Teacher here. Need help. Could you answer my questions about unity?

Next semester will be my On The Job training. So basically just need 5 months and I will graduate.

I want to develop my computer skills and I dream of creating educational games for my future students since I love game designing in the first place.

Here is my questions.

Is unity capable of providing quality educational games without the need of buying the pro version?

I have the most basic knowledge about coding so do you think it is worth to jump first in game programming?

I want to learn a skill which I can use not only to make games but also make other useful applications. Do you think Unity is capable of doing other things not just on gaming?

Do you think my laptop can handle Unity? Specs: Processor Intel 1.7GHz, Ram 2 Gb, Windows 10 64bit brand ACER.

Also currently don't have a way to spend a single dollar for buying assets. Do you think I can still create decent games from free stuffs? Or it will be a hard time if I don't spend money?

Advance thank you for those who will response.

 

Yes.

Yes, you can learn as you go. Work hard between now and then, using the Learn section (see the link at the top of this page).

Yes, it's good for all sorts of real-time simulations and such too. It's not so good for creating ordinary desktop or mobile apps (i.e. anything with a native user interface). But C# is still pretty good for that, so your programming skill will transfer to that if you ever need it.

Yes.

You'll be fine (depending on your definition of "decent" and what sort of game you're trying to make, as well as your own art skills).

Good luck!

 

Yes, but keep in mind that the game you are developing will affect the system requirements more than Unity itself. With those hardware specs you're going to be restricted to developing fairly lightweight games. Unfortunately Windows will eat up about half of that memory leaving you with relatively little for Unity itself.

 

Are you for real right now, you're a teacher and you put all this work into a post instead of just doing cursory Wikipedia skimming?

It's a blast, anyway. Fortunately the answers to all of your questions are very yes, especially if your goal is to teach someone the basic fundamentals of high-level language code structures and algorithms. Unity could easily be used to spice up lots of the more boring programming essentials, too.

 

I'm going to go against what everyone else here has said and say no. Unity personal has a 100k revenue/budget limit for the organisation using it. Which means you can't use it for the school you work for.

Unity personal is technically capable of making the games. But I don't see how you can do it within the lisence terms.

 

OK, that's an interesting point. I was thinking of revenue generated by the games (which will probably be zero), but not the unrelated revenue of the organization.

But I've always found Unity to be very supportive of education. I would suggest contacting them directly, and asking them about it. I suspect you could easily work something out.

 

This is probably true. Unity go out of their way to make teaching Unity easy.

But the lisence does have a specific provision for educational institutes with budgets over 100k not using personal.

 

This topic went off on a licensing tangent and I'm not sure why? The OP asked about creating educational games and the suitability of Unity, his (her) current hardware, and free assets. He is completely free to create educational games and use in his classes using the free Unity and free assets. If he decides to market his games, the revenue threshold is high enough that he can also start off totally free too. For his immediate future, licensing issues are not relevant and do not answer his questions.

My $0.02 is yes, go for it. You may find your inner artist or inner coder!

You may also find free assets are limiting, and some assets are worth paying for. You may also find your hardware could use an upgrade, maybe a desktop with a large screen. Original expectations rarely pan out, so learn as much as you can and actually use Unity, don't study it. As you proceed, you will be able to answer much more on your own, or the level of your questions will be much more focused on solving specific issues you are having within the development cycle of a project. If you can dream it, Unity can do it, every developer puts their own constraints on it.

 

Well no. From the license

So unless your school budget is less then $US100,000 you cannot use Unity personal in your capacity as an employee of the school. You certainly could make your own games at home, but the moment you bring one of them into a class room to benefit the school you are violating the license terms.

You could go through various hoops to set up an entity separate from the school that then provides software to the school, and has a budget of less then 100K annually. But you would need to make sure your legal set up was water tight.

From a technical standpoint Unity personal is completely adequate to do the job. So is the guys hardware. However from a licensing standpoint its not allowed.

 

Isn't that only if you have the students work on the project(s) though? The wording in the original post led me to believe that they were going to develop the games at home and bring them to their students as a published build.

 

I'm pretty sure that would be in violation of the license. I might be wrong, and I'm willing to be challenged by a Unity employee on that.

My reasoning is thus

• The teacher is a direct employee of a school with a budget over the limit
• The teacher is using Unity to provide a direct benefit to the school
• Therefore for all intents and purposes the school is using Unity

If there is a flaw in my reasoning let me know. But understand the implications. If the teacher is allowed to use Unity to build software for their students, I could use the same line of logic to let me use Unity in my day job. As long as I do it at home and only bring in the results as a published build. It would be very useful for some 3D visualisations I would love to have.

"As a chemical engineer can I make software in Unity personal and use it at work?"

 

Not an employee, but the license does not restrict how you distribute Unity-made applications. (Aside from gambling stuff.) It concerns the editor only.

--Eric

 

I'm still unconvinced. Sounds like a great way to circumnavigate the licensing provisions. Under my local law me doing something on my own time that benefited the company would be considered working for the company. So I can't actually open the editor with the intention of building a piece of software that would benefit my employer.

However when multiple people of the calibre here disagree with me, it does make me wonder if I'm wrong. Consider my posts to be my opinion only.

 

@BoredMormon, there is no revenue being generated from the games, this is Unity's only concern.

I also think you are conflating your personal situation with your employer and some non disclosure / non compete agreement, which is possibly illegal. Let's say you start building a hot rod in your garage, You work on it, evenings and weekends. Does your employer own your hot rod? No. The agreement is designed to prevent you from using your employers resources for a personal project and only pertains to what you do for your employer. It is no where as broad as you are portraying it.

Working on personal projects is also quite prevalent despite these agreements. There are ways to circumvent those contracts.

 

Bill, I actually think @BoredMormon may be right. Your analogy would be apt if we were talking about using Unity in your own time, for your own projects — like building a hot rod in your garage. Obviously that is OK.

But the situation is different: we're talking about a teacher building software to be used in school. That would be like working for some sort of auto-show company, and building a hot rod in your garage, on your own time, to bring to the auto show for the benefit of your employer. If this hot rod were built from a kit whose license said it could only be used for personal projects, not for big auto-show companies that make over $100k, then you could be in violation even though you built it with your own garage & time.

Now, on the other hand, I suspect that Unity's real intent here is to limit unpaid use of the Unity editor in big schools. If I'm the Los Angeles School District and we're integrating Unity into the curriculum and will have it installed on our 5,348 machines for thousands of students to use, then I should certainly expect to send some money Unity's way (both because it's legally required, and because it's very important to me that Unity not go under in this case). But if I'm a physics teacher and I use Unity to make a few little animations to better get an idea across to the students, I really doubt that Unity would have any problem at all with this, no matter how big a school district I work for.

But I'm not a lawyer... and in fact, I think none of us in this thread are lawyers, nor do we represent Unity. So, I've circled back to my original suggestion: just contact Unity and ask them about it. I'm sure they will be happy to clarify.

 

This is not equivalent, as the hot rod is not used in any way in relation to employee-employer relationship. And we don't know what kind of arrangement about used course materials that school has with their teachers (I've seen some that have clauses like "all your course related materials that you produce are owned by the school, period" and in some parts of the world, that is a legal clause).

Sidenote: I've had a similar situation at work with VS, where I've had my own utility libraries that I built with personal projects using community edition. A friend lawyer said that unless I open source them as a "private person", I shouldn't use them at work, just to be on the safe side (it's a little paranoid, but IP laws are rarely logical in our day and age). Our company lawyer back then was not able to answer the question, so I just didn't use them (they weren't production level anyway and I wasn't ready to show them to the world).

To be honest I think this is the most sensible thing to do from the whole post:

We're just playing a guessing-game, and unless someone in this topic is an international IP lawyer, all of the answers are not substantial (mine included).

Edit: Ninja'd

 

Read the lisence again. Budget of educational institutions is specifically mentioned as a limit. It's abundantly clear that the school cannot use Unity personal.

So the question becomes, is an employee of the school using Unity at home and bringing the end result to school count as the school using Unity?

It's not absolutely clear, but I wouldn't want to proceed without legal clearance from the school and from Unity.

 

Or we can just tag one of them randomly. I'm sure @Andy-Touch could use a break from closing UE4 threads.