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Unity 3D thoughts
DakaSha:
I've decided that it may be a good idea for me too to switch to unity3D from the engine I am currently using (although I'm not sure about this yet) and thought this would be the perfect place to ask some questions about it seeing that it is neutral (as opposed to the unity forums) and arcen actually uses it in a full blown 2D game (I am not interested in 3D for now)
First off, if you get a chance x4000, I guess unity is handling the "2D" rendering quite well (I'm aware it's most likely textures on a 2D plane in 3D space though, correct me if im wrong) but what did you do to get that to work so well? Is there anything I should be aware of? Or can I just do what Unity "wants me to do?"
Btw I havnt even done anything in it. Im just reading about it and see there is a user made custom SpriteManager script available so Im wondering why that is.
Has anybody else here used the engine?
Vampyre:
Hi DakaSha,
I've been using Unity3D myself... Not that I'm a game designer, but I like looking how things work... Unity3d had my curiosity, and I'm now learning how to use it.
Unity3D basically is made for 3D. But that's not really a problem, as you can totally forget about the Z axis. Example : all your object move along X and Y axis, are represented by a sprite... You just need to think how it makes sense to tweak 3D into 2D. For AI War, I'm pretty sure x4000 used a camera, moved it in the 3d space, and just allow zooming in or zooming out. All the rest is parallaxing.
You can build 2D games in a 3D environment (found a free tutorial about it in unity website). You can of course build 3D. I don't think Unity could limitate you to a precise style. There are games designed in Unity only with the GUI Design interface. Others are beautiful renders of 3d earth (realistic !). I'm not sure that's limitating.
On the contrary, Torque Game Builder (don't want to advertise here, but that's just for reference) is great with 2D, but will only do that. If later you want to create something like the tutorial in 2,5D, well, I think that's no way with TGB.
I think that it's better to use an engine who can do very much more than what you actually do, rather than beeing limitated by an engine for which you can't go further... It also avoids learning different languages ;-)
Unity is rather simple (I created a small ridiculous game in about 3 hours. Nothing fancy, just plain cubes, ball, and gravity, and it's not really complicated to learn). Of course programming skills are necessary, but it can be learnt, just as anything else :-)
Furthermore, Unity is free. So why not giving it a try, and see for yourself what it can do (lots of examples to download from unity website). Like that, you could compare with the engine you are using now :-)
DakaSha:
Yeah Ive already started and quite like it so far. I'd be interested in knowing whether X4000 used the SpriteManager script available on the wiki :P
x4000:
I started out with the SpriteManager script, but wound up going my own way. I would suggest that the most effective way to render 2D stuff in Unity 3D is actually without GameObjects and instead with using the Graphics.DrawMesh. It's actually super different from what Unity 3D would suggest, and is the only reason AI War is able to be run on it. Tidalis uses more the standard methods, though, and certainly works fine. So it depends how much you plan on doing on the screen at once, and whether or not you want to spring for Unity Pro. But allocating and deallocating GameObjects is wicked slow, so do that as infrequently as possible no matter what. And don't try to create more than a few thousand of those, heh.
DakaSha:
Hey thanks alot for the tips. Right now I'm obviously just getting the hang of it although its pretty easy after using multiple other engines and vanilla XNA.
Ive always been a "2D guy" but the simplicity of this REALLY makes it hard to not try 3D stuff heh
Anyways thats why I posted here... To get an opinion by an unbiased developer who has actually used it to the fullest
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