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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

#71

Post by pdwetz »

socialist_coder wrote: post #58
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.

I can't speak directly to the differences with Unity, but comparing C# from .NET 2.0 to the latest you're missing: LINQ, dynamic data types, extension methods, optional and named method parameters, covariance and contravariance, async and await... and a whole bunch I'm probably forgetting. It's a lot more flexible now and lets you take advantage of dynamic/functional code. After coding in 4/4.5 for awhile, I certainly wouldn't want to go back to a 2.0 ecosystem.

Re: What's new in Unity 4.3

#72

Post by aras_p »

bloodorange wrote: post #45
malkia wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Professional game developers are exactly the people that would use a product like Unity, Unreal, CryTek's stuff, etc.

As a professional game developer, I can tell you that using Unity was the least pleasant experience I have had (to put it mildly). I don't see it being a tolerable experience for anything more than simplistic games (like a typical casual game). If you were thinking of something like NFS or Unreal or Dues Ex for mobile, it is very painful and you are better off using a decent engine in its place.

Funnily enough, Deus Ex: The Fall for mobile is made with Unity, and the team that built it said it was much, much better experience than the engines they've used in the past. So YMMV.

(note: I work at Unity)

Re: What's new in Unity 4.3

#73

Post by socialist_coder »

tieTYT wrote: post #60
Cacti wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You really can't have multiple people working on the same prefabs or the same scene at once. The files are text, so you can merge them, but anything more than just minor changes will not work properly and someone will have to redo their work.

Working on code is fine and your normal guidelines apply to simultaneous work.

I have Unity projects with 3-5 teammates and we don't run into too many problems with scene/prefab merges. Normally each person is working on separate stuff so it would be rare for 2 people to need to touch the same prefab or scene.

If your scenes or prefabs are huge and it becomes a problem then you probably should think about redoing your architecture to keep your scenes and prefabs smaller.

Re: What's new in Unity 4.3

#74

Post by socialist_coder »

pdwetz wrote: post #71
socialist_coder wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can't speak directly to the differences with Unity, but comparing C# from .NET 2.0 to the latest you're missing: LINQ, dynamic data types, extension methods, optional and named method parameters, covariance and contravariance, async and await... and a whole bunch I'm probably forgetting. It's a lot more flexible now and lets you take advantage of dynamic/functional code. After coding in 4/4.5 for awhile, I certainl…

Extension methods work (I use those all the time), and async and await are unnecessary because Unity gives you coroutines and yield.

The rest of that stuff seems cool though. Oh well =\

Re: What's new in Unity 4.3

#75

Post by binarycrusader »

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.

Yes, they posted on their forums about the licensing issues:

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/197948-New-version-of-Mono-...

Of course, I find it somewhat amusing that licensing is what prevents Unity from upgrading their C# support, since licensing the Unity source code is something that is also very difficult:

  We license Unity source code on a per-case and per-title
  basis via special arrangements made by our business
  development team. As this can be quite expensive, we do
  not generally license source code to smaller operations,
  educational institutions, nor to companies in countries
  which do not have adequate legal intellectual property
  protection.
http://unity3d.com/unity/faq

Re: What's new in Unity 4.3

#76

Post by Arelius »

aras_p wrote: post #72
bloodorange wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a professional game developer, I can tell you that using Unity was the least pleasant experience I have had (to put it mildly). I don't see it being a tolerable experience for anything more than simplistic games (like a typical casual game). If you were thinking of something like NFS or Unreal or Dues Ex for mobile, it is very painful and you are better off using a decent engine in its place.

Funnily enough, Deus Ex: The Fall for mobile is made with Unity, and the team that built it said it was much, much better experience than the engines they've used in the past. So YMMV. (note: I work at Unity)

That is however a mobile game.

Unity is really nice, and if you plan for it, can scale pretty well. It's much more flexible, so it's easier to shoot yourself in the foot, while other engines are less flexible, which can be advantageous at time. Additionally, it's difficult to get it to shine at the higher end in the ways that other engines do. IMO, I think this is more of a problem of bad defaults than any significant lack of features. But the top tier games released by most of the other engine developers have really forced them to tweak the engine in ways that Unity has not.

Re: What's new in Unity 4.3

#77

Post by Arelius »

rbanffy wrote: post #55
kleiba wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've had the opposite problem, seeing in the past an article about Unity the compositor, being about 3D rendering of some sort and instantly thought Unity 3D the engine. This is likely due to my exposure to the gaming space.

Re: What's new in Unity 4.3

#78

Post by bloodorange »

aras_p wrote: post #72
bloodorange wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a professional game developer, I can tell you that using Unity was the least pleasant experience I have had (to put it mildly). I don't see it being a tolerable experience for anything more than simplistic games (like a typical casual game). If you were thinking of something like NFS or Unreal or Dues Ex for mobile, it is very painful and you are better off using a decent engine in its place.

Funnily enough, Deus Ex: The Fall for mobile is made with Unity, and the team that built it said it was much, much better experience than the engines they've used in the past. So YMMV. (note: I work at Unity)

I've worked on a sports game, a racing game, a 3D virtual world with a lot of mini-games, a flying arcade style game, simple casual games and maybe a few I can't recall. This was just those which I was involved in while using Unity. I can't speak for my ex-employer but I will not choose Unity in a hurry any time soon after that.

I lost at least 20% of my working hours trying to get the project to work again or waiting for it to sync to asset server and would always be half hopeful and half terrified at the time of any updates to Unity. "Did they fix the unresponsive 'cancel' button on the assert server update action?", "Did they make it more stable?", "OMG! Another update! Will my entire project re-import again?" were the kind of things that used to run in my mind.

I'd have to hear strong positive reviews from those I trust to even try Unity again (assuming they back them with good reasons).

Re: What's new in Unity 4.3

#79

Post by eeeeaaii »

Chrome is dropping NPAPI support, which includes the Unity browser plugin. Unity will be temporarily whitelisted probably through the end of 2014 but the goal is to remove support entirely.

http://blog.chromium.org/2013/09/saying-goodbye-to-our-old-f...

So if they want to continue offering a browser plugin they have to switch to NaCl, I think.

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