Unity progress

[Sizzle]

IGB? wha?

[Lancefighter]

Also: Hai Lance!

HAI!
I thought you said you wouldnt be coming this way? Something about the AI war forums being all proper and not to be trolled? 

[Zeba]

I was nice.. 

Also IGB is short for in game browser. The new chrome based one that got put into eve is pretty sweet though it won't let you install flash for security reasons. 

Hrmmm, so is that something that could be ported into the unity client? Would certainly make getting at the ai wars wiki simpler.

[x4000]

Ah, I didn't know what IGB was, either -- unfortunately, to my knowledge Unity 3D doesn't have one.

[HellishFiend]

I'll be one of the ones shedding a tear over the loss of faux-fullscreen. It's been very good to me.

[x4000]

Well, so will I -- I love that feature.  It's not like we don't value that feature.  It's just one that's far outweighed by all the other benefits.

[Baleur]

Cant you just do it like some third party apps do it? Just have the game start in normal windowed mode, then auto-move the window a certain ammount of pixels so the window frame isnt visible?
Exactly the same effect as faux-fullscreen, just that you dont see the window borders even if they are still "there"

A good example is the eve online tool, which just moves the window in the manner i described. You have the option to either have the app attempt it at start-up of EVE, or check every minute or so and move the window if required. Takes no cpu power, no resources (okay, 500 byte perhaps ).
I dont see why this couldnt be done for AI War as well, i suggest the devs take a look at it and see if it cant be incorporated on start-up.

[x4000]

We don't have any control for doing things like this with Unity.  We'd have to resort to platform-invoke calls specific to each platform, and that's... dicey.  It's likely to introduce a lot of bugs, etc.

[Mánagarmr]

VEMon (and EVEMover) are indeed made of win and awesome. However, I think we have some aspiring programmers in the AI War player base, and someone will inevitably make an app for us xD

[zespri]

x4000,

since you've been pretty open on game development topics, let me ask you this.

I do understand when game developers fix bugs after the release. It's what everyone expect them to do for the price of the product. Also it is natural for developers themselves as when they develop an expansion and come across a bug they just feel dirty if they don't fix it right away.

I do understand when new features are added and free expansions are made - this instils faith to the game users in the company/developer making the game, so the a) more likely to buy future titles knowing that they will receive a lot of love even after purchase and b) more likely to buy this particular title for the same reason. Let's face it everyone like to be in an active project rather than in finished and closed one.

What I don't quite get is why to change graphic engine in already released title. I actually can't remember a single game, where it was done. It is usually a big job that costs a lot of money and for the finished game it usually is not worth the investment.

So, can you tell me why? I'd be really curious to know why a developer choose to spend time (equals money) on such a tremendous change rather than concentrating on new games / expansions / etc?

[keith.lamothe]

Welcome to the forums (you may have already gotten that, but anyhow)

The conversion to Unity is way more than just the graphics engine, it's the whole platform.  So the game will no longer require .NET, DirectX, or SlimDX.  Going further, the game will work on Mac (and be much more likely to work in WINE on Linux, though we won't be able to officially support that).

More details here:

http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,5602.0.html

[zespri]

So the motivation is to let those who use mac and linux play the game? I guess this makes sense, there should be quite a lot of them.

Re: .net 3.5 dependency. I think that .net 3.5 comes built-in to Windows 7 and there are more and more Windows users now that are using Widnows 7 If they are not prevalent among windows users yet they'll sure soon be.

It's also kind of funny. Mono, I think is more like .net 2.0, not like .net 3.5 and .net 2.0 is installed with operating system almost on every windows os and if not you can get it with windows update easily. I guess the problem is that SlimDX requries 3.5 and Unity happily runs on mono.

Do you think that if SlimDX ran on .net 2.0 you'd have a lot less problems with installation?

[Mánagarmr]

x4000,

since you've been pretty open on game development topics, let me ask you this.

I do understand when game developers fix bugs after the release. It's what everyone expect them to do for the price of the product. Also it is natural for developers themselves as when they develop an expansion and come across a bug they just feel dirty if they don't fix it right away.

I do understand when new features are added and free expansions are made - this instils faith to the game users in the company/developer making the game, so the a) more likely to buy future titles knowing that they will receive a lot of love even after purchase and b) more likely to buy this particular title for the same reason. Let's face it everyone like to be in an active project rather than in finished and closed one.

What I don't quite get is why to change graphic engine in already released title. I actually can't remember a single game, where it was done. It is usually a big job that costs a lot of money and for the finished game it usually is not worth the investment.

So, can you tell me why? I'd be really curious to know why a developer choose to spend time (equals money) on such a tremendous change rather than concentrating on new games / expansions / etc?

You haven't played EVE Online, I take it? They completely replaced the Trinity 1.0 engine with an new one (dubbed Trinity 2.0) in order to make use of a lot of new effects, shaders and whatnot. I admit, it's just one game, but it's been done.

[zespri]

You haven't played EVE Online, I take it? They completely replaced the Trinity 1.0 engine with an new one (dubbed Trinity 2.0) in order to make use of a lot of new effects, shaders and whatnot. I admit, it's just one game, but it's been done.

I admit, I didn't know EVE Online did this, but MMORPG is the type of game I'm the least surprised would do that, since their revenue model is to keep up the number of subscribed customers. So for MMORPG it makes complete sense.

[Lancefighter]

it seems more to me that they were using this engine because they either hadnt found unity or this one was currently better - after developing tidalis in this new engine, they wanted to move it all there as to easier develop for both games..

Keep in mind that valve completely rewrote the hl2 engine to run on macs recently as well...