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How Unity3D Became a Game-Development Beast
Nerval's Lobster writes "In the early 2000s, three young programmers without much money gathered in a basement and started coding what would become one of the most widely used pieces of software in the video game industry. 'Nobody really remembers how we survived in that period except we probably didn't eat much,' said David Helgason, the CEO and co-founder of Unity Technologies, maker of the Unity3D game engine. A decade later, untold numbers of developers have used Unity3D to make thousands of video games for mobile devices, consoles, browsers, PCs, Macs, and even Linux. The existence of Unity3D and similar products (such as the Unreal Engine and CryEngine) helped democratize game development, making the kinds of tools used by the world's largest game companies available to developers at little or no cost. This has helped developers focus less on creating a video game's underlying technology and more on the artistic and creative processes that actually make games fun to play. In this article, Helgason talks about how Final Cut Pro helped inspire his team during the initial building stages, how it's possible to create a game in Unity without actually writing code, and how he hopes to make the software more of a presence on traditional consoles despite Unity3D being several years late to supporting the PS3 and Xbox 360."
My only experience with Unity is seeing how its Oculus Rift support has made rapid prototyping of games possible. The headset was out for literally days before the first demos started popping up.
SDL is actually quite thin, close to hardware, abstraction layer.
There still hasn't been a single AAA title developed with Unity 3D, despite their many claims.
Cities in Motion 2 just came out...
Allowing more open development is fantastic. However, the summary (and really a ton of people) have the relationship at play with games backwards:
"This has helped developers focus less on creating a video game's underlying technology and more on the artistic and creative processes that actually make games fun to play."
The underlying technology, however, is the essence of the game. It's what tells us how mario moves compared to sonic or y metroid cant crawl. The artistic and creative process, while quite important, largely affect how a game is presented visually and thematically. The rise of one-size-fits-all platforms, designed to be broadly used not only between titles but between genres and platforms, has led to a massive homogenization of gameplay. Gameplay, of course, is what makes a game fun to actually play. Setting is not gameplay. Writing is not gameplay, and graphics aren't gameplay.
Yes, these platforms are customizable, but the distinctness that came with each game or class of games has largely been lost as games increasingly rely on generalized engines. Unity and Unreal (and various other engines) are great, but they're not responsible for freeing developers to make experimental games. To the extent that is happening, it is despite of, not because of, those engines.
Pfft, noob. Everyone knows you let a company build up a nice wad of cash before you unleash the patent lawyers.
This has helped developers focus less on creating a video game's underlying technology and more on anti-piracy tecnology, ad-serving technology, nickel and dime technology.
There hasn't been a triple aaa title released that didn't have it's own in house engine developers that was any good.
Skyrim being the last one I played.
Call of duty sucks balls.
Halo, Unreal, Half Life all great titles all releasing stuff all great games, but they have no need for unity3d. Same with FarCry but they sold out and are producing arcade shit instead of military grade simulations so screw them.
AAA titles cost millions to produce, and are mostly bland risk-averse garbage. (With a few notable exceptions)
Unity enables creative people to publish high-concept games that are actually a lot of fun. They're often cheap too. I'm ok with this, because I've found that playing a handful of cheap games that are very good at one or two things to be a lot more interesting than large bland titles that do nothing well.
If your game is a success you can move on to better frameworks or brew your own.
Of course, Unity also enables a lot of crap companies to make shovelware games, but that's a function of the market ant not really unity's fault.
Unity3d can build a target application that runs on Linux, but the development environment only runs on Windows or Mac
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Unity doesn't suck (although the workflow doesn't suit everybody). A lot of Unity users are inexperienced, and don't fully understand how Unity's rendering tech works.
Without a background in lower-level games/graphics programming, It's very easy to over-use expensive features (pass-per-light dynamic lights, projectors, full-screen post effects) without knowing what Unity is having to do behind the scenes.
how it's possible to create a game in Unity without actually writing code
Kinda like how you can build a car out of legos without doing any engineering.
Better known as 318230.
I'm grateful because they now support linux and now we have more games. Humble bundle showed that there is a linux market, only a little smaller than the mac one and with steam also supporting linux there is already some pressure to other engines to also support linux (or risk losing some market share on a highly competitive market). Due to this CryEngine is already being ported to linux (sadly still with unknown release date) and several other companies with in house engines are also testing the linux port.
Again, thanks for your support, unity
Higuita
There still hasn't been a single AAA title developed with Unity 3D
/shrug
Meanwhile, games like Kerbal Space Program are far more compelling than any AAA title ever developed, and it's still in alpha.
LOL... "muck about", he says, as if that is relevant.
At least Unity lets you create and publish games, and for free at that. Go ahead and "muck about" in CryEngine, get something like the basis of a game conceptualized, start building and importing assets and writing code. Let me know how relevant or useful that is when you realize you need more than $1 million USD per license for CryEngine and everything you learned "mucking about" has no bearing on development processes or standards in an engine you can actually afford to release in without being owned by a AAA-class publisher or succeeding in a record-breaking Kickstarter. There's a REASON indie devs don't use CryEngine.
Because otherwise, CryEngine has little to no bearing on developing in any other engine. How do I know this? By spending 3 years as a member of the dev team for Mechwarrior: Living Legends, as well as being a developer at my own studio, working in... you guessed it, Unity3D. After the MWLL project wound down, a group of us set out to start our own studio, and even with numerous, highly-placed contacts at CryTek, we *still* chose Unity for a reason: value, because Unity is actually affordable by us merely mortal developers without Chris Roberts-like bank accounts and industry connections and multi-million dollar Kickstarters.
I could release a game in Unity tomorrow. It might look like crap and have bugs, but I can release and publish a game in 24 hours. CryEngine? HAH, good luck with that. At best, it still won't work or look any better than my Unity game would, due mainly to the quality and quantity of art that I could produce, which the engine has nothing to do with, and the amount of code I could pump out, which CryEngine doesn't just automagically make better. If you've never *worked* with CryEngine (ala, more than just "mucking about"), you simply aren't qualified to comment about features being locked away or unavailable in Unity, much less things just working, because no matter the features CryEngine might let you "muck about" with, they're not relevant if you can't afford the engine license in the first place. Despite what the fanboys think, CryEngine is not some shining bastion of game engine perfection that can do no wrong: and it is a giant square peg that fits in a giant square hole, filling a purpose, whereas Unity is a little more like a bunch of legos - the starter kit for which is FREE - that, when assembled, fit a series of differently shaped, if generally smaller holes, and it fits them well.
I doubt anyone who has actually published a title in CryEngine AND Unity would say this is is really anything more than and apples and oranges comparison at best, as they are different engines with different strengths and weaknesses, and they fill different niches within the game development community.
"Inveniemus Viam Aut Faciemus" 'We will find a way... Or we will make one!' --Hannibal of Carthage
I am starting to use Unity, despite not knowing C# (though it's easy enough to pick up) and find it beneficial to someone who has a bit of a coding background, but absolutely no experience or knowledge of "okay, I know how to write code, but how do I apply it to making a game, where you have so many different layers and abstractions. . . .?"
I mean, I could use something like SDL or a number of other options, but after the "make a ball move around on the screen" part, I have no idea where you go. How do you turn that into a small engine or a small game? In fact, this seems to be where a lot of fledgling game makers get hopelessly lost.
I eventually just caved in and realized that instead of dreaming of writing my own engine from scratch in C and building a game around it (thinking a roguelike or Dwarf Fortress style), I might benefit from learning how to use a system that has a workflow and sort of gives you a path for "where the fuck do I go from here?". Once I have a clue, maybe I can go back and write something from scratch and be all artisanal.
but you're comparing unity with CryEngine... when you should be comparing it with Irrlicht or Ogre or similar.
But isn't this the problem of pretty much all game engines today? I mean you look at how good some of the games in the golden age of 99-04 looked and played, even on weak as hell hardware, and then you look at some of the frankly insane system requirements for modern games, games that only look moderately better than those games from more than a decade ago, and you can tell what having the "any idiot can use this without knowing anything" mantra when it comes to game engines has cost us.
Everyone talks about "Windows bloat" but nobody talks about engine bloat and how many extra resources all this abstraction is costing us. It will be interesting to see if mobile gaming will bring a return to less abstraction or if like PCs they are gonna have to just grow insanely powerful so they can run engines that let you build by drag and drop.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Because when a game is released they tend not to plaster "Made with Unity" on it.
However, if you look at the games list there may be a few on there you'd recognise: http://unity3d.com/gallery/made-with-unity/game-list
Sure, there's alot of mobile games on there, like Bad Piggies and Temple Run 2, but there's a few really good PC indie games, like Dungeonland, Pid, Guns of Icarus and Endless Space