I would just like to know what kind of games have been developed with unity and how does it compare with torque, truevision, and realm crafter. Im looking for a easy to use development environment like realm crafter yet with the power or close to the power of truevision and torque. @ of my projects include an sci-fi fps and a mmo that comes after my fps
after doing some searching i see that no one has done an mmo, but found that with work it could be possible. now for single player games do i have to implament my own save and load or does unity come with one?
The MMO would take some work to make in any engine since a network of computers would likely be needed to support the massive number of people. But presuming you just wanted 50 or less people on a server as single computer would likely suffice and I think it would be doable for a committed single person.
The FPS would be simple to get a good start on using the three part FPS tutorial.
http://unity3d.com/support/resources/tutorials/fps-tutorial-part1
Easiest way to save single player games would be with player prefs.
I personally think Unity is one of the most powerful game engines in its class and the easiest to use, although I haven’t tried all three of the ones you listed, so i’ll let someone else answer that more thoroughly.
Unity would have no way of knowing what you want to do with your game data, so you have to implement that sort of thing on your own. Unity is an extremely powerful development environment, but it’s not going to do generic behaviors for you…actually, that’s what makes it so powerful. Otherwise you get stuck with what the designers implement, which becomes very limiting very quickly. What Unity does is take care of the really hard low-level stuff in an elegant way (3D/animation handling/shaders/physics/sound/input etc.), and provides a very smooth workflow where you can quickly and easily bring your assets together. All of the high-level game programming is up to you.
–Eric
As far as what games have been released, here is a quick list…
Big Bang Brain Games
Avert Fate
Tiki Magic Mini Golf
Megapixel
Wolf Quest
Global Conflicts: Palestine
Gooball
Timez Attack
Stunt Mania
Turret Wars
Plus many smaller games and many many more in development.
How does Unity compare to other engines? I don’t know about truevision or realm crafter, but I know something about the problems torque has. Torque went the route of licensing its source code (For about the same price as Unity pro). If you are on PC and buy a torque source code license, you might be able to reach the same level of quality in your games as you could with Unity pro, except for one huge problem: You would have to learn all about torque and how to modify the source code, make builds, fight problems with your own engine, and in the end you have spent months before you can even start to think about your game. Torque’s source code has become a crutch for it’s developers and as a result a lot of things cannot be done in Torque without modifying the source code. Without the source code license of torque (or without the knowledge and patience to modify the source code), Torque is probably on average less powerful than Unity indie. In Unity almost anything is possible and you can start right away, even if you don’t know what your are doing. Not saying that you will create a game without knowing the ropes, but you will pick it up quickly.
I don’t know much about true vision but by default I say Unity is better for new developers, just an educated guess 
Realm creator looks like a blank slate for putting mmorpg content in, and while the idea of dropping art into a magic box and getting an MMO out is appealing, you have to consider often hidden but very critical issues like compatibility, stability and the power to do whatever you want or can imagine in your game. Unity has those virtues all over, its what Unity is about. Not to mention that while no one can deny that its hard to make a game, the great community here and support softens the blow a substantial amount.
MMOs are possible in Unity, but no one has attempted one yet. This is largely because it would be a huge undertaking, and even with the many competent people and teams around here, no one has tackled the MMO yet. It is also something to consider that we’ve only had a networking library in Unity for a couple of months.
Unity does not have a “built in save and load”. You have to realize that this is not a feature gap, it is something that is often not practical for an engine of Unity’s class. Issues include sizes of save files for large scenes, procedurally generated content, and other things. Creating your own preferences or save and load functionality is so much more practical and is not hard at all compared to say, creating a convincing AI character in an FPS.
… god I sound like a walking advertisement. Well, maybe its a sign of how good Unity is
and:
TurretWars
StuntMania
Cheers.
Yes, torque is a good/powerful game engine. Unity can build same game what can be done in torque + great tools + great tutorial + documentations + community. 
You can import c# and c++ dll if you want. With this ability, you can add additional functions such as save game, ai or etc. You can concentrate on your game coding and let your 3d/graphic artist do their own job. If you don’t believe me, try download unity trial and ask your artist to use it. They will love it. At the end, happy programmer happy designer Furthermore, there is asset server to handle media, sound, coding etc. Powerful shader, you even can create your own shader script base own Cg. There are a lot more very useful features.
ps: Sorry for my bad English.
I did use TrueVision before making the jump to Unity. Truevision is a powerful engine. I guess it all depends on what your goals are. Unity provides all what is necessary to create games and there is pretty much nothing that Truevision can and Unity cannot do. Truevision is very tempting at its price but you need to be a solid coder to actual release a game. Take a look at the Truevision site, how long they are on the market and how many games were released by its users. Unity allows you to focus on creating games with an outstanding workflow. You get your compiled version with a single click for both the PC (Unity Pro), Mac and browser. Whereas with Truevision you have to put much more effort in optimization and dealing with all the different PC setups your users will have. For example, in my case I was not nearly as far as I am now with Unity and my project already dropped below 30 fps. With Unity I am stilll around 50 fps in a, for my game, complex scene without putting any effort in optimization yet.
Don´t take me wrong, Truevision is a great engine and Sylvain and his guys came up with a pretty good piece of software at its price of, if I am right $149, or so. But it simply does not give you the workflow that Unity will give you. It is the ideal product for a hobbyist or a hardcore coder with a low budget who actual wants to release a product.
so the save and load thing can be done with scripts it self? I had some trouble figuring out torques source code. And now that realm crafter released its source code you can modify it to make your mmo unique. the same hting goes for rc pro when they decide to release that. I am thinking about using unity as my single player option. as for my mmo solution im still looking kinda, but its gonna be a while before its released but i know it is an undertaking im gonna take in the next 2 to 3 years.
Just one problem that i see is that i use to use milkshape now ive moved to gamespace and ive grown found of that. is there any way to get the artwork from that to import into unitty. Lightwave is on my list of things to get but thats gonna be a while
please tell me i can install this on my windows machine that its not just a mac invronment that you can deploy to windows…
Unfortunately, at the current point in time: No, you can’t install the authoring tool on Windows… sorry!
A Windows port is in the works, but that will still take a significant amount of time (there’s no official timeline, but I guess “at least one year from now” is still somewhat of a good estimate). If you search the forums, you’ll find a lot of discussions about this… I think there is also a way to get Mac OS running on a standard PC… search hackintosh, and you’ll probably find that…
About a year ago, I was kind of in a similar situation as you right now. A few months later, I got a Mac, and another few months later, I got Unity… and, whoa am I glad I did this… I don’t regret any second I’ve waited, and neither do I regret any penny I’ve spent.
Right now, I’m developing my first game in Unity, and all the scripts in VS.NET 2005 running on Windows XP on my Mac in VMWare Fusion (C# is a language I like, Javascript simply is not). I have to say I find this the coolest way of developing my game - Mac is cool, Windows XP is cool, the best development environment I could imagine for developing .NET / Mono is Visual Studio (not available for Mac OS), the best game authoring tool I could imagine is Unity (not available on Windows XP), so now I have the best of both worlds sitting on my desktop… and I have Mac OS X, which is a cool operating system, side by side with Windows XP, which also is a cool operating system
In half a day I had my first demo running (which already was fun to play around with), and right now, I’m doing the multiplayer-networking stuff (probably will put V0.6 up today or tomorrow). It’s just pure joy using this engine on a Mac (even though I’ve also had my troubles, just very recently - but that’s another story, and ironically, it had to do with Windows… sometimes things just don’t run as smooth when you have to support the zillions of different configurations in that world of hardware diversity ).
I’m doing two “small games” first, and then I’m also heading for a very very ambitious MMO (just mentioning it here for you, won’t talk much about it otherwise until I have finished the other two games because of credibility issues ). As far as I can see, Unity is THE chance for me that my rather ambitious ideas ever get to see the light of the day. From what I’ve seen so far, I’m very optimistic…
Jashan
PS: It should really be made more obvious on the first page of unity3d.com that this is currently “Mac only authoring”, shouldn’t it?
Currently, unity only have macos as development environment. You need pro version to deploy standalone windows build. The build also from macos environment. With indie version, it’s limited to macos and web player.
This isn’t exactly accurate. Almost anything can be done with Unity’s scripting languages, Javascript, C# and Boo (variation of python). For example things you would code in script are save and load, AI calculations, animation rigs, procedural meshes and other things. C++ plugins (pro only) are used for things like accessing the microphone volume level, advanced sound stuff like midi, and possibly heavy processing you don’t want to do in script.
Yes. And it could be as simple as:
// as the game is loaded
health = PlayerPrefs.GetFloat("health");
ammo = PlayerPrefs.GetInt("ammo");
items = PlayerPrefs.GetString("items");
// when the player clicks save game, or every second, or when the player exits
PlayerPrefs.SetFloat("health", health);
PlayerPrefs.SetInt("ammo", ammo);
PlayerPrefs.SetString("items", items);
// you can do the same for just about anything. With a more advanced setup you could save inventories, positions of dropped items, player position, game states and more all with separate player profiles.
And yes the Unity editor is Mac only right now, and there has not yet been an announcement of the windows editor date, though we know they are busily working on it.
Many people here have simply bought a Mac and I don’t think a single one was unhappy afterwards. Its a big step, but don’t forget you can easily run windows on it just like you are now with all the same files and programs.
As you can see here, fbx export is supported in milkshape. It should export to Unity just fine in that case. If fbx doesn’t work, it looks like milkshape supports a load of other formats so I bet a few work with Unity.
milkshape fbx worked just fine when i tested it with ms3d 1.7.9
I am glad that it works on mac it opens the door to release a multiplatform project which is ap lus for me. yes torque can do all 3 but who the hec is gonna spend a month just decoding its source? what kinda mac should i get for developing with unity?
Ideally, a Mac Pro. If you don’t want to spend as much, an iMac would be fine. Get a refurb model if you want to save more. Personally I’m not fond of laptops for developing, but if you want to go that route, the Macbook Pro is best, although that’s kind of pricey. The Macbook (non-Pro) is less than ideal because of the integrated graphics.
–Eric
if its worth the money i dont mind spending it on a new mac pro
A little over three years ago, I spent close to $3000 on a G5 Power Mac, which is similar to the current Mac Pros (aside from the CPUs of course), and it was easily the best money I’ve spent on a computer. I doubt I’ll be looking to replace it for quite a while yet. Plus, they just released new Mac Pro models last week, so get 'em while they’re hot. (Only problem is, the 8800GTs are pretty well backordered it seems.)
–Eric
As far as I know, an iMac will do great for almost any type of development. I have a mac pro here, though I don’t think I have really benefited from its power aside from CPU intensive operations like copying and etc taking very little time. I am using it with the stock graphics card, and so far I have never needed anything faster. In general I say its good to develop on a machine not that much better than your target audience has.
If your computer is too fast you can have a hard time optimizing and do things foolishly that you will regret later because, well, it didn’t result in 3 fps on your machine.
If you are just getting a mac because you want to develop a web or other game in the same graphics bracket as the Wii or original xbox and all you care about is the Right Now, get an iMac. If you want to create the next crysis or mass effect or you want a mac workhorse that will last into the future, get a mac pro with the nvidia 8000-whatever card in it. (Remember you can buy it now without the fancy card and upgrade later if that is more convenient)
We are using C2D iMacs here… they are awesome for Unity Dev… esp with an additional monitor.
Also, make sure you get 2GB of ram min.