Hi,
I’m currently investigating a number of engines for an upcoming game project. There are a few things I wanted to check, which I haven’t been able to find in the Unity documentation/discussions so far.
Firstly, does Unity support rendering UIs on meshes?
Secondly, how does Unity handle map streaming? That is, does it work like Source (inside of which, you have to load a whole new BSP for each map ‘zone’), or can we stream in parts of new levels without immersion-breaking loading screens?
Thanks for your help
You’ve got some options because neither of these things are particularly built-in, but can be implemented to your liking. Using the built-in GUI stuff you are basically creating a flat 2D gui which floats above everything, like a hud. There are other plugins such as NGUI which can do stuff in 3D. To get a whole user interface to wrap onto a mesh you could render to a texture and put that texture on the mesh.
I don’t think Unity has a streaming map option… it holds any loaded objects in memory. You can have multiple terrains in your scene. You could also load a new object easily enough but there might be a slight (or major?) delay as it loads.
Great, I’ll take a look at NGUI and see if its what I’m looking for. Some render-to-texture stuff may be feasible, provided there’s a workable method for interacting with the UI once its in 3D space.
The map streaming is somewhat of a deal-breaker for me, loading screens on this project are a big no-no, and given the complexity/fake scale of different scenes, loading/unloading on the fly could prove troublesome.
I’ve have a visual effects background (TV, film, commercials), so am fairly new the the gaming side of things.
Sounds like its exactly what I’m looking for, cheers. Only thing that puts me off a tad is the Pro-only nature. Was hoping something like this would be available under the free licence (akin to UDK).
Many pros and cons between the two engines, hard to decide where to start working…