Hey guys,
I'm glad I have now enough time to write here :)



Recently, I was thinking about making 3D car game.
I've never write any car engine - I've never even write 3D game so it's really new thread for me.

So, first of all, I thought "I can do it myself! I write all engine, all physic myself as I did it when I was writing 2D platform game".
But I talked with my friend and he told me it's quite complicate, I have to know a lot of math and so on.

Of course, I know whats the result of 2+2*2, but I'm only 17 and I've never learnt about matrix etc.

So I decided that the best way is to download prepared engine.
And of course the first question: Which engine?

I've never used any engine so I dont even know how it looks and what should I looking for.
When I google and watch some videos on youtube I found "XXX uses Unity engine + Physx".
So - doest it mean I need 2 engines? One engine like Unity, and another "Physic engine" ?


What do you think about Unity engine?
First, I read a little about it but I dont know is it free or not :P
Unity Pro costs 1200$ but when do I have to buy it? Can I use free version of this engine for commercial purposes?
(The same question with PhysX)



I will definitely have more and more questions but this few are enough for now :)

I'm pretty sure you can use the free version of Unity to spit out legally salable stuff, but don't take my word for it: read that license first. That said, I've heard good things about it; it's probably a fine place to start.

The math needed for 3d isn't bad, but is a few jumps beyond the maths you may have been exposed to so far. You'll need at a bare minimum a course in linear algebra, or some other means of learning matrix manipulation. Bottom line is you could use a canned tutorial program skeleton and get things moving around, but without a core understanding of fundamentals you'll be severely restricted in what you can do. My school had me slog through Calc 1 and 2 (derivatives and integrals) before I was permitted to take linear; and those courses have some useful math in them too. If you ever want to do fancy lighting changes or have objects follow nonlinear paths to get places, you'll really want to take calculus.

Math is 50% of computer science and easily 50% of graphics programming. The other half of graphics programming is art. ;)

There may be some decent matrix tutorials out there somewhere for you to pick through if you haven't had the chance to take all that math I recommend, but I'm afraid I'm not aware of any. Welcome to the fold and good luck.

MM, Yea, I know Linear algebra, quadratic function, some transformations etc. But I don't know nothing about e.g matrix.
So that's why I decided to use engine - I dont want to get stuck when I will have to do some math,physic or logic calculations.

But you know, I also don't want to use something like Game Maker. I want to write code.
I saw some movies on youtube when somebody make simply game in unity almost without any code... ;o
(maybe he didnt show everything on video - I dont know)


Anyway, I'm going to download it tommorow and see what's it like.

Edit:
Um. I see that there is Unity for Windows and also for Mac OS.
I prefer to work on the Mac OS but I want my game to be compatible with Windows also.
Is there any different before version for windows and mac?
Can I use version for Mac Os and after a little time open the same project on the Windows version?