Yesterday I met the CEO and co-founder of Unity 3D, David Helgason. We have a mutual friend—Brett Seyler, who used to work at Garage Games/InstantAction and made the Torque game engine, but joined the Unity 3D team a few years ago. We talked for quite some time and he had his senior staff give me a first-class presentation on how to make a simple but fast game with Unity 3D. I was also offered a job as they announced yesterday a new office in Japan, but was unfortunately not able to accept the offer at this time.
Unity 3D has come a long way since I first heard of it only a few years ago. The primary authoring tool is extensive and I liked the idea of having scripts add scrollbars to the editor for fast editing of script variables by artists. I was shown how to edit terrain, add foliage, and make a first-person shooter with a ball that falls via gravity and dies after some time.
What was impressive about the overall system was just how easy it is to use and to get a result. In the simple demonstration I was given, no fog was added and it did not end up looking like Crysis 2, but it seemed flexible enough for any type of game (critics of CryEngine * claim it is best suited for first-person shooters, for example) and with very little code being written.
In regards to the graphics, while what I saw is suitable for current-generation graphics, it was not quite next-generation as you would see in Crysis 2 and Battlefield 3. But David assured me they are planning to go this route and will have some announcements soon. From the sounds of it, they have the right staff for competing with Frostbite 2, but I wonder if they can get there from their existing codebase or if it would be better to simply start from the ground up, as would be the best approach for maximum DirectX 11 utilization.
It will be interesting to see what they have in store for the next generation.
L. Spiro
[Update]
David answered my conjecture as to whether or not they will start from the ground up on supporting DirectX 11: No. He said Unity 3D has multiple render paths already and they are all stable and clean (not spaghetti). Hopefully their system for avoiding spaghetti code is super tight because they are going to need it for adding yet another render path.
[/Update]
