Unity. Is this thing for real?

SubJeff on 15/12/2012 at 18:03

The Pro version license is less than £1000 ($1500). If you think you've got a game that 2000 people will pay 50p for then I reckon it's worth it.

Does it get a bad rap from gamers? Aren't some of the humble indie bundle games made with it?

catbarf on 15/12/2012 at 18:10

Quote Posted by Subjective Effect

The Pro version license is less than £1000 ($1500). If you think you've got a game that 2000 people will pay 50p for then I reckon it's worth it.

Definitely. I think they also have special pricing for developers a la Adobe.

Quote Posted by Subjective Effect

Does it get a bad rap from gamers? Aren't some of the humble indie bundle games made with it?

I've seen some developers get kind of dismissed out of hand on other forums because their past games were Unity-based (as in, 'this game is going to suck, the devs have only made Unity games'). I think there are people who aren't familiar with the engine who see it as 'baby's first game development platform'.

faetal on 15/12/2012 at 18:19

Quote Posted by Subjective Effect

May I ask what you are doing a PhD in?

Immunology / proteomics to investigate mechanisms of allergic contact dermatitis.

icemann on 15/12/2012 at 18:53

Interesting. Last thing I did in Unity was a simulation/test sequence for pharmaceutical students of Monash (uni in Australia), which basically had you (from a FPS perspective) walk into a clinic and prepare medications etc for a randomly generated patients script. Was quite interesting to work on.

Renzatic on 15/12/2012 at 19:36

Quote Posted by Subjective Effect

Does it get a bad rap from gamers? Aren't some of the humble indie bundle games made with it?

I think it gets a bad rep because no one's made a mind blowing AAA quality game with it a'la Unreal Engine 3.

Speaking of which, are there any advantages to using UE3 over Unity? I know it costs considerably more, but is it worth it? Is it easier to work with and more flexible than Unity in any way? Does it offer anything beyond the latest and greatest of graphical technology bling?

WingedKagouti on 15/12/2012 at 20:09

Quote Posted by Renzatic

Speaking of which, are there any advantages to using UE3 over Unity?

Last I checked, they had different philosophies when it comes to how you structure your game. But I may be wrong as I didn't have too indepth a look at either.

Judith on 15/12/2012 at 20:13

It's super-duper user friendly, has many diagnostic tools and adding anything to your level is super fast, if you know the shortcuts.

And, AFAIK the pricing model is different: with UDK you agree to pay Epic the percentage based on your sales, not the fixed price (because that would be like a million dollars). That might be pretty decent deal for indie developers, but the amount rises with your revenue, so if your title gets pretty popular and you get some serious cash, you'll have to split it with Epic.

demagogue on 16/12/2012 at 04:04

I was playing around with making a game with it last year or so. I love the editor, how easy it is to drop things in and play-test it right then. And the community is very big and prolific, so you can get code snippets of any kind of thing you want to do. I thought it was easily the best all-around platform for a 3D game you could pick. It gets a bad rap I think because it's so easy, a lot of people toss out half baked games that are shit quality.

Part of that too is that it's not like modding where you already have the core gameplay down and are tweaking it; you're building the game from the ground up, so you have to put in more work and do everything, and that can be glitchy and impatient people will stop halfway. But I think if you really invest time in it to polish it, I've seen some pretty cool and good games coming out on it.

By the way, if anyone was wondering, my game was a little French Revolution sim where you're fighting for control of Paris one street at a time, getting yourself elected, fighting off the enemies of the revolution (or for restoration if you swing that way), and ultimately vying to be the next ruler of France. Well your goal depends on your faction & your ambition: nobility, military, clergy, merchant, or farmer. Could work like a Napoleon sim too, but more about the politics in Paris. I've been using Unity, although I don't know if it's the best platform.

Renzatic on 16/12/2012 at 07:00

Quote Posted by Judith

...is Epic really licensing it out for $1 mil a pop? I know it's good and all, but damn...that's pricey.

Though I did know Epic begins charging for it once you reach a certain amount of revenue, but I always thought it was a solid 30% or so once you reach a certain point.

Volitions Advocate on 16/12/2012 at 08:23

I don't know if it's up on the site or not anymore, but around the time UT3 came out Epic was still licensing UE2 for around $350K USD. At the same time ID was licensing ID tech 4 for $250K. Epic has actually been updating UE3 quite a bit over the last half decade, and I guess they're probably pretty proud of it. There's a big difference between being a licensee of UE3 and being a licensee of UDK. UDK has the 25% of anything over 5K clause. I'd think think that a full blown UE3 license being around $1M is probably not that far fetched.

In a lot of the circles I "travel" there seems to be a big hate on for Unity. A lot of people I've spoken to think of it as a tool for Apple hipsters to release a bunch of samey games on the app store. Unity has pretty good performance for what you get though, but reliance on the asset store does make a lot of the developers look lazy. (in fact, Fargo says that they're using a shite-ton of asset store assets in Wasteland 2, and that makes me sad). I can find the reference for that if I were less lazy, it was posted in another forum I frequent.

I personally am not a Unity fan, partially because I'm one of those people baised against the Apple hipsters, but I realize not everyone who uses unity falls into that category. The one thing that bothers me me the most about all of these independent engines, is that none of them use BSP style editing. In unity its all height maps for terrain, and anything you want like buildings or whatever, you've either got to be really damn good with primitives or import the whole thing from your 3d program. None of them have vertex editing like Source SDK or UDK. Which puts a lot of work on the artists to create everything. I personally like UDK's method of primitive shapes populated by tons of static meshes to flesh out the detail. It means as a mapper I can do a ton of work and let the artists do the details.

You can't do that with Unity (last time I checked).