First Experiences with Unity 3D

I first heard about Unity 3D early last year when some rumblings were made about it in Indie Games Circles. I wasn't really doing much with regards to Indie Games at the time and the company I was working for at time had it's own technology. On top of that Unity 3D was only really available for the Macintosh platform at the time (Windows version was still in Development). With all that in mind it didn't seem like I was going to get a chance to try out Unity 3D any time soon.

Fast forward now to last month. I've just started a new contract for a local mob. We're using Unity 3D, predominately on the Windows platform. So I've finally got the chance to look at Unity 3D properly. My first impressions have been predominately positive.

Unity is probably best described as a Game Engine and Editor “all in one”. It's an IDE, a level editor and properties tweaker. The professional version also has some source control functionality. There is a lot of functionality included in the package an it has the potential to save an enormous amount of development time.

The User Interface

The User Interface is visually appealing, I suppose it would have to be to suit the fashion concious Macintosh crowd. The main interface is broken up in to several areas, the Game View, the Scene View, the Hierarchy View, an Assets View and the Inspector. The game view allows you to review the status of your Game, it's essentially what the game would like. It can be set to run, pause and stop basically allow you to run the game and see what's happening as you build it. If you want to see an animation running in your scene all you have to do is hit play.

The scene view is similar to the Game view but is more orientated towards the actual development process. The scene view will show the scene and level objects in a simple form as well as many of the other implicit objects required for the game logic. The Camera in the scene view is free moving. Models and Game objects can be orientated, placed and scaled all the in the scene view. The interface is quite a lot like 3DS Max in the basic controls.

The hierarchy view (a panel really) is clearly inspired by a Scene Graph. It is essentially a list of objects in the scene, it also displays (via it's heirarchical nature) how these scene objects relate to each other. With it you can quickly find any object in your scene. In the Hierarchy panel, you can select an object, then when you move your mouse pointer over the scene display, pressing “F” will focus the scene view on the select hierarchy object. This without a doubt saves a lot of time. The hierarchy view is also useful for attaching components (behavior modifiers, graphical sugar and script/logic) to your scene objects.

The inspector panel works closely with the hierarchy and asset views. All objects, behaviors and such in your scene have properties associated with them. These properties are exposed by the inspector and can be directly manipulated. Running the game in real time and tweaking values in the inspector allows you to rapidly tune settings for a visual effect or game play behavior.
Finally the last main view or panel is the Project or Asset panel. This is where you can see all the assets in the scene. It's also where you can import new assets into the scene and construct prefab objects (objects that can be used again and again). All assets that have been imported into the assets can be edited from their new locations. Changes are re-imported and applied almost instantly.

Programming

The actual programming side of is done via scripts written in Javascript or C# . Although there is the ability to use plugins in the professional version which are written in C, C++ and or C# - I assume on the Macintosh version we can also use Objective C). The Javascript is really UnityScript I suppose, while sharing many similarities with Javascript there are some notable differences as well, particularly when it comes to the way objects work.

Scripts are typically assigned to game objects where their interfaces are called as the game logic progresses. Scripts assigned to game objects are known as behaviors. The script editor built into Unity 3D is Scite which is a well known simple editor. For more professional programmers who are used to the fully feature code environments such as the likes of Microsoft Visual Studio they may be disappointed. The environment notably lacks any easily accessible debugging, so you'll probably be spending a lot of time doing the old print debugging thing of yesteryear. Thankfully as everything else about the environment makes achieving results easy, this probably isn't as painful as it sounds. At least for small projects.

Under the hood Unity basically creates dynamic libraries with the code that is compiled from the Game scene in development. This is most likely how the Unityscript/Javascript is so fast. Indeed the it becomes apparent that the Javascript i really just a thin veneer over the C# innards and as you start to realise the Unityscript's differences to Javascript it becomes clearer what is going on underneath. Of course it's not Microsoft .Net implementation but rather the C# implementation made available via the Mono project.

Source Control

In the professional version, Unity's own source control functionality is available. It's not brilliant. It's some hodgepodge or Unity 3D UI, with a backend of a Postgres database. Over low latency links it's horrible and generally it lacks features. Strangely it's also one of the most expensive accessories for Unity. I can sort of the see the logic in it, those requiring source control will most likely be the ones cashed up enough to be able to afford it. In effect subsidising the cost of Unity's development and cheap price to Indie Developers and students.

Conclusion

I'm overall feeling positive towards Unity 3D. I've still got a lot to learn but I can see enormous utility in the package for what amounts to (especially for Indies) a lot of bang for you buck. Depending on how my experiences go I may consider using the Engine/Tool myself on a title I've been mooting. I hope to post updates on my experiences as I go.