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Dunno, to me Polycode looks like broader Unity, which I don't really appreciate.

Also, if you want it really easy you could use...

*drum roll*

GameMaker. It has modules for building iOS and Android games.

raidho36 wrote:Dunno, to me Polycode looks like broader Unity, which I don't really appreciate.

Also, if you want it really easy you could use...

*drum roll*

GameMaker. It has modules for building iOS and Android games.

I'm trying to avoid things like GameMaker... I want to code!!!!

You CAN code with GameMaker all right. It has it's own scripting language GML though, and it's not similar to Lua in any way; if anything, I'd called it "similar" to plain C by approach to coding, and it has a little bit of common generic scripting to it.

raidho36 wrote:Dunno, to me Polycode looks like broader Unity, which I don't really appreciate.

Err, not really. Sure, it has some things in common, but the weight, workflow, style, and general philosophy are way different.

Not sure about Unity's users philosophy, but it's designers intent is pretty clear: to get most money out of you. Full Unity pack is something about $1500, and biggest half is for pretty much generic and commonly FREE stuff like shader support. I'd called this price "OK" if they were selling AAA-tier editors for this money in conjunction to engine with all features available for free, but they do the opposite, and I wouldn't called anything of Unity an AAA-tier anyway. Now compare to UDK who offers all of it's stuff at once completely for free, unless you're gonna use their engine for commercial purposes. I mean it's not about the money, it's about an attitude: Unity sell their customers thin air! That's an outrage if you ask me.

raidho36 wrote:Not sure about Unity's users philosophy, but it's designers intent is pretty clear: to get most money out of you. Full Unity pack is something about $1500, and biggest half is for pretty much generic and commonly FREE stuff like shader support. I'd called this price "OK" if they were selling AAA-tier editors for this money in conjunction to engine with all features available for free, but they do the opposite, and I wouldn't called anything of Unity an AAA-tier anyway.

Agreed, and that's one of many areas where Polycode is completely different. Polycode is 100% free and open source, and you are encouraged to dig right into the C++ source if you want (even to the extent that all the code samples in the tutorials have both C++ and Lua snippets for everything).

Honestly though, if I was wanting to create a relatively large 3D game, I may consider Unity free except...no dynamic light support. I mean, really? Kind of silly, imo. As far as 3D engines, I'm really interested in WaveEngine. The O/P may want to look into that if he is interested in 3D game dev and doesn't mind C#.

Well, you should really mind C#, it's awful. That's what I can tell you all right from my own experience. Better off with Java, provided C# is a (lousy) copycat of it. I mean they both have big time problems, but C# has many more. That's another reason for me to avoid Unity: it would only offer you C# and JavaScript which, as practice shows, is only good for browser-embed scripting engine, but even that I'd honestly preferred Lua over JS, it's just all-around better. It's a terrible shame that none of the web browsers would support any other scripting language.

raidho36 wrote:Not sure about Unity's users philosophy, but it's designers intent is pretty clear: to get most money out of you. Full Unity pack is something about $1500, and biggest half is for pretty much generic and commonly FREE stuff like shader support. I'd called this price "OK" if they were selling AAA-tier editors for this money in conjunction to engine with all features available for free, but they do the opposite, and I wouldn't called anything of Unity an AAA-tier anyway. Now compare to UDK who offers all of it's stuff at once completely for free, unless you're gonna use their engine for commercial purposes. I mean it's not about the money, it's about an attitude: Unity sell their customers thin air! That's an outrage if you ask me.

You can use custom (or built-in) shaders with the free version. You don't even have to buy the pro version if you sell a game using the free version and you make less than $100,000/year. Most of Unity Pro's features are not needed to create most games, especially smaller ones.

Lets compare UDK to Unity for a second. The most obvious difference by far is that UDK is clearly designed to be used by large teams, whereas Unity is designed to be used by small ones - it is much more difficult to create a simple small game by yourself using UDK than it is with Unity.

Now lets compare price. Say you want to make a game and just put it out there for free. UDK and Unity both let you do that. Say you want to make a game and sell it for $2 on Desura, you'll have to pay the $100 commercial license for UDK, but Unity will still be free.

Say you make a small commercial game and it does very well (for a game made by one person), and it sells $80,000 during a year. You don't have to pay a cent to Unity, but you'll have to pay $100 + ($30,000 * 0.25) = $7,600 to Epic in royalties for UDK.
Now, if instead the game makes you $200,000 during that year (which obviously is extremely unlikely in most situations) you will have to pay $1,500 for the Unity Pro license, or $100 + ($150,000 * 0.25) = $37,600 to Epic in royalties for UDK.

scutheotaku wrote:Honestly though, if I was wanting to create a relatively large 3D game, I may consider Unity free except...no dynamic light support. I mean, really? Kind of silly, imo.

Unity free has dynamic lighting. What the free version doesn't have is high quality dynamic shadows - but you still have the option of either lightmapping or projectors.

raidho36 wrote:Well, you should really mind C#, it's awful. That's what I can tell you all right from my own experience. Better off with Java, provided C# is a (lousy) copycat of it.

I think this is the first time I've seen anyone call C# worse than Java as an actual language.
Personally I've used both, and Java is missing so many staple features of C# that it's pretty hard to compare the two.

raidho36 wrote:Well, you should really mind C#, it's awful. That's what I can tell you all right from my own experience. Better off with Java, provided C# is a (lousy) copycat of it. I mean they both have big time problems, but C# has many more. That's another reason for me to avoid Unity: it would only offer you C# and JavaScript which, as practice shows, is only good for browser-embed scripting engine, but even that I'd honestly preferred Lua over JS, it's just all-around better. It's a terrible shame that none of the web browsers would support any other scripting language.

C# is awful? I suppose to each their own. Not sure why you would prefer the mess that is Java (IMO at least) and its painfully slow VM though, except for its portability.

Have you looked into TypeScript? It doesn't solve all of JS' problems, and its young, but it has potential. It compiles to JS, so it has full support everywhere (unlike Google's competing offering).

Also, web browsers support plenty of other scripting languages, obviously. While it's not as seamless as using JS, you can even use Lua for web scripting.

slime wrote:

scutheotaku wrote:Honestly though, if I was wanting to create a relatively large 3D game, I may consider Unity free except...no dynamic light support. I mean, really? Kind of silly, imo.

Unity free has dynamic lighting. What the free version doesn't have is high quality dynamic shadows - but you still have the option of either lightmaps or projectors.

Yep, sorry, that's what I meant

I know UDK is way more expensive than Unity, and I said it's not about the money. It's about the way they sell it.

Not sure why you would prefer the inefficient mess that is Java and its painfully slow VM though, except for its portability.

What are you talking about, they're both inefficient mess and painfully slow, and on top of that C# lacks cross-platform abilities.

you can even use Lua for web scripting

I was talking about embedding your lua script to web page and expect every decent browser to run it. Emulating %whatever% through JS is not a solution: I don't want %whatever% syntax, I want %whatever% itself.