Hi there
I am currently a iTorque2D user. I am thinking of switching over to Unity for the following reasons.
Mainly that the system in iTorque, requires me to program every little detail of my game. I feel that it is often overwhelming since the engine does not take care of anything beyond the core. Has anyone had experience in both Unity and Torque? Can you compare?
Also, the gui in Unity seems soooo much sexier. The company overall seems far more professional and for lack of a better term, advanced.
I really love Torque and would like to stay with them for sentimental reasons since it is where I first began to code, but I am increasingly thinking I should switch. Do you as a Unity user think that would be wise and why?
Further, this brings me to my final question… how much coding is involved in your average run of the mill app, and how much, if any is kind of taken care of by Unity? Or am I just talking nonsense at this point?
As far as languages go… I only know Torque. Would you or anyone be able to gauge how difficult, or easy it would be to learn Java, Boo or C#? And if so, which would you recommend? I am thinking Java since I could dip into HTML if I wanted.
Java is not the same as Javascript, it’s a different language. Unity doesn’t use Java. The “Javascript” that Unity uses is actually Unityscript, a unique language, that’s not much like web Javascript, but is similar to ActionScript 3.
Unity’s Javascript has nothing to do with actual javascript and is just syntactically similar. Under the hood all three languages compile to the same source and rely on mono/.NET as a technology, and Unity’s Javascript cannot just dip into HTML. Unity’s Javascript lacks some language features of C#, and Boo is not as commonly used so help can be a pain. If you are new to all 3 I would suggest C# as it has the most online support and can be transferred to all sorts of other engines, whereas the other two as much less common outside of Unity.
Most people here will call Unity’s Javascript UnityScript, because it is a Unity proprietary language that has no other relation outside of influence to actual javascript. It is an entirely separate language.
So it seems that people, knowing my situation are leaning towards C#. Is that fair? Is that simply because, of my knowledge of C++ and that most people here use C#?
Could you give me some examples?
How many users are there in Unity? This type of response in Torque would take a week.
There are 500K+ registered users, but of course not all of them would be considered “developers”. I believe it’s less than 100K active users (defined as using Unity at least a few times per month). Which is still a lot.
Yeah, it probably is 700K registered users by now; the 500K number is some months old at least. But that’s why I said 500K+. You have to register Unity to use it, and since Unity is free to download, naturally the number of registered users is going to be a lot more than the number of people who actually stick with it.
Also I was off on the 100K figure, here’s the actual quote (from May 2011):
“Unity Technologies, provider of the Unity development platform for awesome games and interactive 3D on the web, iOS, Android, consoles and beyond, today announced that its registered user base has doubled to more than 500,000 users in just over 6 months; 150,000 of these users are active monthly users representing well over a million hours of game development every month. In addition, installs of the free Unity browser plugin for playing web games have surpassed 60 million.”
You have to register Unity to use it, and since Unity is free to download, naturally the number of registered users is going to be a lot more than the number of people who actually stick with it.