That’sawesome Scott, thanks for taking the time to write that summary, it’s sounds like there would be a moderate learning curve but nothing some time and perseverance wouldn’t solve - it looks super-cool and always good to expand the horizons etc 😊
Cheers again Jason Roberts Journeyman Software Developer Twitter: @robertsjason Blog: http://DontCodeTired.com Pluralsight Courses: http://bit.ly/psjasonroberts From: Scott Barnes Sent: Monday, 23 September 2013 7:12 AM To: ozDotNet I'm using Unity3D but not for Games, more to do with Enterprise Visualisation(s). I did write my own Voxel Engine + Custom Occlusion Culling (https://vimeo.com/71330826) though so I can say I know enough about Unity3D to be dangerous :D RE: Game Store options. You're not limited by just publishing your game on Windows 8 / Wp8 You can use the same code (sort of) for Android/iPhone aswell given it has its own publishing approach per platform. I say sort of bare in mind your code is likely to have IF/ELSE statements for anything Windows 8 / Wp8 related as opposed to Android/OSX/Windows/Blackberry/iPhone (which pisses me off given the one platform which actually has the easiest developer story is the one that adds the most friction in Unity - go figure). Assuming you're happy for ye olde #IF Windows8 style syntax sprinkled in your Mono C# code you'll be good to go (also keep an eye on the compatibility matrix for other API level issues and differences between Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 and then after that the rest). RE: Tooling. You can use Visual Studio 2012 with Unity if you download the UnityVS plugin (third party) for VS. It allows you to debug in Visual Studio etc so you'll be back at home soon enough although bare in mind debugging is a bit of a hit and miss the bigger the solution becomes and at times your first pass on fields will only occur once (ie if you are debugging a particular property and you collapse the hierarchy then go back the value becomes undefined). You can also use Xamarin Studio or Mono Develop edition (comes with Unity native) but overall C# coders won't find any issue other then the fact Intelli-sense doesn't work as with most Non-VS IDE's. RE: Learning Curve. - The 2D system inside Unity3D is not great, in that you're always in 3D (much like WPF) but you're probably going to want to adopt some framework like NoesisUI (XAML) or ScaleForm (Flash UI) to handle most of the heavy lifting. Unity are working on the 2D UI story and are likely to give that out in future releases but at the moment its kind of build your own from the ground up. - The 2D Arcade mechanics are much easier now with the latest release than they were before given it will handle a lot of the 2D rigid body manipulation for you (see their latest videos). So if the game style you're working on is that then yay! its easier today. - The 3D animation / state machine style manipulation (using Mecanim) is amazingly good (even has the new AutoDesk HumanIK baked in). So if your game is a FPS etc then the hardest part you have to do is figure out what are some basic animations and how detailed you want your models (lighting etc ). You can also re-use the animations for other models as well (ie Male walking can be used for a dwarf walking as well via the new Mecanim system). - If you have a static open world, whereby you want to manually place objects in your world etc (not via procedural code) then you can also get free Occlusion Culling via its bake system (ie you place everything you want on stage, select all objects, bake them and presto you get auto culling when the camera's not looking thus saving your GPU / FPS for free - as in beer). - SDK's etc in C# are pretty basic, normal approach you would use with any DLL out there. Just figure out what you want to do and write the code but keep in mind you're dealing with a subset of Mono itself and if you choose to introduce 3rd party DLL's be mindful that they also have to be written in Mono if you want to drag them into the iPhone/Android/OSX world. - Remember Vertex count trumps polygon count. At the end of the day Polygons are a great for helping modellers keep track of their budgets etc but in Unity3d each GameObject has a limit of 64k in memory of vertex's to be used with GPU. GameObjects are essentially just FrameworkElement you see today in WPF, placeholder object classes that you build up from. In other 3d Tools these are "Null" objects meaning they have no visual appearance. - You also attach behaviours / effects to them so the whole point behind Unity is that it uses a decorator style pattern in that make additive additions to GameObjects (camera control, movement behaviour and so on). It really depends at the end of the day what you want to do and how you go about it (ping me offline or on here for others to learn from) and I can give you more specific pointers as Unity3D is more of an actual 2D/3D rendering pipeline then it is just a "game creator" so there is so much built into this product its simply amazing. The hardest part of my learning curve was wrapping my head around how it handles the GPU rendering, in that with XNA and OpenGL etc you have a lot of finite control over how things are pumped into the GPU Buffer(s) but in Unity3D its heavily automated for you. You can still manipulate this at the lowest point of abstraction between you can the abstraction layer and that for me was good enough. Beyond that you'll have to crack open your C++ skills and go deeper into that realm. You can easily make Angry Birds with this thing and not break a sweat (other than the actual 2D designs). You could in theory even get pretty close to GTA5 with this thing aswell, but that would be a massive undertaking and lastly you could build Minecraft with this engine but bettter gfx! :). --- Regards, Scott Barnes http://www.riagenic.com On Sun, Sep 22, 2013 at 6:57 PM, Nathan Chere <nathan.ch...@saiglobal.com> wrote: Your game has a much broader horizon on Atari 2600 than WinPhone/Win8. From: ozdotnet-boun...@ozdotnet.com [mailto:ozdotnet-boun...@ozdotnet.com] On Behalf Of David Connors Sent: Saturday, 21 September 2013 7:08 PM To: ozDotNet Subject: Re: Unity Learning Curve I can't comment technically but I was at the Tokyo Game Show today and there were a couple of stands there that featured Unity pretty prominently. From a business perspective, your game has a much broader horizon on Unity than WinPhone/Win8. David Connors da...@connors.com | M +61 417 189 363 Download my v-card: https://www.codify.com/cards/davidconnors Follow me on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/davidconnors Connect with me on LinkedIn: http://au.linkedin.com/in/davidjohnconnors On Sat, Sep 21, 2013 at 3:57 PM, <osjasonrobe...@gmail.com> wrote: Hi all, I have an idea for a game (2d, story-led, with a small number of mini-games for story progression). I want to release on Windows Phone (8) and possibly Win 8 stores. While I could do this in XAML/C# I was thinking Unity might be a better fit Has anyone built and published a Unity game? And what’s the learning curve like (tools, languages/scripting/data access/etc)? Cheers Jason Roberts Journeyman Software Developer Twitter: @robertsjason Blog: http://DontCodeTired.com Pluralsight Courses: http://bit.ly/psjasonroberts Click here to report this email as spam. This message has been scanned for malware by Websense. www.websense.com
