Quote:Original post by TheRealDeal
Which engines are those?

If that's in reference to my post, then an example of an engine that would lend itself to real-time generation of procedural content would be Unity, and an example of an engine that wouldn't would be the Q3 engine. (Q3 obviously isn't that current technology-wise, but it's a good example of the more rigid type of framework that you alluded to in your earlier posts.)

Sorry yes, that was in reply to your post jyk. But funny thing, I had just been doing a fair amount of reading on Unity earlier this evening after seeing a few impressive games in progress through it.

Something I'm struggling with though is the editor. All the tutorials, examples, and videos are focused on using the integrated visual editor to modify your world right then and there. It shows you how to add this and that but all through the visual editor. This is where my meager understanding of engines is coming into play, but taking a shot, can I basically just download the engine, use Visual Studio for my programming needs, and then compile and run what I have without ever touching the visual editor?

For my needs I don't see the visual editor being all that critical.

Thanks for putting up with the questions guys!

Quote:Something I'm struggling with though is the editor. All the tutorials, examples, and videos are focused on using the integrated visual editor to modify your world right then and there. It shows you how to add this and that but all through the visual editor.

Tutorials and introductory materials tend to focus on the editor because for many people that's the easiest and most intuitive way to interact with the engine (initially, at least). However, pretty much everything that can be done using the editor can also be done through scripting (and in fact advanced users will generally spend much more time coding than they will using the editor).

Quote:This is where my meager understanding of engines is coming into play, but taking a shot, can I basically just download the engine, use Visual Studio for my programming needs, and then compile and run what I have without ever touching the visual editor?

Not really. There are licenses that include source code access, but that's probably not what you'd be looking at as a new user, and in any case that probably wouldn't be the best way to accomplish whatever it is you want to accomplish, IMO.

There's no need to avoid the editor in Unity. Even if most of the work is done in code, the editor allows you to organize and manipulate assets, diagnose and debug, playtest, tweak parameters, etc. No matter how code-oriented the project is, the editor still provides the basic interface through which you manage and organize your project. So no, you can't really avoid using the editor (in the general case), nor would you want to.