Preliminary Questions

Unity Engine
1

Hi, I don’t have access to Unity yet because I am eagerly awaiting the Windows release, which I am told is imminent. So in the meantime I have been browsing through all the information and content available for Unity and living vicariously off this communities’ experience.

I thought I’d ask a few unconventional questions that I haven’t come across before to feed my hunger for Unity knowledge.

I am interested in making my world as engaging as possible, and an idea that really excites me is the thought of interactive particle effects. For example; if the character runs through falling snow, can I make the snow particles react by swirling around the character? I’m not sure if I’ve seen this before.

I use Maya, and I love Unity’s import pipeline! What if I use fields in Maya, such as Newton or Turbulence? Can Unity understand these natively, or can it be custom scripted to do so, or does it have it’s own tools for that?

What about hair, fur, or cloth? (Just curious)

If I buy the Indie license and build my game only to realize I made a licensing mistake, can I upgrade to the pro license later on without losing work I’ve done?

What does this community think of releasing to X360 or X360 Live Marketplace? I hope this is an upcoming feature. Is there any kind of foreseeable compatibility with XNA?

To me, AI will be important. I came across Angry Ant’s Path Behave. Can anyone tell me more about using it, how it works, and especially what it can do beyond the info on the site? I’d like to get a feel for the capabilities.

Is there a Windows playable demo for this Unity tutorial?

Well, I hope I didn’t scare you guys off with all my questions! Any answers are welcome. Thanks!

2

Not the word I would use. “Coming someday” would be more accurate.

Yes, you can use world particle colliders and scripts to control interactions.

Not easily.

Yes. You can go the other way, too, but of course you’d lose any pro-only effects you’re using.

3

Thanks! That’s great news about the Particle colliders. I have been questioning this for a long time.

Hair Fur Cloth; not important.

I was given a general timeframe which seems somewhat certain for the Windows release by a Unity representative. I am happy with this timeframe. Not too long now =)

4

I don’t know who you spoke with but “imminent” is still not a phrase I would use.

These aren’t unconventional and some of them can be found using the forum search function. Read on for answers then search around for other details.

Yup, entirely doable as answered above.

Only if they can be exported as part of a FBX file, if they are run-time calculated effects then you’ll need to re-implement them yourself inside of Unity.

Doable but difficult as answered above.

Yes, and when you upgrade you only pay the price difference between the two licenses. I will correct the answer above and note that you cannot “downgrade”, I say that meaning we won’t offer you a refund and let you roll back to Indie. Once you buy Pro you own it.

XBox 360 support is something we’re interested in, compatibility with XNA not so much. Do note that those are not the same thing, it’s one thing to offer export of XBox content, it’s entirely different to be “compatible” with XNA).

AI is a deep and involved topic that requires you to do a lot of reading and studying. It’s not answerable here in one forum post, if you’re into it then start poking around, reading about researching the various techniques then you can look to implement them in Unity. Whether you’re into stuff like pathfinding, flocking/grouping behavior or other AI is up to you, it’s all possible in Unity.

Not that we have posted, perhaps members of the community have produced one. Anyone?

5

I haven’t been focusing a lot on documentation since both projects are download-able in example projects for a hands-on experience.

Currently the Path project is on ice and my focus is 100% on the Behave project. At unite I did a (very much unprepared) open-mic session describing the process of using the Behave project. As soon as unity has these videos available, I’ll make it available as well directly from the website.

Generally more documentation is on my to-do.

Feel free to pop by the IRC channel #unity3d at freenode.net and give me a poke if you have more questions.