Would you say Unity is focuses more on accessibility or ease of use or productivity when using the engine. Now, I know it does both well, but what you think it does better. If you think the point is moot, please tell me so.
Don’t “accessibility” and “ease of use” pretty much mean the same thing?
I think that really depends on the user. For example, Macs focus on “ease of use” for the average user, but power users can find themselves a bit frustrated by the lack of tweakability.
Now for my perspective. I’ve just started learning Unity and I personally feel it strikes a pretty good balance. I’m a strong programmer but not so strong with graphics / etc. Unity makes it pretty simple to very quickly start dropping stuff in and have something up and running. For example, with the controllers for First and Third Person, I can pretty quickly get navigation and camera in place without knowing much about trig or game programming. I started dabbling with XNA a couple years ago and this was something that took a lot more work to get going.
On the other hand, Unity does provide a high level of customization and the ability to code a lot of stuff yourself. The game engine and editor become really good tools with a lot of optional automation but they don’t constrain you to a little sandbox. If you can imagine it, you can almost surely do it with a little bit of work.
With the release of Unity 4 and the addition of the free Indie version, I’d say accessibility has definitely become a focus in that it is affordable (and thus accessible) for many more people. The Indie version may not have a lot of things the Pro version does, but you can still produce some pretty good stuff. Ease of Use is also very prevalent evidenced by everything I touched on in my opening paragraph.
Well put.
So far, to me it seems that unless you are a large company that wants to make it’s own engine or have it’s own really tweaked version for very specific stuff then Unity should do fine - I for one have never felt limited by it and I’ve used it for years/many projects
I still don’t get what the difference between the two things is. Judging from Dustin’s response, maybe you mean “customizability” instead of “accessibility”? Accessibility (link) is sort of the same thing as ease of use. It means there’s a focus on making the app easy for everyone to use, sometimes including features for people with different issues like color blindness or poor vision.
When I said accessibility, I meant community, asset input, price, really a broad spectrum. By easy of use I meant in relation to the editor itself.