How hard is it to port from Ogre to Unity?

Hi there,

I'm developing a game on Windows to help stroke patients perform rehabilitation exercises using the Kinect for Windows. Currently we are using the OGRE graphics engine, but the graphics are very simple and ugly so we are considering switching to Unity and I'm wondering how hard this would be.

Has anyone made this switch? If so I would really appreciate it if we could learn from your experience by answering 4 questions:

1. How long did it take to learn how to use Unity, and what was your prior level of expertise with it?
2. What was the nature of your game, and how long did it take to port over to Unity?
3. Could you also describe some of the benefits derived from the switch?
4. Would you recommend doing it in our case? Our game currently contains 7 small mini games, and has very few assets which all look extremely simple (composed mainly of primitives).

Thank you so much!

 

I only had about two weeks worth of knowledge. I put it aside for something i thought would make life easier (Gamesalad). Bad move lol. I actually completed it, only to find out it had no monetization for android, very deceiving sales pitch. I made the switch back, took me only one month to remake the game from scratch, minus graphics we finished. Google is your best friend.

As for benefits, everything. I was able to do next to anything I wanted, given my game was not AAA graphics. Plus performance was great in unity.

I would 100% recommend it. Your game sounds a lot easier then mine from your description, and I was able to learn fast.

 

I would recommend this talk from Unite 2013

Unite 2013 - Console to Mobile: Bringing AAA to Mobile
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Die3x1CIfng&list=PLX2vGYjWbI0Ri-OXGCFHMplbTdgFOUKlE&index=12

In this talk, Owlchemy talks about porting a game from one platform to another. Ignore the fact that they were trying to go from console to mobile, going from one platform to another has all the general stuff that applies. They are quite happy with Unity, as I understand.

 

Is your bad experience you encounter is from using Unity3d or Game Salad?

 

If this involves massive amounts of physics code ported from another platform to Ogre porting to Unity will be easier.

If you don't have a huge amount of code yet I'd recommend working together with a stroke rehab specialist about using Kinect, Unity, and stroke rehab exercises. I remember one of my friend's mother carried a suitcase with her on one side of her body to strengthen and balance her body after a stroke. Would a Android/iOS/Windows Phone app work in that situation? The Kinect would mostly be console.

If you are working with a big hospital or iR&D company you really need to see if you can't get help from Microsoft as I think the entire field of medicine, rehab, disaster readiness and training are severely neglected on consoles.

Maybe Unity would be interested in collaborating with you to create a technical demo for the new Unity GUI, Kinect, and UMA around some future release of Unity?

There is some availability in mobile. And soon as it's for medical or disaster prep it's seen as license to overcharge.

 

Changing engines won't make "simple and ugly" graphics look any better in and of itself. Engines just render whatever you poke into them.

But anyway, OGRE itself (supporting projects aside) just handles rendering and some scene management, where Unity is an whole game engine. So the difficulty of the porting process will depend on how similar your existing architecture is to the one in Unity. If they don't happen to be really similar then you might be better off selectively porting bits of logic over and re-implementing everything else.

 

Gamesalad. It's essentially like Stencyl, no programming. It's logic based, which is how I learned how it works these days (last time I programmed before was in BASIC, I'm talking 80's, 90's BASIC). But you can imagine how closed of an engine it is. This was 4 years ago. I'm a Unity for good person now. Never going to change that, unless somehow something magically is just as open and easy to use. To me anything's possible with unity. Look at people building features Unity has yet to finish. Like Global Illumination and such.

 

It's difficult as they're chalk and cheese. But worth it.

 

Thanks ThePositiveMoxie, very helpful! What sort of game were you porting? Also, did you know C# before starting with Unity?

Does anyone other than ThePositiveMoxie have actual experience porting a game to Unity? I would really appreciate the specific information from actual experiences (as requested in at least the first 3 of my 4 questions).

A great response would look like:

1. I already had much experience with Unity so it didn't take any time to learn.
2. We ported a FPS with 2 levels and many assets and animated 3D characters but minimal physics from Unreal Engine 3 to Unity in 2 months.
3. We saved time building new levels, the asset store saved much time adding new assets, and the integration with different systems allowed us to quickly add new rigged and animated characters.

Thank you all so much for sharing your experiences!

 

It was my first game, a mobile Arcade game called Beach Ball Blast, exclusive to Android . Sort of a popping game where boats on a beach sail back and forth. Using multipliers, and the game gets more intense the higher the multiplier. Allowing two boats simultaneously. Food for health. Was a fun first game, a learning experience more than anything.

I used JavaScript. Though my most recent game is C#. I literally learned it in a day. Once you know one language in Unity, it's so easy to learn syntax for the others.

 

There are example wrappers for using both the MS kinect (ms kinect sdk) for windows and the asus xtion pro sensors (openNI/nite) for free on the asset store. We use them all the time and they work great. Not hard to learn at all.