I feel a bit sorry for you

For my case I was not much convinced of the former versions. I want to make some bigger demos and I just need good scene management (and I am not talking about some regions with the need of scripting to switch them manually on and off). This was the reason why I did not use Unity. And the shaders where not all up to date. But now I like it very much. Now I can create big worlds and I can make them as beauty as my still renders. I have the same tools (ambient occlusion, shadows, bump mapping, specularity, radiosity, volumetric lights) like in an expensive render program.

From my point of view, Unity was a tool for little casual games but now it became a professional tool for bigger projects.

Nevertheless I am sure it is not perfect, but compared to other Indie engines it is just much more feature complete.

So why should I hate it?

Let us take 2 examples:
I can make a camera flying through my level in minutes, just by using the animation editor in UDK and in Unity. Other engines need me to script some camera movement and to adjust, change script, change parameters, adjust, ... would take me days.
Another example is import. In Unity I can influence almost everything. When I see bad smoothing then I tell it to recalculate vertex normals. I change the smoothing angle and it looks like it looked in Lightwave, hard edges are hard, soft edges are soft.
In other engines I dont have smoothing angles in the import options.
I could mention a lot more.

There is btw some irc channel... with 120 users online o.O
And some of them are even helpfull sometimes... On the other hand, questions tend to be overseen by the mass of messages.

And yes, I perfectly understand your points Frank. I am just still having some troubles with not being able to hate it and also not really being able to love it.
At this very moment I am trying to align my car to the ground, if done something like that several times already and even coded something like that from scratch including my own quaternion class, but I just cant figure out the right way to do it with Unity somehow. But well, in this case it is probably just me not being able to concentrate at the moment.

Wlle, Unity have lot of basic things like different camera systems (FPS, Ratchet And Clanck ...) , and
fake blob shadow system etc ... lot of very basic things you have juts to adjust graphically on panels : very well done !

Take some simple example : simple physics
For your character, you don't have ot type 10 or 20 lines of code to make a capsule collider, just drag and drop a Physic Collider , choose the capsule, and adjust it to your character visually !
And that's done without typing a simple line of code
Yes, why coding , very basic things like that ! Same things for box colliders and some others !

This examples resumes really well the advantages of Unity by having basic things already in a all in one way , where you have just to adjust visually !
After that you 'll have to code to do more advanced things, but the basic things are already here, juts drag and drop them !

Perhaps A9 will do like that ?

That made me laugh ;D But yeah i saw your shaders and they are great, glad you added them

But Slin, i think you are a bit too negative about this all the time. It sometimes sounds like you pick every small problem and turn it into a major thing

I mean making a car isn't easy at all, in no engine especially when you want to handle realistic physics. So how long did you try to create one?
Especially when you don't know all the small tricks behind Unity's optimization for physics, etc, it can be more tricky.

I saw some projects in the Showcase that used car physics and it was pretty good, even at fast speed.

No one forces you to like it but just don't be so negative about it all the time

For Unity, there is a new complete Car Tutorial and scripts
I don't have tried it, but it's looks lot more simple now to make a car with physics without programming, juts adjusting
some variables in the program !

Well a video of a boot camp for Unity 3.0 : promising
Unity 3.0 Bootcamp

Unity 3.0 is beocming an AAA engine, and for the price if you have a team, a great project, designs, it's a way to go indeed ! So mall price for the pro version and for such great technologys that will have 3.0 !

But for indies, and lonewolves, A7 (A8) remains a very good alternative, and some great commercial gales can be made with it, with some more work

I've posted that video already.

But yeah the engine is getting better and better. Maybe i'll have the Pro soon (yay o/).

Well that's the same game over and over again. Basically you can create good games with every engine as long as you know how to use it.

But i agree that 3dgs is good for it as well, especially when you start with gamedesign. Wouldn't be there where i am now without it

Of course I do It is just that everyone seems to consider it perfect, but it isn´t, and that is actually a good thing as this means that things can still improve. Live would be very boring without progress .
And isn´t it evidence enough that I am still working with unity? I´d say that this is a good sign that I don´t consider it very bad. Especially that I already posted on the forums is a good sign. I never posted anything on the ShiVa forums


I am not negative about it, I just bring in some counterbalance to all the extremely positive views on Unity .

I have to agree to Kiyaku here. You don't consider it very bad. To me this means that you consider it bad but not very bad.

Why are you working with a bad tool? Don't punish yourself!

In my case I am indeed happy because it saved me so much time.

And about your car physics. I remember this forum thread where they wanted to collect money for a professional AAA car component (they compared it with GTA IV).
But they also posted tons of existing Unity car demos from users and I found it crazy. I played them for quite some time. I did not see in any other engine so much car games. So it must be somewhat easier than in other tools.

Well i know it's not that bad Slin, and i know you are still around and offer your shaders, etc, which can't mean you totally dislike it

But wether someone is TOO exited about it or TOO negative about it, both is not really good. I just think thinks like "i tried to get a car movement but the physic can't handle it at highspeed" and "sometimes user help on the irc" are a bit too negative.

As long as the physic isn't on the iPhone, i disagree as i used it quite often even for high speed things and i find it really accurate. Try to change the Fixed Timesteps as well to get a more detailed result.

On the iPhone it's... well, you shouldn't use it for fast objects but there is a nifty Raycast Physic script on the wiki that will do the job.

The community is the most helpful communit i've ever seen actually, just see how many great additions and tools they post, sometimes even for free! And the IRC is always the best place to get help, it depends on what time you go online there. During the day in american time, there is like almost no question that doesn't get a helpful answer. During night it's quite cozy lol.

In 2-3 weeks, i'll have a Pro license too (finally!), then i can go on with my fancy prototypes i made during the Pro Trial and Unity 3 Pro beta time, got some crazy effects lol.
And then i'm finally able to use the GL function to improve my Unity Editors

You got me wrong here. Cars at highspeed with physics aren´t a problem of Unity, the only thing I am complaining about here is, that there doesn´t some to be some easy to use movement whith collision detection, but well, while it is a bit tricky and there is still a lot to do, I basicly managed to find some kind of solution, which worked well so far.
The "and some of them are even helpfull sometimes..." was actually meant possitively, as I already got quite some help there, I just would like to see more different people to help and not always the same three or four.


The "very" was meant differently here, but well, I have troubles explaining how it actually was meant. If I would really consider it bad, I would have given up Unity already, but instead I already did quite some stuff with it.
Unity is a good tool for sure and I would probably already have bought the pro version if it would cost less.

I think that programmingwise I still prefer gamestudio, but I like unitys editor and their component system is just great in most aspects.