I’m seriously considering a move over to Unity3D (I’ve been working off of my own game engine now for the last few years). I would have done so sooner, but the lack of Windows support (building the games for Windows, not the IDE) with the indie license has kept me away.
I’m hearing that with the Unity 2.5 Indie License the Mac IDE will be able to build games that run on Windows too? Is this true?
Is there a full feature comparison list somewhere that tells the differences between the 2.5 indie and pro licenses yet? I’d love to just buy a pro license, but, being a true indie, I just don’t have the cash.
Mostly I’m looking for things like networking support, 3D effects, model importers, scripting events, etc…
Also, I saw that the indie license will require a Unity3D splashscreen to appear… how intrusive will that be? How long does it last?
Oh, and I guess I’m looking for some more technical specifications too (like, when on Windows, does it use openGL or Direct3D?). What’s the minimum hardware requirements for a smooth running game (client side, not IDE)? etc.
You pretty much have everything sorted out yourself. Unity 2.5 Indie will be able to publish to both platforms, but there will be a splash screen. How long will the splash screen last? Only a couple of minutes… but it’s a really cool splash screen that has this green/red strobe effect and thumpin’ techno
I have no idea how long the splash screen will actually last, but I’m guessing similar to any splash/logo that comes up in games you’ve played and it will be simple (but no matter what we make the splash screen look like there’s always a handful of people who are going to hate it). Also be aware that the web player will also have a small watermark that pops in the bottom right corner for about 5 seconds and then fades out.
Besides that, everything is going to stay the same for 2.5… no features have migrated to Pro only and besides cross-platform builds nothing has really migrated down to Indie.
Well, with version 2.1 you mention post-processing effects being limited to Pro only, as well as video. 3D effects would include many postprocessing effects, like rendering a scene to a framebuffer and then mapping the framebuffer onto a mesh (to make a wave transition effect, or a Predator-like cloak for instance).
I’m also curious as to how low you can go with hardware before framerates get too bad for a solid game experience. Can it run on Macbooks with the Intel graphics chip? Can it run on Windows machines with Intel graphics chips? etc.
Please tell me you miss spoke about a few minutes and meant a few seconds, I mean I know games that have cinematic intros that are less than a few minutes. If the splash is in fact a few minutes and the user is not able to skip it after a few seconds, than the indie version of Unity3D is pretty much not a viable option(i mean who here would wait a few minutes of a splash screen to play a game every times?)
C’mon man… a splash screen that flashes red and green (resulting in an epileptic fit I’m sure) for a couple minutes with blaring techno on top of it… I was joking.
I need to start using way more smiley faces
After the backlash from the iPhone Basic splash screen we’re certainly conscious of trying to make something that will be as unobtrusive as possible. As I said before we’ll never please everyone with whatever splash screen we come up with, but we’re going to try. Some people see the splash screen as some punishment for using Indie, but we just see it as a fair compromise (and something that many licensed technologies require).
Seems to me that a lot of that is due to not being able to choose horizontal/vertical, rather than the splash screen per se. That would be much less of an issue on computers; vertical screens do exist but very few people use them. Although different aspect ratios are still pretty common (mostly on Windows since the large majority of Macs are widescreen), so you might want to make sure it looks OK at 4:3 and 16:10 or there could be another backlash.
True, the lack of vertical/horizontal images was a mistake and will be fixed in the next release of Unity iPhone. The Mac/PC splash will most likely be an image that gets centered on the screen and will be independent of the aspect ratio or resolution.
It’s OpenGL on Mac OS X and Direct3D on Windows (with an option to run under OpenGL).
The system requirements should be similar to Unity 2.1, (which mostly depend on how your game behaves) - see the System Requirements for Unity-Authored Content at the bottom of the Unity Download page.
The Indy/Pro differences are also specified on the download page. The only change in 2.5 is the Windows build and splash screens as already mentioned.
The new features talk about a customizable editor and it says we can implement our own level editing tools into it. Can someone clarify what exactly this is? Because this sounds like something I’ve wanted in Unity for a long time!
So what is it? How is it implemented? What kinds of tools can we make (please say things like “cutscene tools”)?
If you want to set up your own wizard to create and configure cutscene cameras and the like, you can already do that with 2.1. You can add your own menu items linked to your own scripts, same with right-click contextual menus.
