Unity3d Indie is now freeware

[draxd2007]

Just to let everyone know Unity3d 2.6 is out and indie version is now freeware.
Check:

Code: Select all

http://unity3d.com/

[Pyritie]

link for anyone interested: http://blogs.unity3d.com/2009/10/29/a-free-unity/

[Vectrex]

This reminds me, Ogre could use a way to simply reload meshes while it's running. Materials are easy, but meshes are really hard. After you use Unity for a while you realise that runtime refreshing of assets is really REALLY awesome

[cybereality]

Good news. Thanks for the link. Unity has come a long way and it is very promising technology to deploy 3D applications over the web. Now with it being free (and being available on PC) I could see this becoming very popular.

[ppClarity]

No Linux support and a rather hostile/blase attitude against it from the developers

[jacmoe]

It's better than nothing, I guess.
But for any serious use, Indie is unsuitable:

No Render to texture
No Fullscreen compositors
No Realtime shadows
No Video playback
No Streaming of assets
No Plugins support (allows you to use external libraries)
etc..

But, definitely better than a mere demo.

[cybereality]

It's better than nothing, I guess.
But for any serious use, Indie is unsuitable:

No Render to texture
No Fullscreen compositors
No Realtime shadows
No Video playback
No Streaming of assets
No Plugins support (allows you to use external libraries)
etc..

But, definitely better than a mere demo.

Holy smokes! I must have missed that. That makes it pretty much a waste of time unless you want to pay. Oh well.

[Vectrex]

yes but for actually reeeaalllyy finishing a game it's unbeatable. Just for prototyping it's worth it, even if you don't use it in the end and if you actually want to sell it, then forking out $1500 is nothing in the scheme of things.
The 3 main reasons are, NO recompiling code, NO re-importing/re-exporting 3d and 2d assets. You can code in C#, in a very nice component design, WHILE the game is running. That's right, you don't have to stop the game to see code changes take effect. You can save your .max/.blend etc file and it AUTO exports/reuploads WHILE the game is running. Same with psd photoshop files, it detects the updated file and exports/flattens/dds'/refreshes WHILE the game is running. The amount of time and motivation saved is unmeasurable.
Basically, it's ruined me I can't stand the sight of non-realtime/runtime editors anymore This is why I hope the Ogre devs see it and provide a few hooks to make Ogre easier to enable this type of editor. Basically runtime refreshing of everything.

[Pyritie]

yes but for actually reeeaalllyy finishing a game it's unbeatable. Just for prototyping it's worth it, even if you don't use it in the end and if you actually want to sell it, then forking out $1500 is nothing in the scheme of things.
The 3 main reasons are, NO recompiling code, NO re-importing/re-exporting 3d and 2d assets. You can code in C#, in a very nice component design, WHILE the game is running. That's right, you don't have to stop the game to see code changes take effect. You can save your .max/.blend etc file and it AUTO exports/reuploads WHILE the game is running. Same with psd photoshop files, it detects the updated file and exports/flattens/dds'/refreshes WHILE the game is running. The amount of time and motivation saved is unmeasurable.
Basically, it's ruined me I can't stand the sight of non-realtime/runtime editors anymore This is why I hope the Ogre devs see it and provide a few hooks to make Ogre easier to enable this type of editor. Basically runtime refreshing of everything.

Oh my god that is brilliant.

[Kojack]

If you want textures automatically loaded in ogre when they change on disk, use this: http://www.ogre3d.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=47925

[Vectrex]

If you want textures automatically loaded in ogre when they change on disk, use this: http://www.ogre3d.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=47925

Yeah, it's easy to reload materials in Ogre, but it's really really hard to do the same with meshes, which I think is very important to the use of Ogre in editors as well as the runtime reloading thing.

The other thing I like about Unity is there's no seperate editors for anything. It's all totally in game, in context. I never understood why there had to be seperate windowed 'asset' editors, like entity, particle, mesh etc edited in isolation.

[Evak]

I'm quite fond of Unity. Been playing with it for a few months. As an artist with limited coding skills. Can't even do a simple shader. I'm having a blast and can prototype my own simple games with it, despite my very limited coding skills.

The OO drag and drop interface, where you drop scripts on an objects heirarchy tree view and it aquires that script is very nice indeed, and very easy to troubleshoot. The free edition is somewhat limiting if your going for advanced graphics. But if your just making a casual/indie game its fantastic.

[Evak]

Meh, I'd say the two big negatives with free unity is lack of dynamic shadows, plus no way to use a version control system. So fine if your just playing on your own but once you want to start collaborating its an exercise in frustration since unity spits out 1000's of custom data files when you run the editor. And they all have to be shared or your game won't run when loaded onto another system.

[Baddcog]

Not sold on Unity but I think I am gonna check it out if it's easy to proto. I have no coding skills at all, so if this is an easy way to slap a prototype together to try and get a coder interested in a project it might be nice.

But everything I've seen so far and everyhting I am able to do with Ogre leaves me pretty impressed with what can be done.