Unity 2.5 game engine available for windows now!
finally!
info: http://unity3d.com/unity/whats-new/unity-2.5
demo: http://unity3d.com/unity/UnitySetup.exe
info: http://unity3d.com/unity/whats-new/unity-2.5
demo: http://unity3d.com/unity/UnitySetup.exe
Replies
Hmm.. Its never good financially when they have "contact us @ for licensing information" .
this changes everything...
well, so much fer unity. next!
i´ve used it for one year on the mac and i´ve done some stuff that i though was impossible to do for me being an artist, is really easy to create a game/prototype/mockup
i think is worth to check the demo
A Unity Pro license though isn't all that expensive.
Here are some images of the Rivers and Roads system:
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3651/3365175191_9db41dc23c_o.jpg
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3636/3365175751_3c16f6abba_o.jpg
And here is the lighting system video:
http://vimeo.com/3459341
Also Torque 3D will support the collada format, I and I was pretty sure I heard something about assets dynamically reloading and refreshing in game so you can just export and see your work instantly.
All of this will be out before the end of the year, and should make torque much more usable for small teams and individuals.
Let's say I wanted to create a simple MetroidVania platformer. Nothing too fancy. Player character jumps around the environment and shoots. Enemies follow fixed, pre-defined patterns. 3D graphics with 2D gameplay. For the moment we'll assume that there would be no doors. Each room is its own level.
How difficult do you think it would be given Unity's toolset? How long do you think it would take? (just for the coding and logic, not the art)
I'm not terribly interested in Unity for its graphical prowess. I don't care that much about some of the more advanced shading features being missing from the indie liscence. I'm most interested in Unity for its prototyping possibilities. How capable is it as a platform for getting basic gameplay types up and running?
Depends of course on the scope of the thing, both feature wise and length wise, but it'd go very quickly.
It's certainly the easiest engine I've ever used for such things.
And to put it into a bit of perspective, Unity was one of the engines widely used during this year's 48 hour Global Game Jam, which means that there were some pretty goddamn impressive games made in 48 hours using unity.
So to answer your last question specifically:
How capable is it as a platform for getting basic gameplay types up and running? - Very goddamn capable. Amazingly so. Just download the trial and give it a go around for yourself.
Having used both, I'd definitely go with Unity, unless there's a specific thing Neo Axis has that Unity lacks and you need. We used Neo Axis where I used to work. It's a decent engine, but nowhere near the quality of Unity. We also ended up running into a good deal of technical issues with Neo Axis if I remember correctly. Though that was nearly a year ago, so I suppose it may have improved since.
Snap. There goes my last excuse not to buy this thing. I have years of scripting experience in Flash. I'm fluent in Actionscript 2.0 and 3.0. And I actually already know C#. Object-oriented scripting is no big deal for me. Ditto for using scripting in conjunction with existing libraries and functions. Unfortunately, I don't have a lot of time to try it out at the moment. Gotta do my taxes this week, and I've been trying to stay consistent with Dom War IV.
Screw it. I'll download the trial when I get home. I can afford to spend a few extra hours seeing how it feels.
As a torque user. There is no Colladra support in TGEA. You have to use an ancient method of having null groupings and bounding boxes.
"assets dynamically reloading and refreshing in game so you can just export and see your work instantly."
Are you sure your not thinking of the next Gen Engine that they are touting now? Leaving 1,8 users up a creek since they promised many features they couldnt deliver. Now want to charge more for a new engine? There are no dynamically reloading assests. Also, you have to hand code all your shaders.. THEN start the engine to see any effects. Then tweak the code, then restart the engine.
Maybe all this info your receiving is on the Next Gen engine that Garage Games has been working on. The current TGEA engine at least, uses ancient import methods.
Are GGames still using the collision mesh export lots of linking to objects crap, or are they going to use collada?
I'm ONLY talking about their next engine which is called "Torque 3D". You thought i was talking about TGEA, but the next engine is called Torque 3D while the current one is called TGEA. Torque 3D is suppose to be out before the end of the year.
Also pricing information has not yet been released. It will cost more than TGEA but then again it will offer TONS more than TGEA.
http://www.garagegames.com/community/blogs/view/16679
They are going to keep their existing proprietary format called "DTS" but will put in collada support and probably make that their main format.
With regards to collision. You no longer need to export a collision mesh. TGEA supports polysoup collision so you need only hit a check box in engine to turn on collision and turn it off, and its all perfectly accurate.
Ahh, thats much better with the collision, only have a torque license 1.5 so I didn't know about that. The future release looks promising, they have some nice dynamic lighting.
back to the thread topic i guess now, oops.
Polysoup only works well with simpler meshes. You still need a collision mesh for assets and things like vehicles. Otherwise the system goes to a crawl.
Your right, I did misunderstand you, but I can tell you MANY TGEA users are very upset with how Garage Games is handling this whole shift to their next gen engine. From not fixing things promised with the current, to the new pricing scheme. Don't suppose you have heard about the programmer turn around at them? How can they expect to have a consistent engine when they cant even keep a core group? Or for that fact, their crappy documentation on even the current engine thats been around for years. Even their wiki still leaves alot to be desired. From listing of methods no longer used, to missing the supposed examples the wiki links too.
Look, maybe the new engine will be everything they touted. In the meantime they have burnt many bridges with the developer group they supposedly where focused on.
Anyhow, lets get back on Unity. Which is a much better system by far.
Why use a collision mesh when you can do things with much more effort? :poly142:
Importing a model from Maya was as simple as saving my scene and then directly importing it into unity. It was basically a single step art pipeline. Its definitely worth ever cent it costs.
I think the only good thing about torque by comparison is access to the source code and much more liberal licensing. I'm pretty much in agreement here with everyone on TGEA losing a battle with Unity. Torque is just a big ball of source code that you can turn into something given the time and resources; where as unity will actually help you make a game right of the box.
I think most people would take instant results over cheep source code, but I know there are some projects, like mine, where source code is a must. However, I am, now, defiantly aware of why everyone is so excited about Unity.
you get all the graphical features with the indie licence of neo axis
I mean do they really think I am going to spend all that extra money just to get shadows?
For casual users its bit but much I suppose
i phone licensing is a joke:(
you can use dynamic shadows you just have to pay alot more and get unity pro which I do think is unfair as shadows should really be a feature even in the indie version in my opinion.
sucks with haveing the shadows cut off but i guess they just need something to make the pro version really worth to buy. But even the pro is very cheap in comparision to other engines.
@ Ruz
why is I phone licensing a joke??
Probably because they charge a fee on top of whatever base liscence you purchase, and that fee is twice as much as the actual indie liscence. So, $200 for a base indie liscence, and another $400 for iPhone support. It's $600 to use Unity to make iPhone apps. And of course, that isn't even figuring in the fee you have to pay Apple to distribute your application on the iTunes store.
This sort of pricing structure is assuming a decent return on investment for iPhone apps.
well. that solves everything.
grrrrrr....
http://area.autodesk.com/index.php/stories_bts/bts_detail/unity_ceo_david_helgason/
Nah, they just pay us to use the name it's our (tm)
And Xenobond, definitely try it. I've been using it full steam for 3 weeks and tinkering with it for a couple of months, and it's been amazing so far.
you are not likely to upgrade just to get to test out the shadows.
In fact its more likely to just annoy any potential client
Ruz - that's like complaining that Maya Complete will just annoy potential clients because it's missing some features. You want all the features, pay the full price. They're not running a damned charity for hell's sake. The fact that there even is a 200 dollar version of an engine this good is pretty cool.
Davison - That's how lots of game pipelines work. It's not ideal, I'd definitely also prefer in-editor light baking, but it's by no means that huge a deal, and pipelines can be built to accomodate it. I've used maya for light baking on multiple projects before.
Baking is fer level builders, housewives. and potheads.
Doesn't matter now. downloaded their shadow demo. ( download and judge fer yerself )
( why the shadows are such a big deal for you? )
I dunno myself sometimes It's not like many are in a rush to leverage cinematic shadow composition on a grand Tolandesque scale anyway.
I guess I am propagandizing. The first thing I do when I get my hands on any engine is check out the dyn shadow quality situation.
But that makes me wonder how much performance will be lost when you build it fully in a different app? Unity has als that nice stuff like instances, prefabs, terrain, "Speedtree"and "LOD". Unity is mostly used for makeing low budget casual games and casual gamers usally dont have a good pc. Which also makes the very performance hungry dynamic shadows kinda useless for such games.
They should have made something very good for light baking and didnt programmed dynamic shadows at all instead IMO!