thinking of using unity for personal project

[anon_82045498]

i have been in the midst of doing a ton of research and it seems that this may be the best tool for me to use to make a relatively big project.

game engines looked at

DX studio

Torque 3d (the newest release)

Unity 2.5

now in reference to my question which program would be best to create a game with:

most important features

1. dialogue- the game will have a very high level of dialogue. in both conversation and narrative, it will not have speech as i do not have budget nor voice acting skills and i do not expect much participation from third parties.

2. mission - much like choose your own adventures

do this go to step 2 and it will need to keep track of what was done in the past so as to determine future actions that will and will not be available to you.

3. it will be done with updates, much like the mmos releasing updated content onto the internet for download.
4. leveling system. the game will not have one persee, instead you will get more powerful based on what you do. HP will not exist you will have instead level of injury, hit a leg your leg doesn’t work or not as well, etc.
5. eating and sleeping will be required, i am sure this can be done through coding as with everything else.
6. faction will be very very important. friends enemies teaming up etc.
7. pathfinding (for people randoming walking around, confined to path (for trains)
8. day and night cycles

now I am certain that everything can be done through coding, however one of the mainpoints of a good engine is the WYSIWYG factor, or drag and drop coding (the game codes while you focus on creating)

i want to make my job as easy as possible basically a dreamweaver but for a game.
i want to put in a prefab right click it and start setting up rule for it. pretty much, make a path by just drawing a line and saying what prefabs should follow it. etc. what program is the closest to that?

UNITY 2.5
torque 3d
dx studio

seem the most promising.

now i have begun using this program and here is what i have noted and run into so far:

my game involves the following things. and i was wondering if this would be the engine that would allow me to do that.

a big city - because it is a one man project more or less the city will be big but not consist of textures, i will be using the camera effect grain to add an artistic touch to it along with glowing billboards and weather effect such as rain, hail, snow, and windstorms.
(question)

1. i created the city in Google sketchup export using .OBJ. but a lot of my faces are going in. is there away where i can orientate all the faces or will i have to manually do this?

2. what exactly does generate colliders do? i have imported the city and noticed that i can walk through the walls even if this is checked. do i have to do something special to make the colliders or am I missing something?

the shapes are very simple so i can easy use detection boxes.

also in reference to the city. how does the generate colliders effect slopes and angle will i be able to walk up slopes and if so until what angle?

also when i test the scene in game view. it is very very very very blurry why is that i have a very good gfx card how can i view it without the blurryness.

[anon_74970857]

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1. dialogue- the game will have a very high level of dialogue. in both conversation and narrative, it will not have speech as i do not have budget nor voice acting skills and i do not expect much participation from third parties.

I believe someone on here has a dialog script that he’s selling which would make this process much easier for you.

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2. mission - much like choose your own adventures

do this go to step 2 and it will need to keep track of what was done in the past so as to determine future actions that will and will not be available to you.

There was a pretty recent thread regarding inventory management. I’m sure if you do a quick search you’ll find it in no time.

3. it will be done with updates, much like the mmos releasing updated content onto the internet for download.
4. leveling system. the game will not have one persee, instead you will get more powerful based on what you do. HP will not exist you will have instead level of injury, hit a leg your leg doesn’t work or not as well, etc.
5. eating and sleeping will be required, i am sure this can be done through coding as with everything else.
6. faction will be very very important. friends enemies teaming up etc.
7. pathfinding (for people randoming walking around, confined to path (for trains)
8. day and night cycles

now I am certain that everything can be done through coding, however one of the mainpoints of a good engine is the WYSIWYG factor, or drag and drop coding (the game codes while you focus on creating)

i want to make my job as easy as possible basically a dreamweaver but for a game.
i want to put in a prefab right click it and start setting up rule for it. pretty much, make a path by just drawing a line and saying what prefabs should follow it. etc. what program is the closest to that?

All of this is mainly up to you. You likely won’t find drag and drop code for every function that you want to implement. I’m sure that all of this has been done before, and you could probably pay some people for their code if you really need to save time.

2. what exactly does generate colliders do? i have imported the city and noticed that i can walk through the walls even if this is checked. do i have to do something special to make the colliders or am I missing something?

It creates a collider based upon your mesh. However, if you have some normals/faces that are pointing the wrong direction you’ll be able to walk right through it, but not back.

also in reference to the city. how does the generate colliders effect slopes and angle will i be able to walk up slopes and if so until what angle?

You can set that angle on your character collider.

also when i test the scene in game view. it is very very very very blurry why is that i have a very good gfx card how can i view it without the blurryness.

Check all of your settings. Like your Quality preferences and the settings for your camera.

[anon_85768832]

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1. dialogue- the game will have a very high level of dialogue. in both conversation and narrative, it will not have speech as i do not have budget nor voice acting skills and i do not expect much participation from third parties.

Unity doesn’t have a built-in set of dialog tools but as mentioned above, look at the Unity Dialog Engine (UDE) here on the forums.

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2. mission - much like choose your own adventures

do this go to step 2 and it will need to keep track of what was done in the past so as to determine future actions that will and will not be available to you.

Again, we don’t have anything built-in here but what you’re after is definitely possible and it’s up to you to craft the mechanism that suits your needs. Or of course look around here on the forums as much of this has been done already and there’s likely some great code to be had.

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3. it will be done with updates, much like the mmos releasing updated content onto the internet for download.

You can either post new web player builds on the server, or look to use our AssetBundle feature (Pro-only). AssetBundles are pre-packaged assets you can download and import on the fly, letting you post alternate/updated vehicles, models, sounds, etc.

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4. leveling system. the game will not have one persee, instead you will get more powerful based on what you do. HP will not exist you will have instead level of injury, hit a leg your leg doesn’t work or not as well, etc.

5. eating and sleeping will be required, i am sure this can be done through coding as with everything else.

6. faction will be very very important. friends enemies teaming up etc.

Again, nothing built-in but along the lines above but everything you mentioned is definitely possible, but it’s up to you to craft the systems you’d like to use as you’re crafting the game.

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7. pathfinding (for people randoming walking around, confined to path (for trains)

Once more we don’t have pathfinding tools built-in but you should check out Emil’s Path as an off-the-shelf solution.

@""

8. day and night cycles

Again, not included but can be done and folks have examples here on the forums showing how they’ve done it.

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now I am certain that everything can be done through coding, however one of the mainpoints of a good engine is the WYSIWYG factor, or drag and drop coding (the game codes while you focus on creating)

I disagree that these are required in order to be a “good engine”, sure they’re nice to have elements but not necessarily the key elements to being a good engine. Over time we definitely want more of these features easily accessible in the product but I think that Unity is a very good engine that allows you to craft these things on your own. Hopefully that speaks well enough to you and you’re interested in giving Unity a go.

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i want to make my job as easy as possible basically a dreamweaver but for a game.
i want to put in a prefab right click it and start setting up rule for it. pretty much, make a path by just drawing a line and saying what prefabs should follow it. etc. what program is the closest to that?

Not the competitors, and Unity isn’t exactly that either. The truth is that you seem to want an engine + a template game you can tweak, combined with visual programming. I just don’t see that being offered just yet so it seems to me that you’ll have to get comfortable with getting “dirty” a bit with some code writing, regardless of your tool choice.

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1. i created the city in Google sketchup export using .OBJ. but a lot of my faces are going in. is there away where i can orientate all the faces or will i have to manually do this?

I’m not sure whether that’s our bug or something with SketchUp’s export to OBJ, if you have SketchUp Pro perhaps you can try exporting to FBX instead? Or if not finding an OBJ->FBX converter?

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2. what exactly does generate colliders do? i have imported the city and noticed that i can walk through the walls even if this is checked. do i have to do something special to make the colliders or am I missing something?

That’s an import setting to have it generate the collider data (useful if you update/tweak the model often). Otherwise to actually use a collider and want the object to take part in physics simulations (like collisions) then you must still add a collider/rigidbody component to the game object. Check the docs for more information on using Physics.

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also in reference to the city. how does the generate colliders effect slopes and angle will i be able to walk up slopes and if so until what angle?

You set the maximum slope that a character can climb in the inspector if you’re using our built-in character controller. If you’re using your own system then it will be up to you.

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also when i test the scene in game view. it is very very very very blurry why is that i have a very good gfx card how can i view it without the blurryness.

I’m not at all sure what’s up there, by default our view is crisp and unblurred, are you sure you’ve done nothing to make it blurry? Like antialiasing and/or full-screen post process effects (Pro only)?