What's new in Unity 4.3(unity3d.com) |
What's new in Unity 4.3(unity3d.com) |
It's quite frustrating to work with C# without all the features of the last few versions, particularly if you want to use third party libraries.
It's one thing if you're a major version behind (unfortunate, but manageable), but 2.0 was 5 years ago. That's not a major version, that's practically an entire generation.
Also, lack of compute shader support for anything other than Windows and DX11 is a bit of a drag. Compute shaders are really the future of development and it's a bit of a pain not to be able to use them without going through a number of hurdles. This should be fixed eventually though, I'd imagine.
Hopefully they figure out a better way to handle all their platforms equally, at least for development purposes. Being held back on the desktop just because Unity can deploy to mobile is, again, a bit of a drag. I'd rather have the option.
I have my game server as a C# MVC app as well (latest .NET running on Windows, not Mono/Linux) and the only things new that I seem to be using are the async and await keywords. But you don't need them inside of Unity since they have Coroutines and yield.
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/197948-New-version-of-Mono-...
Of course, I find it somewhat amusing that licensing is what prevents Unity from upgrading their C# support, since licensing the Unity source code is something that is also very difficult:
We license Unity source code on a per-case and per-title
basis via special arrangements made by our business
development team. As this can be quite expensive, we do
not generally license source code to smaller operations,
educational institutions, nor to companies in countries
which do not have adequate legal intellectual property
protection.
The compiler and parsing pipeline is exposed, there is an interpreter built-in, you can hook into the assemblies, etc. I have a console in my game that does input/output from a Boo interpreter and it is exposed to everything in the game scope with no real extra effort on my part.
Only took a few hours to set up, most of which was spent either writing a UI for it or sorting out some compatibility issues (Unity doesn't come with a copy of Boo.Lang.Interpreter).
It's pretty sweet.
The IDE does not run on linux, just mac and windows.
I was told by someone familiar that the XBOX One license will be free.
This was announced some time ago already, http://blogs.unity3d.com/2013/11/05/big-xbox-one-news-for-un...
I think it will also be free on XBOX ONE
http://blog.chromium.org/2013/09/saying-goodbye-to-our-old-f...
So if they want to continue offering a browser plugin they have to switch to NaCl, I think.
In general I feel like the best practice is to touch these .unity scenes as little as possible, and spend most of your time iterating on prefab files, which are easier to read.
Haven't tried git with unity so I dunno if there are any special case issues there.
The Editor loads assemblies dynamically as well so you can branch/checkout and the Editor will automatically recompile everything without a restart.
Only problem I've had is with scene objects but I think I recently fixed that once with a tweak to my .gitignore.
Direct link: http://netstorage.unity3d.com/unity/UnitySetup-4.3.0.exe
If you are completely unaware of the gaming scene and an Ubuntu user (I am in the intersection of both), it's not obvious.
You'd be surprised... there isn't a ton of documentation about it, but most of the engine is pretty well exposed for programmers.
You can punch into the rendering pipeline (down to immediate OpenGL mode if you need to), the compilation pipeline (recompiling on the fly or setting up a custom preprocessor), hook into the assemblies (for, say, an interactive interpreter run in the game), and hook into native binaries in unmanaged code. Naturally you can use any language that can compile into IL, so, you don't even have to use C# or Boo if you don't like it (though you'll want to take a look at Boo... UnityScript interpreter was written in it for a reason! yay, LISP MACROS with dynamic recompilation and loading!)
The editor will, in turn, handle a lot of things for you that are a waste of time to do normally, like visualizing things without having the game running (tweak a shader on the fly), handle all of the recompiling for you in the background, dyanmically load and unload resource files, let you easily browse the scene graph, let you write custom editors (for example, I wrote a converter to convert files of different types so that it happens when those files are added to your resources, instead of converting them on the fly at run-time or with some external half-assed console script), etc. Naturally, you can use your own editor if you're more comfortable (for example, I use Emacs and git and the mono profiler and debugger, rather than Unity and Unity Source Server and Monodevelop, and it works just fine, and I don't spend much time at all in the actual Unity Editor)
And the library itself has all kinds of things that you'd expect to make your life easy: screen graph manipulation, transforms and other 3D math, physics basics like raycasts and bounding box intersections, input handling, camera manipulations, sound and audio handling, event handlers and hooks on all kinds of stuff, color management, network handling and resource streaming, etc.
The tool also comes with a number of pre-written scripts (plus store, of course) to help you out with things you really should never have to re-invent and that a programmer probably doesn't even want to be bothered with, like a first-person or third person controller (complete with physics, camera work, input control and movement, etc.). Or you could go to the Store and pick up, say, a Mini-Map tool for $30 and have it working in about 5 minutes, which, to me, is very programmer friendly (who wants to spend their time reinventing a mini-map?!).
On top of that, your game will be almost entirely cross-platform automatically across a wide array of devices, AND will have native code for those devices for performance-heavy sections. You don't have to waste much time tracking down errors on all kinds of different platforms, which is also very programmer-friendly.
Couple problems: the docs aren't as good as they could be, the Mono version is still a ways back (~2.10ish), compute shaders aren't built-in to OSX yet (though you could do this yourself if you really wanted to), the community is geared around "scripting and drag/drop/click" so getting detailed assistance for very technical matters is sometimes difficult, etc.
All in all though, it's pretty amazing. Now, it will take you awhile to learn all that, to find out where everything is exposed, what you need to hook into, etc., but, once you do, it is actually very programmer friendly.
I guess you are not really the target audience for Unity if full code-only projects are what you are after. I can't really disagree with you though. I've never used Unity, but I watched the 2D feature video and while I have to see the tooling looks absolutely fantastic, very flexible and powerful, I couldn't shake the feeling that I'd be much more comfortable just doing all that stuff using a code-only IDE and good sprite/animation libraries. There's just so many buttons, sliders, menu's, dialogs and other thingamajigs in that user interface :-S. And then somewhere deep down there you also still have your code tied to all of it. I have to say the video was confusing as anything to me.
For example, I worked on a tool for procedurally deforming enemy meshes to prevent the whole 'attack of the clones' vibe that many games fall into. Rather than use print statements to figure out what was happening in the code, I used Gizmos [1] to draw various important coordinates on whichever mesh section was under the mouse and added handles to let me interactively modify the inputs to the algorithm. I also added debugging output on the side panel that updated in real time as I deformed meshes. In Unity its trivial to build those kinds of custom tools. Debugging the same problems with the usual print statements and compile/restart cycle would have been much slower.
I take issue with a lot of the other design decisions in Unity, but the UI is a massive improvement over most work-flows once you learn how to customise it.
[1] http://docs.unity3d.com/Documentation/ScriptReference/Gizmos...
We started the project without knowing if the compile to flash target would be done when we needed it, so we hedged our bets and kept unity as separate from the game code as possible.
The downside is step through debugging can only be done with UnityVS or MonoDevelop and you don't get the flexibility of using "that complex UI", which I rather enjoyed using as a REPL. Oh, going from code change to compiled to seeing the game on the screen was sloooooooow.
As a programmer, I still have not reached the point of feeling that I lacked control over the game and engine. And I doubt that easily happens with indie developers, as Unity is incredibly well-equipped to deal with small-to-medium sized games.
Unity is following the workflow most game studios use, with the usual developer <-> designer interactions.
If you don't care about Unity tooling, just use your editor + compiler.
It feels at times a bit dirty to give up control and do things "The Unity Way" but the payoff in productivity from non-programmers on the team makes it worth it.
The rest of that stuff seems cool though. Oh well =\
AFAIK you can do OpenCL on OSX with Unity, you just don't have the typical Unity integration so you'd have to handle all the details yourself. It's on my list of things to try out soon... the switch to general purpose GPU processing is too large of a revolution to ignore.
I mean, it's not really that bad, just that some things that should be easy to look up are hard to find, and some things that are easy to look up and easy to find have to then be translated from "scripting and drag/drop/click" into actual code (particularly frustrating when you're just starting).
Not sure if you were aware of this already but theres a non-default setting in the Unity preferences for enabling "Version control support" that basically makes Unity save metadata in a text format instead of its standard binary format: http://docs.unity3d.com/Documentation/Manual/ExternalVersion...
There are a couple things to be aware of regarding how you set up your .gitignore, and now, in 4.3, apparently meta files, but, it's pretty straight-forward, IMO.
I'd ask on the forums and get a current response... a lot of problems with the external VCS were things from back in 2.0ish land, which was quite awhile ago.
Working on code is fine and your normal guidelines apply to simultaneous work.
I have Unity projects with 3-5 teammates and we don't run into too many problems with scene/prefab merges. Normally each person is working on separate stuff so it would be rare for 2 people to need to touch the same prefab or scene.
If your scenes or prefabs are huge and it becomes a problem then you probably should think about redoing your architecture to keep your scenes and prefabs smaller.
(note: I work at Unity)
I lost at least 20% of my working hours trying to get the project to work again or waiting for it to sync to asset server and would always be half hopeful and half terrified at the time of any updates to Unity. "Did they fix the unresponsive 'cancel' button on the assert server update action?", "Did they make it more stable?", "OMG! Another update! Will my entire project re-import again?" were the kind of things that used to run in my mind.
I'd have to hear strong positive reviews from those I trust to even try Unity again (assuming they back them with good reasons).
Unity is really nice, and if you plan for it, can scale pretty well. It's much more flexible, so it's easier to shoot yourself in the foot, while other engines are less flexible, which can be advantageous at time. Additionally, it's difficult to get it to shine at the higher end in the ways that other engines do. IMO, I think this is more of a problem of bad defaults than any significant lack of features. But the top tier games released by most of the other engine developers have really forced them to tweak the engine in ways that Unity has not.