Cowabanga, what is the shader?

Jibb

Bumped Diffuse and Toon.

No , it's not pointless. If you apply a normals mapping shader to a gamestudio entity and test the fps , and then you load Unity and apply a normals mapping shader to it and test it and it's faster than Gamestudio's , then Unity is performing better , PERIOD. Unity also has fallbacks for it's shaders , so that's another plus. So let's once and for all answer the question , is Unity better than GameStudio , YES , IN EVERY SINGLE ASPECT as a game engine. But now we even have Unreal Engine 3 for free , which is of course better than Unity, GameStudio , and Torque combined, so , while Unity is an awesome engine that kicks gamestudio in the face when compared to it , it isn't the best engine out there , as even Unreal Engine 3 has some steep competition with the Crysis engine , however , UE3 is free, which to this day I can't belief.

I agree,definitely.

is that true??

Yeah, Google "UDK".

WDID: Yes, it is pointless. Do you have any idea what sort of a difference it makes supporting extra dynamic lights? As well as different cards supporting OpenGL better than DirectX and vice versa.

Jibb

EDIT: I've just been looking at the way Unity handles lights, and there is NO WAY you automatically get better performance. Unity adds an extra pass for every light. It's a great way to simplify their shader/material/light system, but since it's forward rendered this will generally be less efficient than a decently-written shader in A7.

What's the point? Let Unity 3 be 1.xxx times faster than A7/A8, it doesn't really matter when you're an indie. Stop making playable graphic demos and start making games again, not the ones that have hundreds of characters and big open worlds (except for Harry Potter ). Unity won't make your games fun to play.

"is that true??"
Yeah, but if you make a game with it you have to give them 25% profit, but other than that , you can download Unreal Development Kit and use it to make a game for free.

http://www.udk.com/

Such discussions always make me smile, discussions will never find an end when there are obviously big differences in knowledge about the discussion theme, like shaders and so on.

Shaders are not an engine. They are little programs running on the 3D card and their speed only depends on your 3D card when the code is similar.

I have tried Unity shaders with the pro trial version and found, A7 kicks Unity's ass into orbit shader-wise. Not because A7 shaders are faster, they are exactly as fast as Unity, but they are better to write. You see the effect immediately while you write the code. Unity can not do that. And for any decent shader effect you must pay 5 times the money that you pay for A7.

I understand shader programmers, that they like A7. But at the same time keep in mind, that engines like Unity or C4 use a different and more closed approach to be cross-platform and to have a good fall-back strategy.

If you fiddle around manually on your shaders, they might work better for a certain situation, but they will not work on other systems in most cases.

Just take C4 as an example. There is a visual shader editor. The reason is that each shader will work under different lighting situations, with or without fog, at different gaming platforms. Each shader will work together with other shaders. They will be compiled from this graph in real-time on each platform just as needed.

You cannot achieve this when you write some HLSL code.

So it comes to the same point like always: A7 is great for learning and prototyping. But for a flexible cross-platform system, working on different targets (weak and good hardware) it will not work as good, or not at all, as competition does.

yes i know that"i read UDK license agian",but imagine what you can do with such an engine,it's first class AAA engine,alot of great games were developed with it"you know that of course",BIO SHOCK-GEAR OF WAR-SPLIENTER CELL-etc..,check out it's features,the only bad thing about it is UNREALSCRIPT"i mean for beginners",iam not really big fan of Java or Javastyle programing.