is easier to learn than 3DGS.

Here is another one showing how easy to setup physics especially cloths simulation

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2010/...tm_campaign=rss

physx source code is crappy. nvidia employees even admit it themselves:


i guess there still is a lot of ODE code in it (novodex got founded by some ODE coders). ...but due to all the marketing millions everyone thinks it's the top physics engine when actually the others are much more modern.



edit: in the trampoline example in the video the physics looks a bit buggy when some of the balls rocket away with extreme speed.

That article is refering to this
http://www.realworldtech.com/page.cfm?ArticleID=RWT070510142143&p=1

Maybe Bullet is a better choice.

yes, both bullet and newton support SSE2 and all cores of your cpu. and both support cylinder collision shapes. physx (like ODE) still doesn't support cylinders for some strange reason...

If it didn´t change yet, the big problem with bullet is the basicly missing documentations and examples that rely heavily on inheritance in a way which makes them hard to understand. At least if you want to go further than basic rigid bodies. Newton is just great but as far as I know it is still rigid body only? On the other hand, there is hardly much use for the other stuff. On the other hand Crysis is a good example for some softbody like physics on plants and I also like the idea of bursting wood without predefined places .
What people currently seem to tend to forget is Havok. The physics simulation is nearly as clean as Newtons, but it is quite a bit faster and has stuff like softbodies aswell since some time.
PhysX is pretty fast as well, but the physics are less stable, but thanks to all the documentation and the fact that it is free, it fits many projects quite fine.
But I have to say that these are experiences I made two years ago, so things may changed a lot actually .
I will use bullet for my iPhone engine, as I love its license, which basicly allows me to do everything with it for free, as long as the sourcecode keeps the license header

http://vimeo.com/13294411

Here is a video of the light mapping tools in action:
http://blogs.unity3d.com/2010/07/15/unity-3-feature-preview-beast-lightmapping/

looks very promising. i guess it will be pro only?

it would be interesting if someone did a cornell box with gamestudio's lightmapper.

Not exactly, BEAST can be used in the free version too but it doesn't support Global Illumination, that's a Pro only feature.

Here is a video of the new Unity3 Demo that i coming with Unity3.

Looks really cool to me! Users find the video even before UT posted it on their blogs hehe:

http://vimeo.com/12915284

Wow. The animation looks very good.

This looks really impressive. The lighting is very good, the particles are great, window glass can be broken, these dummy puppets lose different parts of their body depending on where you hit them. Covering works and the back radio talk adds to the atmosphere.

damn, yes it all looks really good

i think this compromise is ok. where did you read about this?

I have read this also somewhere in this thread:
http://forum.unity3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=55897

But be aware, this thread already has more than 40 pages.
The Unity forum is full of people and not each post is informative.
But there are some Unity-demo and Unity-technology guys among them.

It's funny how you can remove the word "Unity" out of it and it's true for every forum

I made a test with occlusion culling in Unity. Here you can see a scene with some houses and my camera in front of the first house (looking at the wall, hiding the other ones).
Without occlusion culling (only view frustrum culling) it looks like this:



Here is the same scene with occlusion culling enabled:



This really saves some render calls. Something similar is possible in C4 also. But there you have to place the occlusion geometry manually. Unity uses pre-calculated PVS data to lookup where culling occurs. So it is absolutely easy to setup.

And by the way, here is some fun I had with shaders and post-processing (shadow map, SSAO, glow):



It is absolutely easy to setup, I just add an image-effects component to the camera.

It may is correct the way it is in some cases, but I wonder why there are still shadows thrown by the occluded objects? I would think that one could save quite some draw calls there as well
While the postprocessing is easy to use, it is actually not THAT programmer friendly to create your own effects .
But it is a nice engine anyways and I am trying to figure out a way to get the pro version for free in a legal way But well, for now the 30 days evaluation period and afterwards again the free version are enough.

The occluded objects dont cast shadows. The shadows I used here dont have such a long distance. Maybe it occludes the terrain textures/shaders per pixel as well. I am not the one who programmed it. But it is no shadow. Unity switches real-time shadows off in a distance.

And maybe you did not know but in the blog of the Unity makers they admit that shader writing was too complicated in the old version and that they will make it way more easy. We will see what that means. But for me it is ok, I have everything that I need in the moment. And then there are still enough additional ones in the Wiki.

Guess why
And yes, but I will keep complaining until I see something better than the current shader system, which means that I am really waiting for Unity3 and hope that it will be out soon.
In my opinion a bit stupid is currently also that polygon counter and makes you think that Unity can render very high poly levels at still kinda high framerates, but in the end, the scene has only a small part of those polygons which are multiplied by quite high factors thanks to their strange rendering and them counting the polygons of each rendered pass.
There was for example someone wondering why his 50k polygon level had like 300k after adding some water and a sun.

I am currently trying to code a car in Unity. It is meant to move at very high speed, which makes the physics kinda unusable, especially on collision. There is their character controller thingy, which would probably do the job for me, but guess what, the only supported shape is a capsule, which actually doesn´t work at all for a car...
In the end I am now trying to code the collision myself, trying to use as much of the existing stuff as possible, like triggers and raytraces. Not really fun to do and I am sure that gamestudios c_move would have done a perfect job for me in this case -.-

Did you know that one can chain postprocessing effects in gamestudio with just one short line of code for each effect?
What gamestudio currently really needs are good templates, as everything else is quite solid, especially if the regions really work.

But well, I basicly just hate all the hype around unity...

did you check out their car tutorial?
http://unity3d.com/support/resources/tutorials/car-tutorial

yes, that and a wed redesigned from scratch.

Yes I of course checked that tutorial, but even in their example setup I managed to make the car behave a bit strange somehow .
There is actually some thread on the forums, wehere people offer quite some money for some better car code. But I guess that they want physics and mine is for something else anyways.

have you tried the pacejka magic formula approach that is also mentioned? it seems to be what almost everyone uses (also in the communities of other engines) for car physics that aims for realism. i didn't have time yet to try it myself though.

I feel a bit sorry for you

For my case I was not much convinced of the former versions. I want to make some bigger demos and I just need good scene management (and I am not talking about some regions with the need of scripting to switch them manually on and off). This was the reason why I did not use Unity. And the shaders where not all up to date. But now I like it very much. Now I can create big worlds and I can make them as beauty as my still renders. I have the same tools (ambient occlusion, shadows, bump mapping, specularity, radiosity, volumetric lights) like in an expensive render program.

From my point of view, Unity was a tool for little casual games but now it became a professional tool for bigger projects.

Nevertheless I am sure it is not perfect, but compared to other Indie engines it is just much more feature complete.

So why should I hate it?

Let us take 2 examples:
I can make a camera flying through my level in minutes, just by using the animation editor in UDK and in Unity. Other engines need me to script some camera movement and to adjust, change script, change parameters, adjust, ... would take me days.
Another example is import. In Unity I can influence almost everything. When I see bad smoothing then I tell it to recalculate vertex normals. I change the smoothing angle and it looks like it looked in Lightwave, hard edges are hard, soft edges are soft.
In other engines I dont have smoothing angles in the import options.
I could mention a lot more.

There is btw some irc channel... with 120 users online o.O
And some of them are even helpfull sometimes... On the other hand, questions tend to be overseen by the mass of messages.

And yes, I perfectly understand your points Frank. I am just still having some troubles with not being able to hate it and also not really being able to love it.
At this very moment I am trying to align my car to the ground, if done something like that several times already and even coded something like that from scratch including my own quaternion class, but I just cant figure out the right way to do it with Unity somehow. But well, in this case it is probably just me not being able to concentrate at the moment.

Wlle, Unity have lot of basic things like different camera systems (FPS, Ratchet And Clanck ...) , and
fake blob shadow system etc ... lot of very basic things you have juts to adjust graphically on panels : very well done !

Take some simple example : simple physics
For your character, you don't have ot type 10 or 20 lines of code to make a capsule collider, just drag and drop a Physic Collider , choose the capsule, and adjust it to your character visually !
And that's done without typing a simple line of code
Yes, why coding , very basic things like that ! Same things for box colliders and some others !

This examples resumes really well the advantages of Unity by having basic things already in a all in one way , where you have just to adjust visually !
After that you 'll have to code to do more advanced things, but the basic things are already here, juts drag and drop them !

Perhaps A9 will do like that ?

That made me laugh ;D But yeah i saw your shaders and they are great, glad you added them

But Slin, i think you are a bit too negative about this all the time. It sometimes sounds like you pick every small problem and turn it into a major thing

I mean making a car isn't easy at all, in no engine especially when you want to handle realistic physics. So how long did you try to create one?
Especially when you don't know all the small tricks behind Unity's optimization for physics, etc, it can be more tricky.

I saw some projects in the Showcase that used car physics and it was pretty good, even at fast speed.

No one forces you to like it but just don't be so negative about it all the time

For Unity, there is a new complete Car Tutorial and scripts
I don't have tried it, but it's looks lot more simple now to make a car with physics without programming, juts adjusting
some variables in the program !

Well a video of a boot camp for Unity 3.0 : promising
Unity 3.0 Bootcamp

Unity 3.0 is beocming an AAA engine, and for the price if you have a team, a great project, designs, it's a way to go indeed ! So mall price for the pro version and for such great technologys that will have 3.0 !

But for indies, and lonewolves, A7 (A8) remains a very good alternative, and some great commercial gales can be made with it, with some more work

I've posted that video already.

But yeah the engine is getting better and better. Maybe i'll have the Pro soon (yay o/).

Well that's the same game over and over again. Basically you can create good games with every engine as long as you know how to use it.

But i agree that 3dgs is good for it as well, especially when you start with gamedesign. Wouldn't be there where i am now without it

Of course I do It is just that everyone seems to consider it perfect, but it isn´t, and that is actually a good thing as this means that things can still improve. Live would be very boring without progress .
And isn´t it evidence enough that I am still working with unity? I´d say that this is a good sign that I don´t consider it very bad. Especially that I already posted on the forums is a good sign. I never posted anything on the ShiVa forums


I am not negative about it, I just bring in some counterbalance to all the extremely positive views on Unity .

I have to agree to Kiyaku here. You don't consider it very bad. To me this means that you consider it bad but not very bad.

Why are you working with a bad tool? Don't punish yourself!

In my case I am indeed happy because it saved me so much time.

And about your car physics. I remember this forum thread where they wanted to collect money for a professional AAA car component (they compared it with GTA IV).
But they also posted tons of existing Unity car demos from users and I found it crazy. I played them for quite some time. I did not see in any other engine so much car games. So it must be somewhat easier than in other tools.

Well i know it's not that bad Slin, and i know you are still around and offer your shaders, etc, which can't mean you totally dislike it

But wether someone is TOO exited about it or TOO negative about it, both is not really good. I just think thinks like "i tried to get a car movement but the physic can't handle it at highspeed" and "sometimes user help on the irc" are a bit too negative.

As long as the physic isn't on the iPhone, i disagree as i used it quite often even for high speed things and i find it really accurate. Try to change the Fixed Timesteps as well to get a more detailed result.

On the iPhone it's... well, you shouldn't use it for fast objects but there is a nifty Raycast Physic script on the wiki that will do the job.

The community is the most helpful communit i've ever seen actually, just see how many great additions and tools they post, sometimes even for free! And the IRC is always the best place to get help, it depends on what time you go online there. During the day in american time, there is like almost no question that doesn't get a helpful answer. During night it's quite cozy lol.

In 2-3 weeks, i'll have a Pro license too (finally!), then i can go on with my fancy prototypes i made during the Pro Trial and Unity 3 Pro beta time, got some crazy effects lol.
And then i'm finally able to use the GL function to improve my Unity Editors

You got me wrong here. Cars at highspeed with physics aren´t a problem of Unity, the only thing I am complaining about here is, that there doesn´t some to be some easy to use movement whith collision detection, but well, while it is a bit tricky and there is still a lot to do, I basicly managed to find some kind of solution, which worked well so far.
The "and some of them are even helpfull sometimes..." was actually meant possitively, as I already got quite some help there, I just would like to see more different people to help and not always the same three or four.


The "very" was meant differently here, but well, I have troubles explaining how it actually was meant. If I would really consider it bad, I would have given up Unity already, but instead I already did quite some stuff with it.
Unity is a good tool for sure and I would probably already have bought the pro version if it would cost less.

I think that programmingwise I still prefer gamestudio, but I like unitys editor and their component system is just great in most aspects.

Ahh okay, i guess then it was just a misunderstanding ^^.

But glad to hear you got your movement to work.

The CharacterController is actually an easy to move component with physics cause it also recognize by itself if it's on the ground, etc. But dunno if you can adapt that for a car movement.

I read a video on YouTube about Umbra, so I try it on Unity 3 Beta 4.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fU2L7IdYD...t=1&index=7

I made a test on light map and occlusion culling. Quality setting is Preview, I am not 100% sure what I did is correct or not.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXnC6XJ7x9c

I haven't tried Umbra yet, but your video looks nice and looks correct to me

Still can't believe how powerful Beäst and Umbra are...