I did search, but was unsuccessful and appreciate any help you may provide. I am trying to figure out the best value for money with the licensing scheme:
There is a free version, but it lacks certain functionality. I’m 100% new to Unity so don’t understand much about what is not included. Regarding this, if a person were to learn Unity using the free version, would there be much re-learning after switching over to Pro? Does Pro just add things that make life easier, or would it fundamentally change how certain things are accomplished? I don’t want to have to un-learn/re-learn everything if possible.
How often are new versions released? If a person were to purchase a license for 1.5k and a new version is released within a couple of months, another $750 to upgrade seems excessive and I didn’t find any info about getting access to new versions within a certain time frame of purchasing the current one. How often have major releases happened in the past/how much have you spent to maintain your licenses?
Does anybody recommend the subscription? It seems overpriced to me compared to the owned licenses, especially with the 1-year requirement ($825 minimum for access to the latest version for one year vs $1500 for access to the current version forever.) - but I would like to hear some opposing perspectives as well in case I’m overlooking something.
Ignore unity pro until you atleast know what you would be buying so you can make an informed decision.
Free and pro are the same engine. It’s just that in the free version certain features are locked.
No, Pro version only has a few features over the Free version - namely the biggest feature is the Profiler which let you see where the bottlenecks are and allows you to optimize your game accordingly. Another thing is the Pro version allows your to remove the “Made with Unity” logo at game startup and change it to your own logo. The Pro version also has a few post process effects over the Free version and I think that’s about it. There is not much difference in term of majority of the features. Oh and with Pro version you get DARK SKIN!!! BESTEST FEATURE EVER!!!
This is the detail list of features and license comparison between Pro and Free version of Unity
Used to be 3 year cycle - but from Unity 3 to Unity 4 it was 2.5 years I think, and Unity 4 to Unity 4 may even be 2 year cycle. I would recommend subscription for maximum flexibility and affordability. Buying Unity Pro outright only to be forced to upgrade again is quite costly IMO.
Sure you can use Pro license perpetually if you buy it outright, but it will be outdated very quickly and Asset Store extensions may not support oudated version.
Pro includes tools to significantly improve performance: primarily occlusion culling, LOD groups and static batching (in addition to the profiler of course).
Also, you have huge improvements to the quality: deferred rendering, linear lighting, various effects such as SSAO, bloom, motion blur, depth of field etc.
There are also heaps of little things that make a big difference: for example, you need LoadLevelAsync to deploy an animated loading screen - it’s just not possible with the free version.
Do you need this stuff though? For me, the value of all these features wasn’t apparent until I needed them - and they do make a huge difference if your game requires them.
You’ll know when you need Pro - hang on to your money until you’ve used Free for a while. You won’t have to relearn anything if you decide to upgrade later.
Not only you can effectively learn with Unity Free…
If you buy Unity Pro, by the time you learned enough to “really” take full advantage of Pro features in your game, a few years went by, and you might need to upgrade to Unity 5 (or stick with Unity 4, but… you’ll be outdated!)
By all means buy pro if you don’t mind the price tag, it’ll be fun to play with the Pro features right away. But if the price tag is going to hurt, I recommend learn Unity first, and when you have a promising project, buy Pro to maximize your product’s quality. Or wait until you finished a game, sell it, use the money to buy Pro.
Thanks a lot for the advice everybody, this is exactly what I wanted to know. Free it is, and once again, your helpful advice is very much appreciated!
NO ONE has ever said the fact about movie texture limitation of free version:o. For which reason, I dumped 3D big one and concentrated on 2D tools. A modern video game without any in-game video, seriously?!
FMV is sooooooooooooooooo 90s!
Most modern games use real-time in-game cinematics nowadays. It is actually better practice to do this (unless it is a hardware limitation/performance reason - eg. movie loads faster) because its more jarring to take the player out of the game and play a movie rather than real-time in-game cinematics. You also save a lot of render time plus extra workload as you don’t have to remodel for higher resolution mesh for render and you can reuse all of your in-game assets for the in-game cinematics.
No no, I can’t do this for the kind of game I was working previously. It specifically need FMV (for story-telling and many purposes), like the way of big studios do with bink.
The workflow is, getting source video from,
1.CG rendered videos
2.Real-world acting videos
3.Hand drawing figures and then animating them with 2D skeletal animation tools
After I have those source videos, I can composite them with necessary effects. End result is a collection of frames, video file. Now there is no good way of doing this on unity free, because we can’t play the video file within unity free.
