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merlinfire
Joined: 31 Oct 2009
Posts: 4
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 Posted: Tue Nov 03, 2009 2:38 am Post subject: Unity3D Limitations? |
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I am a new user of Unity3D and I have to say, I'm quite impressed with its ease of use and power. I have been focusing pretty exclusively on C# coding in the last 6 months, and have had a few start-stop-start again attempts at making a game in C#.
Unity3D seems to be a great way to abstract a lot of the 3D engine heavy lifting (trig and vector calc are not my strong points). Despite the fact that it's a "tool" and not a "language", it does seem heads and shoulders above less professional looking tools like FPSCreator and others. What I am asking, if you were willing to read through my wall of text, is this:
What are some major or minor limitations of Unity3D that you have encountered or heard, either in general or in specific circumstances.
I'm actually really psyched about what I can do with Unity, but I want to temper that with reality and perhaps decide in advance what needs it can or cannot meet without coupling it with custom solutions. Thanks in advance. |
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merlinfire
Joined: 31 Oct 2009
Posts: 4
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| Posted: Tue Nov 03, 2009 2:41 am Post subject: |
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| I just realized this might be in the wrong forum. Mods, please move at your earliest convenience. |
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dreamora
Joined: 05 Apr 2008
Posts: 6663
Location: Zürich, Switzerland
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| Posted: Tue Nov 03, 2009 2:49 am Post subject: |
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you can do a lot if not nearly everything aside of modifying the engine itself.
With the free version you are capped on the more professional features (realtime shadows, reflection / refraction, asset bundles and asyncronous loading as well as the headless server), but with the pro version its likely more your end that will put up restrictions than the technology
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merlinfire
Joined: 31 Oct 2009
Posts: 4
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| Posted: Tue Nov 03, 2009 2:58 am Post subject: |
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| dreamora wrote: | you can do a lot if not nearly everything aside of modifying the engine itself.
With the free version you are capped on the more professional features (realtime shadows, reflection / refraction, asset bundles and asyncronous loading as well as the headless server), but with the pro version its likely more your end that will put up restrictions than the technology |
That's good to hear. I've tried for quite a while to make games on my own, and the mathematics of creating my own graphics engine have always been a roadblock for me. So I tried to stick with the non-graphical and am in the middle of creating a new MUD codebase in C#. At the risk of appearing childish..
Dude, I'm totally psyched! |
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HiggyB
Unity Product Evangelist
Joined: 08 Dec 2006
Posts: 5106
Location: San Francisco CA USA
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| Posted: Tue Nov 03, 2009 6:49 pm Post subject: |
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Furthermore, Unity won't box you into a particular game type. It's not a "FPS engine", it's not a "driving game engine", heck, it's a 3D engine but you can in fact even make 2D content if you'd like. So also know that it's not limiting you in that sense, make any game you want, heck make some non-game stuff too! 
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loken
Joined: 25 Mar 2009
Posts: 23
Location: Duluth, MN
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| Posted: Wed Nov 04, 2009 3:27 am Post subject: |
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It functions very poorly as a coffee maker or toaster.
Beyond that, it's pretty much amazing. |
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Lab013
Joined: 22 Oct 2008
Posts: 229
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| Posted: Wed Nov 04, 2009 4:47 am Post subject: |
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| loken wrote: | It functions very poorly as a coffee maker or toaster.
Beyond that, it's pretty much amazing. |
I don't know man, toast and coffee always taste better with a dash of Unity.
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JTBentley
Joined: 30 Jun 2009
Posts: 709
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| Posted: Wed Nov 04, 2009 5:45 am Post subject: |
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| Lab013 wrote: | | I don't know man, toast and coffee always taste better with a dash of Unity. |
Here here!
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merlinfire
Joined: 31 Oct 2009
Posts: 4
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| Posted: Thu Nov 05, 2009 1:46 am Post subject: |
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| HiggyB wrote: | | Furthermore, Unity won't box you into a particular game type. It's not a "FPS engine", it's not a "driving game engine", heck, it's a 3D engine but you can in fact even make 2D content if you'd like. So also know that it's not limiting you in that sense, make any game you want, heck make some non-game stuff too! |
I was fascinated by the fact that that I can create a "studio intro" splash screen using the same system I use to make the rest of the game! |
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Troy Dawson
Joined: 02 Nov 2009
Posts: 54
Location: Sunnyvale
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| Posted: Fri Nov 06, 2009 6:06 am Post subject: |
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| Quote: | | What are some major or minor limitations of Unity3D that you have encountered or heard, either in general or in specific circumstances. |
I've only been using Unity for a week, but my comparison is with Microsoft's XNA, within which I'd been dabbling this year.
XNA is great because it has a captive market of 20 or so million xboxes, each of which is identical and a known quantity, while Unity allows one to target a very wide range of hardware and platforms but at the risk of not taking full advantage of customer's hardware capability.
Also, it's my impression that MS has thought through delivery of the end product better; one thing vexing me now is having the display initialized into a proper fullscreen presentation with the proper pixel aspect -- i'm not a big fan of Unity's current launch widget approach, such initialization should be done in-engine IMO.
Given about a year of work and a good knowledge of rendering pipelines it would be possible to re-create the Unity runtime fully within the XNA environment. XNA gives the programmer the tools to create what Unity already provides but requires the programmer to have some chops to pull off such a well-designed engine as Unity. After another man-year one could re-create the editor, which is really Unity's strongest component perhaps.
With the xbox announcement, my basic strategy for this next year is to work on my game design ideas within Unity with an eye to eventual shipment within Unity for Mac/Windows and/or xbox -- or, depending on events, continue my native engine development within XNA and just port my Unity assets over into that.
One thing that has surprised me is that the "hard shadows" of Pro aren't volumetric shadows as I had assumed, but rather just unblurred shadow maps. I had assumed Pro had volumetric shadows (which I dig) but was kinda let down that it doesn't.
Plus, shadows are being a bit swimmy and wonky for me with 2.6. Being a unity newbie I don't know what I'm doing with the various parameters, but they certainly don't "just work" out of the box.
Unity certainly has the correct technology with C# scripting, a solid editor, decent terrain and collision/physics submodules, and a good material/shader model to develop rendering ideas. |
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Timmer
Joined: 28 Jul 2008
Posts: 334
Location: San Diego, CA
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| Posted: Fri Nov 06, 2009 9:01 am Post subject: |
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| Troy Dawson wrote: | | i'm not a big fan of Unity's current launch widget approach, such initialization should be done in-engine IMO. |
And it can be ... that's just there for convenience. You can make it never be used and do all the settings via code.
| Quote: | | One thing that has surprised me is that the "hard shadows" of Pro aren't volumetric shadows as I had assumed, but rather just unblurred shadow maps. I had assumed Pro had volumetric shadows (which I dig) but was kinda let down that it doesn't. |
Yeah, the pro shadows could definitely be better. Hopefully in 3.0 they'll get a revamp. |
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Eric5h5
Joined: 19 Jul 2006
Posts: 6930
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| Posted: Fri Nov 06, 2009 9:08 am Post subject: |
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| Troy Dawson wrote: | | one thing vexing me now is having the display initialized into a proper fullscreen presentation with the proper pixel aspect -- i'm not a big fan of Unity's current launch widget approach, such initialization should be done in-engine IMO. |
You're certainly free to do that if you want. The built-in front end is just a convenience so you don't have to.
Edit: maybe I shouldn't keep browser tabs open for more than a few minutes without checking to see if there was already a reply. 
--Eric |
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