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It seems this news is a direct reply to yesterday's move from one of their competitors, Epic's Unreal Engine 4 announced to be free* to use. link: https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/ue4-is-free
Unity has been free for at least a year but they didn't seem to advertise it until until Epic made their announcement.
In Unity 4 there was this weird licensing model where certain IOS/android features were not available for the personal addition (such as UDP broadcast, or network access). Is this still true? or is unity 5 personal addition really contains all features?
Unity targets small shops and indie devs. It has quick iteration times for rapid prototyping of gameplay mechanics. It takes more work to make things pretty in Unity.
It will be easier for Unity to ramp-up its visual fidelity than it will be for UE4 to revamp fundamental workflow. We're already beginning to see these changes, like new GI (global illumination) system and physically-based materials in Unity 5. Perhaps Unity v6 or v7 will have graphics on par with UE4.
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Yea, but they've been marketing Unity 5 for a long time now. Finally they just said "screw it and release it to public".
I doubt they just said screw it lets release. This week is GDC so both companies were likely to make large announcements during GDC IT just so happens that epic didn't wait for their keynote, meaning it's more like unreal said "screw it lets just go for free"
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As someone who played Sierra city builders almost exclusively when I was growing up, please do. Hasn't been a good game in that style in ages.
It's not set in ancient times, but Banished is pretty good: http://www.shiningrocksoftware.com/game/
Does that mean it supports Oculus? The previous Personal version didn't.
It does, and the previous version actually did support Occulus. They released a free plugin for it (the free version of Unity) a few months ago.
I was debating over trying out Unreal vs Unity last night. Unreal was looking more capable in its free version than Unity 4 Free, but I would prefer to learn C# over C++. This release makes it an easy choice to give Unity a whirl!
I've seen this type of comment before but usually in the context of someone that already knows either C# or C++. As someone that doesn't know either what factors make you want to learn C# over C++?
I doubt people use C++ if they have another choice. The big problem is that C#'s implementations do not handle memory well enough. The default for them is to heap-allocate most objects, then leave it up to the GC. This means a lot of hacky code to achieve good performance, but it still can't match C++ in many cases. (I'd guess that many apps could see a good double-digit% increase in perf in C# if you could just use the stack more often.)
Plus, if you can use C#, you can probably use F#, which is a far better language than either C++ or C#. Whereas if you need to be runtime-free and C-ABI compatible, your choices of expressive languages are rather limited (Rust being the most exciting one, probably.)
Edit: Also, C++ compilers tend to do a far better job at codegen. Though MS is starting to hint that they're gonna up their JIT story, but they've got a long way to go.
Edit: As to why you'd want to learn one or the other, if you're in games, it seems like you should probably learn C++ because it's so prevalent in games. C# is easy enough to pickup on the side though.
Xamarin, we're looking at you... :)
Can you use Unity to make regular (non-game) apps like you would with Xamarin?
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You're right that you can at least use Perforce as the underlying database, but "worked great" is subjective. The concept of version control is much more integrated into the UX of the Unreal tools, with things like visual diff/merge support for assets built in. Additionally, one of Unreal's killer features for scaling collaboration up with larger teams is the idea of editing a map in multiple distinct layers which ar…
That's an excellent feature. the scenes in unity are binary and not merge-able. That feature alone left me considering other options when I was looking at game engines.
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That's an excellent feature. the scenes in unity are binary and not merge-able. That feature alone left me considering other options when I was looking at game engines.
I am legitimately surprised they're using a binary format for scenes. That is very anti-source control in general. The only binary blobs in the entire project should be assets (e.g. textures, sounds, etc). Everyone loves to whine about XMl, but I'd happily take XML for scene layout over a binary blob.
And they've also improved the merging story, see: http://blogs.unity3d.com/2015/02/17/production-workflow-impr...