Unity: Evaluation

by PhoenixGames on Sep.11, 2016, under On Game Development, Software Engines, Tutorials

I have decided to begin evaluating the Unity game engine, after spending some time with Unreal a few months ago. I found Unreal to be quite difficult to use, and the Blueprint scripting system wasn’t to my liking.

Unity, by contrast, seems to be much more user friendly, and I seem to be able to accomplish much more with it in less time, than with any other engine that I have used.

In just two days, I was able to install and set up Unity, and play around with it enough to get a relatively good idea of how everything fits together. I haven’t done much coding yet, but I have created an run C# files, as well as set up Visual Studio Tools for Unity, and the Visual Studio Debugger. This rapid progress is very encouraging.

So far, in addition to the ease of use, I am particularly impressed with the grass effects. I can completely cover a terrain with dense grass and not suffer and performance problems whatsoever. The same thing is true with the trees, but the grass optimisation and rendering is something I have not seen before.

I am also very impressed with the particle effect system. I have not created many particles of my own yet, but the default particles are very detailed and look great.

The next goal is to start writing some code in Unity. I am not expecting the C++ to C# transition to be particularly difficult, but there could be issues with transitioning from one engine to another. This remains to be seen.