Intense interest, moderate concerns

Unity Engine
1

Guys!

Thanks for reading, sorry if it’s in the wrong spot!

Quick facts to frame this post:

I’m a professional animator that has only recently realized there’s, like, a gaming revolution going on.

I’ve been researching various gaming engines for weeks. I’m dazed. I’m exhausted. And I’m among the PC/XP crowd that’s so impressed with Unity that I’m considering purchasing a new Mac just to get my hands on it.

I’ve read all of the supplied documentation (fairly obsessively) as well as read thru hundreds of posts on this forum – even taking notes! – and have tried my best to answer as many of my own questions as possible…

BUT

My inexperience with the necessary pipeline for general game dev still leaves me with a few:

  1. The least technical, but possbily the most important question I have: how long before the introductory pricing vanishes!? I’d have bought a copy of PRO already if I could verify that my personal pipleine would work (and could decide on the kind of Mac to buy, but thankfully that’s another post for another day.)

  2. It’s all about FBX. (And how much FBX and Lightwave seem to hate each other.) The problems with the LW FBX exporter make me… nervous. We’re talking sleepless, restless, gas-inducing nervous. Alias doesn’t even seem to be updating the LW plug anymore (as of August 2005). That can’t be good.

BUT, they do seem to have an updated XSI exporter. I typically animate in XSI anyway, so I guess my questions re: FBX are A.)Will it faithfully honor my UV maps with LW objects? B.) Why isn’t it possible to export FBX animations out of XSI into Unity? and C.) Is it possible to convert from one FBX format to another (with the Alias conversion utility) to prepare for import into Unity? e.g., maybe from XSI FBX to Maya FBX?

Still more: I’d even be willing to learn how to animate in Blender if I have to, but do imported .blender scenes include animations?

(These are all things I’d love to test, but haven’t thought of a way to.)

  1. It’s also a little bit about Z-Brush. That’s typically where I’ve been adding detail and generating normal maps. Will Unity recognize ZBrush’s unconventional UV tilings? And does Unity support normal maps (the docs only show grayscale bump maps, but I’ve seen screenshots with the familiar purple graphics…)

  2. I’m also unfamiliar with .ogg audio. Will Windows recognize that? Will PCs need a plug-in? When the doc say that mp3 is imported / saved “uncompressed,” does that mean in some sort of “decompressed” format? i.e., a larger file size than the original mp3?

  3. Is this post so long that there’s no hope of anyone actually reading it?

Thanks for whatever help or guidance you can offer. I’m attacted to the developer’s apparent style and professionalism, but also the tone of their correspondence and the overall tone of this forum in general.

Hopefully I can be a part of it, but I haven’t been able to entirely convince myself that it’s worth the risk of $2500 (or more) with only the hope that I’ll successfully get my models and animations from the PC to the Mac and into Unity.

Doubt sucks. But your product clearly doesn’t.

Thanks again.

2

I can answer a few questions:

• The early adopter rebate ends at the end of this month. You have basically one week, if I am not mistaken.

• I am almost completely confident that in the windows builds of unity player the .ogg format plays just fine. I would assume the proper code for playing it is built into the player.

• Unity does indeed support normal maps. It will however, convert a grayscale height map into a normal map if you need it to, which explains why you had a little bit of screenshot confusion.

Also, I would be a little wary of buying new Mac expressly for Unity right now, as the editor is not currently native on the Intel Macs such as the iMac, Mac mini, or MacBook Pro. Additionally, you may run into trouble with Photoshop, Maya, and Lightwave, which as far as I know are not universal either.

3

I have XSI Foundation 5.1 with the new (2006) FBX exporter and it works fine. Animations too. I would recheck the Autodesk FBX plugin site for Lightwave. They (Alias) weren’t updating the XSI exporter either until Autodesk bought Alias. Now the exporter for XSI 5.0 is here. They also provide an FBX converter app as well which will also convert between fbx-fbx but will also do other things.

Unless I am mistaken, isn’t fbx fbx though? How can there be “XSI-fbx” and “LW-fbx” when they are the same format and framework? If it exports FBX it should work in Unity.

Unity also fully supports normal mapping (that is actually how any grayscale map is used internally in Unity as well.) and there are also several bump shaders included.

Question 5: I read it didn’t I? :wink:

Welcome to Unity and I hope it all works out for you!

Oh, almost forgot, AFAIK the early adopters discount ends at the end of April. But you’d want to check on that to be sure, I know it ends really soon.

-Jeremy

4

I did read the whole thing… unfortunately I can’t answer the whole thing :wink:

  1. Unity “Early Adopter” pricing ends April 30th! Find someone with a mac quick, steal/borrow it from them for a day, and try out importing some of your models/animations into Unity using the different software you mentioned.

  2. It is all about FBX, but OTEE seems to be actively trying to work with different software companies to get better compatibility with Unity.

  3. Normal maps work and UVs should work from any app exporting a standard FBX, but I don’t really know just how funky ZBrush mapping is.

  4. Curious myself on that one.

  5. I stopped reading halfway through this question… sorry, couldn’t be bothered with it anymore :wink:

This is a great app, OTEE is a great company, and this is a very nice and helpful community. I doubt you’d regret buying a midlevel mac and a copy of Unity if you’re interested in making games.

HTH

[Edit] lol, should’ve known a few of us we’re all asnwering this at the same time :slight_smile:

5

I would be wary of that. It all depends on what codecs the OTEE guys programmed for and/or what sound libs they used.

I belive the OTEE guys said they would have the Universal Binary of the editor out this march, and either way, the editor runs great on the “old” powerPC machines. And so does all the other dev software. Check around the forums for the best machine to buy though, there have been a few threads about this.
If you can wait for the UB version of unity, you will get a faster machine, but as mindquirk said, you may have trouble with other stuff. It sounds like you will be doing the most development on the PC though anyway (like me)
-Jeremy

6

Yes, the Ogg sound files work fine for windows. Ogg Vorbis is an audio compression format (similar to MP3). Unity is happiest when importing Ogg files. It will take MP3 files, but they are actually less efficient from within Unity. There are many free and non-free software utilities that will convert various audio formats into Ogg. Lately, I have been using Macintosh Audio for OS X for conversion to Ogg.

In general, Unity plays well with most other asset-producing applications, and OTEE is constantly improving interoperability.

If you are really serious about making games, Unity is an excellent choice.

7

Very nice. Good to know, as always OTEE is ahead of the game. :wink:
-Jeremy

8

Holy smokes! Replies!

Thanks everyone for taking the time to help me out.

@jeremyace: re FBX, I’d kind of expect FBX to be FBX, too! But my thinking has been, if that were entirely true, then what’s the Alias conversion utility for? And why does the LW version cause so many developers so much stress?

All that really matters is that you’ve had success with XSI, which may be all I need to know.

@midquirk: So v1.2 only EXPORTS out to UB, huh? Yeah, that sucks a little. Will Unity work at all on Intel? Cause if not, that sucks A LOT. I’d much rather wait and let Apple work out the kinks and give software a chance to catch up… but it sounds like I have about a week (or less!) to make a decision. A little patience might save (or cost!) me $1000!

@antennaTree: Just a general FYI, ZBrush rocks! But it’s native UVs are so scrambled you couldn’t possibly paint them in Photoshop, etc. No prob, easy to work around (just an extra step.)

@tsphillips: Thanks for the info on .ogg. So many things are so new, I wasn’t clear on if it was embedded within the Unity player or not.

@EVERYONE: Seriously, thanks for taking the time to reply. It only reinforces my positive impression re: the Unity community.

I still don’t know what decision I’ll make, but you’ve helped a lot.

Good luck with your games!

Cool? Cool.

D

9

Yes, at the moment you can only build UB games. Unity editor for intel macs is just around the corner, we’re polishing the few remaining bits!

Yes, we embed libogg/libvorbis into Unity, so .ogg sound Just Works everywhere.

10

And just in case it’s not 100% clear: the UB upgrade of the Unity editor which is coming soon is a free one.

d.

11

Months ago I saw an article about Unity and was upset because I didn’t have a Mac to try it out on. I ended up buying a Mac Mini because I wanted to try some things with Xcode. That’s the first time I fired up Unity and since then I’ve been going nuts with my credit card trying to get a complete development environment in one machine. Still, I was using a ton of XP software at the time. Once the new Intel Mac’s came out I jumped and got a MacBook Pro.

Apple’s interesting move to support dual booting the new Intel Mac’s between OSX and XP helped out immensely with my transition to OSX. Apple has a download from their website called Bootcamp. After installing this all you have to do is hold down the Option key when booting and it will let you choose which system to boot to. I’ve got OSX and XP dual booting on a MacBook Pro and so far I have had no problems. I was playing F.E.A.R. earlier tonight on the XP side and working with Cinema 4D and Unity on the OSX side. Yea, Unity isn’t supported on the Intel Mac’s yet but its running fine for me so far. Can’t wait for the upgrade.

One thing that might be a good buy if you don’t want to risk a ton of money is one of them Mac Mini’s with the Intel chipset.

Also…these Unity devs are great with their support. It’s no secret I’ve got more enthusiasm than actual skill but these guys always get an answer back to me within a day or less.

Good luck with your decision!

-Tom