Unity 3

Cool Man nice article.Thanks for everything.
Some more info could be added for large scale and unity server integration. And multilayer support.

But... I WANNA CODE MY OWN ENGINE!!! [bawling]

No mention of their terrain builder? road / river tools? Huge terrain loader?

Aw.

Even though I bought the Indie license (before it went free), I ditched Unity for UDK for a lot of reasons, including the crap interface and editor which looks like is still the same.

Unity has been nothing but hype-fest since day-1. Crap tutorials, terrible community (who think everything else but Unity is the way of life.. don't mention engines like C4 and UDK there at all..) and worst of all, rising cost keeping the Pro version out of the hands of Indies, who they were supposed to be aiming at (not with crap free version).

Anyways, seems to me like it's a perfect update for fanboys (considering all those features are there in UDK already, esp. like the material editor they ripped off, which is a good thing btw).

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Original post by niksha Even though I bought the Indie license (before it went free), I ditched Unity for UDK for a lot of reasons, including the crap interface and editor which looks like is still the same. Unity has been nothing but hype-fest since day-1. Crap tutorials, terrible community (who think everything else but Unity is the way of life.. don't mention engines like C4 and UDK there at all..) and worst of all, rising cost keeping the Pro version out of the hands of Indies, who they were supposed to be aiming at (not with crap free version). Anyways, seems to me like it's a perfect update for fanboys (considering all those features are there in UDK already, esp. like the material editor they ripped off, which is a good thing btw).

If you're going to say something negative, at least make it constructive rather than making yourself look foolish and adding nothing helpful to readers who might want to know the good and bad bits about Unity.

For instance, the GUI tools in Unity are very flexible, but they are a dog to work with. I've worked with a number of GUI systems over the years, and while Unity is probably more powerful than many if not all of them, it will still make you pull your hair out. I heard on the grapevine that may be addressed in a future patch, but I don't believe anything until I see it (thanks to Garage Games). At the moment it's worth grabbing Sprite Manager 2 or some other Unity plugin to do GUI's and 2D stuff.

The community is biased toward Unity, and any wonder why, they're using Unity. Go to Garage Games forums and you'll find they're all biased towards Torque. The community however (especially the IRC community) is extremely helpful. Heck I don't actively use Unity at the moment but I stay for the chat! My decision not to use it is based on wanting to publish to XBLIG though, and that's going to change after my next game, so it will be back to Unity for me.

I have no idea what niksha is referring to about the rising cost. Hasn't changed since I started investigating using Unity more than a year ago.

I don't really think Trent can speak about terrain that much given none of his projects that I've seen use the terrain, however, one only has to download Unity and look at the Bootcamp demo to see what you can do with terrain and the new tree editors.

Also worth nothing is the free version doesn't allow shadowing and post processing (render to texture) effects, so it can be limiting in that regard, but you should at least make your game without that and see if it's worth using.

Sure you can go for C4 or UDK, but both will cost you in different ways. C4 has an upfront cost, but from what I hear excellent support, and UDK has a permanent ~25% (can't remember the exact figure now) royalty due to Epic when you release a game. Unity has no such restrictions. You can make and release commercial games with Unity free (which I am still using) and not have to pay a cent to Unity Technologies (UT).

The tutorials are far from "crap". They're far more fully featured than any other engine I've used, the documentation is a god send (unlike some other engines we know of) and you have the choice of 3 scripting languages (C#, Boo or Unityscript (&#106avascript with extensions).<br/><br/>All in all, for a free tool, this is one you can't pass up trying.

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If you're going to say something negative, at least make it constructive rather than making yourself look foolish and adding nothing helpful to readers who might want to know the good and bad bits about Unity.

You didn't exactly made your points very wisely so stop trying to tell others how to post their opinion. I wasn't posting a review, I posted a short simple "personal experience".

You must be one of those who look for detailed explanations without having any capability to fill in the blanks.

PS: The documentation was promised by the developers ages ago. Proper documentation. They finally came up with some randomly put together docs after ages while claiming how they didn't have enough staff for putting up freaking documents (almost like GG actually.. almost). They did and still do rely on amateur user-made tutorials which are aimed mainly at using the editor (like it was the hardest thing to figure out or something).

Anyways, terrible support, terrible community. Personal experience of course, if you had better, good for you.

Interesting read, but Trent please invest in a thesaurus, it got incredibly repetitive some of the words you used [wink].

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Original post by d000hg Interesting read, but Trent please invest in a thesaurus, it got incredibly repetitive some of the words you used [wink].

I go through "favorite word" phases. This was one of those.