Pre Sales Questions

I couldn't find an 'ask dumb questions'. Of course there's always search, but that relies on asking the right search word and lots of reading - whilst interesting, I wasn't interested in anything I found .

Firstly an introduction, i'm Becky Rose of the established freeware team Banshee Studios. We've been around donkeys years (since 1985 ish) and have shifted over 12 million freeware downloads. That's the ego bit out of the way, so you all know who I am, and some of you may even have witnessed what my team can and can't do

I'm not looking for the full package, I simply cannot afford it. I presume most of the demos on the site are with the more expensive suite - so i'm sorry to say I dismissed those out of hand straight away. I have two main questions regarding the baby product.

1) Does it have TCP and UDP support. I've found a few forum posts hinting at UDP, but nothing in the online manual and no clear answer as to which features are removed (maybe I missed the page). I need to know this before I even experiment with the editor, as I do everything multiplayer these days (easier than coding AI!).

Is the compile to PC a feature that will always be just for the big product due to some business decision, or is it not included because of a roll out issue.

I develope on PC Mac (PPC/Intel) these days, but do most of my coding on the PC - one of the key reasons being a general hatred of the Mac keyboard, but also because preferences permissions cause too many problems when coding, whereas with a PC the only outside influence is spyware that i'm quite used to dealing with and am defended against... It's a personal preference thing, I just preffer working on PC when coding, and prefer Mac when doing design things.

Sorry I used so many words to ask two simple questions, it's an old habbit . Thanks in advance, and sorry for failing the newbie 'search' forum test...

 

Well... most of the demos you see use the features that both the Pro and the "baby" licenses of the software support. In fact, the only difference you're likely to have noticed is reflective water. Unity is an incredibly capable tool from the bottom up (so to speak).

However, if you use Unity, you might want to bite the bullet and get a different keyboard or something for your Mac. Not to say it wouldn't be possible to write scripts on your PC (all you need is a text editor, of course), but unless you're saving directly to Unity's folder over a network (or something), it'll just be a hassle. Unity keeps its eye on a single project folder. When scripts or assets in that folder change it automatically updates its database or recompiles. It's so astoundingly simple that you'll probably forget that you ever had to divide your workspace, to be frank.

In fact, no matter what you'll find yourself typing a whole lot less. Unity comes with the basic logical interface you'll need to build any game—you won't need to code anything from scratch unless you have something very strange in mind, and by then you're into Pro territory (I'm talking unusual input devices like cameras or haptic gloves). Scripts (your own code) exist to enhance and extend existing functionality, for the most part.

Publishing to PC as a Pro-only option is a business decision on OTEE's part, not a functional limitation. And there's even a caveat to this: PC users can view the games you publish to web-page, just with a watermark located in the corner.

Unity has little built-in networking capability, but the entire .NET API is available to you, meaning depending on your skill you can use any of the functionality built into its extensive WWW class.

I just re-read this post and I sound like a promoter. Well, I'm just a user (and only with Unity Indie, for that matter).

By the way... had a look at the videos for the site of your next upcoming game. Nice! Everything I saw could be done with Indie, except maybe the subtle reflections on the windows of the cars.

 

Hi Becky! :O)

a) v2.0 (first half of 2007?) will introduce network support. Until then .net sockets are your friends.

b) Differences between pro and indy are shortly described here https://secure.otee.dk/shop/ It's due to how otee wants to differ the pro from the indy version. It only makes sense till there is no windows IDE but don't ask me when this will happen. I wouldn't count on it within the next days.

c) As for the keyboard i use my IBM RS6000/logitech at the mini as i also wouldn't be happy with a mac keyboard/mouse. There are some annoying issues due to the different layout but in a whole it's workingk quite nicely.


Regards,

taumel

 

For clarity that's not my game in those videos, I do write mods for it but my involvement there is as the promotor clerk of that race series.

A few alarm bells for me then

I pressumed the reflective water in the stuff i've tried was cube mapping, which suggests that texture effects and rendering to a texture or copying to a texture are impossible?

It suggests above that I cannot build network packets without also learning .net, which strikes me as neading to learn two tools to do 1 thing. I could probably handle it, but i've never much been interested in things Microsoft throws out to develop with, if I was, I wouldn't have found the Unity website...

My other concerns I can fix by trying the demo out first before asking, but basically i'm a code junky. I dont do point and click.

 

Well, try it out and see. There is a lot of point and click, click and drag, press the button and bingo it works... OTEE has arranged it in a way so that it does not limit your options. Anyway, you can browse the Scripting forum to see some examples of what a typical script might look like, or take one of the tutorials.

Alas, render to texture is one of the Pro-only features. You can still use cubemaps for interesting effects, like the Indie transparent water.

As far as .net goes... well it's just an api so there's not a whole lot of learning to do in most cases... not if you already know how to build a networking system.

What sort of code are you used to working in? Unity uses C#, object-oriented javascript, Boo, or any combination thereof.

 

RenderToTexture is a pro only feature. But you can still get out a better looking water with the indy version than it would be possible in Blitz3D. I guess there are some examples around how this can look like in the showcase section (no link in mind right now oh beside of my comic like water here... http://spielwiese.marune.de/_uni/spielkisten/index.html ). Garen also had some nice water scenes in the showcase area if i remember right...

If you want easy network access then you'll have to wait till v2 is going to be released. Obviously you also could jump into unity right now and learn all the things beside of networking and later on upgrade to v2 for it.

Regarding the point&click vs. coding issue:

I've experienced that it both can be helpful and be a drag at the same time. If i do have an environment which only allows you to code then i after some time fall into "codemode", time get's unnoticeable and *tschagga* at some point you're done.

The ability that unity allows you to do it also the other way around sometimes prevents me from falling into this productive mode because you also could accomplish things without coding and you sometimes then try to do it this way - this was even more the case in times were the docs were really bad (but they have improved now).

I's funny but it's really something i've experienced which you'll have to learn first. And point&click can also be quite helpful for some certain tasks... :O)

 

You can do cube-mapped reflective water in Blitz3D using render to texture. Quite a few impressive demos out.

Similarly fullscreen glow can be done in Blitz3D using blend modes and render to texture.

Unity3d is great, but don't underestimate Blitz3D

Where I'd say Unity beats Blitz3D is:

1) Transparent support for Cinema4D and Maya workflows.
2) Support for FBX file format.
3) UI -- heck, it has one!
4) OO Language Support.
5) Pixel shader ("DX9") support.
6) Mac support.
7) Ability to run in web browser.
8 ) Overall feature set.

Where Blitz3D wins:

1) Documented file format (.b3d).
A lot of inexpensive shareware programs work with .b3d.

2) Support for .md2, .3ds, .obj, etc.
Almost any serious 3d package can export to at least one format Blitz3D supports.

3) Incredible community, third party tools, libraries
E.g. there are multiple alternative IDEs, GUI libraries and GUI interface builders, dynamic shadow libraries, lightmapping tools, high level networking support... There's also tons of free code that *just works* sitting on their forums.

4) Apps run on vanilla XP installs.
DX9 not required.

5) Simple, easy to get your head around API.
I for one find Unity (as a programming environment) pretty daunting, and it uses a bunch of third party stuff for added functionality. Blitz3D's functionality is all internal and documented in one place.

Obviously, if you develop for a Mac -- well Blitz3D is useless to you and BlitzMax hasn't got a 3d library yet. If you want to develop on Windows, Unity is no use. (Mac keyboards are hardly an issue. Any USB keyboard (within reason) will work with a Mac.)

 

Problem with RTT is the speed you get out with it if you want a good image quality in Blitz3D. And one thing i personally never liked, beside of there is no object orientation in the language, is that they use entities. This is so strange if you come from a really well thought out 3d engine like sw3d which uses groups. It would still be the best in my opinion to have the clear logic structure of sw3d combined with the power of unity but that's another story... :O)

 

sw3d is really well thought out in some abstract sense ... but sucks in every practical sense. (If it's so well thought out, why does it behave like a plugin to Director rather than an intrinsic component? Why have they not added any significant new functionality in five years?)

I'm not convinced that sw3d is architecturally any cleaner than Unity3d anyway. There's no way of building the equivalent of a prefab in sw3d, and because the contents of a 3d object are opaque to the Director UI to do something like attach a behavior to an object inside a scene you need to go through UI gymnastics (add a behavior to the scene then select the object within the scene you want to target from a popup menu). You certainly can't click on an object in a scene and see its associated behaviors. So in the end you just write huge slabs of code.

Blitz3d is not OO (definitely a bummer) but rocks. It has quite a lot of OO features for a non-OO language. (I'm definitely not a member of the OO uber alles club anyway. Many of the benefits of OO can be and have been achieved in procedural languages by good data design; it's more work but it's perfectly doable.)

In the end, architecturally beautiful and sucks always loses to horrible kludge that works. And Blitz3d (and Unity) work and aren't even remotely horrible.

 

Regarding sw3d i was talking about how a 3d world is organized and how you access things in there by code. There is a clear structure an philosophy behind. If you know how to access one thing you mostly know how it works for the others. This is a clean and a reliable design. As you said the abstract sense.

You have to play around with some other engines first to honour this. All these years without any updates but still it's better designed than most of the stuff i've seen and tried out these years. I wonder why people come out with new engines without learning from what has been done before...

Obviously it's an outdated dx7 engine with some major issues but for a v1 which is so old it's brilliant. It's cleaner and easier to use than unity if you see it from the coding side when you compare the side which are available.

Unity clearly wins on the performance side as well as on the feature front regarding games, physics and sound although there are still certain things much more easier to accomplish in sw3d and missing in unity.

When i use sw3d then i see it combined with the debugger in director as well as 3dpi and w3dtoolbar. Sure you aren't so felxible and able to generate stuff like you are in unity from the editor side but this isn't a fault for the 3d hierarchy and code design.

Blitz3D is a jaw dropper performance wise if you come from director but from a design point of view it's horrible. I'm still looking forward to max3D but i would never think of writing a game in Blitz3D. Small projects yes but anything beyond that simply hurts. And from a design point of view...nah... ;O)

But it's good to have folks here around who do not only know unity!

 

I don't think you should mistake Blitz3D's lack of features or minimalist UI for a poor architecture.

A tree structure is a tree structure is a tree structure. Everything is either a thing or a reference to a thing. Every 3D program that doesn't suck works this way... including Blitz3D and Unity.

 

Yep but some trees are just more beautiful than other due to their tree structure and their leaves. ;O)