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Unity 4 is here

unity3d.com

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Re: Unity 4 is here

#11
post #5

I would be curious to see how Ouya will fit in there, yes Android is supported, but at what point will Ouya be supported or not by Unity 4?

Presumably after they show some signs of actually shipping the thing. Yes, yes, I'm a curmudgeony and perennial Kickstarter skeptic - but what other stance can you take when a team that has never shipped any consumer electronics before promise to ship a profoundly game-changing piece of hardware on an extraordinarily aggressive schedule, at a shockingly low price?

The price is realistic: http://www.isuppli.com/Teardowns/News/pages/Low-End-Google-N... gives a BOM cost for the Ouya sans controller at around $75. Add a year's worth of deflation, and it should be around $50. No, they're not making any profit at $99, but they hope to make that up on game sales and later sales to those who missed the Kickstarter. The point is that they're not losing money. A normal manufacturer would have to spend millions in advertising to get the exposure Ouya did.

The only thing that's hard about the schedule is that they're a new manufacturer and need to build relationships with all of their suppliers. NVidia would have given them a reference design that they could almost use unchanged.

Re: Unity 4 is here

#13
post #7

Does anyone know if they updated their default GUI elements (they were pretty rudimental in v3), so you don't need to use custom GUI elements?

They are planning the GUI update for the later 4.x releases. At-least that's what i could guess from the forums.

Correct. I heard from a Unity rep that it's definitely coming in 4.x, but he made it sound like it was still about 6 months away.

Re: Unity 4 is here

#14

Lots of impressive headline features. DirectX 11, detailed animation system, Linux support. The trouble is, these come at the expense of the basics. Not so impressive is that the only supported method for sharing code between projects is copy and paste . The engine is six years old. I'm not kidding. Unfortunately, frustrations like that are common. I adopted Unity expecting to be there for the next few years at least…

On the other hand, Unity has implemented some basics, which are a real time sink in other engines, outstandingly well.

Lets compare the coding workflow in Unreal Engine 3 and Unity 3:

In UE3 you play the game, find something you want to change. So you shutdown the Game/Editor and go to the code. You code in some immature language called UnrealScript (I think there is a complicated way to use C++ too). Then you compile. Then you startup the Game/Editor again (this is slow).

In Unity you find something you want to change. Alt-Tab to your Code Editor. Change C#/Javascript code. Alt-Tab back to the game, recompiling the code and loading it into the currently running game is automatic and takes about 1-2 seconds.

Also the engine APIs are one of the best software designs I've seen in a long time.

Re: Unity 4 is here

#15

Lots of impressive headline features. DirectX 11, detailed animation system, Linux support. The trouble is, these come at the expense of the basics. Not so impressive is that the only supported method for sharing code between projects is copy and paste . The engine is six years old. I'm not kidding. Unfortunately, frustrations like that are common. I adopted Unity expecting to be there for the next few years at least…

Version control on Unity isn't as bad as you describe. Go to Edit > Project Settings > Editor, then set Version Control to Metafiles. If you have a Pro license, also set Asset Serialization Mode to Force Text. The downside is that this litters your project with .meta files, but that lets you work with external version control pretty easily.

Edit: You should also exclude the Library folder from your VCS, because with metafiles enabled the Library is just a local cache.

Re: Unity 4 is here

#18

Lots of impressive headline features. DirectX 11, detailed animation system, Linux support. The trouble is, these come at the expense of the basics. Not so impressive is that the only supported method for sharing code between projects is copy and paste . The engine is six years old. I'm not kidding. Unfortunately, frustrations like that are common. I adopted Unity expecting to be there for the next few years at least…

Our teams share code by not coding in Unity projects. All the assemblies are added as plugins with a build script. The games have very little code actually accessible from within Unity. You lose the nice edit and continue, but for a big project with a lot of assets the Unity IDE explodes under pressure anyway.

Re: Unity 4 is here

#19
post #14

Lots of impressive headline features. DirectX 11, detailed animation system, Linux support. The trouble is, these come at the expense of the basics. Not so impressive is that the only supported method for sharing code between projects is copy and paste . The engine is six years old. I'm not kidding. Unfortunately, frustrations like that are common. I adopted Unity expecting to be there for the next few years at least…

On the other hand, Unity has implemented some basics, which are a real time sink in other engines, outstandingly well. Lets compare the coding workflow in Unreal Engine 3 and Unity 3: In UE3 you play the game, find something you want to change. So you shutdown the Game/Editor and go to the code. You code in some immature language called UnrealScript (I think there is a complicated way to use C++ too). Then you compil…

On the other, other hand, if you don't use their serialization system (I prefer to stick with json), automatic reloading of the code causes a hard crash as your objects have been incorrectly reloaded.

And, naturally, there's no way to turn it off. Strictly speaking there is but it requires restart of Unity, not just the game, to reload code. Which is basically the UE3 workflow you describe.

You're right though; there are quite a lot of good parts of Unity - which is why I'm sticking around for now.

But I stand by my assertion that their focus on headline features is troubling.

Re: Unity 4 is here

#20
post #14

Lots of impressive headline features. DirectX 11, detailed animation system, Linux support. The trouble is, these come at the expense of the basics. Not so impressive is that the only supported method for sharing code between projects is copy and paste . The engine is six years old. I'm not kidding. Unfortunately, frustrations like that are common. I adopted Unity expecting to be there for the next few years at least…

On the other hand, Unity has implemented some basics, which are a real time sink in other engines, outstandingly well. Lets compare the coding workflow in Unreal Engine 3 and Unity 3: In UE3 you play the game, find something you want to change. So you shutdown the Game/Editor and go to the code. You code in some immature language called UnrealScript (I think there is a complicated way to use C++ too). Then you compil…

Unreal Engine 4 will fix the workflow, though.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOvfn1p92_8

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