Other > Game Development

The thread of programming questions, advice, and secrets.

<< < (3/4) > >>

Buttons840:

--- Quote from: x4000 on June 01, 2010, 07:25:12 pm ---My impression of OGRE and SDL.NET and most of the other open source C# ones was that they were at various levels of polish and completion, and that many of them haven't been updated much in the last 2-3 years.  I don't remember which ones were which, now, and certainly the C++ versions of several of those were much more active and had larger communities surrounding them.

In the end, everything on that list is a great product for certain purposes, or many purposes, as the case may be.  But, we needed something that matched with our really specific needs and our established (and semi unusual, but super effective) style of workflow.  So just because something doesn't work for us, doesn't mean it won't work for you.  Some of it even boiled down to us having this focus on 2D in 3D, a lot of those products would have been much better for 3D purposes, which is what many of them were designed for in the first place.

I couldn't be happy with how Unity turned out, though, and at this stage I love it pretty much the same as I do SlimDX.  Both really solid products.
--- End quote ---

I looked at OGRE mainly because I know it was used successfully for the Steam game Torchlight; which looks good, and I hear it's good, but I haven't played it.  I will have to look at some of those others you mentioned.

I suspect many, if not all, of those engines could have worked but I guess there comes a time when you must choose just one of the many "good" options and go with it.  Glad to hear Unity is working well for you.

And thanks for your detailed comments, it's given me some new engines to look into.

x4000:
Well, also bear in mind that a lot of it is preference.  So a workflow that is ideal and perfect for one team might be horrible for another.  If you have a background in Ruby, you might prefer one platform, if you're a C++ guy you'll prefer a different set, and then the C# folks have a different way of thinking, too.  It also depends on your other goals, and what other components you intend to use (input, rendering, sound/music playback, as the basics -- plus windowing, physics, AI, or whatever else as secondary addons).  In our case we always roll our own physics and AI, but sometimes that's another consideration with a platform.

getter77:
Things being as they are, what's the Arcen take on the upcoming, to a layperson such as myself, "big deal" Version 3 Unity3D release in the grand scheme of things?  Or perhaps even just centric to Arcen's wares going forward with such presumed bullet points being implemented satisfactorily?  Given the like of the above examples, I know not of another engine engaging in such an aggressive and comprehensive seeming release outside of maybe the whole UDK shebang, which could well not be such an apt match up given the nature and history of it.  I would presume you lot will have already filed a pre-order for the rather nice chunk off?...

Though I could also see this being a good article topic to expound upon for when the release actually lands and the reins have been more or less grasped on all that is new and shiny regarding it.

x4000:
Well, we have bought version 3 (we got version 2 for free when we bought version 3), and we're definitely excited about it.  However, a lot of the big-ticket features that Unity themselves are talking about most are not really relevant to us, since they are focused on 3D and we won't even be using them.  But, the things (that we know about) that we're particularly excited about, are:

1. A much-improved font rendering engine, though we don't have details.  I'm really hopeful about this helping us cut down on font-related load with AI War and Tidalis.
2. They'll be having a full debugger, which we're really excited about.
3. Various bugfixes, etc, some we know about and others not yet.

Beyond that, honestly most of the features that would be of interest to us are a bit below the radar of what Unity is really discussing.  I'd like to see some improvements in some parts of the GUI rendering engine, for example.  And I'd love to see some of the Sprite Batching stuff that is reputedly in the latest Unity iPhone versions also make it into regular Unity.  I'd love to see support for things like force feedback, which would make sense given the new consoles they'll be supporting.  And I suspect there are a ton of other small API improvements, so I'll be excited to go through those and see what's what.

But, otherwise, for the time being that's pretty much all we know!

getter77:
Good to know!  I can't help but feel oddly drawn to Unity3D out of a sense that they are primed to be a thing promoting much growth, even aside from the incredibly simple price/licensing side of things, like the whole event they had with Google in terms of significantly upping the ante on "browser" level game development as another outlet.

I have a hard time imagining myself truly needing to reckon an engine into existence from scratch for any personal project down the line versus the likes of Unity and the various others, whereas some years back the field strikes me as one that was far narrower in terms of offerings available period, affordable, and capabilities/intuitiveness of use.

One would also surely think that Unity will hew closer to matching iDevice support with Version 3, especially given the latest wranglings regarding iDevices, Android, and likely specs afoot in the 3DS and PSP2 arenas that'll come out moreso during E3---it is marginally terrifying in an extravagant way how close these devices are hitting parity with the "gist" of desk/lap top level performance in general relative to gaming fidelity.

Still can't escape the feeling that somewhere within these apprenticeship months or beyond I'm going to wind up locked in with Unity3D V3 until I can come to grips with it...   :D

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page