[Poll] 2d vs 3d vs both, how many of there are you?

Not so sure about that. Lots of 2D games are aware of 3 dimensions, and should you be implementing things in Unity you will always have to be aware of the 3 dimensions to "layer up" the sprites.

 

this, the 'layer up'. I can imagine a lot of people struggling to get that concept into there head, about layering the artwork to be perceived in 2d. Neat trick tho

 

90% of gameplay is 2D, so it's sort of depends how you look at it

i mean where does 3D start? jumping? stairs? I often find the game itself could be 2d the 3d is just sort of a UI choice


i do wish for better 2d support in unity though, i have old assets i'd love to use

 

Unity is marketted as a 3d engine, hense the unity3d name. If you are looking for a specific 2d engine then you should honestly go elsewhere, I mean, unity is good for 2d, but you have to put the effort in if you would like to use unity for it. Luckily there are some brilliant plugins tho.

 

There's actually a good reason not to do this! Most 2D engines lately are really limited in a lot of execution options outside of GameMaker, which is very underrated. Unity with UniTile and Orthello Free honestly gives me a greater amount of versatility in 2D work than I've had in any dedicated 2D engine in a long time.

 

I believe cocos2d is a good option no? not trying to promote any other engine of course, just friendly discusion. I do however find it interesting that unity is a focused 3d engine but it still catches a lot of 2d attention, I mean, some of the top selling games have been created in unity.

 

It's honestly more awkward to use than it should be and its documentation is kinda sparse. You're looking at a significant time investment just getting it to put a sprite on screen. Unity has honestly, out of any engine I've ever used in my life, the best workflow and asset pipeline for 2D or 3D. With two addons, one of them free and one of them a scant $25, you've basically got a 2D engine that functions as vastly superior and easier to use than most any other. I'd go so far as to say that Unity may well be the best 2D engine on the market right now.

 

There's a bit of overhead for a simple 2D game, though.

 

Unity3d is not it's name. Unity is called Unity.

www.unity.com was taken and so they used www.unity3d.com.

Common misconception, but a very important one.

Also, I would argue with you on the point I should go elsewhere for 2D. So far in my experiences it's been nothing but pleasant in Unity.

 

Oh I never knew that, interesting. Thanks for the insight

 

If you're targeting iOS and Android? Barely. You're looking at maybe an extra 15 megs from a storage standpoint and a completely negligible performance difference unless you're absolutely rubbish at managing drawcalls.

 

No no, im not saying that, im saying that this particular person is not happy with the 2d support in unity, so he, himself, should go somewhere else if he is not happy with the support. Personally I think its quite pleasant, and I am not a proficient programmer at all but I have dabbled with 2d in unity and yes, its quite nice, can be hell at times but thats just to my lack of knowledge.

 

Oh, okay. Yeah, it's not really Unity's fault they don't support 2D. They're a 3D engine.

It's like saying it's the pencils fault that you messed up and that it doesn't have an eraser on it for you.

Or it's the ovens fault it can't microwave.

 

Huh. It was probably because of Apple's old 20mb limit for downloading apps over 3g that the extra 15 megabytes seemed like so much.

 

Yeah, but that's long been increased. I believe it's like 50 or 75 megs now. In fact, I think Unity has also increased the quality of their stripping system, but I can't be sure since I only started doing Android builds lately to test my stuff with the Ouya SDK.

 

This seems like a great example of why using 3D tools for a 2D game can be such a huge time saver. Essentially its like a design once and done sort of thing....

 

Whether the size limit has been increased or not, how much of a concern is the storage size?

 

At that size? Not much. It's like 15 megs of overhead. You could install that nearly 70 times in 1 gig.