I’ve spent the last couple of days looking at different platforms in which to develop the game. Initially I had decided to go with my strengths, something like ogre3d. However, I randomly came upon a post on Slashdot which mentioned Unity3d. And, well, I was pretty blown away with it. Full 3d applications being dropped straight into your browser, with simple ways of producing windows and mac binaries along with iJunk apps.
Indie version is free which is always good 🙂 Unity 3 ( the next version ) which is coming soon ( or now for a beta version ) looks even more awesome. The cost of the commercial version is pretty high ( and well out of my price range at the moment alas ), however, looks like once I get to the point I have a real working game, I can always investigate the upgrade. And when I say pretty high, its relatively small compared to buying a comercial engine.
3d inside the browser is something I’ve always wanted to do. In fact several of my old projects had similar ideas, but mostly were very impractical ( using php’s gdlib to create a first person environment is not the most practical use of server bandwidth 🙂 ).
Unity offers a huge range of features; easy server interaction ( which plays to my lust for php and postgres dbs for massive architecture ), fully integrated editor ( I’m a command line lover, but a GUI always helps speed up the process ), pretty lights, runtime editing, c# and js scripts, and has many other awesome features. Looks like one helluva tool.
The final straw with picking unity was the sewer control room demo. With the name I picked for the site, it seems aptly appropriate 🙂 Just gotta change the water to green 😉
So, once the models have been created within the 19 hour timespan, then I shall be downloading unity, and learning while I code. Probably making this challenge slightly to complex now, but we shall see 🙂 Unity uses c# and js for scripting, which is pretty sweet as I have experience in both, so not to worried about learning a new language from scratch. Getting real excited about starting this 🙂 Tommorrow will be putting a solid four hours in, will be intresting to see how far I get.
tl:dr; Imma gonna create the game with Unity
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