Unity looks like it’ll be great for casual games, but what about something more hardcore like Metal Gear Solid 4 or Resident Evil 4.
Is it even remotely possible to create those type of games with Unity, without license the source code?
Would it be possible to implement the Octocamo like in MGS4 in Unity?
Well the renderer is quite capable of doing 100.000s of polys per frame. Also the render-to-texture feature of the pro version would make something like octocamo possible quite easily… The ability to stream in assets at will will also allow to have very large scenes.
Since 2.1 you can also have dynamic and procedural animations. The weakest spot of Unity so far, are sound effects, but with the new audio features and doppler effects you can do satisfying audio-stuff.
In my opinion, Unity would be quite capable for such a game. But a Pro License is a must to do such a game.
Frank
This is the demo that really got me excited about Unity’s capabilities Made With Unity | Unity
Yes.
Assuming you have (at the very least): talented artists, talented game designers and last but not least talented programmers… that can spit out smart code for logic, VFX and shaders.
Cheers.
Fixed. 
Many people say “can I make (insert latest and greatest game here) in Unity” on these forums; I know Crysis and its ilk have come up many times. The fact is that any game mentioned in these posts was made by dozens if not hundreds of people on a million-dollar-plus budget.
So the answer is, no, you probably can’t make MGS4/RE4 in Unity. But you couldn’t make it in CryEngine, either. Maybe you and a hundred of your most talented friends could.
Starmanta nailed it. MGS4’s budget is north of $50 million dollars. Unity by itself–even without a source license–does have the flexibility to do something on that scale. But the tool, in and of itself, will only get you so far without man-hours and talent to throw into a project…
That’s kind of a “glass half-empty” way of looking at things. While it’s certainly true that these big name commercial games do have an obscene amount of resources available to their development, it’s not the only way in which such games can be produced.
The real factor lies in working with just the right personalities who are talented, patient and determined enough to pull such a project off utilizing the resources they have.
Sure, the result may not be as polished and may take years to finalize, but the possibility is definitely there for anyone who’s bold enough to take up such demanding challenge.
I’d like to think that Unity, and similar apps, exist because there are enough people willing to take on such daunting tasks to justify the need for it.
Remember, the question of whether one can succeed under such conditions isn’t nearly as important as what one stands to learn from trying. Even if you fail, you still gain something from the experience.
Where there’s a will there’s a way!
I agree that creating huge AAA Ttitles may be possible in Unity, but you probably would need a large team and resources.
However, I’ve been working with Unity for just a few weeks now and the project pipeline is very fast, at least on the Art side of it. I think a small team, even 1 artist and 1 coder could do incredible things.
I didn’t think I had a chance of implementing my demo level idea without at least 4 artists and 2 coders. I think I can probably finish it with a team half that size.
As it stands, I’m probably going to have to do all the art assets myself and hope I meet a like minded coder to help with the technical side. Maybe I’ll meet someone at Unite 2008.
You get back what you put into it!
It is possible to create great games in nearly every engine out there from Unity to A7 if you have a talented team with solid direction and skills in the right areas.
It usually isn’t an issue of engine limitations so much as it is team limitations.
It’s going to be interesting to see how well Unity copes with large numbers of players online when Fusion Fall hits.
You probably won’t see anything of the sort. 
The MMO’s server will, I bet, not be made in Unity, but using Raknet directly, which will give them some more control over the way data flows. Unity probably won’t deal with more than the closest players.
Maybe i should of added, that i know talented people(artist, programmer,etc) are needed to create games like MGS4/RE4-5. My question was more about the engine(Unity) capabilities, IMO not all engines are created equally and since i am on a PC there isn’t anyway for me to try out the demo to test it. I know you guys say it capable of producting such triple AAA titles, but i haven’t seen anything that is made with Unity reflecting that opinion(no offense to anyone).
100,000 polygon/frame seems decent but i’ll probably need more something like 500,000 polygon/frame.
Ideally, i’d like to get my PS3 DualShock3 controller to work with Unity, so i could prototype console style games. This needs to be supported by the Unity developers though,drivers are needed.
Probably because most of us don’t have $50,000,000 budgets.
That depends entirely on your computer and graphics card; Unity doesn’t hold anything back. Any somewhat modern hardware with a real graphics card will do that no problem.
Well, it’s up to the OS and/or third-party manufacturers to provide drivers, as always. If your controller works with the OS, it will work with Unity.
–Eric
Ahh.Well 100k polys is decent. Sure you don’t have millions like the cryengine 2 but you should be able to creating stunning stuff none the less with the correct use of mapping. Normal mapping being a biggie!
Now that I think about it MGS4 is setting it very high but MGS4 is [u]possible as the poly count isn’t extremely high.[/u]
[u]from what I’ve trialed-by-fire I’d say that a game that looks great with normal mapping etc that runs at 60fps looks AND plays [u]extremely [u]better than a massive high poly scene running at 12 fps becuase I can’t afford a super computer.[/u][/u][/u]
[u][u][u]Besides, If you are really looking for a multimillion poly engine why wouldn’t you go buy a 750k unreal engine license? Besides unity is only javascript and c# which don’t run as fast as c++. Basically start small, dream big.[/u][/u][/u]
[u][u][u]My 2 cents 
[/u][/u][/u]
This isn’t really correct–as I mentioned above, that’s hardware-dependent. If you have the hardware, you can push millions of polys with Unity.
Also not correct. The Unity engine is native code and is not slower than other engines. Scripting in Javascript/C# is a little slower, but that’s the same as other engines which use a scripting language, like the Unreal3 engine. When you run a Unity game, mostly what’s running is native code, which is doing all the heavy lifting, and your scripting is only a small part of it. In many or most cases it hardly matters if scripting is not 100% native speed since you’re waiting for the graphics card to finish drawing frames anyway.
Besides, if you have Pro you can use C++ plugins if you need to, and if you really really need it, you can get a Unity source code license.
–Eric
I had never played MGS4, but some youtube videos showed the Octocamo – that is pretty cool, so I wanted to see what it would take to implement something similar in Unity.
I had pretty good luck parenting a camera that looks down to the model and setting the camera so that it doesn’t view the layer of the model. The camera rendered to a rendertexture that works on a projector that projects down onto the model but not onto anything else. The projector was a quick test - you could use the rendertexture in a more complex way of course.
It would be easy to have it triggered to fade in the projection and implement some kind of radius feature to flag you as invisible to AI in maybe 20 lines of code. A quick proof of concept took about 5 minutes in Unity. I would guess that you could adjust it and have a working prototype in an hour or two.
Thanks for bringing up Octocamo – that is a pretty cool effect.
I’ma just goin off the website mate. Ah well good to know eh?
Once again Charles, you r so smrt u r
I agree that not all engines are created equally. And not every engine will suit every need.
Polygons/frame are one variable to consider. But when you’re talking about creating a AAA title, you might rather focus on the development process because that’s where the real challenges are to be found. Getting 10, 15, 50 or even 100 people to work efficiently on one project is not a trivial task.
With Unity 2.0, I’d have doubted that would have worked “smoothly”. The Asset Server already was there, which definitely is one key requirement for any project of a significant scale. However, 2.0 didn’t support setting up a proper build system - which I guess is probably a deal-breaker for any large-scale project: Are you gonna have QA-folks do their own builds with their own installation of Unity? Would you want to waste your precious developers’ time to create builds for QA? Or would you rather have every tester just fire up the most recent executables generated automatically by the nightly build??? 
With 2.1, most limitations I could think of in that area have been removed (it’s fun to read the release notes from that perspective). Even though I’m still developing “all on my own” (or maybe because of just that - being on your own you need to be hyper-efficient ), there’s some things I miss (e.g. proper, script/commandline-controlled support for conditional compilation symbols), but I’m close to running out of wishes in the area of setting up a professional software-engineering process
Does that mean Unity will “do everything for you”? No - it will still take its time and expertise to set everything up for an efficient dev-process.
But AFAICS Unity won’t be in your way with that. You just need to set it up in a way that suits your needs.
Why should Unity support any kind of specific hardware? Unity Pro does have a C++ plugin interface, and I’m pretty sure you can connect any device with that interface. For an example, bliprob did a plugin with which you could use the WiiMote within Unity - see this thread for the details and discussion.
That won’t work with Web players (for good reasons discussed elsewhere on this forum), but that’s the only limitation I can see in that regard.
Point is: As far as I can see right now, Unity won’t limit you. The only limits are your (or your team’s) time and skills (more skills can substitute for less time, and more time can - to a certain degree - subsitute for less skills).
Sunny regards,
Jashan
Actually that kind of numbers don’t mean much anymore… for AAA titles at least.
I remember seeing a conference on Halo 3 where you could see the artists talking about their work. Someone in the crowd asked how many polygons they were authorized by the developers to put in their characters/objects/levels and they said that no one could tell because there were too many factors to take into consideration.
For example if you know that an object will only be visible during slow part of a game, you can add lots of details while a grenade, for instance, will generally be used during an action phase creating a particle effect on the explosion etc. and thus has to be kept very low detailed.