Your favourite feature of Unity

I think it would be interesting to see what people's favourite features of Unity are

Mine is probably prefabs. It's basically object oriented, and I love that

What are yours?

 

The fact that it uses C#. For me, that's its strongest advantage over its primary competitor.

 

Honestly, while there are dozens of things that I really like about Unity, the best feature for me is that it's free, which allows me to pursue my hobby without the expense of paying for a game framework of Unity's quality.

 

Free is good, and a major draw card.

The community is also awesome.

And it's sheer reach. Anecdotally there are more unity decs then any other engine. That means finding people to collaborate with, or who are experts, is pretty straight forward. As is finding learning material.

 

fave feature is the staff

 

The ability to drag and drop references in the editor.

 

Play-mode and the ability to adjust values in the inspector. Maybe I am too old school, but many people do not realize what a huge time savor that is compared to the old days. I sometimes go a week without doing a build now.

The other one is Mecanim. If you are new, you think it is overly complicated and with some bugs.. but man, if you worked on this stuff a few years ago, you would see how powerful it is and how much time it saves.

 

C# and a wonderful api

 

C#. the types of files that can be imported and i just love the way that the code file just drag drops onto GameObject then drag that as a prefab. Massive time saver.

 

Okay going from writing a test game in Python (just don't unless you want to learn it isn't for games) I can second that

 

C# support

Now if we want to talk about least favorite editor features, I have quite the list building up.

 

I really like how easy it is to write editor extensions. You write editor extensions in the same language you write the game in and you can use the same API/properties/methods for modifying objects.

Unity could never foresee all the game-specific tools I need to make my game but they have given me the option to create them myself with very little effort.

 

The fact that UT goes for features most needed and implements them quite fast. They had weak animation? They made mecanim. They had bad GUI? They made UUI. They had bad multiplayer that required rewriting it in a lot of cases? They made UNet. And in all of those cases they hit it right when I was thinking "this is quite bad, I'll have to write it myself..." And next thing I see it's already here.

 

Favorite feature is hard to say... especially if you mean compared to other frameworks. I'd have to really think about that.

If you mean in isolation then of course there are many things I like about Unity.

I guess my favorite that handles both cases above is....

The potential of the Asset store to make development easier & faster. I don't think it's there yet but I like the idea of it. And I believe in time people will make some really kick-ass mini frameworks and such that allow devs to quickly knock out the core functionality common to nearly all games so we can focus on the game itself.

 

Best feature: I don't have to write my own game engine.

Runner ups: Lovely community, Asset store, C# support.

 

It's free and has so many features and is relatively user friendly.

 

I think the best thing about Unity is, that it's designed in a way that enables single users to work - you don't neccessarily need a team for smaller projects - Other engines just don't offer that fast of a workflow for single person devs.

 

Not wanting to derail this thread. This is what I am trying to figure out. People say this often and I don't understand what they mean by it. For me Monkey X, XNA etc all allow(ed) a single dev to make stuff quickly. Are you talking about shaders or other graphics related stuff? Feel free to PM me instead of replying here. Like I said I don't wana to derail.

 

I like the Unity way of doing things. For the most part, it is very easy for me to pick up because a lot of of it works the way I think it should work.

I'm not saying my way is the best way of doing things, I'm just saying that it is easier to think like someone that thinks like me.

 

Make MMO button. Though it's only available in Linux version of Unity Editor.

 

If I had to pick just one... t'd be cross platform deployment with minimal extra effort.

 

Components, prefabs and C#. Basically easier OOP.

 

I liked HumanBone-related functionality in mecanim.
Lots of fun stuff can be done using those.

Not much else stood out, though.