Hi folks,

most regular readers will have noticed that we've jumped onto the Unity wagon after it finally came out for the windows world and so I think it's time to write down a few of my thoughts ...

What it is:
an easy to use development platform for 3d games (although easy, well, I'll cover that later)

What it is not:
Simply put: easy.
And it is not flash.

So?
The best part of it is, that you can do a decent 3d based game with it quite quickly, that is if you know how to code unity (I might have twittered once or twice that the docs are not one of the strong points) and (what's more important if you or someone in your team) can do low poly 3d.

So?
I really can't stress enough that it is NOT flash, not at all, when you get started with Unity all is nice and straight forward, but once you hit the point where you really would like to do a quick tween for the main menu, or use a fancy drop shadow on your font ... you'll probably start cursing and wish you could use a timeline and some keyframes.

One of the really big letdowns for me was to discover that a quick, easy and nice UI is not going to happen fast in Unity. You can get away with it if you don't need dynamic text to appear, but I need to do a lot of stuff with that, because nearly all of our games are prepared to be played in at least two languages.

How does all that relate to the title?
When I first got in touch with flash (6 I think) AS was really nothing more than a scripting language, coding for the best part was ... shit and most of us messed with onEnterFrames per movielclip. Then AS2 hit the light of the day and with AS3 it came very close to real coding ...
But when I entered the Unity world it seems like the old distributed scripts came back to haunt me. You've got the choice of using a set of different languages: javascript like, c#, boo and some others.

JS on the one hand is easy to use, ridiculously lose typed and commonly used. I really don't like lose typed coding, so for me it was c# ...
Anyway something that commes very close the the old MC based onEnterFrame is Update ... so a script that would move the object 1 "unit" (since we have no pixel) to the left would be:

function Update () {
    transform.position.x++;
}

(or something very close to that, I said I use c#, oh and I'm sure I saw some other methods to do the same)

Save that as a ".js" text file, add that to a cube on stage and viola (there you have the back to script part covered).

I hope you won't be doing that for a complex game, but ... thinking back ... I knew people who did that with flash  ** shudder **.

As I already mentioned, I hate lose typed coding and as I used c# for some years now for coding anyway it was a logical choice (that and the fact that I could continue using Visual Studio).

Oh and did I stress that there is NO timeline?

Everything you want to have animated either needs to be coded (ie for dynamic text) or already be animated in a 3d app ...

Oops, I think I need to get back to work ...

nGFX

ps: just to have something to look at a screenie of the menu (the start of a camera move) of my "test" game to see how I get along with Unity, if everything works well, I might be able to invite for a private beta test on Friday (give me a shout if you want to) ...