I’m evaluating Unity as a possible engine for my team’s next game. We’re working on a single-player or small-party multiplayer (not MMO) role playing game which is probably closer to Oblivion than to anything else currently on the market. In the past we’ve used toolkits based around BioWare’s Aurora engine, both the original Aurora Toolkit and the D’Jinni toolkit released with CDPR’s The Witcher.
Obviously, these are much higher level toolkits than Unity, and the reason we’re looking at things like Unity is because we find they constrain us too much. We’re quite prepared to have to build some of the tools we need.
However, at the same time other people must have needed some of the same things we need, specifically:
Waypoints and actionpoints, or something equivalent, to allow specification of NPC behaviour;
NPC conversation; a framework for character models capable of facial animation, and to engage in scripted conversations with one another and with player characters;
Related to that, a conversation editor (although since it’s almost certain one would want to have conversations in an XML format of some kind, any decent XML editor would do);
A high-level plot editor. While D’Jinni has a lot of faults, its ‘quest editor’ really is extremely good, making it very easy to describe plots at high level. Again, we will probably use some XML dialect to describe high-level plots, but if someone had a visual plot editor which integrated with Unity we’d be very interested.
The Islands demo shows quite a large land area, but we want to build a much larger land area, probably using a background loading scheme to load in new content ahead of the player as he moves. Has anyone done this sort of thing in Unity? Is there a library available?
Related to that is procedural forest. The Islands demo shows what appears to be a hand-modelled forest, with individual tree models individually placed. On larger land areas hand modelled vegetation becomes infeasible - it’s too much work and the data volume gets out of hand (although that’s getting less of a problem these days). Also, in the Islands demo it’s clear that there are only about a couple of dozen plant models used altogether and the player quickly comes to recognise them and see the repetition.
So I’m hoping to use at least procedural forests and vegetation, and possibly procedural settlements as well, at least away from ‘main plot event’ areas. Again, has anyone done this with Unity? Anyone used XFrog with Unity?
Finally, there’s a point I need to clarify about Unity licensing. We’re an amateur team. This project might take us professional, but realistically it probably won’t. So we want to be able to have the choice whether to sell what we build or give it away for free. Will Unity allow us to give the game away for free, or is there a per-copy royalty?