My Experience

Unity Engine
1

Hi unityUsers,

I just wanted to share my experience using unity. I’m of course using the free version, since I’m not a company and do not have a rich uncle. I’m using windows 7. I decided to do the tutorials supplied on this website, starting with the two projects given; “Project #00: Roll-a-Ball” and afterwards “Project #01: Stealth”.

Project #00: Roll-a-Ball

This was a nice project to work on. The guy presenting the tutorial in the video talks very clearly and very easy to understand. The tutorial video is too fast, I think I had to pause it like 100 times, step back and continue… really not the way to do it.

I noticed that making duplicates is done by ctrl-d, which is fine and works, but why don’t unity just use the common practice with ctrl-c ctrl-v that everybody knows. Having to add yet another key memory association is just a pain.

The soft shadow does not work. I have no clue if this is because I’m running the free version or if something is missing in the tutorial.

I noticed that there are more than one place to do the same operation in unity, like adding scripts or editing them. Why so many different places to do the same thing?! this only adds to the confusion.

Project #01: Stealth

This is a little bigger project and needs a set of assets to be able to complete this tutorial. I would like to have had this tutorial without any assets, but the same idea of creating a person running around. Right now it just feels like add this and this and do this, which means I’m not really learning that much from the tutorial.

Right from the start I had a problem, getting the assets? how? where? The tutorial just says download the assets and gives you a link. This doesn’t really help. I could NOT download the assets anywhere, but got an option to open the asset store in unity. When I did that then I got an option to import. This all was strange, because I was expecting to download and install. I pressed the import button without any clue what it would do. It started to import all the assets into the “Project #00: Roll-a-Ball”, because that was the project that was open. It reached around 30% and locked up. I had to open my task manager and kill unity and start over. Now I knew it would add these assets to the CURRENT project, so I quickly made an empty project and imported the assets. Now everything was as it should be. Unity really should explain this in detail, tutorials are for people that are trying to learn and this is a real turn down.

I proceeded with the tutorial (at it’s lightspeed tempo) until I reached baking lightmaps. The tutorial talks about baking directional lightmaps, which is ONLY support in the pro version. So WTF do I do now? I selected one of the other options and continue, hoping this would not effect anything else… but it wouldn’t take long before I found another problem which might be related to this. When creating a dynamic direction light that should cast shadows in the scene, a strange thing happens, there are no shadows!?! Is this another unity pro thing? or is it related to the fact that I could not create directional lightmaps? The whole light setup is a failure.

I did not give up. I decided to try and continue. Adding the alarms and sounds, which was pretty much straight forward, but did require a lot of coding, which I think can be simplified a lot.

I decided to call it a night. Will continue with the tutorial again this week.

Conclusion

All in all it is nice to have these tutorials, but I really think unity should break them up into smaller chunks. The tutorials must work 100% on the free version, if not then there should be a pro and free project tutorial section.

Some Comments

The 1500 dollars price is still too pricey for non commercial usage. I just want to add some interactivity on my website using unity, but I’m not going to pay the 1500 price when everything on my website is free and I do not make a living from it. The free version will only get you so far.

2

I think your observations are very astute. I had many of the same reactions when I was first learning Unity. You get used to its quirks and some of the more un-intuitive elements over time. I agree that having multiple different-looking ways of doing the exact same function is a UI failure in any product, as it is confusing (the user will question themselves while learning it, and think that perhaps this different-looking thing actually does it differently in an important way they haven’t figured out yet). If the argument is “power users like the option to do things by this more efficient method…” then the answer needs to be, “so we should just eliminate the option in the UI to do it any way OTHER than the most efficient way.” That said, Unity probably strikes a better balance of intuitiveness-to-power than any other option currently out there. Of course that doesn’t mean there isn’t much room for improvement.
Your experience with instability while importing packages is unfortunately very typical. One learns to always do a full backup before importing anything major because it’s 50/50 whether Unity will crash in the process. I think they really need to fix this whole process.
$1500 is indeed steep for non-commercial usage, but I gather that’s the point. I’m not sure about the “free version will only get you so far” bit. It’s not lacking in very much at all compared to the Pro version, to be honest. The lighting thing is a major one, but that’s really a polish element, not a core experience that your users will miss out on. You can do some amazing and powerful things with it.

One other thing I’ve noticed is that all the official documentation and tutorials seem to be in widely varying states of agreement with the current version of Unity. Some are updated regularly and some seems to be totally obsolete for years. There are also many examples of unclear documentation; one thing I notice a lot is that the writers typically try to be ‘helpful’ by pointing out what a feature is typically used for… but without ever really explaining its core functionality or how it may interact/conflict with other features. If you happen to fall outside what they were thinking of as “typical usages” (and some of them seem not to typical at all, actually), you can be left without a clear understanding, so it’s trail and error until you have a better understanding of something than it seems even the writers did.

Anyway, on the whole, I agree with most of what you said, and still think Unity is pretty special, so I hope the team takes these constructive criticisms into account in the future.

3

You can bake lightmaps in Free, I have done so on multiple occasions.

Unity 4.x Free includes support for a single directional dynamic light. Make sure things are set as casters and receivers for shadows.

Free gets you a heck of a long way. Pro is really just for the extra polish features and profiling. (And Rift support, but that’s because of Render Textures). For non-commercial, yes, Pro might be a bit out of your price range…but that’s the point. It’s the “Pro” version. And dependent on one’s day job, $1500 for a hobby may not be all that much anyways (e.g. take a look at some Warhammer players or AFOL builds…particularly the SHIPs). You can make some amazing games with just the Free version.