Is there a side-by-side comparison that shows the difference between Unity Indie and Pro? I’ve noticed that the two major exclusions in the Indie are PC Publishing and Graphic effects. What’s included in the graphic effects addition if I buy Pro?
The major question I have is if I buy Indie to develop most of my title, will it be easy to integrate the new features when I buy Pro later on? Or will it be ideal to integrate the new features right from the beginning?
Thanks.
The only changes for Pro are:
-Render-To-Texture capabilities
-Direct access to OpenGL via the GL class
-Windows build
-C/C++ plugins
-“Secure Deployment” (whatever that means…)
That’s all that I know of at least. Who knows what Unity 2.0 will add to the list though. 
the only feature ‘gotcha’ i found switching from indie to pro is glow which uses the main color alpha channel - the first time you thow it on a camera in a scene made in indie you’ll likely have blinding whiteness everywhere. completely a non-issue simple to fix - just startling the first time i tried it ; )
I think the biggest reason most people go for “Pro” is the ability to build a Windows stand-alone player, perhaps followed by “realistic water” (which implements the “render to texture” feature).
Should be. When you upgrade to “Pro” you basically download additional new “assets” into your asset folder. Otherwise Pro and Indie are essentially the same.
If you plan on using some of the Pro features extensively or need to test your game extensively on PC’s, then you’ll benefit from having Pro from the start.
Unlike a lot of the other game engines out there, Unity “Indie” version really isn’t crippled at all, it just lacks a hand full of features that make the Pro version worth the extra expense. (Hopefully that makes sense ).
That’s a listing that shouldn’t be present, both Indie and Pro offer “secure deployment” in that you don’t post your source material for web player viewing, rather you post only your unityweb build files (so it’s secure in that it’s a compiled/built file rather than raw source).
Just out of curiosity, with Unity 2.0, how will this low level access be? Will there be an abstract unity middle layer or will there be access to both DirectDraw and OpenGL seperately?
Regards,
Afonso
Everything will just continue to work. The GL class will not represent OpenGL anymore, but something like a “Graphics Library” (see, the abbreviation is still suitable!).
For the curious, yes, we emulate OpenGL-like Begin/Vertex/Color/TexCoord/End functionality on D3D.
I noticed you said “for web player viewing” and not for standalone.
I remember Joe or David saying a while ago that “secured deployment” wasn’t finished yet, but it would be something like a form of encryption for the generated bytecode. As it is now, the bytecode seems quite easily reverse engineered, and for any Unity app that does verification / encryption, that could be a problem.
When did that change?
-Jeremy
http://forum.unity3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=1264&highlight=secure
http://forum.unity3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=1306&highlight=secured+deployment
Found em
-Jeremy
???
-Jeremy
So I still don’t get it… when is Unity deployment secure and when isn’t it?
The Secured Deployment blurb has been on the site forever (ok for at least 1 year).
Your art is quite secure, as with anything people can extract it, but not easily.
The issue is with the compiled bytecode for the scripts.
If you follow the second link above: http://forum.unity3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=1306&highlight=secured+deployment
Joe explained it better than I probably can. Right now, you can decompile the bytecode quite easily, and that’s not good.
Everything is crackable with enough effort, but otee siad they would greatly improve the security for built games.
-Jeremy
So I guess since it’s been on the website for over a year… the obvious questions are:
When?
and…
Which deployment targets?
I am a bit suprised that there is no reply from Otee yet on this issue. Any word?
-Jeremy
Jeremy and others: I’m seeking clarification as it’s clear that my understanding of what “Secure Deployment” was/is is just not correct… Sorry for the slow reply here, stay tuned for more info.
All Unity data files are shipped in a closed and compressed format, which is very hard to extract anything useful from. As we continue developing Unity, we’ll be adding more compression features, which will in turn make things harder to extract.
Also, the layers of textures are flattened, and 3D models, audio, and animation data is have superfluous data removed. Thus anything that does get extracted will serve as a pretty bad starting point to work from.
As has been mentioned before, this feature really was always both in Unity Indie and Unity Pro, as opposed to our original plans of only making it for Unity Pro. Removing it from Unity Indie would have been extra work - and not very nice. So we’ve now (finally!) gone ahead and removed it from the list of features to avoid confusion.
d.
I know art assets are locked down pretty tight, and that’s cool. I am fine with that.
What I am still missing here is what Joe said about bytecode encryption at this link: http://forum.unity3d.com/viewtopic.php?p=8179#8179
Also, I just did some exploring and found out that user-created shaders are complete and human-readable in the sharedassets.assets file.
That’s what I am concerned about, the bytecode and now the shaders.
I don’t like being a pain, but I don’t like when something is promised with detailed reasons as to why it will be added, then it is said that the problem actually doesn’t exist now.
-Jeremy