Comments on: Unity: First impressions

By: diamondTearz

diamondTearz — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 02:23:15 +0000

@adam- how did your trial with Unity go?

By: Brian Gorby

Brian Gorby — Tue, 12 May 2009 21:10:58 +0000

Late to the game here, but:

This post is a bit disheartening as I recently purchased a Unity license (I kept letting my trials expire). However it’s always informative to read an industry veteran’s take on the product.

I’m hoping Unity improves the quality of the product. Their support has been impressive, and the forum community is helpful and non-elitist.

By: Andrew Crystall

Andrew Crystall — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 13:49:35 +0000

..I mean XP’s behavior, 2k did it correctly.

By: Oskar

Oskar — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 13:30:28 +0000

I am not a fan of the whole standard of making one “uberpowereverything” tool that does everything. Different parts of any game needs different methods of iteration, they might as well have different tool pipelines as well.

By: Andrew Crystall

Andrew Crystall — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 12:02:55 +0000

The really fun one, adam, is 2k’s default “search inside” behavior only working on a limited subset of file types, you need to start adding strings in the registry to make it search inside other file types.

By: adam

adam — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 22:23:03 +0000

It’s been infamously atrocious for more than 10 years – they may finally have fixed it for Vista (I haven’t checked – like many people, I’m still not using Vista :().

The associations are hidden on a “properties of current folder” menu that doesn’t make sense and is badly organized even wehn you find it. As recently as windows XP the dialog still had a stupid tiny scroll window that was trying to show typically thousands of lines of associations, and there was no search, no index, nothing to help you find the one you wanted bar scrolling manually.

So, yeah. File associations on windows? Bad.

That’s not to mention the various bugs that existed in the execution of the related command lines, and the fact that the “Open With” dialog that win2k introduced only works “some” of the time, and other times won’t add items automatically – and you can’t manually add to it. etc etc etc)

By: James

James — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 20:00:57 +0000

Why do you say managing file associations in Windows is bad? I’ve never been bothered by it – it takes all of about 3 seconds to change the association for any file, and I don’t know of any programs that will auto re-steal it.

By: adam

adam — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 16:32:08 +0000

“escaping Xcode” was one of my reasons for trying Unity. They have an iPhone specific version (completely separate executable, although the GUI is almost the same), but I haven’t had the time to try wading past the user-unfriendliness to try using it yet.

There’s a 30 day trial, so … maybe give it a go (the iPhone version) and see what it’s like? Can’t be (much) worse than Xcode really, can it? :)

By: Mark Baker

Mark Baker — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 16:01:30 +0000

Urgh. Sounds bad. Is Unity stealing back the file associations every time it starts? (madness)

On a related note, is there a better UI for editing Objective C than Xcode? Having become acclimatised to Visual Studio (ick) I’m finding it a bit hard to rewire my brain to the necessary keyboard shortcuts. Just a keyboard shortcut editor for Xcode would help.

By: CaesarsGhost

CaesarsGhost — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 12:53:51 +0000

I’ve read complete and utter horror stories from friends with Unity… most of them are post-prototype stories. A friend of mine made his own engine, hoping to gauge it’s “in browser” ability against Unity, he installed it. Had he not setup a SVN on a separate machine, he would’ve lost his entire engine because of the over-writing and whatnot that Unity does, even on a base level.

Everybody I know who’s sprung for Unity always ends up saying the same thing:
Good for Prototyping, but you realize it was a waste of money afterwards.