Checking out Unity
Saturday, August 30th, 2008
Yesterday I dusted off my old G4 and set it up in order to mess around with Unity. Unity is a high-level 3d game creation engine that many ex-Director users have switched over to. Games made in Unity can play on Mac or Windows, but the authoring environment is Mac only.
I hope to be able to post my thoughts here on Unity as I explore it’s capabilities.
Day 1: Installing the trial
I downloaded and installed Unity 2.1, and immediately ran into a problem: the app was booting to a completely blank dialog box with just an OK button on it, then freezing. OTEE (the makers of Unity) support was quick, but their best suggestion was to re-install. The next day however I solved the problem: it turned out my date/time on my old Mac was not set correctly, and this was playing havoc with the DRM. I set up my date correctly and now Unity is working fine.
First Impressions
So far Unity looks pretty cool. It’s apparent that it is optimized for making games compared to Director (which takes a more general approach). That is, there’s a lot of primitives and built-in game-oriented options that don’t require scripting, or even using pre-written scripts. That’s a breath of fresh air compared to Director, which pretty much requires you write your own systems for just about everything. The way the editor interacts with scripts reminds me a lot of Leia, which was LucasArt’s in-house level editor originally written for Jedi Knight (which I did level design for).
I’m about 1/3 through the Lerpz tutorial, which is a combo PDF and Unity project file that takes you though the basics of creating a 3rd person platformer using pre-written component scripts. It all seems pretty straightforward so far. My first few nitpicks: I’ve had a few crashes when switching viewport layouts, and the undo/redo seems a bit sketchy. Still, I’m impressed.
More to come here as I continue to play with it ….
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