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[Tain]

unreal goes free is just a marketing move
if you are a indie proyect or a 2d development keep using Unity.

why is unreal going free just a marketing move exactly?

 

[Mechanical Snowman]

As a hobbyist, I was just getting into Unity Free and messing around with creating buildings and first person cam. I know I'm overstepping in this Unity thread, but I want to seriously create a small game and I'm torn as to which engine to pursue. Unreal or Unity? I'm not entirely familiar with Unity but it has a lot of community support, and I don't know how to code, so Unreal's Blueprint visual scripting makes me the most excited.

Would anyone care to shed light for me and potentially any other (lurking) hobbyist out there?

Download both, I've just downloaded Unity after using Unreal for ~3 months to try it out. The immediate pros of Unreal for me at the moment are its lighting engine, blueprint scripting and temporal AA. I'm looking at Unity for its price model and possibly performance / lightness as Unreal is pretty heavy from the get-go, especially in VR.

 

[Gattsu25]

why is unreal going free just a marketing move exactly?

Because they still collect royalties?

https://www.unrealengine.com/release

(Just a guess)

 

[BibiMaghoo]

So the console extensions are now free? The scripting reference has been updated to include the consoles command. I note with joy that there is variable for remote play key assignment.

 

[TekGryphon]

Pretty much. They've got a new C# compiler and runtime which is pretty much five times faster than the old one, though, really, UnityScript is pretty much barely used anyway, which even Unity's developers have noted, so they've been moving all their example scripts over to C#.

That's fantastic! Really good to hear.

As someone in his early 30's I'm going to be starting to learn coding as soon as I clear a last few business development contracts. One of the disappointing things about wanting to learn Unity is that it seems like there's 1/10th to 1/20th the course materials out there for C# as any other language.

Every time they post those "learn coding, it's easy, here's 10 sites!" on Imgur, invariably not one single f'ing one of them will teach C#.

It's making it so I'm not really confident on how to begin. I know I need to start with the fundamentals of object oriented design, and then move into some tutorials (I was looking at the Walker Brothers), but it's disappointing that, if I decide to do something outside Unity, it's going to be hell finding good online courses.

 

[hotnheavyload]

"As a hobbyist, I was just getting into Unity Free and messing around with creating buildings and first person cam. I know I'm overstepping in this Unity thread, but I want to seriously create a small game and I'm torn as to which engine to pursue. Unreal or Unity? I'm not entirely familiar with Unity but it has a lot of community support, and I don't know how to code, so Unreal's Blueprint visual scripting makes me the most excited.

Would anyone care to shed light for me and potentially any other (lurking) hobbyist out there?"


Learn both (earnestly) and use the one you like best. Now that they're both free there's no reason not to explore both options fully.

Indeed. Though after about 3 years of using Unity and only a couple of months using UE4, I have grown to like UE4 a lot.

 

[Calabi]

This is awesome news.

I really wanted to use some of these pro features, not so much fragmentation of the market now. Should be able to buy assets and not worry if there pro only.

 

[MidgarBlowedUp]

That's fantastic! Really good to hear.

As someone in his early 30's I'm going to be starting to learn coding as soon as I clear a last few business development contracts. One of the disappointing things about wanting to learn Unity is that it seems like there's 1/10th to 1/20th the course materials out there for C# as any other language.

Every time they post those "learn coding, it's easy, here's 10 sites!" on Imgur, invariably not one single f'ing one of them will teach C#.

It's making it so I'm not really confident on how to begin. I know I need to start with the fundamentals of object oriented design, and then move into some tutorials (I was looking at the Walker Brothers), but it's disappointing that, if I decide to do something outside Unity, it's going to be hell finding good online courses.

Digital Tutors has finally added a handful of decent/good C# Unity tutorials. On top of this, they are now partnered with Pluralsight which also has some good general C# training courses. That's not counting the countless tutorials of other software they have. Lately, the past few months, they have been adding new tutorials all the time and really stepping up their game. So, you could buy a month and see how you like the training.

 

[RSP]

Are they getting rid of iOS Pro and Android Pro?

 

[HelloMeow]

Are they getting rid of iOS Pro and Android Pro?

It looks like they're not.

Unity 5 Professional customers who earned/received more than $100,000 in revenue/funding in the previous fiscal year must purchase iOS Pro and/or Android Pro deployment add-ons to deploy to these platforms. The iOS and Android Pro add-ons enable deployment without the Personal Edition splash screen.

Unity 5 Professional customers who earned/received less than $100,000 in revenue/funding in the previous fiscal year can deploy with included iOS and Android support with the Personal Edition splash screen.

 

[TekGryphon]

Digital Tutors has finally added a handful of decent/good C# Unity tutorials. On top of this, they are now partnered with Pluralsight which also has some good general C# training courses. That's not counting the countless tutorials of other software they have. Lately, the past few months, they have been adding new tutorials all the time and really stepping up their game. So, you could buy a month and see how you like the training.

Thank you for your reply and help, but it was almost eery. I've spent months (very casually) searching the net for good programming tutorial sites. For some reason I never saw Pluralsight until just today when I did another search after I posted.

I was so impressed with their course catalog, and some of their blogs which provide great recommended learning paths, that I made a half dozen bookmarks.

I had no idea, though, that Unity was partnering with them. I think I'll go through the beginner level C#, .Net, and Object Oriented fundamental courses first, then switch over to the Unity-centric courses.

 

[BigWeather]

Is the C# editor improved in Unity 5? The Unity 4 one crashed quite a bit and just wasn't nearly up to what I was used to in Visual Studio. I believe there was a plug-in for Visual Studio you could use but I seem to recall it needed more than the free version of VS to work.

Unfortunately I learned XNA first and it is just a bit more 2D tile-based game-friendly, the kind I like to dabble with. Unity always seemed a bit overkill in that area. I'm starting to realize, however, that I really need to just get over it and dive into Unity. With Unity 5 being free seems like a good time to take the plunge.

 

[Dreamwriter]

Are they getting rid of iOS Pro and Android Pro?

As of Unity 5, iOS Pro and Android Pro *only* let the user replace the Unity splash screen; aside from that the free versions support all Unity engine features. And the Unity splash screen has a snazzy animation now

Is the C# editor improved in Unity 5? The Unity 4 one crashed quite a bit and just wasn't nearly up to what I was used to in Visual Studio. I believe there was a plug-in for Visual Studio you could use but I seem to recall it needed more than the free version of VS to work. .

The new free version of Visual Studio now works with the "Unity Tools for Visual Studio", as long as you are using C#. As for Unity's code editor "MonoDevelop", it still uses that, but they used a newer version starting I think in Unity 4.3 that is quite a bit better in most ways (they had been using an old version of Monodevelop for a long time).

 

[Iced_Eagle]

Is the C# editor improved in Unity 5? The Unity 4 one crashed quite a bit and just wasn't nearly up to what I was used to in Visual Studio. I believe there was a plug-in for Visual Studio you could use but I seem to recall it needed more than the free version of VS to work.

Unfortunately I learned XNA first and it is just a bit more 2D tile-based game-friendly, the kind I like to dabble with. Unity always seemed a bit overkill in that area. I'm starting to realize, however, that I really need to just get over it and dive into Unity. With Unity 5 being free seems like a good time to take the plunge.

Visual Studio removed the plug-in restriction at the end of last year, so you can use the new "Community Edition" for free (no longer called express edition). Download here: https://www.visualstudio.com/news/vs2013-community-vs

Microsoft owns the VS Unity plug-in as well, so they do a good job of making things stay up to date. I believe the VS 2015 preview plug-in was just updated to support Unity 5 officially, and the VS 2013 plug-in currently has a bug (but with a very easy workaround if you look at the Q&A on the VS extensions site where the download is hosted). Probably won't be too long before the fix the issue.

 

[ekim]

Pretty surprised that both games are made in Unity

 

[nib95]

Pretty surprised that both games are made in Unity

Same.

 

[Interfectum]

Pretty surprised that both games are made in Unity

Unity is awesome. The same engine can produce Hearthstone, Cities Skylines and Pillars of Eternity.

Easy to use, can compile to almost any platform and the asset store is <3. I love messing with the engine even as hobby.

 

[-SD-]

Sonic Ether GDC 2015 Unity 5 tech demo. Shown at GDC in March, now released for the public.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gU4ntL83ET8

Global Illumination + Screen-Space Ambient Occlusion + Natural Bloom.

 

[MrCunningham]

Sorry for the necro bump, but I wasn't sure if this is new thread worthy or not. This is still a pretty big deal though. Unity just released an experimental build of their native stand alone editor for Linux.

Packages can be found here: http://blogs.unity3d.com/2015/08/26/unity-comes-to-linux-experimental-build-now-available/. No compiling needed, they have installer packages available in .deb and .sh formats.

Screenshot of the editor running on my PC:

So far, installation was really painless and everything works rather smooth in Mint 17.1 for me. This is awesome.