Game News Wasteland 2 to use Unity

[SerratedBiz]

No, it's obviously much more insightful to believe that they are doing the coding for Unity.

ITT codexers shot down by developer with actual arguments, Drocon disappears into the wasteland.

 

[tiagocc0]

No, it's obviously much more insightful to believe that they are doing the coding for Unity.

This would mean they would save money, because Unity would be giving them the license or offering a great discount.

 

[Davaris]

I assume he means the Linux version of W2 not the Linux version of Unity.

No they are being given the code base, so they can make Unity work on Linux.

The express part, sounds like they can only make alterations to the code base, for that purpose.

 

[Captain Shrek]

Smartphone/ Tablet version incoming. Considering that touchpad is very nicely suited to TBS games it does make sense. Although PC is the best platform.

 

[EG]

http://www.unifycommunity.com/wiki/..._into_Unity_with_UnityScript#It.27s_different

Doesn't look as limiting as I expected. Hm.

 

[EG]

Think I'll stick with mucking about Unity for now. Though I'd like to see your results with C4, Drocon. See where I get in a couple of days, though.

 

[EG]

And I wasn't posting to gain your approval. I'm just curious what you've accomplished using C4.

 

[oscar]

Well I just sent my resume and a single unity3d- project to them. It was the one I developed hoping to make it into the Unity Asset Store. Turn based I promise you!

here if anyone is curious:
http://www.sendspace.com/file/95ewmm


Also I suppose you could see this as a very very gentle look into what could come of a UnityEngine turnbased game. 7-zip to extract.

 

[Gregz]

But whether you like mine or not there's games and there's games, and I know just how far you'd get trying to make say a Jagged Alliance 2 clone using Unity. Complete failure. Only thing good about Unity is literally that it takes 1 second to plop in art assets. Again, guess what? While it takes longer in C4 it takes like 0.1% of the time I spend actually developing the game.

 

[Jaesun]

I'm just curious what you've accomplished using C4.

Yet has never once shown any proof of such EXPART MAD Programming skills. He is the world most authority on programming. So you just better listen to the expert.

GO GO Page 11!

 

[Grim Monk]

 

[Davaris]

If anyone does want to try C4 don't let C++ intimidate you. I thought it would be harder but it's actually much easier than using other languages.

I don't understand why people talk about C++, as if it is scary. If they find C++ intimidating, the 3D math is going to make them head for the hills.

 

[tiagocc0]

If anyone does want to try C4 don't let C++ intimidate you. I thought it would be harder but it's actually much easier than using other languages.

I don't understand why people talk about C++, as if it is scary. If they find C++ intimidating, the 3D math is going to make them head for the hills.

Yep, I know c++ but I ran away from math/3d.

 

[Jigawatt]

Well this is quite a thread

Some facts about Unity:

- Unity is the engine that brought game engines to the masses with it's cheap pricing scheme. Before Unity, Unreal only had "buy me for a million bucks".

Damn straight. It wasn't until Unity that any of these slowpokes came along, truly they are the champion of the little people.

- Unity is the engine that brought multi-platform support to become a standard. They started on Mac and currently offer: PC, Mac, iOS, Android, PS3, XBOX 360, Wii, Web, NativeCL and Flash.

Considering that W2 was kickstarted under the assumption that it was targeting devices that feature kb/mouse as standard input, I don't know what you're getting at here. Saying "it has PC and Mac!" isn't a sterling endorsement.

- Unity is considered one of the 3 big ones, including: Unreal and CryEngine as stated by the guys making Unreal and CryEngine during interviews.

Ahh... the appeal to popularity. Makes sense to get the main theme of your upcoming posts out of the way early I suppose.

- Unity has a very efficient art asset pipeline - Easier than both CryEngine (which is tailored more to 3dsmax) and Unreal which has limits on how characters have to be constructed for instance.

I'll admit I can't comment too much here - I make programmer art. But exporting a rigged mesh and material and giving them names has served me well outside Unity, I can't really envision how it could be much more efficient.

- Unity offers scripting in 3 languages: C#, UnityScript and Boo - So no limits to what you can script. CryEngine is adding C# support as we speak. Unreal is looking into how it can make it's scripting pipeline as fast as Unity's.

Ugh, ugh and ugh. I went to the unity home page, support -> documentation -> basics and landed here. You can click any link on the page and not see any code. You know, to make a computer game. When you finally get to the scripting reference, you can see example functions with at most 2 but generally 1 line of code. I've never seen a game engine so concerned about my impending RSI in my life.

- The new GUI system, which will make it easier to make animated UIs. Beyond that there are already 3 commercial grade GUI solutions. Scaleform is also getting a Unity version and it's easy as hell to write your own.

Woo! It took me about 10 hours to get Qt to share a frame buffer with my own game project (yeah, yeah - every career programmer has a game project on the side) and now I can use all of Qt's widgets, theming and animation. I imagine this might also be possible in Unity, but again, isn't it supposed to be saving me from adding some 3rd party 'commercial grade GUI solution'?

- DirectX 11 support - for all the awesome graphics features PC users want.

Nuts to that. Aside from the fact that any DX11 features would be missing from Linux, Mac and 58% of PC users, nobody funded W2 for the shinies. NOBODY

Non-Unity related issues:

- Making an engine from scratch for a game in this day an age of shrinking budgets, is not really an option, unless your game has some feature that is not possible in any other engine, your
best option is to use a tried and tested solution. Simply because you don't need additional risk.

I don't think anyone here is suggesting rolling an engine from scratch. Merely that Unity is inappropriate. W2 is a game crying out for a well modelled back end - following good software engineering principles in a language that encourages them will end up making designing a compelling RPG possible. The 3D / GUI stuff is just the presentation / controller layer, bind them to your great back end and then you have a game. The very fact that Unity has 'an interface' and never once mentions an IDE is why it falls short for this project.

With Unity they can have a prototype working within a day.

And here you've accidentally stumbled into the heart of the matter. Give 100 people Unity, a day later you have 100 prototypes. Never mind that they're all the same bloody prototype. W2 backers don't want what everyone else is making, and they don't want something plug and play that someone can whip up in a day just with custom art. And in the end, the very features that allow you to have your first-person-walker in a day are what you now have to fight against when you want to make a turn based RPG.

What exactly do you think makes an RPG complex? RPG games are complex because there is so much content you need/want to create/handle. Their complexity stems from handling quest trees, randomly generated items and mainly balancing.

Aha, so that's why they chose Unity! It's well known for it's robust quest editor and tools to help balance gameplay and generate items unique to the Wasteland universe. Oh... wait, no...

Compared to other games, RPGs have simplified AI and slower pacing, which are both great advantages. An AI in an RPG doesn't traverse an island or deal with a physically based world (physics inluded).

CryEngine is a state of the art engine, not because it can handle realistic graphics, but because it can do that while handling high quality physics and AI that is pretty smart (enemies sneak up on you, find alternate roots, hide, work in teams - this in real-time).
To do this in real-time is an achievement, making quests and items isn't as hard as far as tech goes, it can be more time consuming though.

As words fail me

Page 9

That's a lot of words to say "It's popular, it must be good!"

You can't make a full game with just Ogre3D

Torchlight got thrown down the memory hole?

People who are bashing an engine choice should at least post "their alternative" so I can point and laugh.

A truly constructive attitude to take. No, you're not a Unity shill, but any alternative to it is laughable

 

[Hirato]

Brian Fargo ‏ @BrianFargo
We have been supplied the source code to Unity for the express purpose of making the Linux version.

@ https://twitter.com/#!/BrianFargo

Why didn't they just do with Unigine then?
The porting work is already done for them on the platforms that matter (Windows, OS X, Linux... FreeBSD via Linux emulation) and they were offered a free license to boot.

 

[FeelTheRads]

hekir stayla ‏ @hekirstayla
@BrianFargo Are you confident in their Linux support? They don't support at the moment and Linux promise brought you my money.

Brian Fargo ‏ @BrianFargo
@hekirstayla I am confident in my engineers' abilities and the commitment from Unity to make Linux work properly.

So, no, they're not "working for Unity".

 

[Executer]

Thread needs more engine rage, but atleast I've now been made aware all engines are shit.

(Statement fixed)

 

[Davaris]

Thread needs more engine rage, but atleast I've now been made aware all engines are shit.

(Statement fixed)

Nah, just the marketing guys are that way.

 

[Brother None]

Why didn't they just do with Unigine then?
The porting work is already done for them on the platforms that matter (Windows, OS X, Linux... FreeBSD via Linux emulation) and they were offered a free license to boot.

Because the multi-platform support wasn't the only factor in deciding this, and Unigine never offered source code access or support for free. Forget the free part, it wasn't all that meaningful, they chose Unity because it is better for this project.

 

[kazgar]

Why didn't they just do with Unigine then?
The porting work is already done for them on the platforms that matter (Windows, OS X, Linux... FreeBSD via Linux emulation) and they were offered a free license to boot.

Because the multi-platform support wasn't the only factor in deciding this, and Unigine never offered source code access or support for free. Forget the free part, it wasn't all that meaningful, they chose Unity because it is better for this project.

Brother None, why are you coming in here with relevant to this project facts? Ruining the whole tone of the thread!

 

[Hirato]

Because the multi-platform support wasn't the only factor in deciding this, and Unigine never offered source code access or support for free. Forget the free part, it wasn't all that meaningful, they chose Unity because it is better for this project.

Would access to the source code really be needed?
I'm under the impression that it ships with a plethora of tools for use in creating content and a scripting language (based on Ecmascript IIRC) that would be used to create the game systems and logic... At least I imagine their own in-house game, Oilrush, took this route... some bug-fixes aside.
Even if you did need to get commercial support separately for Unigine (no source) I imagine it would cost less than a unity license with the source code included.
I believe Unigine also offers cheaper licensing options for Indies, but those from memory do demand royalties.


Still, Unity already runs on OS X, so the native Linux version should be a non-issue.

 

[Hirato]

The drivers are the issue because they are completely different from OS X. That's why it seems like a bad idea for InXile to add its own Linux support. Then you take all the driver support onto yourself, and that's the main thing an enginemaker does for you (It's not like tools can't be done by just about anyone, or a renderer is impossibly hard to make - or just use Ogre with your own tools).

While it's true that the drivers are different, I don't see what this has to do with porting Unity to Linux.
The renderer should function completely unchanged as both platforms utilise solely OpenGL for hardware acceleration (though I believe OS X is still stuck at supporting up to 2.1).
Where issues are likely to crop up are with context creation and the interface, assuming they use a library like SDL or something else cross platform it's likely that the port won't require a single modification to the renderer or the context management.

As for driver bugs, NVIDIA's drivers are generally really good and as for ATI's, I know for a fact that every single OpenGL related issue on Linux is also reproducible with their windows counterpart - so we should be fine as long as the renderer gets tested, even if on Windows, and I've no reason to believe that the OpenGL renderer would be unavailable on Windows so there should've already been plenty of testing.
The proprietary NVIDIA and ATI drivers do share most of their code among their various counterparts, after all.
As for Intel and the Mesa drivers, whilst they have improved considerably over the years and are showing the first vestiges of full hardware accelerated OpenGL 3.0 support. You are still crazy if you intend to use them for gaming, but for what it's worth I believe OilRush (It's the most graphically intense Linux game I know of!) is fully functional and playable with the mesa drivers.

 

[crojipjip]

The drivers are the issue because they are completely different from OS X. That's why it seems like a bad idea for InXile to add its own Linux support. Then you take all the driver support onto yourself, and that's the main thing an enginemaker does for you (It's not like tools can't be done by just about anyone, or a renderer is impossibly hard to make - or just use Ogre with your own tools).

The Unigine offer was kind of crap because the binary version is something like 5k and the source version is way more. Still a nice gesture, though.

No offense man, but drivers are an issue for Linux. An were much more of an issue.
for Windows drivers are as good as they will ever be.
Mac, we don't have a choice how good things are. They just are what Mac standard allows.

This shit about drivers being a part of engine development needs to be sectioned off from the word engine. The engine drives your game. What drives the engine is the engine, the parts assimilated by the designer into a design. By any means software, the real limitation is hardware. But today so little limitation applies to a game like Fallout. The universe is nice but it doesn't call for extreme tech. In fact I could make a better fallout than the originals and new vegas and anything you could probably imagine, and I say this before even trying to visualize what I mean. I know my shit. And I know the shit you want to view as so shitty, isn't quite shitty for your reasons. The day you make a topic and get 10 members to agree to a new engine, and will do all the content by yourselves for the community, is the day you can tell me the physics of design is trumped by what drivers mean today.

 

[asper]

Wasn't Cleve's zombie game also done in Unity? I remember his posts praising the engine, telling us how he whipped up something that looked better than L4D in a couple of days

 

[Yaar Podshipnik]

You know, all this talk made me take a look on several engines "Features" page. The stuff shown there is, in my opinion, very telling about how the engine devs treat their developers. Each picture is clicky, it will get you to the feature page itself.

Panda3D:


UDK:


C4:


Unigine:


Unity3D:


You will notice, that while other engines (even as "casual" as Panda3D") list their features clearly, Unity3D guys feel the need to streamline the experience and break up the information into small, easily manageable chunks hidden behind big colorful buttons. This tells me that this engine is not addressed towards programmers but artists.

All engines provide buttons to whore themselves on twitter and facebook, except, unsurprisingly, Panda3D.

I give mad props to C4 guys for including engine architecture graph so visibly. It speaks to my inner engineer.

Different engines, for different kind of the job. None of them will let you make a fun game if you (or your team) suck at design and/or coding. Some of them look easier to get into than the others though.

Now, to address something that koyima said about assets. You are right, people will reuse existing assets because it is cheaper. They will reuse models, effects, animations, AI scripts etc. We see this in the movies, we see it in the games. And you know what - it fucking sucks. It's the same stuff all over the place. The same trees, the same cars, the same human models, in same clothes. There is less and less variation. Games are becoming mass produced shitware. What was once a labor of love and fruit of dedication, a great expression of creativity now is becoming another commodity product. Even the AI bugs are similar/same in different games. It was awesomely fun to try to "break" a game, see where its limitations are. Now, with so much reuse, it's the same everywhere. That is why Asset Store things piss me off - they kill creativity in the name of faster turnover.