Hope the title didn’t throw you off too much.
Hello, unity noob here, I tried unity a while back but did not get far, it also ran slow on my laptop but i have a slight upgrade now
( I have made flash games before, so spare me your “You think you want to make games? but you really don’t” speech )
anyway I have several questions
1: What game is that a screenshot of when you go to download unity? its like a schoolbus flying into a building with 2 cop cars underneath of it, it looks like an awesome GTA style game, WHAT is this game? XD
2: How hard is it to implement physics into a game? Say I wanted to make a game where you drive around in the hills, is it going to take 400 lines of code ? or is it simpler than that?
3: What exactly are the capabilities of unity? I notice most of the unity games i see are first person shooters, how would unity handle a game with lots of NPC’s running around, and events etc RPG style ? Flash for example can only handle so much, you can’t have dozens, and dozens of AI running around, path finding checking line of site, making their decisions, running their animation etc. So where is the limit for unity? its strong, and weak points?
4: I make graphics in truespace, its a slightly older 3D model program, is this the kind of program I need to implement 3d graphics into unity? or do I need something else like Blender? (which i don’t like)
Not a game but an animation made to showcase Unity 4.
Unity is well-documented. Read them to see how physics works as there is no way to easily answer in one little post.
Unity can handle pretty much anything you can throw at it. I think they still have a single mesh limit of 64k triangles but if you system can handle it, you can have millions of triangles in hundreds of different meshes.
AFAIK any program that can export FBX or OBJ (or other unity compatible files) will work.
Physics are super easy (at least the making an object fall down part). Its all drag and drop. Getting physics to move is a bit trickier, but not so hard you will have to write 100’s of lines of code to do anything. Ie basic car physics can be done in under 20 lines using the wheel colliders.
Unity does ok at handling lots of things going on, but it can take heavy optimisation to get it to run well. Forget making a 64 player BF3 type game. I doubt you will ever squeeze that out of Unity. Have a look at the vid in my signature if you want to see a relatively complex (in terms of physics/AI/etc) vehicle RTS style game.
Without knowing what truespace can export, you can at least get blender and no doubt import your models there and re-export them as a Unity supported format.
To be clear, it wasn’t made with Unity 4, but with a hacked-up massively extended version of Unity that a bunch of UT engineers spend a while putting together for the animation studio, or so I understand it, with things like 64-bit support turned on. It’s not presently possible to build Butterfly Effect in Unity Pro 4.
(Which, you might argue, makes using it to push Unity 4 a somewhat disingenuous act. I would not disagree with you).
Well, no - I imagine that working through it all unveiled a bunch of bugs and helped make some progress towards eventually getting those features implemented properly. Like a big ninjacamp. Or the space programme. I don’t think it was a waste of time.
I just think it’s disingenuous of the marketing team to plaster Butterfly Effect imagery all over the place because people will assume it’s an example of ‘What Unity Can Do,’ when that’s presently false.
But I’ve not had a very high opinion of UT’s marketing team for a while now.
Unity support a range of 3d model formats, but its native file is the FBX and these work by far the best(.OBJ works good to but for me vertex colors never work :()
My advice would be forget about MMO… you’ll never finish it even if you get a handful of people to work on it with you. Unless its a handful of professional level people (ie few years commercial experience). Its the magnitude of content required that makes this so hard. Even with a handful of pros, Id estimate you have a 5% chance of finishing.
We all know what happens to those discoveries in real world development though… They get noted (sometimes), they get prioritised (is this feature cool? yes: number 1 priority! no: it might make it into some future release - no promises)
I like the idea that they did all this and it make it into the product.
I still would have preferred they spent some time sorting out GC.
Whats wrong with mmos? There are quite a few studios that have released mmos made in Unity. And a number of active collaborations doing mmos. Just name me a genre and I can point you in the direction of an active collaboration project.
Futuristic Survival (pvp)
Post apocalyptic survival (pvp)
Stone age Survival (progression)
Story driven mmo (progression)
Physics based combat mmo (pvp?)
Fantasy themed sandbox (progression)
But mmos are not for the feint of heart. They take months if not years to complete. And unless you have 10 hours a week to dedicate to a team for several months, don’t even bother. If you got the time and the motivation, please take my advise to go shopping among the existing mmo projects. I’ve been a part of a fairly ambitious mmo project for the past year. And though many stopped by we have recruited a grand total of zero new people that stayed active for even a month. So if you start your own mmo project, don’t expect others to complete it for you.
