I wish the indy version had plugin support

Hi! I really want to use Unity to build an alternative user interface, and I'm frustrated by its primitive support for 2d display.

I would like to fix this by for example:

- building some better ttf support so we can have actual vector fonts.

- trying to get GTK working inside unity.

I also have a collaborator who is great with MaxMSP. I want to build a bridge between it and Unity. They make a free development kit available to me, but I don't get access to the API for unity.

I can understand that I don't get access to advanced rendering features with the indy version; I hope to be able to afford it once I have a good prototype.

There's also some cool flocking/nearest neighbor algorithms out there in C++ that I'd like to bring into Unity.

I further need to do graphing, so I wanted to grab some of the great graphing algorithms from the Gnome project.

All of these extensions I would release under a FOSS license.

Please, why do you make me pay you in order to donate labor to extend Unity?

 

This has been brought up several times before. As I understand it the problem with opening up the plug-in functionality to both versions of Unity means that given enough coding anyone could imbue the Indie version of Unity with all the functionality of the Pro version. OTEE has to draw a line in the sand differentiating the 2 versions somewhere. That way they can offer a $250 license (which is a great bargain) to people just starting out and then let those people upgrade to the Pro version once they're making some money off their efforts with Indie.

I can see why you think creating C++ plug-ins for Unity is expanding the core functionality of the program and thus helping out the community and the application itself, but I believe OTEE has to be very careful how it licenses it's product and I'm sure they've spent countless hours thinking about how the 2 versions stack up.

Ethan

 

I can see what you're saying; still, it seems like unity could release the plugin development stuff under, say, the GPL. This would require any code linked against it to be released GPL as well; that way they would ensure that nobody would be using the Indie version to get everything that the full version has, and still let indie developers get a feel for working with plugins.

 

Not sure how GPL would help in that situation, but I see what you're getting at. In the end, you have to draw the line somewhere...

Okay, let's be frank. (It will be tricky with everyone having the same name but...)

What's the great need here? None of those items listed seemed like show stoppers to me. If you need it that badly, I guess... buy pro?

If you can't afford it, make a game with Indie first to earn the money. If you can't eventually do that... I guess you didn't need pro. Okay, we can go back to our regular names, now.

There are some features I'd like to use in Pro, but I haven't really used the full potential of Indie and I'm very satisfied with what I have so far. I plan to get pro when it's time to sell on Windows and then I'll have it for my next game. Simple.

 

Originally, I had the same desire for just the plugin to be open for indie, then I spent a few days with the indie license and C# dll's and realized that for what I was actually doing, I didn't need the pro for the C++ plugin ability. Mono was the only limitation, I had to stay within the boundries of what mono supported, no big deal.

Then I got the itch for quicktime on meshes and other really cool pro items and purchased pro. I haven't made a nickle on this product yet, I have a few projects started in it, and every time I turn around, I find something new I didn't know about before, so I go back to the drawing board, scrip 3/4 of my working code, and find a way to do it in 1/4 the lines of code from before.

This engine is very well self contained, the only mixed feelings I have right now, is the fact I am a poor artists, meaning I can't do graphics to save my life. I have hundreds of game ideas in my head and I can only draw stick figures.

If you are that good of a coder, I am sure you can accomplish the basics in C# by creating a DLL and using it, for instance, I have expanded Unity for myself into the SOAP realm with little effort once I figured out what I needed to do, and I have a DLL that does the work for me, so I pass it a few strings worth of data, RSA encrypt the info, the client stores the public key and the server has the private key pair for deciphering.

Start small, work in what you got for a month, see where you can get with what you got, DLL's are your friend.