Hm? Why 11.000 bucks there? Unity Indie costs $199. How can that be much for such an engine?

Well those discussions lead to nothing anywhere, especially not if people didn't really tested Unity. I just "checked" it out one year before i bought it. I didn't like it much back there. So this year i re-tested it again, but with more details. Now i'm addicted to it.

I see no problem in using Unity Indie and make professional, commercial games with it. Many does. Especially with the iPhone License (which i got now too, just waiting for my iPhone to arrive).

So like it and use it, or don't. That's it.

@Machinery Frank :
I doubt all formats will be supported without any glitches.
It's like some Beyo.. Virt.. engine or others listing lot of formats , but having lot of problems.

Does someone have tested Blender animated models import in Unity ?

The Pro version price is too hight for a lone wolf.
But with indie perhaps some casual succesfull games can be made.
For the price i'll buy indie and play with it to see what point i can reach !

What we can see is that the Unity team is lot more people than A7 , that's why it's progressing so fast with support for
iphone and Wii.
What i like is their "All in One" editor like Torque Engine.

I like A7 and i except A8 to have a new totally editor all in one also ; )

While I agree that not looking at the video and then arguing about it is a bit strange the video still does not show anything spectacular. The shadow mapping can be handled way better in Unity than with 3DGS built-in lightmapper as you can use stuff like Gile[s] or even Lightwave or whatever rendering suite you have giving you superb results...

The only thing not ready out of the package would be the dynamic character shadows and that's probably also how that "the shadows cannot be that good" statement is meant towards: The shadows either are stencil shadows or just ye good ol' Z-Buffer shadows (I can't really tell although they don't seem to bend over the stairs in one scene so they might very well be just Z-Buffer ones) and no fancy pants shader based soft shadows. The question now is how far Unity's Indie versions capabilities go in sort of including a feature similar to that (dunno if that's the case - what I read was always about fancy shader stuff & that kind) / how fakable this is with Unity's feature set...


You shouldn't forget about all the other features which often imo are more important than things like multiplayer like e.g. a serious bone animation system you can use in a way your animations won't look silly with today's polycount (-> weighted, esp. for organic stuff) or having some kind of LOD systems or even having a filepacker...

The Indie version of Unity really "just" lacks shadows & the render-to-texture feature (which tend to go hand in hand nowadays anyway).


As I said - with 150 € for me it cost me less than an A7 Com Edition and places itself right between A7 Extra and Com. When looking at the features you can't really complain for that price. Still shadows would be more viable to me than e.g. multiplayer...


So you say if a game has no fancy dark areas below a character it immediately truns into trash? Are you really that addicted to eyecandy? Don't want to sound rude but even if we'd have a game with just blob shadows below the characters - people might see this as "They really should have come up with something better here!" but in the end it's no game decider or anything even close to that...


The reason probably is that if you have done a commercial quality game you should have the 1000 bucks left for your project and the others to come or let the distributor pay that costs. If not - well ... without any profits you won't make it through the months of creating your next project and you thus have failed...

But to get OT again:
When using OpenGL does your app run under Linux?

Enjoy your meal
Toast

well, while its not needed to sell a game for the pc, it nowadays pretty much expected to have some sort of dynamic shadow. Of course I'd like to see what they have for both extendablity and license on that extendability because if you could write a dll for your own custom shadows that would make it redeemable in my mind, provided someone is actually working on it, or providing i had the skill to do so myself.

Man, Unity guys should hire you for marketing..

"Buy our next-gen 3D engine which has everything you'll ever need to make a game. To help the small time Indie developers, we have even removed useless and most basic features which have been seen in games like Thief ages ago. We say SCREW THE SHADOWS, they are afterall but a bunch of dark areas under characters. Your players haven't experienced horror until they see a giant blob that looks like a shadow moving around in some distant light.. NOW THAT IS SCARY!!!"

Also, I really don't see the point in telling me what features are available on upgrading when I already am talking about SOME of them. No offense Toast but your replies just seem generically dripping with fanboyism, more so than some other people (hell, I am not even defending A7 but talking about basic features for a genre which are expected these days).

While you are making your genre bending horror game using Unity Indie, assuming you are keeping the visual style real, please do some research on how Resident Evil 4 port of PC was a huge fuck-up in visual department. It was SO bad that it served as a wake-up call for Capcom on how PC gamers demans best from a 3D game (they are now porting all of their games themselves, like DMC4 and Street Fighter).

Even small things matter and can really make or break the immersion factor for the player no matter how awesome your gameplay is (and it better be if you intent to add blobs everywhere, like RE4.. which was saved by the gameplay).

I didn´t watch the Kabus video but of course I know the Kabus screenshots and I just don´t find them very impressive and a good example.

I am sure the primitive Gamestudio z-buffer style shadows can be faked very easily with Unity indie. Just squeeze a copy of the model or something. That´s how they work after all. You also aren´t limited to using fuzzy blobs as shadows but can use something more accurate (maybe even animated).

Like always it´s really funny how AAA games enter the discussion. You won´t be able to compete by using any engine if you don´t have a multi million dollar budget.

I have to agree with amy here. At my (humble) mind Ortucis and Lostclimate watch this discussion from a wrong point of view.

I see it that way: If you have little budget, as a small studio or hobby-developer, you will not earn much with a game. You need to be fast and efficiently. You have to create small games, casual games, nice ideas. I formerly used to program games in Delphi and I finished most of my Windows 2d games at a weekend. I sold each game for a few hundreds of bucks to a publisher and this was fine. It would not work if it takes years to finish such small games.

And this is the area where the indie license of Unity makes sense. You get it and you make small nice games for iPhone, Windows, Mac. The price is a no-brainer. You can get much more money back.

But if you really want to make a 3d-game with great shadows, shaders, fantastic lighting, then you have to pay a bit more in the Unity department. This makes sense because you also have to pay a lot more for artwork, game develoopment. You will spend much more time on your project, several years, for sure.

But to be honest: If you really want to go this eye-candy way, then I would suggest to use C4. It is even much cheaper than Unity Pro and just looks better, has a visual shader editor, better light sources and a better scene-management especially for indoors.

So we should see it in a more realistic way: Unity as well as Gamestudio is not a id-Tech 3d shader engine at the graphical edge. C4 is a better choice then. But C4 needs more investment in programming time. So if you want to make small games faster then Unity is just the better bet, scripting, the fastest art-workflow and the most platforms available for your game. Actually this is the technology for small indies to grow bigger, for realistic projects.
If you are a dreamer then better get you Torque3d or C4. Both can be used to create very good looking scenery if you have the arts behind it. But at the end you need much time and a big team for a complete project.

So every technology has its place and we should not beat it down.
Lite-C as an example is a good starting point for pupils or students with no budget at all and with no knowledge of C++ (if they had then they could go with free alternatives like Irrlicht / Ogre without any feature cut at all).

Edit: By the way - I found it interesting that Ortucis as someone who uses Max 2009 and Mudbox has a problem with such a cheap price of Unity
These 2 tools are 20 times more expensive than Unity indie.

It's called a "JOB" where an artist can use the softwares purchased by a studio. I know, shocking, makes no sense... just like any other post defending Unity or offering alternatives for no sane reason.

If you have a job then Unity Indie is cheap as well. But then you probably have no time to make a high end graphic game in your spare time any way. Smaller and casual games are still the better bet then.

And if you did not understand the reason I mentioned in terms of development times, project size and technology, then I feel sorry for you. I tried to help but I cannot help everybody. I dont defend Unity. I mentioned a lot of other tools as well because every tool has its place.

It is up to you. Have fun or finish a game!

You still can fake the Kabus style shadows. Not elegant, not without any hassle but it can be done...


Simple - you wanted to argue about what a Pro license has to look like and gave "additional", sensible stuff like the rather unimportant logo and the multiplayer for 3DGS while comparing to the totally important as essential feature of shadows & co on the Unity side. My comment now was about that even with 3DGS you get some precious things that are important to pretty much any project just with the pro version...


I don't see any fanboyism in my postings (heck I don't even own Unity and probably won't buy it with the missing shadows in the Indie version being one reason) - you've just got in your head that Unity (Indie) can't do a Kabus quality game. Then you started mocking people considering to use this engine - telling them to get a game that will be laughed at (or whatever else) and this just because of the shadows. There's not much to say about this argument: A single not gameplay decisive missing feature won't turn your game into something you'll be "entertained by the responses" from (you even admitted that with the RE example). Using another engine for this task still might be wiser - it changes nothing on the Kabus comparison though...

Also I don't get why you're now comparing and telling stuff about Resident Evil? Your whole point was about Kabus vs. a Unity clone and here all what you cannot do instantly in Unity are the dynamic character shadows. I now won't repeat again how a lack of an engine feature for this type of shadow has to be rated - it was told here by numerous guys...

Enjoy your meal
Toast