Unity 3 looks very tempting but I’m going to pass on buying a license.
Reason 1. Scripting resource issues
I’m not new to scripting. I’ve written scripts for automated rigging tasks in maya (mel). Built templates for maya using python and also written some jscripts for xsi to simplify some rigging tasks. I also used to do some coffee in c4d. All that did take some time to learn. But the manuals were helpful. Video training series and forums were also extremely helpful.
As for unity. I’ve been tinkering with it on and off. Looking for any kind of resource to work with. Besides throwing cocunuts, opening doors, turrets shooting at worms. My knowledge is bare bones and it isn’t practical trying to branch off into anything more complicated.
Reason 2. Pro vs Indie
For me, if I owned a pro license. To me the value of the product would go down when an indie version is released that contains 85% of the pro functionality.
It’d be nice to have the latest and greatest things in my hands. But it’s pretty obvious I lack the ability to make anything decent in 2.6 and probably that much less in version 3. My big question is, does unity team feel that their documentation is lacking enough that they feel they should give it an overhaul.
I think the bottom line is… if you cannot create something that earns enough money to by Pro - then its probably a waste of money to spend on Pro in the first place.
I’m still on indie (unity free) and its perfectly capable of generating income - if you use it right.
You don’t have to resist temptation, since it’s free.
The Unity manuals are very helpful, so are the forums, and there are by now a lot of tutorials.
Come on, there are loads of resources. UnityAnswers, the wiki (which has hundreds of scripts), lots of stuff on the forums (sometimes you have to do some digging since there are hundreds of thousands of posts), the tutorials I mentioned, a couple real live books, a magazine, etc.
That’s too bad; to me it didn’t. When it’s $1500 for Pro, $200 or $0 for Indie doesn’t make any difference, and doesn’t affect the value of Unity in any case. Plus it’s likely that the number of Pro buyers has increased since the number of people trying Unity is much larger.
It was already quite good, aside from a few areas that were lacking in detail. It was improved still more in Unity 3 (the online docs are active; go see). What they will not do is teach you how to program, nor is it reasonable to expect that they would. You can already learn that through massively extensive resources elsewhere. The docs do what they are supposed to do, which is teach you how to use Unity. They aren’t perfect–personally I’d like to see the advanced section go into more detail about how things work behind the scenes; too much of my knowledge in that area was picked up from the forums over time. Also UnityScript really needs to be officially documented as a language at this point, since it only exists in Unity and it’s pretty silly to expect people to poke around the net to find out the necessary info. (It was nearly the same as JScript.NET until Unity 3, but you wouldn’t have known that from the docs, and now there’s a bunch of stuff that I don’t think exists in JScript.) If you have at least basic programming ability, the Unity docs are plenty sufficient and definitely above average.