some pre-purchase unity questions

News & General Discussion
1

Hi,

Myself and a colleague are looking to build a small fun game then, assuming we had fun, moving onto a bit of a dream project. We’re both professional motion graphics designers who do a lot of 3D work, Maya and C4D, plus i do MEL, Python, Java and PHP. We realise we’ll need some help so we’ve got a bit of a budget together to pay for extra code/art work and to keep things exciting :slight_smile:

We’re trying to plan ahead and work out the best way to approach things, to put a time/money value on the various things we’d like to include. I was wondering if someone out there might help us out by answering some of our questions:

  • We thought we’d start with an indie license then want to move to pro if development proceeds well. What sort of time investment would be required to upgrade to take advantage of pro features? i.e. will we end up re-lighting/baking everything? Just want a feel of where our time should be best invested prior/post upgrading.
  • We’re looking at some big scenes (couple of city blocks) and want 4-32 players in them, with full physics and lots of NPC’s etc. What sort of restrictions will we likely face with that sort of network requirement? Will we be fighting against or with Unity if we head down a persistent networked server path?
  • Environmental lighting and day to night cycles - i was wondering if the overhead on dynamic lighting is restrictive on how much we can do with this? It’d be great to have night time roll over and the lights come up but only if we can make it look great.
  • We’re both heavily into color/composition. We’ll definitely be wanting to fake HDR (glow/bloom is fine for this) plus some motion blur and lots of colour/tone changes i’d imagine (i know this is pro only). Is there much overhead to the post effects?
  • While it’s not something we’re looking at for the first project, destructable terrain and dynamically loaded textures/meshs … is this sort of ‘changing world’ variety of effect at the easy or hard end of the spectrum?
    Thanks in advance for your answers. We’re both excited about getting into this while we’ve got some time between projects.

Anyway, back to the demo :slight_smile:

2

Generally most features in Unity Pro are very fast to add to an existing project. For example, add glow, tweak material alpha values: looks good. Turn on shadows: looks good. Build a windows game: good :slight_smile:

Apart from shadows and render textures, there are no features that change the rendering pipeline in Indie vs. Pro. So all your lightmaps and light setup won’t start to look weird just because you upgraded to Pro.

Either you do it with real directional light, animating it’s direction and color over time; or you bake lighting into multiple sets of lightmaps and blend between them over time. Both are possible in Unity, which is better depends on your game and your target hardware (obviously realtime light with shadows is slower than a baked lightmap, but realtime shadows have their own benefits).

Generally they are cheap. All that happens is that a shader is run over the screen pixels (it’s a bit more complex for glow). And they are very easy to disable with some in-game options or just by detecting a crappy video card.

3

Sorry to interrupt this thread, but this question seems fitting:

Is that technique possible with the terrain lightmap?

Thanks!

Frank

4

You could just generate a new lightmap by blending multiple lightmaps at runtime and assigning it to the terrain. You can update the lightmap over a course of several frames or only change it when the sun has moved enough.

5

Aras,

Thanks for the reply and sorry for my slow response - working week and all that :slight_smile:

Anyway, we started playing around and getting assets in and all that jazz. I’m sure i’ll have more questions soon.