March 4th, 2010 @ Sway Bar, London
UK studios converge to battle over who's the cleverest - have you booked your place yet?
Thursday April 22nd, 2009 @ The Brewery, London
The countdown to the MCV Awards 2010 has begun – with date, venue and categories announced.
July 14th, 2010 @ The Hilton Metropole, Brighton
The Develop Industry Excellence Awards is the only event which rewards the work done by Europe’s leading games development companies.
The top 10 game engines as selected by Develop continues
The top 10 game engines as selected by Develop continues today with Unity 3D. We will be revealing a new entrant to the list every day until this Friday, so keep checking back to see which other tech providers you should be looking at for your next project…
Unity 3D
Developer: Unity Technologies
Platforms: PC, Mac, iPhone, Wii
Browser support: Yes
Cost: $199 (Indie), $1499 (Pro), $399+ (iPhone), $15,000 (WiiWare, per title), $30,000 (Wii, per title)
Published titles: FusionFall (Cartoon Network), Zombieville USA (mikamobile)
Titles in development: Secret MMO by Funcom, other unannounced products
Middleware integrations: PhysX, Mono, more to come
We first covered Unity in these pages about a year ago, as it started to make more of an impact in the indie/low-end development market. For all its virtues, though, it was hampered by being Mac-only.
Unity 2.5, launched at GDC, finally brings the Unity toolset to Windows and all those developers unwilling to switch to Macs for the sake of a nice engine. The editor differs from many in being entirely visual-lead – assets can be imported into projects by a simple drag-and-drop (that actually opens the host application in the background to export with optimal settings) and scripts are linked visually.
The editor is also now completely scriptable, meaning that new workflows and interfaces can quickly be made up. Several members of the community have made new editors freely available, including a pathfinding module with automatic (and manual) nagivation mesh generation and behavioural tree editors.
The community is something that Unity Technologies considers a big selling point of the engine: the low entry point means that many hobbyist and indie developers are ardent supporters. As they rationalise it, when big triple-As like Funcom and EA embark on development, they’ve got a wide (and educated) support base and also a pool of ready-trained talent to recruit from. Parts of Cartoon Network’s MMO FusionFall were developed by community members, for example.
It’s also got arguably the best iPhone support, with the actual device acting as an input method to the editor to fine-tune accelerometer controls. According to the company, a new Unity-powered iPhone game is added to the App Store almost every day.
Other console support is currently limited to Wii, but support for Xbox 360 and PS3 is firmly within the company’s roadmap, as are the MMO functionality updates spun out from the success of FusionFall.
Contact: Duevej 94 a, 2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark
E-mail: info@unity3d.com
Web: www.unity3d.com
Unity is amazing 3D Engine. The best engine on this side of one millione dollars on the planet.
I realy love it.
It needs some graphics update IMO.
And restricting dynamic shadows to indies is dumb
WhoMe, not to sound fanboyish, but needing a graphics update doesn't make any sense. You provide your own models and textures, and you can write your own shaders. You can also use blob shadows or create your own 'dynamic' shadows. You just don't get real time automatic shadows. It's kind of just an extra, since adding shadows yourself is really not that challenging.
You are wrong. Since "Render to Texture" functionality is disabled in Unity Indie _no_ shadows or post effects can be implemented (or very crude FFP maybe).
So limiting this side of functionality is really bad decision (you can get shadows "out of the box" with Ogre with no cost at all).
UNITY INDIE IS NOW FREE, yes I said FREE !!!!!
Yes,! is free!, easy to use, is great, but badly has no dynamic shadows, that was the great exception to be the perfect engine :`( no more than lightmaps to get a good looking scene, is incredible that the step to get shadows coasts US 1000 :( .,, only the shadows i need! only the shadows!! and no more... :( , but yet using it because is easy to use and do fantastics things,, ..... just shadows..... bah.
i don´t know.... the titles of this engine are toon, there are too mucho iphone titles, the games looks not so incredibles, there are just 1 game that took my attention, "Avert Fate"... the engine is enough fast to do very looking good games... why ps3 xbox360 or at least ps2, are not released for this engine?, however this is in 4th place, but Infernal is 6th, and GhostBusters was made with it, and it has a incredible graphics, people pay attention to the demo games or currently released and then will pay attention to the engine... Unity is great!, i know!, but needs to release less toon games and more nice looking games...
