Mac Platform and no TGEA

#1 How much does unity run?

#2 $150 for indie license.

#3 Heck, that's a bargain. unity seems to be leaps and bounds ahead of TGEA in many ways.

But it seems like you can only develop on Macs.

#4 Correction:
Unity Indie 149.00/$199.00/
Unity Pro 1099.00/$1499.00

You need Unity Pro to build a Windows application.
Sorry for the confusion.

I hate those forums!
My post got eaten one more time.

#5 Yeah, i think i noticed that about the pro version. But the dev tools themselves seem to be mac only.

#6 Yes, but they are working on a Windows version of the development tools.

#7 It's not just about price for me. I'll pay $1K as long as I feel they are committed to multi-platform development! I wish they supported Linux, though I guess GG doesn't really either :-(

I'm just glad I didn't get our university to pony up for a bunch of licenses to run in our Mac lab (I teach as well).

Guess I'll download the Unity demo this week and give it a shot. It's a shame, as much custom code I've written that I'll have to drop....oh well.

#8 Unity has a lot of strong points, the key being a great usability interface the comes from a number of authoring packages and ideologies that are much, much, much more friendly than most AAA game engines. The drawback is that you don't get the source code, though many projects won't need it. There have been a number of optimization issues when publishing to Windows that have been noted. I haven't experienced them since I'm an Indie license user.

EDIT:
And yes, the tools are Mac only currently. There is not an ETA that I know of on the Windows tools, but they are being worked on.

#9 There are still some of us Mac TGE developers here. I post more in the general forums than in the Mac forum since most of my issues are engine-related, not platform-related.

It would be nice to upgrade to TGEA, but I'm not holding my breath.

If I was starting a new project now, I would strongly consider Unity, but I'm not familiar enough with its limitations to know where some of the sticking points are.

#10 The main limitation with Unity is not having engine-level source manipulation to the core engine. I'm not sure how much engine changes you've made for Vespers, but I'm thinking that it was quite a large amount when it came to 3D spatial parsing of text commands.

It is a great visualization tool for art asset manipulation, though. Some of the animation issues you were having with DTS animations would have been much easier to work out.

#11 Not having the Source Code for Unity is a huge risk for a project IMO. Even if you get a demo and use it for awhile, there'll still be the "dark cloud" hanging around that you're going to run into something that the engine just can't do. You're can never be sure when you're going to run smack dab into a "brick wall" in your development.

The other risk I see is with Windows deployment. Since you're doing dev work on a Mac and then running your prog through Unity's deployment module to Window there's a chance that you're going to run into things that are bugs in the Windows version that can never be repo'd in your dev environment. So then all you can do is fiddle around with things "blindly" until you get something that works, possibly breaking things on your Mac platform or more things on your Windows platform in the process. The "true" origin of the bug is probably in the Unity Deployment module, but that's a big "black box" that you don't have access to, code-wise.

Bottom line: Torque may have its issues, but since you have the source code you can always just go and fix it. With Unity, you don't have that option.

#12 Actually, I've made some engine changes, but virtually all of what you refer to is done in script. But yeah, I agree with the above that having the source code is a huge plus.

#13 Very nice. I hadn't gotten to talk about the actual coding that you've done on the game at IGC. I just had fun running around and watching him clean a rabbit.