Unity 5 released with upgrades, full-featured free version • Hacker News Board

Re: Unity 5 released with upgrades, full-featured free version

#91

Post by shinymark » Tue, Mar 03, 2015, 9:20 PM UTC

Someone1234 wrote: post #70

weaksauce wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Scenes and prefabs have been able to be saved in a text format for a while. That said, they were still effectively unable to be merged in all but the simplest of situations for reasons I don't fully understand.

Hopefully this was improved in Unity 5. One of the buried release notes mentions a new merge tool for scenes and prefabs in the engine.

Re: Unity 5 released with upgrades, full-featured free version

#92

Post by gambiting » Tue, Mar 03, 2015, 9:22 PM UTC

msie wrote: post #81

chrisbennet wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unity has been free for at least a year but they didn't seem to advertise it until until Epic made their announcement.

Now you can deploy to iPhone and Android without paying $150/month.

You could before too. You would get the Unity splashscreen at the start, but you could deploy to any platform from the free version.

Re: Unity 5 released with upgrades, full-featured free version

#93

Post by fredophile » Tue, Mar 03, 2015, 9:24 PM UTC

MichaelGG wrote: post #87

fredophile wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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++?

C#'s tooling and ease-of-use really blows C++ away. Plus there's the safety, where it's rather difficult to introduce a memory-safety issue into C# code, vs C++ where we see vulnerabilities every week due to this problem. 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 i…

While I appreciate your well thought out reply I don't think you have the perspective I'm interested in learning about. From your reply I'd say you already know at least one of the two. I'm interested in knowing why someone without experience in either would choose C# over C++ or vice versa.

Re: Unity 5 released with upgrades, full-featured free version

#94

Post by wlesieutre » Tue, Mar 03, 2015, 9:25 PM UTC

minikites wrote: post #73

joshuapants wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

Fun game, but the AI eventually killed it for me. You can tell a villager to work on a bridge, and he'll sometimes try to walk around the river to work on the far side, starving to death in the process. Oops.

But that wasn't long after release, maybe it's been fixed by now.

Re: Unity 5 released with upgrades, full-featured free version

#95

Post by ephemeralgomi » Tue, Mar 03, 2015, 9:36 PM UTC

weaksauce wrote: post #62

antiuniverse wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Jonathan Blow wrote an excellent article on the text-based entity file format he developed for The Witness, which was designed to be (more) mergeable:

http://the-witness.net/news/2011/12/engine-tech-concurrent-w...

Re: Unity 5 released with upgrades, full-featured free version

#96

Post by ercu » Tue, Mar 03, 2015, 9:38 PM UTC

gambiting wrote: post #92

msie wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now you can deploy to iPhone and Android without paying $150/month.

You could before too. You would get the Unity splashscreen at the start, but you could deploy to any platform from the free version.

is the splash removed in Unity 5 free?

Re: Unity 5 released with upgrades, full-featured free version

#97

Post by scott_karana » Tue, Mar 03, 2015, 9:38 PM UTC

chc wrote: post #46

robertfw wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is my highest desire and I did look around for some bindings, but I think it's still early.

I think it's more likely for Unreal Engine. Epic have said that they're open to new language implementations as long as they are free and open-source (this being why they didn't want C#).

That's changed now, though: Microsoft's Roslyn C# compiler is Apache 2.0 licensed. :-)

https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn/blob/master/License.txt

Re: Unity 5 released with upgrades, full-featured free version

#98

Post by vblord » Tue, Mar 03, 2015, 9:45 PM UTC

Illniyar wrote: post #88

vblord wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you use Unity to make regular (non-game) apps like you would with Xamarin?

as I understand it the "game loop" that is inherit in the Unity engine makes any app made with it a battery hag. Unity does not have an event based system, so it uses a lot more cpu then regular apps.

That's a great point, thanks

Re: Unity 5 released with upgrades, full-featured free version

#99

Post by vblord » Tue, Mar 03, 2015, 9:48 PM UTC

zura wrote: post #76

vblord wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you use Unity to make regular (non-game) apps like you would with Xamarin?

Technically, why not... but that would be overkill. I'd rather make a regular app with Adobe Flex/Air.

Because I would like to do cross platform C# development (using Visual Studio IDE)... but the only option I found so far was Xamarin. But Xamarin's prices are out in the stratosphere somewhere. If they had a model like Unity it would be way better for us small developers.

Re: Unity 5 released with upgrades, full-featured free version

#100

Post by zanny » Tue, Mar 03, 2015, 9:53 PM UTC

rdudek wrote: post #9

Nice response to Unreal Engine price change. Now the hard part is trying to pick which one to learn and use. Competition is a good thing.

When in doubt, UE4 is going to be open source and Unity is not. In my book until Unity opens up their code there is no competition for anything more than a hobbyist toy that needs to get at the engine guts without a new car or more to see it.