Bunch of questions

Unity Engine
1

Hi all

I just learned of the Unity engine and wow, I am impressed!

I am currently using TGEA for my indie game project,
www.rocketeergames.com
but am considering changing engines. Here are my questions;

  1. Does the indie license also support Windows as well as Mac?

  2. Can I get tracked as well as wheeled vehicles working in Unity, easily? Currently TGEA will support them, but it takes a lot of coding to get them to work. Although, you can never get them to “move/behave” correctly.

  3. …Shadows… TGEA has no support for them unless you create .dif models using their own builder. There is no support for .dts statics as far as shadows are concerned.

  4. How much support does Unity have for A.I.?

  5. How would Unity vrs. TGEA netcode compare?

  6. Advanced shaders? Normal maps, specular?

  7. Are there exporters for Maya as well as Max?

  8. How difficult would it be to get a player model working ingame, if you had all of the content such as mesh and animation?

Thanks!

2

  1. Not right now.

  2. Depending on how accurate you want to be, it would range from somewhat easy to fairly hard.

  3. Unity Pro has dynamic self-shadowing texture-based shadows. In Indie you can use projector blob shadows.

  4. Nothing out of the box, since AI is pretty much game-dependent. You can code whatever you like of course.

  5. Not sure.

  6. Yes.

  7. Unity uses the .fbx format, so if it exports .fbx, Unity will read it.

  8. Quite simple.

–Eric

3

Note that some 3D file formats can be dropped right into your assets and unity does the conversion to FBX for you. Maya and Cheetah 3D files for instance.

4

As former long time Torque user some additions:

  1. For the webplayer and export to Windows binary: yes, of course. The Windows version of the IDE was demoed at Unite, but not ready yet.

  2. Compared to Torque, yes! You will be delighted how easy it is. At least for some simple stuff. Of course, making a full fledged racing sim is a different story, but that is with any engine. I know how hard any vehicle stuff is in Torque. Took me ages to get them somewhat working for the Flight Game Example.

  3. Yes, out of the box by just clicking a checkbox (in the Pro version!). No hassle with exporting special file formats or whatsoever. Again, you will be happy how easy it is!

  4. A guy called Angry Ant made some nice extra package (free!) for pathfinding.

  5. Great! Unity uses Raknet which works super flawlessly. A bunch of working multiplayer games shows this very good. Personally I think the level is somewhat equal to script a multiplayer game in Torque or Unity.

  6. All of them. And waaaaay easier to assign than in Torque. You don’t even need to restart anything - all realtime in the editor.

  7. Compared to Torque… again super easy. You don’t need to waste your time with these strange export formats Torque uses. Just save your model from Maya or whatever tool in the Unity folder and done. You’ll immediately have the model then in the game by just dragging it into the scene. Updating is the same easy - re-save the model from the modelling app and Unity automatically re-imports it.

Personal note: Go and buy Unity - you won’t regret it. If I’m wrong, I give you a free copy of the Flight Game Example for Torque… :slight_smile:

5

You have to have a full (but not necessarily activated) version of Maya installed on the same machine as Unity for Unity to be able to import a Maya file.

6

Hey there GI_JOEJK,

Just a couple of things:

The Indie verison of Unity does not allow you to deploy to Windows .exe currently. It will do in the next revision we were told at the recent Unite 2008 conference which will be only a few months away. Currently only the PRO version of Unity supports realtime shadows and Windows .exe for deploy, of course you can deploy to a web browser (which a PC can view) for most of the main browsers on Apple and Windows platforms.

Unity is currently ONLY Apple based for development, but it is coming to Windows, we saw a demo as Martin says at Unite 2008. Looks identical to the Apple version and we can’t wait for it.

Maya is a little more tightly integrated into Unity than Max as far as I can tell.

As a new user, I recently re-eported a fully animated cartoon character from 3DS Max into Unity via fbx format and in less than an afternoons worth of fiddling, I had it down to a very simple process by the time I was finished. There are also NUMEROUS fully professionally developed media examples for most things available on the website, most with project folders and pdfs ready for you to grab and learn. The community is great too, along with a live IRC chat channel where users seem to be 24 hrs a day and often someone is able to help with your problems, live!

If you have been working ok with Torque, you’ll giggle at how much easier things are in Unity, yet you still have the Unity interface to drag and drop stuff as you are used to, its just the whole thing is MUCH much sweeter to use.

Welcome and good luck.