Right, first let me explain myself a bit. If you don’t care who I am as a human being, just skip this block fo text to get right to the directions. I’ve been modding games for 4 years but only in the past month have I wanted to use a real game engine.
Most of my modding experience has been in Warcraft 3’s editor. The editor was simple enough so I could make games when I was a novice, but powerful enough to keep me coming back again and again for 3 years. Rapidly prototyping a game was incredibly easy : changing the vanilla gameplay of an rts into a survival literally took only a few hours to make basic gameplay. This let users rapidly prototype games, though there were limitations (limited terrain map, poor performance, poor syntax, ect).
A few months ago however I started to become bored with it, and started looking for other engines. With starcraft2 right around the corner I decided to pick up it’s editor. Surely the company that made wc3 would produce an even better editor, right? Nope! With it’s UI clumsy, slow, maps ballooning in size, no scripting support, horrid GUI making something like a survival map would take days, rather than hours. After 2 weeks I gave up on it.
At this point I wanted to work with a real game engine, and hit up on UDK. I tried again and again for a week to get it to work, in the end giving up. My week-old account on Epic’s forum is still not approved, and their tutorials are often not up to date. I’ve been searching over the forum but I haven’t really found many question threads like this, so here I go.
QUESTIONS
1: How easy is Unity to work with? Is it a clean process, or do you have to worry about normalizing the dohickey attached ot the child of the player spawn
A day in and I’m already understanding it. Making a player which moves is literally a drag and drop.
2: So the current (2.6) Unity (free) has no realtime shadows? What about 3.0 (it does a poor job differencing between what you get in the free and pro). Any topics I’ve missed that go this?
When I modded wc3 I started getting really into procedural creation - mostly in buildings but also in gameplay. I made several games where an entire 1km^2 was filled in with procedurally created building I made using blocks of wall, flooring, and scripts. It worked really well, but major limitations (64,000 doodad limit, I made it for online use, ect) made it hard to really flesh it out. By “procedurally made” I’m talking wall for wall. 1x1 floor by 1x1 floor. Counter by refrigerator. Bed by light.
One of the reasons why I want to work with a real game engine (and not just mod) is I could really flesh out my building scripts.
3: Can you create static-meshes with collision ingame?
As I understand it - yes.
4: Is there any limit (outside of draw / polygon) to these?
5: Does the engine support pathing - if so, would it work with ingame-created meshes?
The engine doesn’t directly support pathing, but A* Pathfinding Project is incredibly easy to import and work with.
6: Can you modify terrain (textures, height) ingame?
I don’t know about terrain, but look in the procedural section of Unity Support, and you’ll see a demo which modifies a plane using perlin noise.
Thanks, if you have any questions just post or PM them and I’ll fix it up as fast as I can.