Unity 3d 2.5 Part One

There has been a lot of buzz about  Unity3D, a new plugin that handles 3d much better than flash. It now works for Windows and can output to a lot of different platforms (Windows, Mac, Web, iPhone, Wii, etc). I read a few reviews on it from a couple different sources and it was a pretty mixed bag in terms of quality and use. I thought I would give it a try.

I downloaded a copy (~120MB) and started rocking!

The interface is very intuitive and I applaud the GUI designers that constructed everything. I watched a few of the videos and felt comfortable with the interface in less than an hour.

After learning how everything is organized on the application, it was time to start creating my own game! Not so simple though. The test videos are more about the interface, so I was pretty clueless on how to actually do anything.

All the functionality of everything is based on components, which make static models have collision detection, move, or affect the game in any way. There is a huge amount of components - so it makes the learning curve a little steep to get something up and running. Everything is object-oriented, so it is easy to drag walking scripts or physics colliders onto your player model. The object components then have parameters that you can change.

I was hoping to have a little demo of something I made, but I need to spend some more time with it learning how games are put together. I am working through the 3d platform game tutorial that they provide,  so I will have more later.  There is a free 30-day trial on their site, so that is what I am using.

So far it seems like a great program. It crashes a fair amount, so make sure to save it often.  There are already starting to be some other uses for it like iPerform. There is a trial version for the iPhone that isn’t on the website (only for Macs though). I will play around with it more this coming week.