Checking out Unity

Aug-30-08, 2:38 pm by Hanford
File under: Video games, consoles, Unity, tech

Yesterday I dusted off my old G4 and set it up in order to mess around with Unity. Unity is a high-level 3d game creation engine that many ex-Director users have switched over to. Games made in Unity can play on Mac or Windows, but the authoring environment is Mac only.

I hope to be able to post my thoughts here on Unity as I explore it's capabilities.

Day 1: Installing the trial

I downloaded and installed Unity 2.1, and immediately ran into a problem: the app was booting to a completely blank dialog box with just an OK button on it, then freezing. OTEE (the makers of Unity) support was quick, but their best suggestion was to re-install. The next day however I solved the problem: it turned out my date/time on my old Mac was not set correctly, and this was playing havoc with the DRM. I set up my date correctly and now Unity is working fine.

First Impressions

So far Unity looks pretty cool. It's apparent that it is optimized for making games compared to Director (which takes a more general approach). That is, there's a lot of primitives and built-in game-oriented options that don't require scripting, or even using pre-written scripts. That's a breath of fresh air compared to Director, which pretty much requires you write your own systems for just about everything. The way the editor interacts with scripts reminds me a lot of Leia, which was LucasArt's in-house level editor originally written for Jedi Knight (which I did level design for).

I'm about 1/3 through the Lerpz tutorial, which is a combo PDF and Unity project file that takes you though the basics of creating a 3rd person platformer using pre-written component scripts. It all seems pretty straightforward so far. My first few nitpicks: I've had a few crashes when switching viewport layouts, and the undo/redo seems a bit sketchy. Still, I'm impressed.

More to come here as I continue to play with it ....

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Wangtang wrote: Jan-14-09, 3:29 pm

Ah, LEIA... I was actually just thinking about LEIA the other day. I just picked up a Macbook Pro over the holiday, and have been thinking about playing with Unity and making a game with my kids...

-Yuan

P.S. I started following you on twitter! :)

Tom Higgins wrote: Sep-1-08, 2:54 pm

I'm glad to hear that you're enjoying Unity so far, although that only comes after the installation issues (I'll be speaking with our support, dev and qa folks to see about better messaging and support). Keep at it though, I think that as you dive deeper into Unity it will continue showing its advantages over other tools over and over. As to your crashes while switching viewport layouts, please log bugs when that happens, you can do that right in the Help menu and it will pull crash log information straight from your machine so we can fix those. Submitting a bug using the Bug Reporter goes right to our engineering team and you can even get a bug ID number to track or follow-up on those issues later on. We're committed to a quality product and hearing from users when they have crashes (or any other bugs/issues) will help us fix those problems.

Rock on Hanford!

Gavin Bowman wrote: Aug-31-08, 12:10 am

Thanks for the write up, I really want to try Unity myself soon. Looking forward to seeing how you get on.

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