General Unity3d setup and how to start

Hi there, i have been trying to create game with unity in the past.
I am planning to do it as my income rather then working as a employee.

I am willing to buy hardware needed to work with unity3d smoothly..

Previously i have been using this spec:

AMD ATHLON TRIPLE CORE
3GB RAM
DEDICATED GRAPHIC NVIDIA GT220 1GB

And unity was working but not as smooth as i expected, .

What you would recommend to use?

My thought was to buy:
Intel Core i3,5 or 7
Ram 4GB, 8, 16 or 32.
Dedicated graphic minimum 2GB.
Plus SSD hard-drive to run windows+unity installation on it.

I will do graphic with Blender.

Another thing is i need to get better with unity scripting i know that is something different that just C# or Java.
I have no problems with such us languages, they are pretty straight forward.

But would like to buy some books to learn more.

I need it mainly for mobile 3d games (android to start of with), with network support.
Also with blender export to unity i know it does automatically these days but how about animation controls?

Any recommended books to start of with.
I do got a book with IOS Game Development but none of scripts works anymore - possibly would needed older version of Unity but do not want to go backwards, need something new with current version to be used with.

Many thanks for looking in this thread, and i know a lot of questions but i am unsure where to start.
Any answers appreciated.

Regards, Dave.

 

I can work with my 1 GB RAM. There is no need of more than 8.
It will would be east if money to buying 32 GB RAM! .
A 2GB Graphic card cannot define how smooth anything will run. It depends on many other things. And U recommend you to join a job rather than developing games. Because if you fail (which you probably will) you will at least have a source if income.
Good luck

 

Game development can be processor intensive at times with tasks such as compiling and baking lightmaps. A Core i5 may be sufficient but upgrading later is more expensive than installing in additional memory. Therefore I recommend getting the Core i7 from the beginning. It'll let you spend less time sitting around for waiting for tasks to finish.

Memory being very easily upgraded I recommend simply buying a single stick of the biggest size your motherboard can handle while still being affordable. At the moment that is generally going to be an 8GB stick. Don't bother at all with anything less because you may decide down the road you want more and it could mean throwing out smaller sticks.

Your choice of graphics card is going to depend on how complex your scene becomes, but I cannot imagine a mobile game project needing more than a GTX 960 during development. You could probably get away with far less too but the GTX 960s are the weakest of the current generation available from NVIDIA. They have 4GB of memory too.

 

My Intel 82459G Express Chipest (On Board GPU) works hardly for even mobile dev. But my brother had and Intel HD 4K. which worked great (though he had an Nvidia GT 700M (or something like that)).
Nowdays even the on Board GPU are quite powerful for Mobile GameDev.
But I highly recommend you to buy a Good GPU as when you are annoyed/bored you can play some games. (Its always better than buying a new Laptop ).

 

My brother I5 2.6 GHz Quad Core works great in all situations.
At worse it gives me 35 FPS (with a lots of Image Effects and Max Quality in Editor)

 

What you're describing are not purely CPU-bound tasks though. Baking lightmaps, compiling and publishing, etc are demanding tasks that are completely dependent on the CPU. The difference between an i5 and an i7 may not seem like much but it can add up very quickly.

Additionally as I stated earlier upgrading the CPU down the road involves removing the chip and effectively shelving it.

 

I don't see any noticeable time in compiling. But building takes a like a 30 mins with Appodeal and everplay in my PC and I'd normal in his (because java classed converting takes a lot of RAM I could not afford )
But baking and building works good in his PC.
I thought that baking too requires GPU

 

My book works great if you already know a bit of programming: Unity in Action

I talk about mobile specifically in the last chapter, but the majority of the book doesn't mention the final deployment target because Unity is wonderfully platform agnostic.

 

I agree with almost everything here, but I would recommend getting 2 sticks of ram so that the CPU can utilize both memory channels which will increase performance. since most desktop motherboards come with 4 DIMM slots (I wouldn't buy one with less) you could could start with 2x4GB pair, and then add another 2x4 or a 2x8 if needed in the future.

laptops are a different animal though. replacing CPU's or Graphics cards is typically impossible, and upgrading ram on most models you have to pull out the old and put in the new.