Unity in general

[keith.lamothe]

I used eclipse for Java for a few months to help out with a game project some years ago.  It's pretty good, but it's nowhere near as good as visual studio.  That's not an insult, it's just hard to compete with the best piece of software ever written

[Wanderer]

Cheers! Good luck to you, it sounds like you're at the early stages of a fun journey. My main comment is: unity 3d actually greatly simplifies a lot of things about game development. Most of your opening comments apply to game development as a whole, heh.

Agreed, and thanks.  Yeah, some of this is just figuring out what a Matrix is, or a Vector2.  I know what they mean... ish... but not completely what they're representing.

Not to say unity isn't complex, but you're not having to deal with raw vertices and triangle faces and so on unless you really choose to; you're not having to worry about initialization sequences for the various directx sub-components, each of which is more than a little complex; you don't have to worry about completely resetting everything by hand whenever the fullscreen mode changes (having to do this is why so many older early-2000s games would crash on the switch); and so on and so forth.

Oh, I can imagine.  I knew the pool was deep from some direct code work I did on some 2D games and programming courses WAY back (think Win 95 wayback) but um... yeah.  This pool got a lot deeper when I wasn't looking.   

C# is superior   Sorry, had to get that out of my system.  Though I'm sure it will recharge in the next 5 minutes.

Superior perhaps, but I've been doing VBA/VBscript coding so long it's second nature.

I'm working through a copy of Unity 3x Game Development by Example - Beginner's Guide.

We didn't use any books (at least, I didn't) but from what you said it's helping, so that's good.

Fair enough, but I'm coming to the conclusion of just how much I'm a neophyte in the game implementation mechanics.  I've been theoretical FAR too damned long.

But that said, it is actually usable, if you're not too perfectionistic and are well practiced in the general form of "bang head against brick wall until it comes down", and if you've been programming that long I'm sure you're pretty good at that.

LOL, yeah, eventually head to desk impact maintenance on code performs as advertised.

We've only used the PC support, Mac support, and web-browser support (for Tidalis Lite), but I have to say it's incredibly good.  Not without some pain (Tidalis's release was our first official mac support, and there were some unity bugs that did awful things... but those bugs have been fixed since then, it was the late 2.x days for unity), and since Chris handled most/all of the porting itself I'm sure he's probably less unanimous in his praise for it... but all told, the porting works, and it works well.

That's awesome to hear.

One thing to bear in mind when making inferences from our stuff is that we deviate substantially from the path that Unity tries to guide you down usage-wise.  I think the only GameObject's we use are:

Um.  Er.  Hm.  Thanks for the warning.

Unity uses mono and it works great   There's a few things that aren't as good as .NET but the biggest weakness in our setup is the lack of ability to do generalized line-level profiling, and that's more a weakness of the Unity setup than the mono one (I think current versions of mono have at least the necessary basic support for this).

I have a few complaints about mono but its not mono's entirely mono's fault.  It's that I'm just not used to its idiosyncracies, like the file needs to be saved before a variable gets added to the keyword collection, or that the keyword collection doesn't always include certain items in function arguments that it'll include in a newline.

Thanks for the extra information guys.  It'll probably just back burner for a while as I dig through it and goof around.  I don't think the first stages of my project are overly ambitious other than the fact that I have absolutely no idea what the hell I'm doing yet.     Luckily being in software design this long has given me a good ground state for the mixed waterfall/sprint model I prefer, and I'm tackling things in (what I currently think) is a reasonable volume of work per step.  Well, at least that's what the incomplete design doc looks like so far.  I'm still working through Chapter 9 for now!   

[x4000]

I got into "modern" game programming around 2002.  I was working in C# at that time, but C# was new and wasn't used in any games at that point.  So I had to read books in C++, then figure out how to translate that stuff to C# and the managed libraries.  Fun!  Tutorials and such have come a long way since then, but the pool is even deeper now (shaders, etc) than it was even that far back.

I missed out on the windows 95 programming era, though I certainly used that OS plenty; all my limited programming at the time was DOS-focused, though.  Mostly QBASIC.  The difference in depth between that pool and the current one is... substantial, as you say. But definitely surmountable!

[keith.lamothe]

I have a few complaints about mono but its not mono's entirely mono's fault.  It's that I'm just not used to its idiosyncracies, like the file needs to be saved before a variable gets added to the keyword collection, or that the keyword collection doesn't always include certain items in function arguments that it'll include in a newline.

I'm not sure I follow: do you mean including symbols in the intellisense dropdowns (in VS terms)?

In any event, we're actually using a .NET coding environment, but the code is only ever run by the mono runtime.  The result is that VS gives us all the normal behavior we'd expect from working on C#.NET, up to the point where we try to run it.

Thanks for the extra information guys.  It'll probably just back burner for a while as I dig through it and goof around.  I don't think the first stages of my project are overly ambitious other than the fact that I have absolutely no idea what the hell I'm doing yet.     Luckily being in software design this long has given me a good ground state for the mixed waterfall/sprint model I prefer, and I'm tackling things in (what I currently think) is a reasonable volume of work per step.  Well, at least that's what the incomplete design doc looks like so far.  I'm still working through Chapter 9 for now!   

There's a lot of things particular to game design/programming, yea, but having that solid background in other software development really does help a lot.  I had no professional game programming experience, and only about say 300-400 hours of amateur game programming experience, in January 2010 when I started some part-time contracting work for Arcen.  But the previous 5 years of professional enterprise programming experience was pretty helpful   That, and Chris is an excellent teacher.  And if I'm honest, the fact that he's always handled the true guts of the graphics stuff helps

[Wanderer]

Note to self paying from your new iphone knockoff is a serious pita.  Yeah I meant the intelligence equivalent there.

[RogueDeus]

This may be an out of left field sort of question but I am really curious how you guys handle the scene/level limitations of Unity. What little I have learned to do makes pretty significant use of gameobject scripting and the level editor, but I get the impression you barely utilize either.

How do you manage that?

And what happens when you complete your work? Do you build it from the unity tool set as though it where a normal project?

I hope I am not asking you something that has already been answered.

[keith.lamothe]

This may be an out of left field sort of question but I am really curious how you guys handle the scene/level limitations of Unity. What little I have learned to do makes pretty significant use of gameobject scripting and the level editor, but I get the impression you barely utilize either.

Right, we just have one scene and it's just one camera with the game drawn in front of it via orthographic-perfect projection.

How do you manage that?

Chris set it up, but once it's in place it's quite simple

And what happens when you complete your work? Do you build it from the unity tool set as though it where a normal project?

We do build the Unity Standalone Player in Unity, yes, but for an update if the changes are all code and/or graphics we don't have to rebuild in Unity because a c# build from VS will create a dll we can just copy over the c-sharp dll used by the standalone, and the graphics are stored separate from the asset bundle and are loaded at runtime.  Said runtime loading is definitely not the way Unity likes it to be done, though, as we've found it's really quite slow in 4.0 in some circumstances.

If we have to change something in the asset bundle that requires rebuilding from within Unity.

[x4000]

Yeah, I would also add we use practically no gameobjects, and we runtime-load most of our assets via the WWW class.  I literally can go a month without opening the unity editor, while releasing daily updates to a game.