AAS - Progressive GamePlay?

Hi all,

I am trying to make a game/mod that mimics the gameplay of an old favorite, Joint Operations (JO) by Novalogic.
The basic gameplay is Advance And Secure (AAS), which is a progessive type of game: each team trying to win all the bases, in order, from the opposition and vice-versa - a very simple underlying game logic. There are no Unlocks, Ranking system or Perks, just simple tactical gameplay (ie: none of the rubbish bloat of the latest BFs and CoDs, which only encourages lonewolf players(read:Tards)).
I have been trying things out in CryengineSDK and so far it has been very good - great terrain and foliage tools and it looks very pretty and there are many basic assets that come with the SDK, however the scripting side of things is rather daunting for anybody not conversant in scripting/programming and this side of the SDK is difficult to say the least, imo. I have also dabbled in ArmA3 but the tools from BIstudios are terrible.

My questions are:
1- can Unity deal with large terrains of 2 or more kilometers on a side?
2- can Unity allow an AAS type game to work?
3- can Unity deal with dense foliation?
4- can Unity look like anything other than the Cartoony Look ive seen so far?
5- is Unitys multiplayer netcode robust enough (and how many players can it deal with on the server)?
6- can Unity deal with Time of Day cycles?
7- is there any basic free assets that come with Unity, other than the cutesy/fantasy (ie: im never going to use) assets?
8- can Unity do realistic balistics?

I ask these questions because i cannot find answers in the Forums.

Ive been talked-at to look into Unity because "it's really easy". unfortunately from what ive seen so far that may not entirely be the case.


Cheers.

.LJ

 

1 - Should be fine. Floating point errors with positions don't occur for 10,000 units from the center of the world on my junk laptop! It might be useful to learn how to save and load chunks though, if there are going to be a lot of objects.

2 - Sounds a lot like War from CoD 3&5. If you can work out the logic of how it should be done (like writing rules for a board game), then you're set in any game engine! Unity can do C# RPCs for multiplayer stuff.

3 - I can't personally tell you how to handle this for free, but there are a lot of great things on the asset store you should check out until you find a good answer for this. Pro is useful for this kind of thing because you can do LOD stuff.

4 - Sounds like you're talking about either toon shading or models that weren't very well detailed / lacked a bump / normal map. This is all up to the artwork you can make / get.

5 - There are a lot of server solutions available, my experience is limited to LAN stuff with RPCs. Rust is made with Unity and they have a decent server system, so it definitely can be done. There's also a big networking update coming in 5.x!

6 - Yes. You can even adjust ambient light or directional lights over time in the scene for fading from daytime to nighttime.

7 - Check the asset store & other 'free 3D model' websites. Things won't be available with the download right away, but you can download just about anything and toss it into your project folder, and unity will load it in. Look for fbx files for models, wav files for sounds, mp3/oggs for music, entire scene files on the asset store for demo projects to see what you can do, etc.

8 - Yes. You can make monobehavior components which can be put onto objects directly so they can act however you like. You don't need a reference to them or anything, they can each have their own share of the hidden master thread if you give them an Update function


Unity is simple when you get used to using the editor for creating prefabs and placing objects in your scene. I recommend going through the asset store, getting a handful of free projects and seeing how they're set up. There are different ways to accomplish most things and in [probably] the implementation will be fine however you desire to get it done. You can check out the angry bots project that comes with unity as well.

 

The answer to just about any "can unity do x" question is "yes, but only if you can."

 

thanks for the replies, guys. much appreciated

cheers.