Unity's power?

I can’t really fault Unity in terms of its asset management, ease of use and rapid prototyping - but I can’t help feeling that it’s still somewhat lacking in certain areas - particularly in the raw power of the graphics engine itself.

For example Portal and terrain rendering - I would expect these to be standard features of a modern 3d engine yet they are not present in Unity. I understand that a limit of 10,000 polygons was kept to during the development of Gooball (I may be wrong) but this too me does not seem very high - and so far I haven’t really seen any demos that really show off the power of the graphics engine.

I realise there are always ways to work around missing features and that Unity is still a young product, but I would love to know what the future plans are for Unity and also whether anyone has yet produced anything of commercial quality (other than gooball).

The GooBall polycount was 40000. The only reason that it was kept that low was to make it run with multipass lighting on Radeon7500. We push polygons like no other engine on the Mac.

Nobody has yet made a commercial game with Unity (apart from GooBall) - it simply takes too long to make one for it to have happened yet. I know of two commercial games in production at the moment, and we are using one of them for profiling and optimization and will do the same for the other.

We want to get a terrain engine in, but so far we just haven’t been able to find the time.

A portal culling renderer will be included in version 2 of unity.

But as you said, building a portal culling layer in C# on top of unitys rendering system is very feasable.

Unity doesn’t support “real” shadows nor built-in multiplayer either, the real power of Unity is the workflow, the combination of the editor and language.