So far while the work I’ve seen from Unity developers is encouraging many of the images seem to lack the polish that would really punch Mac game development forward. At this point I’m not sure whether it’s lack of resources for indie development or the limitation of the tools, but is it possible to directly access the advanced features of new GPU/driver combos via Unity for hardware assisted solutions to things like anti-aliasing?
How exactly does that all work inside of Unity? Would I have to use Ati or Nvidia specific shaders to get any of the benefits? Is there a “Render Globals” interface of some kind that would me to see exactly what the render attributes of different video cards is and make adjustments?
If I wanted to set up Explosions, or some other physics simulation and theoretically had the Ageia Maya plug-in (Is there a Mac/Maya version? Anyone used it?) How would that work or get into Unity?
Unity is a young app (i guess about 1.5 years) and thats normally not a time span to present professional games to the public. Many indies are on their own, thats what makes them indies ;). You cant do everything to pro levels, when on your own. A small team with mid sized funding can definetly do awesome stuff with unity.
This piece of software comes for 250 - 1250$ and not 150000$ or so like other well known engines used by the industry. But in general you are only limited by your skills and equipment.
So how does it work. You create content outside unity and then assemble it inside, using wizards, the great gui and of course scripting and coding.
You can set up physics based explosions and other simulations as well. As far as i know, only the hardware based features of the PhysX Engine are not yet implemented.
Normally you can throw your native Maya Files into the asset folder and Unity converts them on the fly, so you dont really have to care about exporting (this includes animations, either bone- or transform-based). But i dont really know, what happens to stuff created with 3D app plugins.
Thanks I haven’t been here in a while and now I’m seeing all of the different instructional materials I’ll be goin through. I’ll have more questions and probably post to this thread some more after I check through the stuff.
Unity has anti-aliasing already. No need to directly access any drivers or anything…just a matter of checking a box. As far as “polish”, you’re almost entirely limited by your artwork skills (modeling/texturing), and since nearly everything posted so far has been the work of one or two people, it’s unrealistic to compare that to AAA titles with many dozens of artists and budgets in the tens of millions. Actually, some of the stuff shown so far is very impressive indeed considering the extreme budget disparity that almost everyone here is working with compared to the “big boys”.
If you want to write your own shaders, they are written in Cg language plus Unity’s custom ShaderLab to control various rendering paths (see documentation). Usually you author multiple “techniques” in the shader (called “subshaders”), and Unity will pick the first that is supported by the hardware.
The real question is: what “benefits” exactly do you want to get? Anti-aliasing, render textures, fragment programs, cubemaps - all are supported in Unity without you having to worry about hardware specifics. Anything more you had in mind?
It’s not the fault of Unity. It’s a fantastic app for creating games, and if you have the skill it will produce great results… like any other software out there. Of course it has a few little issues and rough edges, but I’m very confident they will be ironed out over the next few releases. But as is, it is very compatiable of producing professional titles.
