So I started messing around in Unity

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAVXSBnsEtA

I’ve been really wanting to learn Unity for the longest time. I’ve had this idea in my head for a sort of Nexus: The Jupiter Incident style game for awhile. I decided to mock something up for it as my Unity excuse.

I managed to put this whole thing together in one (very long) Sunday. It really speaks a lot to Unity that I was able to do that. Before today I only had a very basic understanding of how Unity works, and I throughout the course of the day I was able to figure out a lot about the scripting workflow. Some things blew me away in how easy they were, especially handling input.

The ship model is a kitbashed, upsized, slightly remodeled Rhino from Freelancer. It’s now the size of a large corvette or small frigate.

Also Unity Pro is really, really cool and I wish I could just throw around $1500 like that.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MT7wJq50n1Q

I decided to have a go at some simple AI today.

I think people don’t give the Freelancer AI the credit it deserves. It’s one of those things that you don’t really think about because there’s nothing wrong with it. There are a lot of little things that to this day amaze me about both Freelancer’s autopilot system and the way the AI flies. It’s so fluid, smart and precise.

In addition to the player flown Rhino frigate, there are now 4 Defenders that fly around. I spent half of my time working on some formation flying AI, and I got it working half decent, but nowhere near as solid as Freelancer’s. It’s good enough for now though. If I were to ever make this into a real game I’d love to give proper autopilot another go.

Davis wrote:
Amazing work Why!

I checked out the Unity’s website and found several tutorials. Which one did you use besides the basics?

I did the car tutorial a very long time ago, but that’s about it. Most of what I did I figured out through Googling for specific things. Another thing worth noting is that although I took a day to set up and code the entire scene, I had spent some of the previous day getting the model imported and looking correctly.

Thank you all for the positive comments!

Tonight I started writing turret scripts. Unlike pretty much everything else I’ve written for this little prototype, I’m actually trying to do the turrets right. Meaning, writing the script so that it is robust enough to handle all sorts of arbitrary turrets.(Provided the models were setup correctly.)

As of tonight I have them tracking arbitrary targets. They also can be given limits in elevation and azimuth. A good example of azimuth limiting is the front turret on the Rhino. It can’t turn past a certain point or else it would end up hitting the ship. Elevation limits prevent the barrels from elevating to impossible extremes.

Next up is to write an actual turret controller. This means something that will actually assign targets to turrets. Right now I’m only doing it in a sort of developer/debug way. There’s no way right now for a player to assign targets.

No video for tonight. Turrets aren’t _that_ exciting.

sumanuti wrote:
fantastic work. it really looks promising.
as I remember, some Russian guy also started to make one similar, just dunno was it with a same engine.
rly wanted to see work being finished and test the feel of flying / shooting!
fingers crossed 4 u to succeed, even with freeware version (if it is as “must”)

Yeah I remember it. It is the same engine. I haven’t actually looked at their code beyond just a glance. I wanted to start from scratch anyway. Another thing to keep in mind is that if I was to ever make this into an actual game, I would have to rewrite nearly all of this from scratch. I didn’t really build any of this in any supportable way. I just wanted a proof of concept demo that looked really impressive beyond all else.

Timmy51m wrote:
I take it you’ve tried Black Prophecy Why? That’s Unity, and although not a popular game, it’s visually impressive and the AI is just fine.

I tried it a long time ago. I had no idea it was Unity. It was a very visually impressive game, but I never actually got into it because of how bad the lag was. The game also felt kind of clunky. It’s too bad really, because it looked fantastic.

J.Walker wrote:
Hey Why, nice looking so far.

Have you thought of trying Torque 3d? A little bit more involved than Unity, but if you want buy it it is only $150 USD , you get access to full engine source code, and 2 programming seats on the license. It also comes with browser plugins that you can compile specific to your project for FireFox and Internet Explorer to allow playing via the browser. It is a modern Triple A rated game engine with one of the best Networking code bases available.

EA, Bioware, Microsoft, and NASA all use a version of the Torque engine. With the Cost of Full Source at only $150 USD it is way more affordable the a License to Unity at $1500 USD.

Just a suggestion. check it out at: http://www.garagegames.com if you want to have a look.

It is what i am using currently.

Unity license does suck for being so expensive. I haven’t looked at Torque but I think it’s pretty funny to use the Tribes 2 engine for a space sim.

I did at one point use the Ogre 3D graphics library to try something similar. I got much further along in that project than I did this one. I had integrated an open source physics engine and my own ship managers and spawners. It was far more robust than this hard coded, but pretty, demo. I’m not to keen on switching engines. Not at least until my pro trial runs out anyway.

What are you using Torque for anyway?