Unity

[Erkki]

My last game project has been collecting dust since I started working on a programming language, but I've had some new ideas for it that I want to test so might give Unity a try as well. I'm assuming there's a Box2D port for it or some other way to do 2D physics?

[darthbator]

Most people just use the built in PhysX model and and then constrain the bodies Z motion. I've actually wanted to start a podcast focusing more on the nuts and bolts of indie development. Kinda talking to different people about the methods they've used to solve various issues. If you want to do 2D anything in Unity you should really just suck it up and buy http://www.unikronsoftware.com/2dtoolkit/'>2D Toolkit and save yourself hundreds of hours of agony. Even a lot of 3D games leverage 2D toolkit for stuff. That particular plugin is almost as uniquitus as the famous http://www.tasharen.com/?page_id=140'>NGUI. Those particular add ons are so good that they should honestly be part of the base product. I know Unity has actually hired the main developer of NGUI to retool their GUI system (which is currently a horrid abortion). 

[Erkki]

Thanks. Links bookmarked

[Twig]

This thread has given me a wealth of shit to think about. Been planning to get into Unity for some time, now. This will get me going, I SWEAR.

[gregbrown]

Same boat here. All this information is incredibly useful, and I'd love to hear that podcast darthbator! The Mac development community has several great podcasts, while there aren't any on the gaming side that I know of.

[TheLastBaron]

Everyone in this thread should work together to make the best game ever created and then become more super rich and become the first private citizens to go to the moon.

[dibs]

I'm in. Ill voice the loveable Irish character.

[darthbator]

Same boat here. All this information is incredibly useful, and I'd love to hear that podcast darthbator! 

 

I'd love to make it! Unfortunately I just started at a new studio about a month ago and I am knee deep in kinda figuring everything out there. Podcasting is something I have only the smallest amount of experience with so that would be yet another new thing to learn. Hopefully by the end of the month I'll be feeling comfortable enough at work to start working on putting the podcast together. I'm still kinda trying to figure out a format. I think it's short and more "inside baseball" then most of the other stuff I am into. 

 

I think there are a lot of podcasts out there that give insight into design, narrative and etc. But I don't think there are many that are more concentrated on the nuts and bolts of the craft itself. I would be really into that. I also think if it's done correctly it could also shed some light on some of the extremely hard working people inside this industry. 

[Forbin]

If you're working on a game with multiple people, Git, Hg, etc. almost certainly won't work well for your project. With the exception of the scripts, everything is a binary, which doesn't play nice with a shared-checkout system. The free version of Perforce is probably a better starting place for games since it provides exclusive checkouts of specific files. If it's just you, though, Git is awesome.

 

It's worth pointing out the Pro version of Unity allows you to use text files for scenes and meta files which will reduce a lot of the pain of collaborating on a Unity project.  Still it's inadvisable to have people working on the same scene, as you'll have to use patient merges in git for it to do things properly on large changes.  Often it's pretty good though.  Unless someone's drastically re-organized the game object hierarchy in a scene things aren't that bad.