I hope to not use third party and plugins to handle something on my game
like the backend (users authentications and management , saving data on online cloud , leaderboards and etc)
, social integration(facebook , google+ , etc) , cloud code , downloadable content , achievements system like in google play services , in-game chat , push notifications and more…
it will be awesome if the engine have these features built-in , like ads and IAP now
Wishful thinking at best. I’m not aware of any game engines on the market that handle all the aspects that you’ve listed and even if there are some they aren’t affordable like Unity.
I hope people stop saying this ![]()
You have confused the concept of game and game engine. If you want a completed game, go buy one from blizzard or ea or any of the hundreds of indies out there.
Unity gives you the tools to make a game, not a fully completed game.
they managed to do some stuff built-in like ads and IAP
“they can”
By the way these are third party services. Why would you expect Unity to implement support themselves?
Naturally they would have to implement support for their own services (Unity Ads). Otherwise how would you use them?
Facebook,google+,gamecenter,kongregate and twitter is built-in with Construct-2 ![]()
So long as you don’t mind waiting between 0 seconds and eternity.
The problem with doing support for those is not doing the initial implementation. That would be fairly easy. It’s maintaining those implementations. For a lot of those services the implementations and APIs change frequently. It would be to be on top of these on top of other more important and game breaking changes that come with new android versions and new iOS versions.
Construct is aimed at people who would normally struggle with other toolsets. It does various things like replace actual scripting languages with visual event systems. Apparently its own users are not even aware that the integration for those platforms is through plug-ins too and not actually part of the core. Those plug-ins are simply downloaded with it.
A similar approach could be taken with Unity by having the web installer grab the various SDKs. Though if someone cannot handle even downloading an SDK by themselves then I question their ability to be a game developer. At least with a toolset that is not designed to completely hold their hand through every step.
I’d rather them work on the game engine: rendering, sound, animation, resource management, etc. Saving to the cloud? That’s uploading your save file somewhere. Achievements? That’s a bool. How would they even implement these things? You’re still going to have to serialize and deserialize the data your game needs (aka writing a save system). You’re still going to have to count kills and make UI for the achievements.
The OPs title kind of sounds condescending but there seems to be a bit of undeserved vitriol here. UT clearly IS moving in this direction: Unity Ads, Unity EverPlay, Unity Analytics, etc. Its very likely this service portfolio will continue to grow.
You may not want UT to focus on these things but there’s no need to trivialise them. There are plenty of large, successful companies providing games back-ends as a service*, and doing it in a secure, reliable, cost-effective and scalable way is not trivial.
- PlayFab has so far raised 10m in seed and Series A, PlayScale was acquired by Yahoo, Gamooga, GameSparks, many more.
Right. They’re moving in the direction of providing their own services. They don’t own Facebook or any of those. Those won’t likely ever be handled by Unity unless those companies collaborate directly with Unity like Microsoft has been doing lately.
This look very similar to “make my mmo” push button dream engine.
The OP listed many items of which social is one … and there’s no way Unity would ever try to wrap third party social libraries … http://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Social.html …
EDIT: And Facebook used to be in the list of ISocialPlatforms (although it wasn’t actually implemented and has since been removed).
I totally disagree. Unity’s mission of ‘democratising game development’ is about remove hurdles so you can focus on creating your game.
Many games these days have server-side requirements, and not just for multiplayer (IAP validation, anti-piracy, anti-cheat, etc). But having to build complex server-side systems is a real blocker. Learning a new language and tech stack as well as a bunch of different cloud and social APIs can seriously impact timeline/budget. And its got nothing to do with creating gameplay.
If Unity can take these problems away then its doing a better job of realising its mission.
Yet these are not truly hurdles as they’re already being solved by third parties. Unity having them integrated into the core wouldn’t eliminate the true difficulty which consists of reading the documentation to understand how to use the APIs and eliminating any problems in the code that you write.
This would only eliminate the difficulty of acquiring and importing the asset which is one of the simplest steps.
Those projects are most of the time “big team” games or with people already familiar with these API and that are able to call them throught a 3D engine.
Having Unity follow theses Apis would just bring more problems to the table, Enlighten for example is still far from finished and optimal and it is not entirelly graphic bugs free, we stilll have problems or features like “mixed mode” still not totally integrated and debugged.
I am not sure a 3D engine purpose is to integrate all Apis each individual could need, this would become overwhelming work as there is thousands of optionnal Apis anyone could pick up to integrate within Unity.
But there is a lot of these features listed that are available in the Asset Store for individual specific needs.
I’m not sure Photon would be the go to solution for cloud data storage for something like a Candy Crush type game where you aim to get many users and make a small amount per user its extremely expensive for that sort of game (compared to say some of the back-end services I listed a few posts ago).
But you are right you don’t necessarily have to write a back end you can of course consume a third-party service.
You do still have to find out about these services, you have to pick which one is right, you have to learn them, you have to pull them all together and hope they work together. You have to hope they stay current with Unity version. The more Unity does towards these the easier and smoother it becomes.
I’ve used many ad services with Unity (from writing my own iAd wrappers, to third party plugins like RevMob), yet when Unity released Unity Ads I switched. Its just easy ![]()
Anyway we are getting way off my original point which was simply that the OP’s point is not so left field that they deserve derision.
I think thats the crux of it. Is Unity a 3D engine or a game development platform, to me it seems like they are heading more for option number 2 and some people (e.g. OP) seem to want this.