Interested in Unity - a few questions

Hi guys 8)
I'm very interested in buying Unity but there are a few questions I need to ask:

- is there any demo or screenshot that can show me how big the watermark of the Indie-Webplayer is? - answered

- is it possible to buy Unity Indie and then upgrade to Pro sometimes later?

- how will the water in Unity Indie look like, on the website there are just sceenshots showing reflective and refractive water.

- what does "Secured Deployment" mean?

- must Mono/.Net be installed on the machines that run the deployed games? I notived I had not to install Mono when downloading the Unity demo so I wonder. - answered

- how good are the network features of Unity? Can they be used from webplayer games so one could create an browser-FPS that anyone can play against each other without having to install the game? - answered

I hope my iMac will be repaired by the end of this week (power supply said "Bye bye" just 30 days after I bought the iMac) so I can go again with Cheetah3D and (maybe) Unity.

 

Most of your questions can be answered with the free trial.

Nope - all games are compltely self-contained, except for Web players which only require the plugin be installed.

Right now....not very. You *can* write a Web player like that, yes, but any networking in 1.x takes a lot of work and expertise. Improved networking is one of the major rumored features of 2.0, though.

 

I had the free trial (until my iMac stopped working as I wrote in my first post). So there are still a few questions open, for example I didn't have the opportunity to look at the water. "World of Warcraft" quality water (with those sparks on the waves) would be enough for me (for now). I also don't know what "Secure Deployment" means, does this mean everyone can hack games made with Unity Indie?
And I don't know how the trial version could give me an answer on the question of upgrading the license. But nevertheless: thank you for answering a part of my questions

 

Q: is there any demo or screenshot that can show me how big the watermark of the Indie-Webplayer is?

Here's one (taken of the FPS tutorial in fact):




Q: is it possible to buy Unity Indie and then upgrade to Pro sometimes later?

Yes, the upgrade price is $1300 USD.


Q: how will the water in Unity Indie look like, on the website there are just sceenshots showing reflective and refractive water.

There won't be any reflection or refraction as those are render to texture based (render to texture being a pro-only feature). Look at the screenshot just above, it shows a touch of water on one side as it appears in the Indie version of Unity.


Q: what does "Secured Deployment" mean?

Secured deployment means you publish compressed publish files instead of raw source files, thus preventing others from simply opening your published content in Unity to see your source scripts and whatnot. Our site has a bit of an error in listing that as a Pro-only feature, it's found in both the Indie and Pro products.


Q: must Mono/.Net be installed on the machines that run the deployed games? I notived I had not to install Mono when downloading the Unity demo so I wonder.

As answered above, no you don't need it installed to run Unity nor any Unity content.


Q: how good are the network features of Unity? Can they be used from webplayer games so one could create an browser-FPS that anyone can play against each other without having to install the game?

Again as answered above the possibilities are there today but they certainly aren't readily available to most. One of our GDC news tidbits last week* was that some proper networking features will be in the next major release of Unity.


*Note: we're working on an announcement email about the news we shared at GDC last week, stay tuned for that later.

 

@HiggyB: Thank you for those answers. The water looks good enough to me, the watermark is small enough for a full featured freeware game (I read somewhere that the watermark is just shown when playing on a WinPC, is that true?) and I'm waiting for the announced news 8)

 

You are correct in that the watermark is shown on Windows only when publishing web content from an Indie license. Of course whether you're in Indie or Pro, there's an option to always show the watermark (Mac or Win) if you're feeling so inclined...