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sunsvortex

Unity

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Anyone using Unity for development and if so could you provide a critique based on your own experience with it?. I have only been working with it for a week or so and it seems to do a pretty good job at most everything so far.
 
Im going to take the plunge and start developing my own title and before I start slinging cash around, just looking for people with real world experience with Unity to give a real world opinion of it.
 
Unity is being used as the client for Atavism, which is the back end im looking at using. Its all supposed to be a one stop shop to build a complete MMO, and is priced for Indie. No 400k ~ 500k  or royalty garbage. They are doing thier own game to showcase what the system can do. the system is currently under development and in Alpha / Beta. Ill be getting a copy of thier stuff next week I think and getting it setup to give it a spin.
 
But if it all works as intended....they offer a lot of very cool stuff, voxel terrain and building, combat, assets, mob setup and spawn, loot tables, support for level or skills based progression, and of course if you have the dev license you can get the source code and put in anything you like.

 

[media]https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=Qcyr3cs0nFw

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I'm not a dev myself, but me and my brother played a bit with Unity's IDE (using the free version), and it was quite awesome, with a bit of dedication anyone with a bit of imagination, and some math skills and basic programing knowledge can do a fun game in it (you see a lot in newgrounds, kongregate and such). I've also seen tech demos for games being developed in unity and its amazing what you see.


 


I've said years ago it would be nice if they re-did wurm on Unity using voxels xp


Sorry i can't tell you more, since i'm not really too savvy in game development, but form what i've experienced its a great foundation for a game.


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I looked into using Unity before. I had a hard to sifting through the unfinished and rubbish games people had made/were making. Now though, there are a few surfacing that look quite polished and complete. For an indie/hobby purpose it seems to be a very good choice for 3D. Even if you don't end up using it for your final game, it's very good for prototyping and getting basic features in quickly.


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I looked at Unity a bit.  If they ever add dynamic navmesh updates so you can have real time deformable terrain it will become *very* interesting.  They did add cutting in addition of obstacles to the navmesh in real time so there's hope.

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Some games said to be using the Unity engine (besides Greed Monger :P )


 


Gloria Victis


 


Rust


 


Shroud of the Avatar


 


Dragons of Elanthia


 


City of Steam


 


Guns of Icarus


 


Legends of Aethereus


 


 


Some of those have some well known experienced game developers and that will give Unity even more mainstream acceptance. After all, if it's good enough for Richard Garriott ...


 


I am not sure of the differences between the "free or almost free" indy versions of Unity and the more expensive Big League Guys Version of Unity.


 


I've backed at least one Kickstarter project that is using Unity (nnnooo not THAT one -- it's Obsidian's Pillars of Eternity,  (formerly Project Eternity) with some of the same developers who made Baldur’s Gate and  Icewind Dale)  inXile entertainment is also said to be using Unity for Wasteland 2 and Torment: Tides of Numenera (successor to Planescape Torment)


Edited by Brash_Endeavors

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I looked at Unity a bit.  If they ever add dynamic navmesh updates so you can have real time deformable terrain it will become *very* interesting.  They did add cutting in addition of obstacles to the navmesh in real time so there's hope.

Atavism does this using their own AtVoxel plugin...which you can get separately for Unity or comes built in with their package. I haven't looked directly at it yet, but they are building it in to Atavism. So it should be pretty straight forward to use it for surface terraforming, caves, ect ect ect.

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I've said years ago it would be nice if they re-did wurm on Unity using voxels xp

Sorry i can't tell you more, since i'm not really too savvy in game development, but form what i've experienced its a great foundation for a game.

Thats what i thought after my first month in wurm... That would be really so great to see

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Some games said to be using the Unity engine (besides Greed Monger :P )

 

Gloria Victis

 

Rust

 

Shroud of the Avatar

 

Dragons of Elanthia

 

City of Steam

 

Guns of Icarus

 

Legends of Aethereus

 

 

Some of those have some well known experienced game developers and that will give Unity even more mainstream acceptance. After all, if it's good enough for Richard Garriott ...

 

I am not sure of the differences between the "free or almost free" indy versions of Unity and the more expensive Big League Guys Version of Unity.

 

I've backed at least one Kickstarter project that is using Unity (nnnooo not THAT one -- it's Obsidian's Pillars of Eternity,  (formerly Project Eternity) with some of the same developers who made Baldur’s Gate and  Icewind Dale)  inXile entertainment is also said to be using Unity for Wasteland 2 and Torment: Tides of Numenera (successor to Planescape Torment)

Chris Robert's Star Citizen is also on Unity.. and partnered up with the Unity dev team to make the engine more MMO supportive (larger numbers of connected users in a single instance, larger map support, etc...)

 

Unity isn't the crappy little browser game engine it used to be...

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Planet Explorers uses Unity, problem with it is  64 bit support,  PE is waiting for that to be released, when it is, tons more u can do in that game. Truth is, ALOT of games run unity these days. Seems to be a very realiable and handy engine for creating sandbox games.


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 I have been working mostly with Mecanim doing animations and importing from Blender, but tonight I started messing with terrains....15 min tops, I have a world and a "Tim the Toolman" char running around inside it. No wonder its becoming so popular.


 


dhhBZpk.png


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I've been working with Unity full time since March last year. http://www.thespacegame.com uses it for the client (web and PC build).


 


Pros: It's crazy fast to get stuff going with it. I had a working game in a couple of days of messing around. Asset store is full of cheap second rate assets that make great placeholders so you can proof of concept stuff really fast. It's easy to learn too, by FAR the easiest to get into and get things going that I've ever seen. If you're making your first game, for the love of god do it with Unity and save yourself a lot of time.


 


Cons: It's got training wheels you just can't remove. Trying to do threading with it or 64bit scenes is a bit of a nightmare, but I've got around most of its limitations in one way or another. Their attitude to bugs is pretty bad and they have a LOT of bugs. The dev focus seems to be on flashy new features not fixing broken old stuff. There's been a full screen crash for standalone clients for as long as I've been making standalone clients and no sign of it even being worked on as near as I can tell. The latest version crashes out trying to build our game and I haven't seen any progress on my bug report in weeks. No big deal, previous version still works...


 


Stay away from asset store stuff if you're getting serious. Get a areal artist and pay them for art, be super careful selecting UI packs as the inbuilt UI stuff is often better and they're doing a new one as we speak.


 


There are limitations but you can work around them. We have planets the size of Earth with a full spherical terrain engine, star systems many times the size of ours, and more than 270,000,000,000 star systems in total, and now colonies with thousands of buildings. Unity got in the way with all of those things but there's ways around it.


 


For my next game (some time away, still in love with this one) I would re-evaluate unity and the other engines around at the time. Frankly NOBODY makes 64bit infinite engines for insanely huge space MMOs so no matter what engine I went with for this project I was always going to be hacking to some extent.


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Sometimes using a library can save large amounts of development time. Other times it can cause more problems than its worth. Especially for closed source stuff as you can't even attempt to fix the bugs yourself and workarounds are horrible to maintain.



That said heard good stuff about Unity, though some complaints that cross-platform is not as smooth as they make out. Also heard that people had problems with 64-bit builds being unstable.


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I've been working with Unity full time since March last year. http://www.thespacegame.com uses it for the client (web and PC build).

 

Pros: It's crazy fast to get stuff going with it. I had a working game in a couple of days of messing around. Asset store is full of cheap second rate assets that make great placeholders so you can proof of concept stuff really fast. It's easy to learn too, by FAR the easiest to get into and get things going that I've ever seen. If you're making your first game, for the love of god do it with Unity and save yourself a lot of time.

 

Cons: It's got training wheels you just can't remove. Trying to do threading with it or 64bit scenes is a bit of a nightmare, but I've got around most of its limitations in one way or another. Their attitude to bugs is pretty bad and they have a LOT of bugs. The dev focus seems to be on flashy new features not fixing broken old stuff. There's been a full screen crash for standalone clients for as long as I've been making standalone clients and no sign of it even being worked on as near as I can tell. The latest version crashes out trying to build our game and I haven't seen any progress on my bug report in weeks. No big deal, previous version still works...

 

Stay away from asset store stuff if you're getting serious. Get a areal artist and pay them for art, be super careful selecting UI packs as the inbuilt UI stuff is often better and they're doing a new one as we speak.

 

There are limitations but you can work around them. We have planets the size of Earth with a full spherical terrain engine, star systems many times the size of ours, and more than 270,000,000,000 star systems in total, and now colonies with thousands of buildings. Unity got in the way with all of those things but there's ways around it.

 

For my next game (some time away, still in love with this one) I would re-evaluate unity and the other engines around at the time. Frankly NOBODY makes 64bit infinite engines for insanely huge space MMOs so no matter what engine I went with for this project I was always going to be hacking to some extent

Cool game, going to play on it here in just a bit to check out all your work.

 

    Yeah its very fast getting stuff in, configured and up and running. The asset store is interesting, but luckily I have an artist, he is just a traditional artist, so, is just learning blender. While he is learning it Im going to be doing some of the smaller art jobs and probably using a lot of placeholders so I can start coding stuff.

 

     Also have a Java back end lady who will be handling server side. So I guess that leaves me as everything else till they get up to speed. We'll be working out workflows,models, art and design till Unity 5 is released and Atavism gets a bit more polished.

 

The endless terrain is something Atavism has built in to thier system(although I don't think we will be using it. IIRC its the default and last I read they were adding in a way to set size limits)..so im hoping that system will save us a lot of time and effort and we can just concentrate on building the game and modifying the back end only where we need to and not having to build it from scratch.

 

Edit - took me a bit to find this one as its buried a bit, but it shows the infinite terrain stuff. Maybe it can be adapted to what your doing fairly readily and may be worth a look. I am assuming since Unity will be the client and its going to have a 64 bit editor...that Atavism will follow suit. They may already have and I just missed it somewhere.

 

[media]http://youtu.be/FxqF3BfoLGQ

 

and another one on infinite terrain

 

[media]http://youtu.be/tXspwqpr6KQ

 

 

That said heard good stuff about Unity, though some complaints that cross-platform is not as smooth as they make out. Also heard that people had problems with 64-bit builds being unstable.

 

Unity 5 is doing a 64 bit editor...so hopefully that should take care of most 64bit issues. Also looks like cross platform is getting some love as well. So if those are the big issues, looks like Unity 5 will be at least somewhat addressing them. Guess well see when it comes out.

Edited by sunsvortex
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My experience with Unity mostly lies in programming.

I found that doing basic stuff is really simple. Imagine you wanted to create a doodle jump clone, you could probably make a basic version of it in a few hours, if you look at the programming part.

However, for me, a lot of things didn't make sense at the beginning. Normally you'd have like a class, and the class would contain information about the gameobject. In Unity it's the reverse, the gameobject contains information like scripts that are attached to it.

This also results that you can't just make your own simple classes that shouldn't require a gameobject to function. Think about manager classes. Instead, you have to instantiate them as an actual gameobject.

There are a few other small things like this that make programming a little bit confusing, but it's pretty easy to get over it.

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Got Atavism today and have been setting it up. Only the starter license to give it a test drive. Kind of a pain to setup as Im not familiar with Unix commands...but eventually i muddled through it and got them running. Its got scripts of course for the db setup so painless there and runs on mysql. UI is a bit buggy still, but its also still in the very first stages of beta - its very promising so far. If I wanted to, I could grab a hosting server and set this up and have people log in. Comes with default logins and account setup, char creation, all ready to go. Just insert your own stuff  and change a ton of ip addys and ports over half a dozen places.


 


AID0Wqn.png


Edited by sunsvortex

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Unity is great, though I'm always trying to avoid any engines by writing everything by myself. Waste of time probably, but I feel safer that way.


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omg Greedmonger... I had totally forgotten about that one.


 


EDIT: Oh yeah and heard Rust's devs scrapped its codebase. No idea if they are still using Unity.


Edited by Klaa

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im creating my online game www.fiefwarsonline.com in unity right now. its early alpha. but you can create accounts, terraform terrain ect. runs right in the browser. unity is more limited to the users ability to program. im saying that becuase I have seen lots of post and reviews stating unity cant do xxxxxx. when it would be more accurate to say the user doesnt know how to program in it. the first month was hard for me as I had to get around the way the engine works. I was used to game maker. but now that I got past learning the engine. I would recommend unity 100%. I have also used torque and game studios . but find unity3d can do it all faster, at least for me.

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For someone that would literally just begin coding (I've messed with java a bit, and understand *some* of the basics) Would unity be good to play around with?


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For someone that would literally just begin coding (I've messed with java a bit, and understand *some* of the basics) Would unity be good to play around with?

 

Definitely a yes. The reason I say that is their documentation/manual is presented almost as a bag of awesome tutorials. The scripting API is also very well documented so you can look up how to do specific stuff pretty easily without much previous programming knowledge.

 

That said, its always nice to know a bit of JavaScript or C#, since those are the two main scripting languages that Unity uses which you can put to good use elsewhere if/when you move on. :)

Edited by syncaidius

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Definitely a yes. The reason I say that is their documentation/manual is presented almost as a bag of awesome tutorials. The scripting API is also very well documented so you can look up how to do specific stuff pretty easily without much previous programming knowledge.

 

That said, its always nice to know a bit of JavaScript or C#, since those are the two main scripting languages that Unity uses which you can put to good use elsewhere if/when you move on. :)

 

very good to hear! Maybe I'll take a shot at it then and see if it's something I could get into once again :) thanks for the info

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yah. id say its a good start. the engine handles things like culling, collision detection, and physics. so you can focus more on building your game. they also have good documentation. you just have to get used to how the engine works and start a small project. I can help you start if you want too. teach some basics. also pure java wont work with unity. they use thier own JavaScript. but like I said the documentation is pretty good. if you want me to help teach just sign up on my forums. im there more often. www.fiefwarsonline.com. anyone else looking for help on unity im willing ;)

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