How Flexible Is Unity 5?

[inflames21 53]

Curious about exactly how flexible the unity 5 engine is.

 

Armor and weapons and abilities and spells etc easy to add into the engine or does it take longer than a normal game engine to add it all in ?

[Adall 3,895]

[halethrain 352]

Curious about exactly how flexible the unity 5 engine is.

 

Armor and weapons and abilities and spells etc easy to add into the engine or does it take longer than a normal game engine to add it all in ?

 

UE, Cryengine, and Unity all have their respective advantages and disadvantages. Areas of this game would probably be easier in UE or CE, but on the other hands some would be much harder. Any of the three are pretty damn good at this point.

Edited April 2, 2015 by halethrain

[Niedar 8]

It is bad.

[Angier 371]

It will blend.

[ozzie mozzie 1,928]

I cannot honestly speak from experience but I've heard Unity 5 is quite good.

[Speely 14]

Pros and cons. In regard to the mechanics themselves, it will probably serve very well. When you introduce how all those things are communicated through netcode and thus presented to the players... it's a new engine so we don't really know. It's a very good engine in and of itself, so there's that. Handling hundreds of players on-screen? Who knows? The strengths and weaknesses of an engine in regard to that cannot really be known until it's tested.

 

As far as adding content goes, from what I know of U5 adding on to it should be smoother than it would be for most from-scratch engines. It doesn't lack for modification potential. 

Edited April 2, 2015 by Speely

[MrPriest 67]

It is easy to add, modify and debug content while running the game, I hear it's a feature that the other engines lack. This means it is far simpler to test new items, updates and the like while a test server is up (Well, never worked while running a server, but I know it's true for offline projects).

I also read in one of the FAQs that Unity 5 is much more MMO friendly.

[Osegrim 217]

It is easy to add, modify and debug content while running the game, I hear it's a feature that the other engines lack. This means it is far simpler to test new items, updates and the like while a test server is up (Well, never worked while running a server, but I know it's true for offline projects).

 

I also read in one of the FAQs that Unity 5 is much more MMO friendly.

 

I've had some experience with Unity 4 and testing multiplayer functions (lag, metrics for balance) during open multiplay with other people over the net. With Unity 5 this only got better.

It's kinda funny you can connect to the same servers the players are connected to with their executables, while you're still in Unity and you have access to all the things and can change variables on the fly, easily move around and spawn things.

 

Really specific things like spells, weapons and such, things that require new code (because those aren't the kind of features an engine like Unity 3D natively has). Won't take that much more time than in other engines (apart from prototyping), it's mostly just the testing system (testing things and bugfixing usually is one of the biggest timesinks in development, sometimes I feel like all you're really doing during development is continually fixing problems).

Though if they make tools/systems for themselves and good systems to create new items and spells in (if they're smart, they probably will), the development of them can be much quicker, this isn't tool dependent either though. (the easy asset workflow does help in this regard though)

 

It's the really optimized physics engine, graphics engine, powerful exporting tools, new cloud building, analytics and report systems and since a lot of functions haven't fully developed yet that are going to make a lot of difference in the speed of the engine, it's also going to be fairly powerful to have lots of people running on the screen doing all sorts of things.

 

Them using this engine REALLY means we'll be seeing fairly functional gameplay mechanics (in the beginning, mostly test cases) fairly quickly and relatively quick bug fixes in the coming future (not all the time though).

 

It's going to be exciting to see them working in this tool I've been working in for almost 3 years now. I hope they'll show some more behind the scenes stuff in that regard in the future.

Edited April 2, 2015 by Osegrim

[Speely 14]

snip

 

Great stuff, Osegrim. Thank you very much for the insight. 

[zinnie 2,399]

Its very flexible.

[motstandet 445]

I am of the belief that the quality of software is directly correlated to the amount of iteration. Unity offers very fast iteration with a AAA engine.

[courant101 5,755]

[...] Handling hundreds of players on-screen? Who knows? The strengths and weaknesses of an engine in regard to that cannot really be known until it's tested. 

 

Pretty sure they have already made some experimentation with the performance of the engine when high number of players are gathered together. 

[inflames21 53]

hopefully my iMac is still alive or i've won the lottery and built myself an epic gaming rig by the time it comes out cause i def love trying to push games to the max.

[reboco 5]

Unity is great for iterative development.

 

But for the specific question about how fast you can add new content, it all comes down to how well did you design your game from the bottom. This is not about the engine, rather about the game technical design. 

Edited April 3, 2015 by reboco

[seventhbeacon 4,036]

I've been hearing people elsewhere on the internet describe Unity as a poor engine for mass player combat based on games like Rust. I was wondering if there was anything inherently limiting about the engine in that regard, or if that's something that's addressed in development on the back end, and Rust for instance just wasn't properly set up for large player skirmishes.

[Sinij 704]

Heresay: I heard Unity has big issue at a large scale. So 100 vs 100 won't be possible without heavy tinkering.

[seventhbeacon 4,036]

Heresay: I heard Unity has big issue at a large scale. So 100 vs 100 won't be possible without heavy tinkering.

 

I certainly trust developer choice over anonymous online players' anecdotal evidence. I keep thinking, they wouldn't choose an engine that wouldn't let them create their fundamental vision due to that sort of limitation.

[bairloch 2,136]

Heresay: I heard Unity has big issue at a large scale. So 100 vs 100 won't be possible without heavy tinkering.

Were you going for "Heresy" as in "this thing I heard is heretical" or "Hearsay" as in "this is just something I heard"?

[Kell 728]

I certainly trust developer choice over anonymous online players' anecdotal evidence. I keep thinking, they wouldn't choose an engine that wouldn't let them create their fundamental vision due to that sort of limitation.

I agree. Opinions on the internet don't bear weight.

 

I assume ACE has the confidence in unity to support the zergs...