hi there,
i have one simple question:
what´s the difference between the indie and the pro version?
i read about windows-binaries here and video support there, but is there a full list of features, that are in one version and not in the other?
thanks in advance for your help,
jens
http://unity3d.com/unity/download
welcome : )
thanks for the link. i think the list has only few information:
can a pro user just tell me some words about the single points?
Realtime soft shadows
Render effects (bloom, motion-blur, …)
Reflection and refraction
>> what about quality and performance of these?
Render-to-texture based effects >> ???
Streaming video support
does this mean, normal videos work in unity indie and pro additional supports streaming?
Low-level rendering access >> ???
C/C++ plugins support >> what kind of plugins?
sorry for all the questions ;-).
thanks,
jens
btw: drjones has 1111 posts. congratulations!
to the point “streaming video support”:
videos aren’t running anyway in the indie-version
alex
render to texture based effects: anything that you listed right before that line are basing on render textures 
Performance and quality can be seen in the games that are linked on the unity page. Given you have a 3D card (intel CPU to VGA / DVI adapters are no 3D cards), they run pretty well but this highly depends on the capabilities of artist and level designer. A bad designer can kill the performance of the greatest engine
doubled
okay. thanks everyone. i just contacted the unity sales-unit to get a pro trial.
for your interest: what we usually do is stuff like below… it`s a video, which was captured from a realtime-software. the blends are postproduced. the engine is quest3d and there were 16 lofts in the program. the one in the video is a small one. i think doing something similar is a lot of work in unity, too.
Bloom, motion blur, glow and others are post processing effects. The cost of them is rendering scene into a render texture, and then generally drawing a fullscreen quad with some shader (there cost is directly dependent on shader length). Most of the postprocessing effects that we ship are pretty simple, but there’s nothing stopping you from writing your own complex effects
Shadows - again, the performance is what is required to render shadows. Shadow casters need to be rendered into the shadowmaps, and shaders for shadow receivers need to sample the shadowmaps. We have lots of options for tuningshadows for quality and performance.
Everything of the above are render-to-texture based (as something needs to be rendered into textures, and not directly to the screen). Additional render to texture things that come to mind: reflective water, reflective mirrors, surveillance cameras, shiny objects with realtime cubemap reflections, etc.
Not really. Video and streaming video both are Unity Pro.
Access to procedural drawing classes like Graphics and GL.
Ability to use external dll/dylib files written in C/C++ (or any other language for that matter than can emit C-style linking info). See here
what confused me in the beginning (and almost made me a little angry) was that the differences between Indie and Pro are NOT listed on the Store page. The store makes it sound as if the only difference was that pro works with the asset server. That’s bad as that page is exactly where I would instinctively look for that sort of information…
Unity Indie is still incredible value for the money, but one of my first feelings after starting the trial was disappointment about the shadows being greyed out… No, I usually don’t read through the entire website before downloading a trial (and no one else does either). And yes, I got over it and bought Unity Indie anyway