Depends on what type of game you want to make. See this link for a comparison:http://unity3d.com/unity/licenses
Unity vs XNA
Thanks. I've checked that out and it appears that for a game of, say space craft dogfighting in space... that the Unity base engine should work just fine. The game I am developing is a mixture of civ and space exploration and dogfighting. For right now, focusing on one aspect of the development cycle, I'm working on the flight portion.
You'd probably need some kind of AI scripting for that. There's also pirating if you're not above that but for the record I'm not endorsing it. Only the pro version supports path-finding through meshes...Unless I'm understanding that wrong and you can still use AI scripting
Lol I'll take your word for it :P but I'd rather not spend 1500 on something you might not even need
That's my thoughts as well :) I have no plan on dropping that kind of money unless i absolutely need it.
Anything you can do in Unity can be done in XNA, it might just take a little while longer. Either way I'm sure you can find some tutorials on either if you go with one or the other
Why not try Unity for a few days. Its free to try for almost everything you would need to make a solid game. Only you can decide if you like it more than using XNA. There is very little barrier getting into Unity other than opinions and stigmas. Not to mention that you can port to many devices and platforms much easier than I would think XNA could. (I am assuming you mean XNA, and not MonoGame).
Try it.
Yes. Editors bad. Kodes gut.
Unity, Unreal, CryEngine, all those engines with straight up-designer only, programmers shot on sight, IDEs are for noobs anyway.
Unity gives you ($0):
- A full engine with a modern component-based model.
- The dreaded IDE for building scenes and blocks of pre-assembled serialised data. Don't worry though, if you're too manly for it, you can leave this stupid productivity booster in the dust and insist on handling everything from code or spend an appropriate amount of time building your own, better editor.
- Mono. Not the latest Xamarin owned version, but the Attachmate version plus Unity tweaks. Still, most .net byte-code slips right in and C#, Boo and Unitys "JavaScript" - an ECMA script variant - are compiled automatically.
- The asset store with loads of code, assets and editor extensions available for cheap or free. Don't worry though, you don't have to use it. That would probably be cheating.
- Publishing to OS X, Windows, Linux, OS X/Windows webplayer (with special support from Facebook if you're into that sort of thing), Google Native Client, iOS, Android and Windows Phone.
If you want to pay for Unity ($1500+), you get additional things like:
- RenderTextures. I'm sure no game can be made without this.
- Native plugins on Windows/OS X (for the mobile platforms, this is already available for free). You will obviously need this one when you need to fix the hopelessly ineffective engine.
- NavMesh baking. Getting things from the asset store, like some of the cheap or free alternative pathfinders, would clearly be cheating, so no way around the need of this one.
- Various other high end things you cannot live without.
- Console platform licenses which is obviously the only reasonable direction to take your game in.
Long story short, Unity is pretty useless unless you pay like a gazillion dollars to an evil corporation, so you might as well forget about it and start from scratch. After all, making engines is a whole lot more fun than games, right?
In all seriousness though, tharealjohn has the right idea. These "vs" posts only ever end up in two camps of supporters yelling at each other across the thread. Give both a serious try and form an opinion based on that.
And give it serious thought on whether you want to make a game or an engine. If the later, then Unity is obviously not for you and you should adjust your steering accordingly. As mentioned earlier, writing an engine is indeed awesome learning.
Not trying for a vs thread... just seeing what's out there and what the pros and cons are.
I will likely download the free Unity and see what I can do with it and go from there. I like hearing from people that have done both as they have some experience that can be shared.
My knowledge with 3D engines is very limited at the moment, so writing one is a daunting task. However on the flipside, paying $1500 is also quite daunting for something I may not actually need. I understand a lot of what Unity offers but there are other things I'm not so sure what they are... for example... RenderTextures.
My target is a windows game. Would be cool to port to Mac OS. Trying to keep the scope small and build from there. If Unity can get that done for me easier, I may go that route.
However part of me wants to do my own 3D engine. So XNA would be good for that too.
Not an easy decision to make
I am indeed talking straight XNA. I'm not sure what the MonoGame platform is at this point.