I use/teach Unity and UDK so this is VERY exciting news.
I’m curious about whether Unity for iPhone will now be released for free to compete.
we will see if it will compete, cause unitys benefit is productivity, something UDK doesn’t offer anywhere on a competitive scale
any word on the pricing of it for commercial projects?
likely the same or comparable to UDK when its added to UDK
I am kinda interested on seeing how that will actually work. Are they releasing a OSX version of UDK? Or will it just output a xcode project like unity.
Only if Apple starts to upgrade all past sold machines to 4GB to run the UDK editor usefully 
I think UDK has a lot of strengths where Unity does not but most of that comes with a price though and I mean aside from money.
UDK requires a lot more work when it comes to game art and modeling so you would benefit from having some artists on retainer. The scripting or coding has a much higher learning curve and can be very strict and cumbersome and less direct but also offers a greater degree of precision if you are good at it so having some coders around would be good too.
Overall if you have a TEAM of good artists and coders and a good level builder then you could put out a pretty powerful game. For an individual game designer I would stay away from it if you want a unique game because it is a long road. Unity does not start with a cookie cutter design methodology and has to the point scripting options…multiple ones at that so you are not limited. The importing, animation, modeling and realtime testing are far superior and the deployment options couldn’t be easier and that would be a lot to compete with.
This is a good news.
And if the license is like current UDK.
It would be amazing.
I hope it could let Unity make more progress.
However, I don’t want Unity iPhone become free.
Just hope add more features that lack in Unity and Unity iPhone.
Like iPhone Terrain support, Waypoint and navigation mesh Path finding, GUI Editor, Ad, bluetooth…etc.
In other engines, These features have been built-in.
No need pay for the additional plug-ins support.
BTW, the Esenthel Engine now supports iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch too.
UT can’t fix apples broken view on reality when it comes to use 24 months graphic chips in current gen devices (ipad / iphone 4)
Nor do you need with unity. iphone 3 offers plugin support on both ends.
I mean these features should be built-in Unity and Unity iPhone.
Especially terrain for iPhone and path finding.
Rather than relying on plug-ins.
Because these features are common in other engines,
And have already worked well in iPhone.
So, I think it’s a very good news if UDK(and other engines like Esenthel Engine) support iOS.
They provide complete services and features to developers.
Rather than users themselves to find solutions.
Plug-ins can not solve all problems.
Even have to spend extra costs for them.
IMHO, Even though Unity is not GG, But more and more like.
Just “Source code” replace to “Plugin”?
they might have worked for other engiens with their terrain engines etc.
But unity’s terrain engine would run at a handfull of frames at best and if you even think about adding foliage etc its 0 FPS. as mentioned, the iDevices gpu isn’t up anywhere to what it would need to handle it (2 USSE just don’t cut anything but a piece of paper)
path finding is a matter of dropping in Aron Granbergs great solution actually which is free for non commercial and the small nothing of $100 per commercial project and is hellish fast actually and unlike other engines hardcoded implementations it can be used fully flexible the way you want
so those two aspects are either covered or just not doable technically.
If you want a simpler terrain then a user here wrote a flight game once and offers the flight game code + terrain code he wrote for it at $100 or so and that was performant enough to run on iphone 3g already with unity iphone 1.0.x and 1.5 under iOS2
Why everybody want path finding waypoint etc things built -in , where is the fun to scratch his head around and learn to do yourself on purpose then ?
I rather prefer try to do that stuff myself just for the sake of learning things…then when I am totally f*** because that don’t perform I eventually grab some plug - in :lol:
Right, The path finding is not difficult.
But not only path finding, including other features.
It’s all need TIME for practice.
So, The reason is simple.
Because Unity is a “Game Engine”, not a SDK.
It’s use for solve game development and save developer’s TIME.
If it need developer to find solution, and maybe need charges,
then why we need purchase Unity?
Unity is even more expensive than other indie game engines.
The other game engines from indie to AAA, form cheap to expensive,
including: UE3, UDK, ShiVa, Esenthel Engine, NeoAxis…etc.
All have their own path finding solution.
Only Unity has not, And some of them even younger than Unity.
So, we need a “official solution” in Unity,
A stable, no additional charges solution.
Plugings should be use for solve very special case.
Rather than as a reason for escape.
BTW, I LOVE Unity’s development workflow.
So I just upgrade to Unity iPhone Pro a few day.
But I think UDK, ShiVa and Esenthel Engine would be a good solution to replace Unity in the future.
If Unity ignore the needs of users.
We don’t need official solutions, we need working solutions and in case of path finding we have one which exceeds anything UT could do within any reasonable time and which which is more than you will likely ever get in nonpro at all (cause anything advanced in the future will remain a pro feature, take that as granted).
UT can’t do everything on their own, there are millions of problems and only so little dev time as they can’t just raise the price by 400% to cover dreams and wishes.
Also what you ignore is that even 3/4 of those engines don’t offer any of that. they offer you to drop in 5 figure++ per title plugins, while not offering anything integrate or something thats barebone enough to be of no use beyond prototyping, which is horrible.
Or at worst something hardcoded as in shiva where you have some serious problems expanding it for specific usages.
There are much more pressing things that need attention like getting a UI system that works and is performant, including at least basic editor support for example and naturally any kind of multitouch capability at all, webplayer cache support as integrated part of the license not under questionable extra cost license schemes that cost more than the pro licenses for whole teams (shiva and flash both have it out of the box and U3 does not even show any sign that the once mentioned “we are thinking about solutions” was ever started at all unhappily), webcam and mic support …
things like that that you can NOT do yourself or another community member, things that are important to indie developers in one or the other way and where no performant and powerfull addons exist especially.
We are working on some special shaders. In fact is a pre-computed lighting system, similar to the one seen in Epic Citadel that works with Beast lightmaps. We will be able to have an lots of pixel shaders in our iPhone game with minimal performance impact. Static lights will make surounding objets shades as if they were dynamic lights, everything tied up with Beast lightmaps. 
Just wait till UT integrates beasts light clouds …
Then citadel will get some ugly burnt ass “out of the box”
I guess you do something comparable yet less data intense and likely less precise yet still more than good enough for the devices we talk about here 
Are you talking about Unity 4? ^^
I dint heard about any Beast update regarding such similar pre-computed lighting system.
No not Unity 4
More like 3.1 or 3.5
Its a standard Beast feature, Unity just needs to use it.
Would have a drastic impact on the quality.
light clouds basically are “3D lightmap data” sampled at specific points in space. they are then used to realtime color dynamic objects moving through them.
lightmapped, correctly looking normalmaps for example would be a thing that would benefit from this as the light cloud data can be used to extrapolate the “static light” on the surface
EDIT: fixed typo
Some pics from the Editor, It runs at stable 27-30 fps on the iPone3GS. Is a very complex (and unoptimized) scene, with tons of normal and specular maps. In fact is a full walkthrough level from our current projet. The level contains several corridors with rooms fully loaded with objets. Is hard to see the dynamic shading on theses object cause is just an pic, but it really shades the same way as if they were a real dynamic light.
Pretty nice,
Hope they will integrate that soon, Unity, specially Unity iPhone users will benefit from such rendering improvements.