Programming Knowledge Needed?

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1

Hello, I’m not sure if this is the correct forum to post this in, however…

…I am a Game Art student at the Art institute in Las Vegas. My school (AILV) is thinking of buying the Unity Engine for all Art Institutes to replace the Unreal 3 Engine. As students we have been avidly against UT3 because of its lack of resources (There’s no book out yet) and its inflexibility.

So I had a few questions I wanted to see if you guys could answer. If this is the wrong venue to ask such questions please point me in the right direction.

1: What kind of resources do you provide for a school that purchases your engine? I didn’t see any literature on designing games with the Unity Engine?

2: We are art school students with only minimal programming knowledge. We do take a few scripting classes but we are by no means programmers. How hard is programming for the Unity Engine? And do you provide any resources for that as well?

Thank you for your time. We (AILV) are looking to have a secondary engine implemented by our Fall Semester. I believe the deans are already talking to you guys but as a Student I would like to know first hand weather or not this is the answer we are looking for.

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When you say “do you provide” are you talking to us at Unity Tech? Or to others that have promoted this or other tools like you’re trying to do? From our end we don’t have anything specific to provide like course ware but we do have:

Unity Resources
http://unity3d.com/support/resources

Apart from that there are other community resources including wikis and tutorial sites, but you’re asking what “we” provide and the above is what we have to offer apart from our documentation. FYI, a book on Unity is in progress (by Will Goldstone), there’s a thread on it here somewhere.

You will need to do some scripting if you want to go beyond 1st/3rd person walkthroughs. With that in mind you can use either JavaScript or C# and so the approach is easy enough - artists can step in and be productive quickly, then in parallel ramp up on some simple scripting skills and become capable Unity users with relative ease. See the above for the resources discussion.

Edit: funny enough, I’m sitting in a room with a new AI SF student intern we have on board and one of our full-time employees who’s an instructor at AI SF. :slight_smile:

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I see, most of us are pretty excited about making the switch from UT3, and I think between the community, wiki and the link you provided seem like they should be great resources for us to go to.

Thank you for the quick response. Unity is all the seniors have been talking about for 2 weeks now since we decided to start looking for other engines. And our whole class has tons of questions on what the engine is capable of and the ease of use compared to UT3. So I thought I would ask.

Thanks again.

4

And here is my two cents, as the Level Design Instructor at Illinois Institute of Art Chicago, using Unreal 3.

First and foremost, have you been pointed to the resources available from your instructor on using Unreal 3? If not PM me and I will point you to them. This is a Unity forum after all :slight_smile:

As Tom pointed out, you will need to do scripting/programming to use Unity beyond the basics.The same holds true for Unreal, although Unreal has Kismet.

The problem I see with some students, regardless of whether I am teaching Unreal or MEL scripting, is they try to bite off more than they can chew. You will never turn Unreal into a top down MMO in two semesters. Ever. Period. But the same is true for Unity.

Regardles of the platform you are using, you as the student, and your instructor as your guide, need to realistically asses your abilities,your strengths, and your time frame, and come up with something that is attainable.

I suggest if you want to get into Unity, or Unreal for that matter, to grab the demo of Unity, or plant yourself infront of a machine with UnrealEd on it, and get started looking into how everything works. Get to know how to import assets, apply shaders, create basic animations, create basic interactions, and functionality. I find that when doing that, you will have numerous ideas start popping into your head of little prototypes you could tackle. Prototypes are the beginnings of new games and new gameplay ideas.

I may have gone off on a seemingly slight rant, but you will get out of it, exactly what you put into it. You need to be willing to do the research, the testing, the experimenting, and the learning.

Feel free to PM me if you have any questions.

Two final things.

  1. Unreal is not limited. Of the four shipped titles I was involved in, none of them were first person shooters.

  2. Using Unity has been the most fun I have had developing in a long long time.

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I would love to see the senior projects coming out of AI Illinois, especially if they are not shooters.

I have been pointed to UT3s resources and I found them a bit lacking, your students didn’t? I think our major issue was the book being pushed back several times and Epics lack of response to us. There was a lot of talk about being able to use UT04 books in UT3 but that’s like using Adobe CS books with CS3 yes it can be done, but there are interface changes and simple quickkeys that just don’t exist or are in different spots that make it more aggravating then helpful.

Also please note that I was not on the last few senior projects as I was not a senior, but since I started this degree I have been picking the brains of every senior on the project asking what they like what they don’t and what they would change. I’ve also been to all the AILV senior presentations and seen what students have been making.

I think Unity has a few things going for it that the other engines do not, first is accessibility the interface (so far) doesn’t seem as daunting as some of the others I’ve looked at. Another is that it is a complete Engine and not just an editor, and if we have to learn programming past the basics why not do it in a full fledged engine instead of a level editor. Third is this community seems tons more friendly then what I’ve seen elsewhere. All of its members seem more then willing to point you in the right direction or offer advice, that will be an amazing boon as students doing a senior project. And lastly versatility, while I agree the UT3 engine is capable of stuff other then FPS I think no matter what you do its incredibly hard to wash that “unrealness” off your game, I can point to any game made with Unreal and tell you “that was made with unreal.”

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A programming language is a machine-readable artificial language designed to express computations that can be performed by a machine, particularly a computer. Programming languages can be used to create programs that specify the behavior of a machine, to express algorithms precisely, or as a mode of human communication.
Many programming languages have some form of written specification of their syntax and semantics, since computers require precisely defined instructions. Some (such as C) are defined by a specification document (for example, an ISO Standard), while others (such as Perl) have a dominant implementation.
The earliest programming languages predate the invention of the computer, and were used to direct the behavior of machines such as Jacquard looms and player pianos. Thousands of different programming languages have been created, mainly in the computer field,[1] with many more being created every year.