Unity3D - Free vs. Pro

Well, developers are not *required* to use Unity. Unreal 4 is a great engine, and is available for $19/m. You can also code your own engine with DirectX or OpenGL for free. If that is too difficult, there are open-source libraries that can be used like OGRE, Irrlicht, etc. if you do the integration work yourself. Unity is not the only option.

Agree with cybereality. It wasn't that long ago when you wouldn't feel so spoiled to be able to buy an amazing engine like UE4 for the very low cost it now is. You would have had to take the Rift SDK and code your own engine on top of Direct X or whatever. And that is still an option. In fact it's my back up option, should I ever get tired of paying fees to epic or something, using my own old basic 3d game engine that needs an overhaul to drag it out of D3D8 era :lol: ).

It's something I want to work on in my spare time, and you can do the same with free engines like irrlicht or ogre as mentioned. They do the grunt work of rendering, you do the work of making it a 'game engine' rather than just a 3D engine. UE4 and Unity are game engines with a LOT of hard work put into them by the developers so you didn't have to, and that cost them a lot of money to develop!

I also have my own game engine on top of the Irrlict 3D engine which was relatively 'simple' to do (if you know C++).

Distinction there between game engine and 3D engine is vital! Game engines rarely come 'free' as so much work goes into them, empowering you to make games far more easily, so therefore there should be some remuneration for whoever made that game engine! What you are requesting is that basically someone else should do all the heavy lifting for you (the technical stuff) then give you it totally free so you can create games very easily then sell those games for a profit! And these days the 'game engine' is a massive part of any game, or series of games.



So, if you really can't/don't want to pay for the amazing UE4 or other options then take the SDK and get cracking! It's not 'silly' for Oculus not to do everything for you already, or give away so much for free (UE4 wouldn't be free, oculus would have to pay Epic some major fees for what you suggest) and that makes no sense to me. Those that have a craving to develop for VR will do so, either through hard work making their own engine or a relatively small investment in other's engines. If neither of those options appeal then I'd submit you aren't taking it seriously enough anyway?

"Philth" wrote:
It seems a bit silly that what we have available is behind a quite expensive pay wall right now

C++ is free. DirectX SDK is free. Rift SDK is free. Knock yourself out. :mrgreen:

Rolling your own engine is kind of a meh option, at least for non-trivial 3D games (it's a massive amount of work, especially if it's not just doing the barebones).

In any case, I don't see this as an issue with the Rift at all, or anything that Oculus needs to mess with. It's all on Unity.

The way I see it, if $1500 doesn't sound appealing, but you still want a ready made engine, UE4 is where it's at. $20 is hardly an insurmountable paywall.

I don't imagine that Unity will be able to continue with their current pricing model in the face of UE4's, which is vastly better for the audiences that Unity targets (i.e., basement developers/hobbyists). So I'd expect them to either support the Rift in the Free version at some point, and/or change their pricing structure to be more competitive with UE4.

Personally I find Unity a bit of a pain to work with when it's time to get down to the nitty gritty of actually building the game.

To give a quick example:

I had planned to make a co-op game in Unity.

I got a character with some melee animations, and basic locomotion animations, all set up in a pack. I grabbed a networking pack, and then spent a couple of days getting the movement and basic animations networked.

I ran into serious issues when it came to syncing more complex Mecanim setups, and the transition to ragdoll on remote clients.

To contrast, I'm making a mostly-singleplayer focused dungeon crawler in UE4 right now, and had just set up the networking for my inventory system (which took ~1 hour, including watching docs, to set up).

I went to test it, thinking to myself that I'd need to spend some time networking the animations and movement of the players next.

To my surprise, movement + animation worked over the network without me actually having to do anything. Not even any configuration.

Having a built in networking layer that works super well and is easy to use by itself is enough of a win that I'd pick UE4 every time until Unity gets something comparable.