oh another game of note: http://bounty-arms.blogspot.com/ … another game powered by unreal, that people should take a look at… it looks really nice too.
I emailed one of the creators of bounty arms and he said Unity did not had the features and quality it need to make Bounty arms… he wouldnt eloborate, (nice guy, he was super busy), but i disagree with him.
just want to know what the Unity community thinks about these games.
and the question, can unity achieve something like that, what are the limitation or forsee-able hurdles for unity3d, in making something like Hawken and Bounty Arms.
I don’t think Unity will be able to achieve Hawken’s quality, at least with any speed. Most of Hawken/the rest of the games good looks are due to to high-quality art.
I agree with Pedro. Although I only watched the first 1/3 of the video, I didn’t see anything that couldn’t be done in Unity. 99% of what I saw was fairly simple modeling with very well done textures, baked shadows and some reasonably OK particles (I’ve seen much better smoke demos in Unity BTW). The UI could be done with GUITextures and RenderTextures easy enough. Everything looked very do-able in Unity from what I saw.
General consensus then too was “it’s all in the art”, which it is. You could take all that over, put it in Unity and redo the techy bits to fit the Unity way of doing things and the end result wouldn’t look much different.
The unity engine is heavily optimised for prefabbed chunks, or pieces of geometry which are then put together in the editor. This approach was correctly done for mass effect 2, although bioware messed up for mass effect 1 and didn’t read the docs and just slapped it together.
For unity, I am not sure it will be the same speed. I doubt it. I don’t think unity is very optimised for instanced geometry but I’m not the programmer so I wouldn’t know. But with great art and assets with umbra, there isn’t a reason you couldn’t make it look the same.
They are using unreal engine not only because it is good, but because it significantly raises the possibility of getting funded and published mainstream, which I don’t think they would turn down.
It’s all about optimization. If you just drop a ton of objects into a scene, they’d kill any engine. A lot of those objects in there look like they are either using exactly the same materials (same basic texture, different UV’s to use it in different ways), so they’d all get batched. There’s a bit of popping going on in that video so there’s most certainly LOD’s being used and objects being switched off at various distances. There’s no doubt occlusion culling going on, and most of the lighting will be a lightmap.
It’s just very good artistic talent that makes it stand out, really.
The proverbial nail on the head. Those with the money and the resources tend to be pretty blind to anything that isn’t Cryengine or Unreal. So getting noticed = using things they know.
Say Unity to some bigwig who wipes his bottom with $50 notes, and he’d look at you the same way I would if you said RPG maker, could be used to make a AAA game, hehe.
Is that really true though, especially for PC games? IMO, if you’re developing a PC game, the most popular method of distribution right now is Steam. From what I understand they really don’t care how you developed your game as long as they think its neat, and they’re apparently pretty cool with Unity, too (Foreign Legions, Bob Came in Pieces, some others).
One might make that (false) assumption based on the majority of what is on display in the forums here. Again, based on what I saw, I didn’t see anything that would be an issue for Unity (as long as some attempt was made to make it run properly in Unity and not simply imported without any optimization at all). The only performance issues I’ve run into have been physics related, and when we get multi-core physics that will (hopefully) no longer be a barrier either.
It is pretty possible in Unity.
As Frank OZ said, if you change the building, landscape and textures at different distances of the character, then it is possible to do it in unity at the same fps rate.
The publisher has to provide the support too. They’re more inclined to support a system they’re familiar with than go to the trouble to spend money on teaching or hiring support for something unfamiliar to them.
Currently Steam isn’t the primary distribution method for the majority of proper commercial titles, it’s still and will be for some time, be stores, Walmart, HMV, Amazon etc. Steam is just an extra method of distribution (but could be considered a primary one for indie developers).
Again they probably have tools for setting up games to run correctly in that too. Commercial games don’t get made then instantly put into the stores by a publisher, they have to go through it with a fine tooth comb, have changes made, bugs fixed, legal issues sorted out, their own branding everywhere. Proper installations setup, double checking for various platform rules on how a program should behave. If it’s for the consoles it’s even more stuff to deal with. Publishers are the big scary guy tailing the hot chick in the park. She’s the developer with the goods, and the publisher is going to rape her… what a messed up way of seeing it hahaha.
The buildings and set pieces are “mash-kitted,” an x amount of building and and set pieces were made but rearranged…
to build that city in Hawkens (as was explained in the blog).
ahh… so the hurdle would be optimization in Unity, to get it to run smoothly ???
what about that differed rendering in Unity, where only a section of the enivronment is rendered, where the character is located
would that help ???
