Sorry to ask such an annoying question, but I’m entering a very tight dev planning (aiming to release a 2 years long gamedev for christmas), and the searched info could save me about 2 monthes of delay.
So : It was stated that Unity 3 was going to have a new dedicated 2D engine, but later after release.
Does Unity team have any estimation (even on monthly unit) about when will it be available ?
If it’s by the end of this year, I can wait for it and focus on other production elements, but if it’s later, I’ll have to change this planning and refine my own 2D framework, which would mean an average 2 monthes of work for putting everything together (menus, HUD, buttons, forms, etc). Yeah basically this info would decide my next 2 monthes of work.
A new GUI framework is more likely to come out quickly than a 2D engine. I’d have a look at one of the 2D frameworks available - so far I’m liking 2D Toolkit.
When unity posted their April Fools blog post about catering to the 2D crowd with a cool new engine, part of me thought of it as a double-fool, ie they made it seem highly unlikely and sarcastic, but maybe in actual fact it’s still in the works and will be here soon? One can hope. There’s a few things on the asset store that Unity needs to implement properly as part of the standard product:
Sculpting/generating/modifying geometry/objects within the editor
We just wrote our own code to make 2D work and it’s going really well so far… a 2D version really isn’t necessary, what with Retroformer, The Other Brothers and more being made in Unity3D.
When you use a commercial game engine, you get everything. I don’t use the Terrain at all, but when it was added to iOS, it pushed an update to my game over 20 MB (which was the 3G limit at the time), and I had to do a lot of work to optimise the game further so that it came back under.
Pro has options for removing some unused features, maybe 2D would be included in that.
