I can’t seem to find the “beginners” forum, so I’m going to bang out a few questions here being that iOS is my target.
I’m a very experienced c# developer with very little experience in game design. I’ve been playing with cocos2d for a month or so, and I’ve hacked out a few basic concepts, but I’d be less than honest if I said I enjoyed the IDE or the objective C.
So, I heard about this unity thing and got excited, but I’m still confused. What does my c# experience buy me? I can dev in Visual Studio, but I can’t use things that are not supported in the mono project? Maybe I’m wrong? I haven’t seen anything about XNA either. Is that not supported? Does unity provide some sort of game library I plug into the IDE?
If I download the free framework, can I build something at my own pace, then use the 30 day iOS version to evaluate it on my iOS device, then pay for the whole thing should it work as I expect?
I don’t know, I guess in general is this somethin I should get involved with, or just stick with the objective c route for the time being?
Your C# experience buys you pretty much all the actual know-how (coding-wise) you need. Of course you will need to learn the IDE/API/whatever to see what you can and cannot access and so on. That should come fairly quickly and there are a fair number of good tutorials around, both directly via the Unity Resources page and by other fellow users. I would suggest primarily looking at the official things since those are really thorough.
As I’ve never used Visual Studio I cannot say anything certainly, but as far as I understand, Mono is sort of a multiplatform copy of VS. That would obviously mean that some amount, but not all, of VS will apply to the Mono/Unity implementation. XNA is not supported.
Yes, you can download the free version and evaluate the iOS addon like you said.
Unity makes most of the hard work/hard math in creating games (especially 3D games) go away. Of course, the logic involved in game creation is still around and learning Unity as an IDE will take some time. So, really depending on your angle, the answer can only be your own.
As Unity is a 3D engine, you need to get some 3D content into it.
If you have no knowledge in creating that and how to produce other assets like sounds and textures you will have a hard time.
I am just mentioning that, cause you only spoke of coding - but not what you want to achieve. May be there are jobs around for pure coding unity - don´t know.
From a coding side, your knowledge will be very beneficial!
Oh, ya…assets shouldn’t be a problem. My partner is a designer with plenty of 3d modeling experience. I’m more concerned with how approachable this framework is. I think I’m just going to have to download it and try it out. It doesn’t sound like there is a cut and dry answer, however it certainly seems like the forums have a lot of information.
Unity is a lot more than a game library (though it is also a fairly feature laden library). It’s got a really nice front end that allows a lot of things to be visually edited, and gives you a pretty intuitive way to import and organize all your assets.
I use Visual Studio with Unity. I just bring in the Unity .dll files into the references of my Visual Studio project and link in all the C# files and it works perfectly.
Even if you can code, you’ll have to learn a lot about Unity to use it effectively. Programmers I’ve met who are busy learning it seem to have complaints here and there about its restrictions or quirks. But I’ve been using it so long I don’t see these things anymore.
There are quite a few example projects that you can look through. These (and the tutorials) should give you a good idea of how Unity works best. Unity can speed up your workflow immensely if you use it right… though I’ve come across plenty of programmers who try and fight it.
Also it will be best for you to read up on and keep an eye on performance early on, because iOS hardware has some limitations and peculiarities about it.