Social Anime MMO RPG, Unity or Away Lite?

News & General Discussion
1

Hello everyone,

I’m planning to develop a social anime mmo rpg to be ideally released in 2012-13 (fully-featured one with a team of ideally 15-20 people). I’m actually in a recruitment phase and I need to choose the engine ( I have already started considering flash and away3d and I have already some talents including away3d and flash developers but…), it will be web based and I need to make it light.

At first I was thinking about flash and away3dlite, market penetration and community, but after looking at the 3.0 demo for unity, I’m in a big doubt. I understand here there are biased fans, so will suggest unity3d, and I believe there are serious technical reasons for it, more power and all the tools, I’m not a flash/unity developer myself but I have a wide background in various areas and development, and I would act as founder, art director and content development, and I’m a fulltime web professional myself.

Anyone could give me some advice/guidance/comparison to choose the right investment for the future?

Cheers,
Nicolo

2

Simply because you want to do 3D I would stay the stuff away from flash because it is so processor intensive and horrible. Unity will beat flash with efficiency.

But you probably want it to be accessible by lots of people and have as many users as possible and Unity does not have as many installs as flash. Then again you want to release it in 2012-13, in which case you will be fine because there are very many installs every day.

I would go with Unity personally.

Since you want an MMO, you will have to use photon or something similar for the networking but as long as you guys know what you are doing this shouldn’t be too hard.

3

Yes after considering the rapid growing of unity, seems to be quite appreciated by the community and the nice features in the next 3.0 speak clear, and powerful itself. I’m really worried could be a more flexible platform, especially if the market penetration is going to be a lot better in the future.

The project should start more or less at the time that 3.0 will be out if summer 2010 is confirmed(in the meanwhile there is the recruitment and features planning part), so seems ideal, but would be nice to know if we start with the 2.6, is there any problem to move the project to the future 3.0 without changes, should be hassle free right?

Another plus for the development seems that unity is free, so the whole team can install it,load and visualize offline features of the game in development (at least at the initial stage, and I can have a look as well without troubles) while flash,flex,away3d and company needs more technical skills to run and make things work for non flash developer involved in the flash, more hassles, am I right?

I’m planning to use smartfox as I have already someone skilled on that, and the starting license can permit the use for the initial testing without paying a cent ans it seems very used one and powerful for the target and more, being scalable it will be fine.

Another topic is protection of the assets, even if I know that there is no real way to protect creative work from skilled people (apart registering assets with copyright offices to protect creatives who work on the project and the game itself), seems unity have the upper hand so far, flash files are easily decompiled compared to unity, am i right?

My big concern is anyway, the market penetration and capacity for unity to produce compact size web games compared to flash, light to download. Is there any comparative between file compilation to see which one is more efficient and produce the best optimized result compressing assets and code?

Thanks for your time.

Cheers,
Nicolo

4

Ya, it usually is just open the old project and wait for it to finish the automatic update to 3.0. Then done. Worse case scenario would be reimporting all scripts and models and other assets manually which would take up to probably an hour.

Don’t know about away3d or flex, but flash certainly isn’t what I would call hard to use. But again, 3d in flash is not a very good idea IMO.

Flash files are decompiled with the click of a button. Unity, I am sure could be ravaged to get the assets back but it would be a lot harder than clicking that button.

Size difference, I have no clue. Probably flash wins but it is just a guess. But Unity does have very good compression I guarantee. I will give you an example game that is under 5 Megabytes… Domain name for sale - M2H

That is a pretty fun game with quite a few models and assets and it is 2,174.78 KB. So compression isn’t too much of a problem.

As stated on the Unity website, "World’s Fastest JavaScript

Unity’s JavaScript implementation JIT-compiles to native machine code. It runs 20x faster than Flash or Director based JavaScript, and the same speed as C# and Boo. "
That is pretty fast :).

Wish you good luck on your project.