To Learn Unity Or Not To Learn Unity

herohamp

To Learn Unity Or Not To Learn Unity. That is my question.

Firedrake969

depends on what your goals are

herohamp

Firedrake969 wrote:
depends on what your goals are

Making 2d Games ;P

TheMonsterOfTheDeep

herohamp wrote:
Firedrake969 wrote:
depends on what your goals are
Making 2d Games ;P

eehhhhhhhhh

I haven't used it for 2D games, but I'm using it in my game dev class for a 3D game (that I might actually share soon, seeing as how school is ending) and I've found that, despite a lot of things being really easy, once you stray just a little outside the normal boundaries, everything grows incredibly difficult.

Or maybe that's just my experience - you probably should *try* it and see if it fits your goals.

bobbybee

It's a massive proprietary game engine, with a massive proprietary runtime your users are forced to run. If you care at all about software freedom – or the software freedom of your users, for that matter – it'd be kind of shame to see all of that learning go to waste.

(I don't do game programming at all these days, so I'm not in a position to recommend any engine. But I'm sure if you look around, you'll find something worthwhile.)

Last edited by bobbybee (April 23, 2017 01:58:26)

herohamp

bobbybee wrote:
It's a massive proprietary game engine, with a massive proprietary runtime your users are forced to run. If you care at all about software freedom – or the software freedom of your users, for that matter – it'd be kind of shame to see all of that learning go to waste.

(I don't do game programming at all these days, so I'm not in a position to recommend any engine. But I'm sure if you look around, you'll find something worthwhile.)

So I assume you hate unity ;P

gdpr533f604550b2f20900645890

herohamp wrote:
bobbybee wrote:
It's a massive proprietary game engine, with a massive proprietary runtime your users are forced to run. If you care at all about software freedom – or the software freedom of your users, for that matter – it'd be kind of shame to see all of that learning go to waste.

(I don't do game programming at all these days, so I'm not in a position to recommend any engine. But I'm sure if you look around, you'll find something worthwhile.)
So I assume you hate unity ;P

You should use Godot, which is libre software.

bobbybee

herohamp wrote:
bobbybee wrote:
It's a massive proprietary game engine, with a massive proprietary runtime your users are forced to run. If you care at all about software freedom – or the software freedom of your users, for that matter – it'd be kind of shame to see all of that learning go to waste.

(I don't do game programming at all these days, so I'm not in a position to recommend any engine. But I'm sure if you look around, you'll find something worthwhile.)
So I assume you hate unity ;P

Not in particular; at least, I don't dislike it any more than any other proprietary package like it. But even if I as a developer don't care about the license of the editor (which is my choice to make), by using it I'm requiring any would-be-players to run Unity's code too, which is much more questionable.

In any case, I would highly discourage learning it, since it's not trivial and that time would be better spent learning something free (or at least standard's compliant?)

Firedrake969

of course, unless you want to make money by making and selling games, in which case having a free philosophy probably won't net you as much

bobbybee

Firedrake969 wrote:
of course, unless you want to make money by making and selling games, in which case having a free philosophy probably won't net you as much

Dubious – this is concerning the engine, not the game itself. With the bits you code, you can release it under whatever license you choose. There are many models of varying success, some of which are proprietaries, others of which are not. Even if it is a proprietary game, you can release the source later, freeing it once it's no longer commercially profitable (Doom anyone?)

With an engine like Unity, there's a major blackbox that totally out of your control and your user's control. You couldn't free your game if you wanted to.

(I'm tempted to prefer proprietary games using free engines over free games using proprietary engines, for what it's worth…)

Last edited by bobbybee (April 23, 2017 04:45:00)

Firedrake969

bobbybee wrote:
Firedrake969 wrote:
of course, unless you want to make money by making and selling games, in which case having a free philosophy probably won't net you as much
Dubious – this is concerning the engine, not the game itself. With the bits you code, you can release it under whatever license you choose. There are many models of varying success, some of which are proprietaries, others of which are not. Even if it is a proprietary game, you can release the source later, freeing it once it's no longer commercially profitable (Doom anyone?)

With an engine like Unity, there's a major blackbox that totally out of your control and your user's control. You couldn't free your game if you wanted to.

(I'm tempted to prefer proprietary games using free engines over free games using proprietary engines, for what it's worth…)

ah, thought you were talking about the actual game code, lol

either way, make sure you choose your tools to match your goals

bobbybee

Firedrake969 wrote:
bobbybee wrote:
Firedrake969 wrote:
of course, unless you want to make money by making and selling games, in which case having a free philosophy probably won't net you as much
Dubious – this is concerning the engine, not the game itself. With the bits you code, you can release it under whatever license you choose. There are many models of varying success, some of which are proprietaries, others of which are not. Even if it is a proprietary game, you can release the source later, freeing it once it's no longer commercially profitable (Doom anyone?)

With an engine like Unity, there's a major blackbox that totally out of your control and your user's control. You couldn't free your game if you wanted to.

(I'm tempted to prefer proprietary games using free engines over free games using proprietary engines, for what it's worth…)
ah, thought you were talking about the actual game code, lol

either way, make sure you choose your tools to match your goals

Well, that too, but the license you choose on the code is your choice. You couldn't switch away from Unity to something free if you wanted to.

Firedrake969

which is why I said “make sure you choose your tools to match your goals”, because that may or may not be one of his goals - for example, if Unity is the easiest option, that may outweigh his goals for this specific project some X years in the future

Last edited by Firedrake969 (April 23, 2017 23:11:45)

scratchisthebest

Unity's mostly programmed in C#, which is a fairly decent language but takes a bit to get used to. I think Javascript is also an option if you hate performance.

It's definitely an (awkward?) blend of GUI-based asset management and script programming, which can lead to spaghetti if you're not careful. Where'd I define that particle system again…

Depending on who you are and what you like, that might sound really appealing to you. It doesn't for me, that sounds horrible, which is why I'm taking a more serious look at “real” languages like C++ (with things like openFrameworks) for game programming. Plus, you get more performance and *much* smaller filesizes, but you won't get the cool cross platform features something like java or unity has “for free”.

Icey29

I gave Unity an enormous amount of time at one point. It was fun to try and use but you are probably better off with something else IMHO- especially if you are making a 2D game. Unity is built for 3D through-and-through. Unless you are making a 2D game with 3D models (does that make sense?) you should look into some other alternatives. Godot?
Scratchisthebest mentioned spaghetti. This is a big issue in Unity. Everything gets massive very, very quickly, and everything is such a pain to manage. What TheMonsterOfTheDeep said about simple things being easy and everything else being impossibly difficult is very accurate- and this is honestly such a big problem with an engine like Unity that expects you to make fairly complex things.

Okay, so- freedom, whatever, but we can forget about that if you're doing this for fun and you aren't locking yourself into libre systems. Let's take that out of the picture and focus on Unity itself, alright?

Unity's “”linux version“” (massive quotes) does not work. Last time I tried, I couldn't even sign in. You will be using Windows for your game which can be bothersome if you're doing something multiplayer and all of that is on a linux machine/partition. Unity can also be hard on resources.

I'm rambling. To wrap things up: for your purposes, (emphasis on a 2D game, here) you will not like Unity for building a functional ‘thing’. But the free version is fun for what it's worth.

EDIT: a colon and a parenthesis became an emoji and that made me extremely frustrated.

Last edited by Icey29 (April 24, 2017 18:45:59)

Darkwren

I use Unreal Engine 4 and Unity, and if you're concerned about open source, UE4 is open whereas Unity is not. Both aren't to hard to learn, however you can make a game in UE4 without even typing a single line of code. However, UE4 produces really large files that get really big even if they are simple (I heard a blank project can be around 500mb!). Unity projects are small enough to fit on Github pages (see: poscobg.github.io/push). Both are very good, I recommend you try out the free versions of many game engines that you'd like to try.

bobbybee

Darkwren wrote:
I use Unreal Engine 4 and Unity, and if you're concerned about open source, UE4 is open whereas Unity is not. Both aren't to hard to learn, however you can make a game in UE4 without even typing a single line of code. However, UE4 produces really large files that get really big even if they are simple (I heard a blank project can be around 500mb!). Unity projects are small enough to fit on Github pages (see: poscobg.github.io/push). Both are very good, I recommend you try out the free versions of many game engines that you'd like to try.

UE4 is source-available proprietary software. It's neither “free”, “libre”, nor “open source” according to the usual definitions.

TheMonsterOfTheDeep

@bobbybee are there any game engines you would recommend?

As it were I imagine that there are probably no free game engines quite like UE4 - it can do some really incredible stuff.

bobbybee

TheMonsterOfTheDeep wrote:
@bobbybee are there any game engines you would recommend?

As it were I imagine that there are probably no free game engines quite like UE4 - it can do some really incredible stuff.

I know there are a handful of polished free game engines. I can't recommend any, since I don't write (or really play) games these days.

I've played with Panda3D a long time ago (though this is a rather different beast). It's Python-based, in terms of idioms, and was notably developed with Toontown Online.

In principle anything free on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_game_engines is okay by me.

gtoal

Chibi-Matoran wrote:
herohamp wrote:
bobbybee wrote:
It's a massive proprietary game engine, with a massive proprietary runtime your users are forced to run. If you care at all about software freedom – or the software freedom of your users, for that matter – it'd be kind of shame to see all of that learning go to waste.

(I don't do game programming at all these days, so I'm not in a position to recommend any engine. But I'm sure if you look around, you'll find something worthwhile.)
So I assume you hate unity ;P
You should use Godot, which is libre software.

This site can’t be reached

godotengine.org took too long to respond.
Try:
Checking the connection
Checking the proxy and the firewall
Running Windows Network Diagnostics
ERR_CONNECTION_TIMED_OUT

Waiting for godot?

Discuss Scratch