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What's new in Unity 4.3

unity3d.com

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Re: What's new in Unity 4.3

#51

Post by 300bps »

yeppers8 wrote: post #29
300bps wrote: post #6

As someone who made games throughout my childhood, I'm looking forward to trying out the new built-in 2D functionality with my 9 year old. We've used Scratch, RPG Maker and a few other things but it would be nice to use a framework that has such wide publishing capabilities so he can show his friends his creations more easily. I didn't think he was ready to tackle 3D game creation so we haven't tried Unity yet but I…

Unity seems a bit tricky for a 9 year old even with this update, you might want to check out something a bit simpler like Construct 2 to start with. Just an idea

Checked it out - looks awesome and will be downloading the free version to try it out first. Anyone else have other suggestions?

Re: What's new in Unity 4.3

#52

Post by ijk »

TillE wrote: post #36

Unity really desperately needs a Mono upgrade, as their version is years old. Unfortunately it seems to be a licensing issue with Xamarin, because of LGPL constraints on mobile platforms. It's quite frustrating to work with C# without all the features of the last few versions, particularly if you want to use third party libraries.

Which might be why this version of Unity updates to MonoDevelop 4.0.1.

Re: What's new in Unity 4.3

#53

Post by pjmlp »

gnufied wrote: post #39
CmonDev wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mono has a good cross-platform GUI library? IDE is mostly very rich GUI I guess.

Monodevelop was primarily developed on Linux, so this is bit ironic indeed. May be it is because 3D/2D modeling aspects of the IDE, not really because of Coding aspects.

Not any longer, Miguel lost interest.

http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2012/Aug-29.html

Re: What's new in Unity 4.3

#54

Post by saidajigumi »

ijk wrote: post #52
TillE wrote: post #36

Unity really desperately needs a Mono upgrade, as their version is years old. Unfortunately it seems to be a licensing issue with Xamarin, because of LGPL constraints on mobile platforms. It's quite frustrating to work with C# without all the features of the last few versions, particularly if you want to use third party libraries.

Which might be why this version of Unity updates to MonoDevelop 4.0.1.

MonoDevelop != Mono. MonoDevelop is a standalone application, the default Unity code IDE. No doubt an improvement (at least for folks who don't switch Unity to another editor entirely), but not a change in the Unity C# runtime.

Re: What's new in Unity 4.3

#55

Post by rbanffy »

kleiba wrote: post #49
rbanffy wrote: post #47

Am I the only person who opened the link expecting something about Canonical's desktop?

Yeah, the naming has always been unfortunate, but given that the URL after the headline says "unity3d.com" it's kinda clear which of the two was meant.

Unity used 3D acceleration to render its lenses.

If you are completely unaware of the gaming scene and an Ubuntu user (I am in the intersection of both), it's not obvious.

Re: What's new in Unity 4.3

#56

Post by pajaroide »

300bps wrote: post #51
yeppers8 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unity seems a bit tricky for a 9 year old even with this update, you might want to check out something a bit simpler like Construct 2 to start with. Just an idea

Checked it out - looks awesome and will be downloading the free version to try it out first. Anyone else have other suggestions?

I prefer Gamemaker Studio (http://yoyogames.com/) it's more code oriented but very easy to use. There's a free version too. Look up Hotline Miami if you want to see a commercial game made with it.

Re: What's new in Unity 4.3

#57

Post by jamii »

TillE wrote: post #36

Unity really desperately needs a Mono upgrade, as their version is years old. Unfortunately it seems to be a licensing issue with Xamarin, because of LGPL constraints on mobile platforms. It's quite frustrating to work with C# without all the features of the last few versions, particularly if you want to use third party libraries.

It's especially frustrating because ClojureCLR won't run on such old versions of Unity. I spent a good three days trying to backport all the necessary library code and eventually gave up. I was really hoping to get a decent interactive environment working with Unity.

Re: What's new in Unity 4.3

#58

Post by socialist_coder »

TillE wrote: post #36

Unity really desperately needs a Mono upgrade, as their version is years old. Unfortunately it seems to be a licensing issue with Xamarin, because of LGPL constraints on mobile platforms. It's quite frustrating to work with C# without all the features of the last few versions, particularly if you want to use third party libraries.

I mostly program C# inside of Unity. What are some of the newer C# language features that it's missing that you think are pretty cool?

I have my game server as a C# MVC app as well (latest .NET running on Windows, not Mono/Linux) and the only things new that I seem to be using are the async and await keywords. But you don't need them inside of Unity since they have Coroutines and yield.

Re: What's new in Unity 4.3

#59

Post by jamii »

w0utert wrote: post #32
zura wrote: post #2

I'd be more happy if Unity goes toward being more programmer-friendly. Fully code-only projects support, no need to waste a lot of time tinkering in that complex UI, etc...

>> I'd be more happy if Unity goes toward being more programmer-friendly. Fully code-only projects support, no need to waste a lot of time tinkering in that complex UI, etc... I guess you are not really the target audience for Unity if full code-only projects are what you are after. I can't really disagree with you though. I've never used Unity, but I watched the 2D feature video and while I have to see the tooling l…

I did a fair bit of work in Unity earlier this year. The Unity UI makes a lot more sense once you realise it is built by the objects in the scene. You can code entirely in Visual Studio and just use the Unity window to view the results. But you can also start extending your entities with custom controls and debugging panes and build your own graphical tools. Unity basically makes it incredibly easy to whip up graphical debugging and editing tools for the times when that makes sense but doesn't prevent you from working in whatever IDE you are comfortable with.

For example, I worked on a tool for procedurally deforming enemy meshes to prevent the whole 'attack of the clones' vibe that many games fall into. Rather than use print statements to figure out what was happening in the code, I used Gizmos [1] to draw various important coordinates on whichever mesh section was under the mouse and added handles to let me interactively modify the inputs to the algorithm. I also added debugging output on the side panel that updated in real time as I deformed meshes. In Unity its trivial to build those kinds of custom tools. Debugging the same problems with the usual print statements and compile/restart cycle would have been much slower.

I take issue with a lot of the other design decisions in Unity, but the UI is a massive improvement over most work-flows once you learn how to customise it.

[1] http://docs.unity3d.com/Documentation/ScriptReference/Gizmos...

Re: What's new in Unity 4.3

#60

Post by tieTYT »

Cacti wrote: post #34
zura wrote: post #2

I'd be more happy if Unity goes toward being more programmer-friendly. Fully code-only projects support, no need to waste a lot of time tinkering in that complex UI, etc...

Source: me. I don't work for Unity. Software engineer and use Unity for a lot of 'traditional development'. You'd be surprised... there isn't a ton of documentation about it, but most of the engine is pretty well exposed for programmers. You can punch into the rendering pipeline (down to immediate OpenGL mode if you need to), the compilation pipeline (recompiling on the fly or setting up a custom preprocessor), hook…

You seem knowledgeable so I figure I'd reply here since I keep getting mixed messages on this point: Is it easy to commit your Unity code in a VCS and have teammates work on it with you simultaneously? Some people say yes, some say no.
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