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Unity Game Engine



STRBramley

ClioSport Club Member
  182 Trophy #404
Anyone had any exposure to this?
I'm downloading it now as I would like to get into some simple game development.
Is it possible to develop for PC, Android and iOS using this tool?

Unity Game Engine
 

SharkyUK

ClioSport Club Member
I've used it a fair bit mate. It's really impressive to be honest. However, there is a steep learning curve and it's not realistic to expect to simply jump in and start producing half-decent games! I'm not trying to put folks off from having a go; but be prepared to invest a LOT of hours getting to grips with the interface, scripting, modelling, etc. (obviously depends on your knowledge of such things). :)

The Free version will allow you to publish to PC executable, Web, Android (needs Android SDK), iOS (requires Apple developer account, $99 per year and a suitable Mac computer). It's not as simple publishing to iOS though...

Do you have any programming / graphics / game development experience?
 

STRBramley

ClioSport Club Member
  182 Trophy #404
I've used it a fair bit mate. It's really impressive to be honest. However, there is a steep learning curve and it's not realistic to expect to simply jump in and start producing half-decent games! I'm not trying to put folks off from having a go; but be prepared to invest a LOT of hours getting to grips with the interface, scripting, modelling, etc. (obviously depends on your knowledge of such things). :)

The Free version will allow you to publish to PC executable, Web, Android (needs Android SDK), iOS (requires Apple developer account, $99 per year and a suitable Mac computer). It's not as simple publishing to iOS though...

Do you have any programming / graphics / game development experience?

Cheers for the reply. I should have guessed you'd be the best person to answer my question :p

I'm more than willing to put the time into learning. Do you know of any good learning material or is it best to learn on your own?

My job requires alot of programming (mainly is C#, SQL, JavaScript and VB) so I'd say I'm pretty competent in this area.
I've also been 3D modelling on and off since around 2004 (started off modelling maps for Halo CE) as a hobby using 3dsMax. I've included some images of my most recent project below. It's still unfinished but it gives a good idea of what I've done.

I don't have any game development experience other than a few University modules where I was required to modify a Flash Pong game to introduce difficulty levels, curve ball and other minor enhancements.

13758870564_4e8a86aabd_b.png


13758878674_0246e983ff_b.png


13758499085_6126ef963e_b.png


13758870034_66a34e213e_b.png
 
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SharkyUK

ClioSport Club Member
Cheers for the reply. I should have guessed you'd be the best person to answer my question :p
LOL! I know nothing :p

I'm more than willing to put the time into learning. Do you know of any good learning material or is it best to learn on your own?
There's LOADS of Unity stuff on the 'Net - from tutorials to downloadable 'games' and so forth. Sadly I cannot remember any of the decent sites off the top of my head, but they are out there; and cater for all levels of experience and ability. I'm not aware of any official learning material, but I expect there is some out there as Unity is fast becoming a major player within this area of game development.

If you're willing to put in the time then you're well on your way. It's time more than anything else that is usually the deciding factor in how well you progress with it and, indeed, the results! It's obvious you've got talent and skills that would be beneficial so it may be a bit easier for you than compared to, say, someone coming in as a total noob.

My job requires alot of programming (mainly is C#, SQL, JavaScript and VB) so I'd say I'm pretty competent in this area.
I've also been 3D modelling on and off since around 2004 (started off modelling maps for Halo CE) as a hobby using 3dsMax. I've included some images of my most recent project below. It's still unfinished but it gives a good idea of what I've done.

I don't have any game development experience other than a few University modules where I was required to modify a Flash Pong game to introduce difficulty levels, curve ball and other minor enhancements.
Knowledge of C# and Javascript will be useful as these are predominantly the languages used to code 'under the hood' with Unity (C# is the best bet in my opinion). Your knowledge of the language and semantics will be very useful here. Having an eye for what looks good and your 3D skillz ;) will also help massively; it's relatively easy to take your 3D art assets and get them into your game world. The best bet is to just dive in and don't be put off by the initial 'clunkiness' of the system. It soon becomes second nature and prefabs are your friend... :) Generally.

On a different note, I love the 3D modelling mate! Very nice! Is it a Cycles Render from within Blender? I'm tempted to be cheeky and ask for the models so that I can run them through my own raytracing software that I'm currently writing. :eek: Seriously, great work :)
 

STRBramley

ClioSport Club Member
  182 Trophy #404
LOL! I know nothing :p


There's LOADS of Unity stuff on the 'Net - from tutorials to downloadable 'games' and so forth. Sadly I cannot remember any of the decent sites off the top of my head, but they are out there; and cater for all levels of experience and ability. I'm not aware of any official learning material, but I expect there is some out there as Unity is fast becoming a major player within this area of game development.

If you're willing to put in the time then you're well on your way. It's time more than anything else that is usually the deciding factor in how well you progress with it and, indeed, the results! It's obvious you've got talent and skills that would be beneficial so it may be a bit easier for you than compared to, say, someone coming in as a total noob.


Knowledge of C# and Javascript will be useful as these are predominantly the languages used to code 'under the hood' with Unity (C# is the best bet in my opinion). Your knowledge of the language and semantics will be very useful here. Having an eye for what looks good and your 3D skillz ;) will also help massively; it's relatively easy to take your 3D art assets and get them into your game world. The best bet is to just dive in and don't be put off by the initial 'clunkiness' of the system. It soon becomes second nature and prefabs are your friend... :) Generally.

On a different note, I love the 3D modelling mate! Very nice! Is it a Cycles Render from within Blender? I'm tempted to be cheeky and ask for the models so that I can run them through my own raytracing software that I'm currently writing. :eek: Seriously, great work :)

I'll have a look around tonight and see what learning material I can find. I saw a couple of videos on the Unity site so I might use them to get familiar with the interface.

Thanks :). It's a V-Ray render done in 3dsMax with a few Photoshop effects on top. Although, they're not polished renders and the DOF was done in Photoshop to save rendering time. The final render will hopefully look better when I get round to finishing off the exterior and starting on the interior.

I'm looking forwards to jumping into it and seeing what can be done. I'm going to have a think about a simple game I can start with and see if I can build up from that.

I've seen your raytracing thread, really interesting stuff. I'd like to see how the camper renders using it :D

I've PM'ed you a link to the 3D model.
 

sn00p

ClioSport Club Member
  A blue one.
These kids these days don't realise how easy it all is nowadays! ;)

Mode X was where it was in the DOS days..its interesting having to draw a frame every 4th pixel at a time...otherwise big speed penalty.

My Michael abrash book still sits on the bookshelf!
 

SharkyUK

ClioSport Club Member
I'll have a look around tonight and see what learning material I can find. I saw a couple of videos on the Unity site so I might use them to get familiar with the interface.

Thanks :). It's a V-Ray render done in 3dsMax with a few Photoshop effects on top. Although, they're not polished renders and the DOF was done in Photoshop to save rendering time. The final render will hopefully look better when I get round to finishing off the exterior and starting on the interior.

I'm looking forwards to jumping into it and seeing what can be done. I'm going to have a think about a simple game I can start with and see if I can build up from that.

I've seen your raytracing thread, really interesting stuff. I'd like to see how the camper renders using it :D

I've PM'ed you a link to the 3D model.
Thanks for the link mate. I'll download and see what it looks like in my raytracer (once I get it working properly again, as I've broken it at the moment). :eek: I'll also need to re-install Max as I'm only running Maya at the moment.

Good luck with Unity; have fun with it and be sure to post up your results / games ;)

These kids these days don't realise how easy it all is nowadays! ;)

Mode X was where it was in the DOS days..its interesting having to draw a frame every 4th pixel at a time...otherwise big speed penalty.

My Michael abrash book still sits on the bookshelf!
Ah yes, Abrash! I'm looking at his Graphics Programming Black Book sitting on my shelf right now! Mode X was great.

I remember spending many a happy hour coding routines with the following (or similar) code at the top...

Code:
[COLOR=#000000]char far *ptr_to_video_segment = MK_FP(0xA000, 0x0000);[/COLOR]

I'm not sure if you remember the good old ZX Speccy days? A fixed palette of 8 colours, or 15 if you enabled the 'bright' version of each colour (excluding black). And only being able to use 2 colours per 8x8 block of pixels and those 2 colours having to be either normal or bright, but not one of each...
 

sn00p

ClioSport Club Member
  A blue one.
It was all about the assembler in those days, I don't think I wrote a single game in 'C'.

Although saying that, while everybody else at college was struggling to write a simple "database" program in pascal (single line read then move to the next field), mine featured a full graphical GUI with movable windows! lol

My Abrash book was the Zen of graphics programming.

I remember writing stuff on the BBC using hardware scrolling, scroll screen, draw new line, erase objects that shouldn't have moved, redraw them....etc.

I think everybody should learn to code on an 8-bitter (Speccy, C64, BBC etc) because it's a real accomplishment. There were some really talented programmers back in the day that did some amazing things. Only the other day did I get a cross assembler for the BBC and wrote a pointless sideways ROM for it, was bored, but there's something physical about writing something that's "bare metal"...an accomplishment.

Now where's my gold star.

PS your work is awesome.
 

SharkyUK

ClioSport Club Member
It was all about the assembler in those days, I don't think I wrote a single game in 'C'.
The lost art of assembler coding... Often challenging, often frustrating, often rewarding... and strangely addictive. I remember writing a few little games and routines in assembler but my more ambitious projects nearly always were C based. Back in those days (DOS, Mode X) I would still use assembler for the likes of memory copies, sprite rendering / blitting and similar. I enjoyed being able to extract as much performance as possible from the target platform - whether using assembler, or optimisation methods such as unrolling loops (or various other tricks that were needed). Compiler optimisations weren't so good in those days. :eek:

Although saying that, while everybody else at college was struggling to write a simple "database" program in pascal (single line read then move to the next field), mine featured a full graphical GUI with movable windows! lol
LOL - I like your style! I really struggled, whilst at Uni, to muster enthusiasm for anything other than programming-based modules on my course. Even some of those modules were a bit of a chore as they assumed little to no experience of programming (the language in this case being C++) whereas I'd been programming from quite a young age. Implementing string classes, container classes (the typical lists, queues, dequeues, stacks, etc. that you will be all too familiar with), and so forth... At least they were easy to get through and didn't require much effort. :) However, I did enjoy the graphics programming module strangely enough. The brief was simple; write a software rasteriser (DOS, 0xA000 13h) that would render simple 3D graphics. The starting point given was a skeleton framework for a triangle / trapezoid rasteriser and we had to go from there. My first task was to ditch that framework and I wrote my own (you'd have done the same!) The idea was to develop the renderer and add lighting, flat shading, Gouraud shading (extra points!) and so forth. As this was an area I was interested in I went a step or two further and wrote a software renderer that supported various lighting/shading models, performed affine or perspective correct texture mapping, ASE model loading support, simplified volume rendering (which ran dog slow), virtual camera system, particle effects(!), post process effects and a few other things.

My Abrash book was the Zen of graphics programming.
Oh yes, I can't believe I forgot about that one! Mr Abrash seems to be doing ok these days as I see he's now working on the Occulus Rift platform.

I remember writing stuff on the BBC using hardware scrolling, scroll screen, draw new line, erase objects that shouldn't have moved, redraw them....etc.

I think everybody should learn to code on an 8-bitter (Speccy, C64, BBC etc) because it's a real accomplishment. There were some really talented programmers back in the day that did some amazing things. Only the other day did I get a cross assembler for the BBC and wrote a pointless sideways ROM for it, was bored, but there's something physical about writing something that's "bare metal"...an accomplishment.
Yeah, I couldn't agree more. Truly talented (younger) programmers are few and far between these days. I won't get on my soapbox but my vision of programming, compared to the visions of new generation coders, don't often align! Trying to find decent software engineers is a pain these days; there is definitely a significant skills gap. It's scary how many so-called expert programmers don't have a clue how to debug or understand what's actually going on with their code at a lower level.

Now where's my gold star.
Award-star-gold-3d.png
;)

PS your work is awesome.
Mine or STRBramley's? LOL! STRBramley's work is awesome.

If you were referring to mine then many thanks for the kind words :)

Apologies for the (possibly) messy and incoherent reply. I'm currently in a meeting and attempting to look interested whilst writing this... ;)
 

sn00p

ClioSport Club Member
  A blue one.
I'll swap your boring meeting for my day! Rushing to get prototype hardware out the door today to a customer.

Just tried updating the firmware via memory stick only to find that the software wouldn't boot, eventually traced the fault down to my pc utility which generates the encrypted and signed firmware images, it reads the ELF file and extracts the code section....but it should also have been extracting another section which seems to be in use by the bluetooth stack.

Also the application firmware should reboot if a usb device is plugged in, but for some reason on my hardware it doesn't....probably a missing or incorrect use of a pull-up/down resistor.

And I need to turn on code protection on the micro, this is scary as if I set the wrong type of protection I will lock the micro out permanantly, the micro is a 200+ pin BGA so if I bugger it up it'll go in the bin....and we've not got that many prototypes!

Plus I need to double check the hardware roadside to make sure it works correctly.

And I need to fit lunch in.

Glass or two of wine tonight!
 

Darren S

ClioSport Club Member
Thanks sn00p/Andy - my brain has attempted to follow the above and is currently dribbling out by my ear lobes. ;)

High-end stuff guys - waaaay beyond the comprehension of us mere mortals!

D.
 

sn00p

ClioSport Club Member
  A blue one.
Thanks sn00p/Andy - my brain has attempted to follow the above and is currently dribbling out by my ear lobes. ;)

High-end stuff guys - waaaay beyond the comprehension of us mere mortals!

D.

I love sharkys updates, awesome stuff.

My brain is now mush, prototype system has gone out the door. Firmware can be updated via memory stick and the worrying settings for code protection worked...but more importantly I was able to wipe the processor afterwards....this is necessary if any failed units come back so that they can be diagnosed, if I can't connect the debugger to the unit then it's very difficult to diagnose any faults.

Time for wine.

And then another.
 

SharkyUK

ClioSport Club Member
I'll swap your boring meeting for my day! Rushing to get prototype hardware out the door today to a customer.

Just tried updating the firmware via memory stick only to find that the software wouldn't boot, eventually traced the fault down to my pc utility which generates the encrypted and signed

...<snip>...

Glass or two of wine tonight!
Blimey mate - sounds like it's been a busy end to the week! I reckon that glass of wine will be (was?) well deserved.

My meeting was a lot more sedate and more of a multi-part presentation in which I was demonstrating one of our products. I was bored because we were last on the agenda and the meeting was already running an hour or so late. I don't do hanging around very well...

Thanks sn00p/Andy - my brain has attempted to follow the above and is currently dribbling out by my ear lobes. ;)

High-end stuff guys - waaaay beyond the comprehension of us mere mortals!
LOL! Ssssssh... D, I haven't a clue what sn00p's on about either... :p (well, maybe a little bit here and there!) I know it involves wine at some point. And troublesome firmware. :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Reality

These guys were legends back in the day, in particular the end scene of that demo was mind blowing for the time.

edit:

the source code for it is here....

https://github.com/mtuomi/SecondReality

Wow - now that demo brings back so many memories. I remember it well and also remember watching it over and over! The Future Crew were awesome. I still follow the demoscene today but it's not quite the same as it used to be. Sure, there are still some good crews out there and some impressive demos but it seems to be dying. :( I remember the Atari ST and Amiga demoscenes particularly fondly and obtaining the latest demo releases by purchasing from the various public domain libraries that were available at the time. I might take a quick look at the source code sometime - just out of curiosity more than anything else. Thanks for the links and nostalgia!

I love sharkys updates, awesome stuff.
:eek: I don't think many people pay much attention as I tend to ramble on sometimes! But thanks, I appreciate the comment and it's good to know they are well received :) I really have a passion for computer graphics and visualisation and sometimes that just spills over onto the forum. I hope I can provide further updates soon (planning on adding a simple global illumination ambient occlusion calculation to simulate indirect lighting and Rayleigh/Mie scattering with aerial perspective to generate some nice landscape and sky renders with half decent sky colours, sunsets and so forth). Time permitting of course.

My brain is now mush, prototype system has gone out the door. Firmware can be updated via memory stick and the worrying settings for code protection worked...but more importantly I was able to wipe the processor afterwards....this is necessary if any failed units come back so that they can be diagnosed, if I can't connect the debugger to the unit then it's very difficult to diagnose any faults.

Time for wine.

And then another.
A good result by the sounds of it mate. And it also sounds like challenging and interesting work, too. I bet that wine went down well...
 

SharkyUK

ClioSport Club Member
STRBramley - I'm trying to locate my 3dsmax install and licence key as my new build PC hasn't seen them installed yet. The problem is that I can't locate either and that is somewhat concerning... Can you export the model in fbx format? That way I can bring it straight into Maya (which I do have installed!) No problem if not! :)
 

STRBramley

ClioSport Club Member
  182 Trophy #404
@STRBramley - I'm trying to locate my 3dsmax install and licence key as my new build PC hasn't seen them installed yet. The problem is that I can't locate either and that is somewhat concerning... Can you export the model in fbx format? That way I can bring it straight into Maya (which I do have installed!) No problem if not! :)

No problem, I've PM'ed you a link. I've tried to include as much as I can but the textures may be missing.

I've been having a play with Unity tonight and I can see the learning curve is going to be huge! So far I've managed to get a solider to stand on a plane without falling through it haha.
Once I've found my way around the interface and know what everything does it'll be better. At the minute I feel like I did when I first opened up 3dsMax 10 years ago!
 

sn00p

ClioSport Club Member
  A blue one.
Ha..speaking of demo effects, I remembered about this that I did a few years back....

[Youtube]DK6ezHNWtVM[/YouTube]

Its more impressive than in looks, that LCD has no controller (therefore no video ram), so I'm literally handling the scan refresh on the fly, clocking out every pixel of every frame fast enough to create the persistence of vision.....oh and drawing and updating the rotozoom into an internal buffer so that the aforementioned code can draw it.

Its much easier to use an LCD with a controller, but its quite fun to do stuff the hard way!
 
  BG 182FF
I've not been on here for ages, then when I do there a thread chatting about Unity. Amazing.

The way unity works is you get a licence for the software, then there are additional paid licences for different platforms that you want to publish to, I think there are free version for mobile. Unity can publish to every major platform (even if they don't advertise it. You can publish to all the consoles including next gen, though this requires being approved by Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony) Thats the great thing about it. It doesn't take a great deal of effort to make a build for each platform, it seems like there main thing that's not compatible is shaders. Ad networks, analytics's and IAPs usually just need a bit of work then you have a fully functioning game across platforms. One of the best things about Unity imo is the asset store. There are so many bit you can buy that you can use to assemble a game with, it means you can write half a game, and assemble the rest of it with assets that other people have made.

Ive been working with Unity for over 2 years now, I'm just about to release a game actually, that I made with a couple of mates. I may as well pop the trailer in here as a shameless plug, as I'm not sure I'll get a better opportunity to plug it than this ;-)

Its cars playing football, you can play it on Android, iPhone and iPad on the 24th April

 
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SharkyUK

ClioSport Club Member
No problem, I've PM'ed you a link. I've tried to include as much as I can but the textures may be missing.
Thanks for your time and exporting again. Sadly Maya hasn't done such a good job of importing it. I didn't expect the materials and textures to necessarily come through unscathed but the mesh seems to have suffered, too. There are various parts missing and some in wrong places. Not to worry, I'll try again when I get Max installed :) Thank you!

I've been having a play with Unity tonight and I can see the learning curve is going to be huge! So far I've managed to get a solider to stand on a plane without falling through it haha.
Once I've found my way around the interface and know what everything does it'll be better. At the minute I feel like I did when I first opened up 3dsMax 10 years ago!
Yes, it can feel a bit like that to start with! It's definitely worth giving it some time though as it is incredibly powerful and, believe it or not, fairly intuitive once you get to grips with it. When I get back home I'll see if I can find the links to the websites I looked at when I first started playing with Unity. There were a couple of gems but I cannot remember them.

Ha..speaking of demo effects, I remembered about this that I did a few years back....

[Youtube]DK6ezHNWtVM[/Youtube]

Its more impressive than in looks, that LCD has no controller (therefore no video ram), so I'm literally handling the scan refresh on the fly, clocking out every pixel of every frame fast enough to create the persistence of vision.....oh and drawing and updating the rotozoom into an internal buffer so that the aforementioned code can draw it.

Its much easier to use an LCD with a controller, but its quite fun to do stuff the hard way!
Haha! That is fantastic and 'proper hardcore' :) And impressive! The only disappointment is the lack of text scroller, copper bars and sine bobs... :p I'm now keen to return home and see if I can find any of my old source code from 'back in the day'. That's if I can a) find the diskettes and b) purchase a floppy drive for my PC and c) if the disks are still readable. I suspect that is a big ask.
 

sn00p

ClioSport Club Member
  A blue one.
Thanks for your time and exporting again. Sadly Maya hasn't done such a good job of importing it. I didn't expect the materials and textures to necessarily come through unscathed but the mesh seems to have suffered, too. There are various parts missing and some in wrong places. Not to worry, I'll try again when I get Max installed :) Thank you!


Yes, it can feel a bit like that to start with! It's definitely worth giving it some time though as it is incredibly powerful and, believe it or not, fairly intuitive once you get to grips with it. When I get back home I'll see if I can find the links to the websites I looked at when I first started playing with Unity. There were a couple of gems but I cannot remember them.


Haha! That is fantastic and 'proper hardcore' :) And impressive! The only disappointment is the lack of text scroller, copper bars and sine bobs... :p I'm now keen to return home and see if I can find any of my old source code from 'back in the day'. That's if I can a) find the diskettes and b) purchase a floppy drive for my PC and c) if the disks are still readable. I suspect that is a big ask.

Its a monochrome display though....although I was able to get 4 shades of grey out of it by running at 4 times the refresh and modulating the pixels. I did that just to see if it would work!

Good old shade bobs . I've probably got some code kicking around somewhere that did those as well. Certainly some scrolling text stuff...but that will be on the Archimedes in assembler. Disks are in my parents loft!
 

SharkyUK

ClioSport Club Member
Not quite the same as the hold-and-modify video modes, but inventive use of the hardware all the same!

I have to confess I've spent an hour or two today just watching youtube videos of some of the old scene demos (such as The Care Bears Cuddly Demos) :eek:
 

sn00p

ClioSport Club Member
  A blue one.
I did stuff like that on the PC as well. (Showing my age here!)

I remember showing friends smooth scrolling in text modes and making a lens in text mode as well!

Its almost worth seeing if any old PC drives power up!

Wasn't the first future crew demo in text mode? I mean it looked like a graphic demo but it was in a text mode. I remember thinking that's pretty awesome.

Now I've got a hankering for writing an old school demo! Sine scroller, some sort of masking demo and hundreds of sprites moving about the screen!
 

SharkyUK

ClioSport Club Member
I can vaguely recall the Future Crew's GR8 and YO demos (having just watched them on youtube). I don't know it they did anything earlier than that though...? I also remember being blown away by some of the stuff I was seeing at the time. :eek: Mind you, I also remember being equally impressed the very first time I heard a digitised sound sample being played! I can't remember which system it was on now, but I do remember it being a sample of somebody laughing. And it took ages to load up from cassette. Happy days :)

Go for it mate. I'd always welcome another old school demo... although I don't have any old PC hardware lying around to run it on. :)

Actually, I wonder how good DosBox is. Apparently Second Reality runs pretty well on it with a few minor tweaks.
 

SharkyUK

ClioSport Club Member
Ive been working with Unity for over 2 years now, I'm just about to release a game actually, that I made with a couple of mates. I may as well pop the trailer in here as a shameless plug, as I'm not sure I'll get a better opportunity to plug it than this ;-)

Its cars playing football, you can play it on Android, iPhone and iPad on the 24th April
How did the release go, mate? Looks like a cool little game :) I'm loving where Unity is going at the moment and some of the newer features coming in v5 are looking good. I've never used it in anger as I've always worked on projects using custom engines and libraries but it's good to see Unity getting stronger and more widespread. It can't match some of the big hitting engines but it's flexibility and accessibility are a big draw and some of the games being developed on it are incredible. :)

Now I've got a hankering for writing an old school demo! Sine scroller, some sort of masking demo and hundreds of sprites moving about the screen!
Not one of yours, is it sn00p? :)

 
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