Eric Heimberg and Sandra Powers (ex-Turbine, Perpetual devs) review Unity 2.5

[Stormwaltz]

I’ve been watching Unity for a year or so now. It’s been frustrating to watch, because the numbskull developers created their first versions only for the Mac! (The resulting applications could run on any platform, but the development tools required a Mac.) When you’re an indie, it’s hard to justify doling out a few grand for a Mac in order to test-drive a piece of software you’ve never used before. This restriction didn’t stop Cartoon Network’s Fusion Fall from using the Mac-based version of Unity, but it kept most small developers, including us, on the sidelines.

However, two weeks ago they finally got around to making an accessible version of their program, one that runs on Windows or Macs. Finally! Sandra and I reorganized our schedules so that we would have a full week to experiment with Unity and a simple off-the-shelf server product called SmartFoxServer. Basically, we spent a week prototyping an MMO. Successfully.

What makes Unity special? Three things, in order of importance:

   1. An enviably powerful tools pipeline,
   2. A rendering engine that works on any platform (and can run on web pages),
   3. And a very reasonable price tag.

Let’s go over each one.

http://www.eldergame.com/2009/04/09/unity-25-the-fast-track-to-an-indie-mmo/

[squirrel]

Yeah it's a cool tool, I've got an indie license and used it on the mac to do architectural walk-throughs. Just installed it on Vista, nice thing is each license allows 2 installs - so I can have it on my Macbook and Vista desktop. Thanks for the link!

[Stephen Zepp]

[mole alert]Unity is a direct competitor to Torque, so take anything I say with a grain of salt and check it out for yourself[/mole alert]

Man are they going to be surprised when they get around to networking....and find out what the source code license is. Oh, and forget using SVN or PerForce.

Unity really is a great tool/engine, and has an amazing pipeline. You don't get anything for free however, and there are definitely trade-offs.

[Prospero]

At GDC they mentioned they were trying to figure out a way to use integrate real source control. Their current solution is... cute.

[Samwise]

Lack of anything resembling source control or a way to integrate with any external source control system is why I gave up on Metaplace without making anything.  I absolutely can't develop in an environment where I can't recover from mistakes easily, especially if I'm still learning to use the tools.

[Stephen Zepp]

To be fair, they have source control--it's just proprietary and locked down--you must purchase their system, and it ain't cheap.

[Krakrok]

Man are they going to be surprised when they get around to networking....

Except they said they are using SmartFoxServer. Which has it's own Unity C# API.

[squirrel]

Unity uses the RakNET libraries. Not sure how good the implementation (ie. exposure of RakNET) is through their prefabs but I've heard networking peer-to-peer is easy enough.

Other than peer-peer, you probably wouldn't want to use Unity as a server application, although some people have - which is why they're using SmartFox with the Mono API. It's pretty straightforward actually, using the included Island demo you can have a working 3D chat room with avatars running in about an hour. Very limited of course, but I put one together just to check it out and it's pretty impressive.

The version control of course is shite. But their solution isn't expensive - Unity asset server is $499.00 - it's just not very good and really needs to support Subversion at the minimum.

[squirrel]

For those interested - Unity has published their first roadmap. SVN integration sometime 'soon'. (Although they've been pretty good at delivering what they promote in the past.)

http://blogs.unity3d.com/2009/04/10/unity-roadmap/