Unity V2 has been released

Those who are interested in serious 3d development might want to take a look at it.

-> http://unity3d.com/unity/features/

Looks nice. Still no proper Windows or Linux version I take it?

The IDE is OSX only but publishing works for WIN (XP, Vista) and OSX for desktop and browsers, oh and Wii if you buy a special licence.

Yes I realize that. But for the $40.000 USD it's going to cost us to buy 6 developer Macs, I think I can get a better overall deal on the platform everyone on the team is already using.

Dont forget that the prices quoted dont include Danish tax - for V1 that was around 25%

I wont be getting it - for a start, I'm unemployed and b) I'll be doing something for Windows, Linux, Mac and F-200

Well, i guess that's somehow your problem if you think you need this amount of money for just six Macs. From my experience i can say that you're pretty fine with an 20inch iMac. You might want to check out their store... http://store.apple.com

Six Macs is $7194 (I presume that doesn't include your sales tax)
Six copies of Unity Pro is $8994 (that wont include VAT)
Currently comes to $16,188

And if you're an institute and contact David directly (you can say that i've told you) i'm sure you can get a discount for buying more licences, if you really need six or more. But maybe it just makes more sense if you're only using Macs for the programmer(s) and do the media on PCs instead.

Well that's nice. Except the US store doesn't ship to Denmark, and even if they did, we'd first need to register with "Erhvervs- og Selskabsstyrelsen" to be allowed to import goods from the US and we'd still end up paying the difference in tariffs anyway.

Sure, we could get the cheapest iMac available (which would cut it down to about $12.000 USD) or the cheapest Mac Pro, (with no screen at all, which would then be about $25.000).

Basicly what it boils down to is whether Unity and Apple can save us roughly 3 man months of development time, compared to other similar products. If it does, I certainly don't see how.

So that'd cut it down to 4 then. We're going to have to do the media on PCs anyway, but it's my understanding that tying up a programmer to do a menial task the content people could do themselves, is a waste of otherwise good resources. But maybe I'm missing something?

We're a company. However the licenses aren't really the issue, as one of the products we're currently evaluating costs more than that. The (first) problem is that Unity is as far as I'm aware still unproven technology, and it's a much harder sell to venture capitalists. The second problem is that in the case of Unity we have to buy all this stuff upfront (from our equity) and gamble on whether it's going to be good enough to get venture capital, where as something like Gamebryo (which offers free evaluation kits), and to some degree even True Vision 3D (which costs peanuts) is a much easier sell.

There is a general 30 days trial period. If this collides with some serious tryout timing on your side then i'm sure that you again can talk do David to get some further time but obviously at some point you'll have to pay for it.

From the engines i know this is the best and most complete engine out there at the moment in this and an above price range (like virtools for instance). V2 is a serious update, especially if you can make use of the features provided in this release like for instance the terrain engine. It also has it's downsides (like the physics could be more complete) but they are working on the engine and improving it with every release, just take a look at their update route so far.

The engine has been used for titles released by freeverse already and is used for commercial titles which are in production. But these things are also standing on the website and if you have meaningful questions just go ahead and contact them.

This product looks really nice. And they have at least 15 people working on it. The demos look great, lots of nice features, pretty fast. I'm jealous!

The shadowmap demo is nice. I wonder what the speed would be like if it was running on a larger scene.

The 'Avert Fate' demo was visually good, but I was disappointed it did not use shadow mapping. I would like to see what a scene looked like that had multiple lights.

I’ve never been keen on editor-heavy game-making tools, as I tend to go for procedural content generation where possible, but Unity V2 might make me reconsider my approach for at least one project. Plus, my Macbook Pro’s OS X partition needs more attention.

Heh, after trying the Unity V2 demo, I don't think it's going to work for me. All this GUI / IDE / Editor stuff overwhelms me in a few minutes, regardless of the easy-to-understand tutorials. Personally I'm more productive with game programming languages like Blitz / Cobra.

I wonder how productive you'll get once you'll try to release something which is more built on a shader level and you need it to be working on a wide range of cards, maybe even on different platforms. By the way you can do procedural stuff in unity as you please.

Why not try the Danish store ? http://store.apple.com/Apple/WebObjects/dkstore/


There are quite a few commerical games that have been written using Unity - Gooball (Ambrosia), Big Bang set of games (Freeverse), and quite a few smaller set of developers have used it too.


Indeed - I'm not too keen on RAD style programs either - but thats one of many reasons why I wont want to get Unity V2

I did think the editor looks quite advanced too and a bit offputting in that regard, you've got to learn the whole interface.

I tried the avert fate demo which ran at about 7fps with all graphics features switched on, on my system at least. I'm still not sure what people see in FPS games, though, to me it isn't far removed from pointing the mouse at moving targets and clicking to shoot. Zombie Apocalypse on the Amiga was more fun - which maybe was a Blitz game ?

I've 150 FPS with fantastic quality in the avert fate demo at 1680x1050 on my 8800GTS superclocked. Not bad for the amount of stuff going on and the amount of effects done at the same time ... would be happy if other engines would have such a performance.

I especially like the fact that it can fallback for weaker systems, something most other new engines are not capable of anymore (TGEA and a few others)

A lot of work actually went into trying to keep system specs as low as possible and providing proper fallbacks and workarounds for a wide range of cards.

Could you not say similar things about other genres? There are bad examples of every genre. RTS games mostly involve repetitive tank rushes. RPG games mostly involve repetitively performing the same action to see a progress bar go up. Adventure games mostly involve repetitively trying every action available on every available object until an arbitrary door opens. Platform games involve repetitively timing pressing the jump button correctly. Still, it's all a matter of taste I suppose - I just get puzzled sometimes by the attitude that first person games are somehow less intelligent than others.

Back on topic, Unity looks fantastic and being a mac user it interests me. I do find the RAD style of it offputting, I have to say, as I'm used to programming B3D style. I tried the 30 day preview and couldn't get into the editor. (Some of the controls could do with an overhaul, for one thing.) If I could get past that, the stability, looks and cross-platform abilities (and the web player) are great factors. I'm also too used to B3D syntax, and the thought of having to learn C# is a bit offputting too. Still, with B3D looking older and older, and BMax not getting a 3D (integrated) engine anytime soon, Unity does look tempting.

Yep, it seems to be quite hard for a lot of more traditional users to get into such an IDE, which also isn't perfecty layed out. I think what would help a lot is if they would put some more effort into more video tutorials. Did you watch those which were available?

-> http://unity3d.com/support/documentation/video/

But the best is if you have someone sitting next to you and doing some simple tasks. Once you've seen that, you most likely also jumped over the hurdle.

Is it true that they are porting Unity to Windows? Can't wait to try it...

Well, at some point, yes. Probably right after FlameDuck bought his $40.000 Mac farm. :O)

It is true, look here:

http://unity3d.com/company/jobs

only job they are offering is:

**************************
Windows GUI programmer

We're looking for a great Windows GUI programmer. You'll work out of our office in Denmark on the Windows port of the Unity editor.

**************************

Perhaps smartazz FlameBait and his team of 30 kickass consultant programers can apply for this position. If he programs as good as he talks here on forums we'll have windows version in no time I think!

Hey, thanks for the link to the video tutorials, they're great. I could sort of work out as much as they teach for myself, but it's good to see it in motion. I'm mainly a bit daunted by the idea of building a whole game straight away... still, I can't wait to get to grips with it. Better start learning C#...

One thing strikes me... for instance with particles, maybe smoke. What if I wanted to have a wind, that blows around randomly, changing direction etc - and affects all the velocities of all particles in a scene? Is that something that can be done? Is it a scripting thing? I guess what I'm asking is, can you do in Unity pretty much everything you can do with B3D, scene-wise?

Maybe you want to start with Javascript first as it's easier to get into, all the examples, the documentation are based on Javascript. In most cases you won't feel any speed difference to C# and it's more likely you'll hit a bottleneck somewere else before.

As for the wind if you have totally different particles which have nothing in common you just would have to write a script which alters them. Either you add the script to the particles by hand or you find the particles by script (searching for the particle type, the name or a tag they use) and then just alter the property you want, like for instance a force or local/world velocity. You can also make a prefab which includes a wind changing script so that you only provide a global which they care about and update themselfes with attached scripts.

Just add a particle to a scene, select it in the hierarchy and you can see all the attributes you can address either via the inspector in the IDE or by scripting or you just open the appropriate page in the docs. ;O)

Ah... thanks for that. So the preset particles, primitives etc will have associated editable scripts too, as well as custom objects I make from scratch?

Generally you do it like this, you create an particle and attach a script to the particle, like with any other object too. In your script you expose those variables which are important for you to the inspector. Once this is done you can run the scene and tweak them in realtime.

But you don't need to do it this way. If you wish you can do everything via scripting, create those particles, transform them, alter their parameters and so on but depending on what you're doing it would be stupid as you just don't take advantage of the IDE. Once you got used to it you know what i mean.