Unity3D

Discussion in 'I wanna be a Game Programmer' started by Gaiyamato, Dec 27, 2009.

  1. Gaiyamato

    Gaiyamato Lurker Not From Round Here

    What do my peers out there, and anyone who is in the industry, think of the Unity3D game engine? We have been heavily using it in our Degree and I have been tinkering with the free indie version in my spare time.

    I'll post links when I am allowed. lol.
     
  2. Pig Cop

    Pig Cop Hardcore Gamer One Of Us

    I haven't actually used it myself, but I have heard some positive things about it from people I work with in our studio. Evidently it's certainly not something we steer clear of in the industry if that's what you're asking :)

    Maybe someone who has had some professional use of it here could offer some more insight...
     
  3. Gaiyamato

    Gaiyamato Lurker Not From Round Here

    Well I have enjoyed it a lot. The concept for an interface for a game engine is quite good. Though I am starting to notice some issues with the engine. Talked about it on the Unity forum a bit.

    Firstly the physics is actually poor, a lot of it is just fixed scripts and it is hard to make anything realistic without using third party add-ons. There are dedicated Unity3D third party add-ons which completely solve the issue though, and they are community made, thus free, as well. So not a realy biggie.

    The Networking is worse than crap. There are many third party plugins that work here and in fact one of the great things I found about Unity was being able to import virtually anything written in any C language through the plugins. But even the Networking tutorial they give doesn't work and as beginners we found the whole thing to be a nightmare.

    The game engine is quite fast, unless you try and do anything outside a very strict set of rules. For example any mesh with more than two Materials will completely lag the engine out. It simply cannot handle it. Custom terrain is exceptionally difficult, though they have a built-in Terrain maker which is awesome if you want something very typical of a FPS Terrain.

    I found that Panda3D is much better, but much harder to learn as a comparrison that some people may know. I think that is the trade-off.
    My only real gripe with Unity is the abysmal state of the API docs. They are so out of date it isn't funny, and half of it was wrong to begin with anyway. lol.

    But after all that I would still give Unity a thumbs up. I also would love to hear what anyone in the game industry has to say about this engine.
    I did hear a rumor that EA was looking at buying a copy of the Unity3D source code to use for a new engine. But I cannot find anything to verify that.
     
  4. LoRez

    LoRez Ender Of Threads One Of Us

  5. Brian Beuken

    Brian Beuken Boring Old Fart One Of Us


    downloading to try it out...any thoughts from anyone else, have you used it?
     
  6. LoRez

    LoRez Ender Of Threads One Of Us

    I should declare an interest since I work for Ideaworks but this is the very same dev kit that we've used to make, amongst others, No.1 grossing games like Backbreaker:Tackle Alley and COD: Nazi Zombies for iPhone.

    Free eval or iPhone only licenses are available now but within the next few days you should be able to purchase full dev licenses from $99/seat/year.

    It's all C/C++ so no need to learn ObjC and it's highly optimised for ARM platforms.

    I'd be extremely interested to hear anyone's views about the SDK.
     
  7. Borsato

    Borsato One sexy mofo! One Of Us

    Maybe this should have its own thread?
     
  8. oaf

    oaf Should know better One Of Us

    Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_VARIABLE in /var/www/airplaysdkcom/content/sites/all/modules/register/register.module on line 418

    :(


    Looks good though!
     
  9. LoRez

    LoRez Ender Of Threads One Of Us

    Oops.. fixed now.
     
  10. Brian Beuken

    Brian Beuken Boring Old Fart One Of Us

    lol

    hey do we get paid for all this beta testing?
     
    • Thank Thank x 1
  11. Base13

    Base13 Industry Unprofessional One Of Us

    Airplay is something totally different to Unity.

    Airplay allows you to program a game once for multiple platforms.

    Unity allows you to make a game without full programming knowledge, just scripting.

    I've had to put my evaluation of Unity on hold because of another project. But what I learnt was good. I'm not a programmer, but I never found anything I couldn't do. And it appears to have very good forums for when you get stuck.
     
  12. Gaiyamato

    Gaiyamato Lurker Not From Round Here

    Yeah Airplay and Unity are vastly different in the approach and often different in uses.

    [side issues]
    I would also question how you declare your game to be a "#1 grossing" game. It seems to me to either be false or a meaningless title. What is it #1 grossing in comparrison to? Is it just #1 out of your games? What is the benchmark for that title?

    [/side issues]

    The Unity forums and the Unify Wiki are excellent. The docs lack in many many areas but for each point lacking in the docs there are dozens of threads and people on the forums willing to help out without any expectation of anything in return.
    Great forum even for non-unity stuff. Good people all round for the most part. :)

    I think that community support and the ease of use of Unity makes it very easy for artists to produce simple games without huge amounts of programming knowledge being required. Being a programmer I still found the engine quite good as it allowed to me to make most of a game without having to do much by way of graphics.
    I think it is a great beginners engine but with a full liscence, a good team and the right third party plugins the engine would work awesomely for anything.

    I particularly like the fact that the editor itself is part of the engine, so you can extend and improve the unity editor itself and even use it to make non-gaming applications with either 2D or 3D graphics for just about anything.
     
    Last edited: Jan 7, 2010
  13. LoRez

    LoRez Ender Of Threads One Of Us

    #1 Grossing iPhone game in US and UK based on Apple's 'Top Grossing Apps' chart which has been around since September. Takes micro-transactions into account which is why Eliminate was able to briefly be top despite being free.

    http://www.mobile-ent.biz/news/34300/New-App-Store-chart-for-Top-Grossing-applications
     
  14. Gaiyamato

    Gaiyamato Lurker Not From Round Here

    Ok fair enough.
    Thanks for that. :)
     
  15. Russell123

    Russell123 Lurker Not From Round Here

    Thanks everyone for their post i also get much help to solve the problem
     
  16. seena

    seena Lurker Not From Round Here

    Hi Guys, A couple of you suggested that I do an article/tutorial on beginning 2D game development in Unity3D.I'm happy to do this, though it may have to wait a week or two, but what I want to know from you guys is what you want in such an article.The trouble with Unity, and probably my biggest gripe about the tool, is that it doesn't come with any native sprite class. It does come with particle system classes, which work for sprites in most circumstances, but proper sprites would be more elegant and run faster (because of the way the particles have to be handled).There is however, what has become, a standard sprite system in Unity, the SpriteManager class (this is what I have been using for my 2D game development in Unity). But implementing it requires a little bit of Unity knowledge (which is where an introduction, and an example project, into sprites in Unity would be helpful)
     
  17. hiphop

    hiphop Yes, yes you can Rest in Peace One Of Us

    and learn some respect lad .. those guys are the top of their game and have been in mobile for the last 7 years....
     
  18. Souperman

    Souperman Unskippable cut scene One Of Us

    I find Unity to be an excellent prototyping tool for game ideas and simple mechanics.

    The idea of making the game, then just exporting it to iOS, Android, XBLA etc is also a very appealing notion.

    However I've yet to use it in a professional capacity, all the programmers I know turn their noses up at it.
     
  19. Base13

    Base13 Industry Unprofessional One Of Us

    A friend was looking at working on some indie projects, but didn't want to get involved in my Unity project as he likes getting his hands dirty with the game engine.

    He is now back working for a big company. They use Unity. He says it feels a bit like kiddie programming... but he gets paid a mans wage!
     
    • Thank Thank x 1
  20. dood

    dood Lurker Not From Round Here

    If you are a Maya user and, like me, can both create art and write code --the iteration time is unbeatable. Save your Maya file, Alt+Tab into Unity, write a quick script, and hit a button to see the new behavior on the iPhone.