Unigine Engine Looks To Wasteland 2

[elanthis]

If they go with Unity at this point Linux users are going to be seriously short changed (If somebody proves me wrong on this point I will be a very happy man).

At the very least, Unity3D games can run on Linux in Chrome thanks to NativeClient.

Coding for Unigine is actually quite good (the programming language is somewhere between C++ and javascript and is relatively well documented). Most of the Asset files are written in XML and relatively easy to understand. There visual coding tools in early development.

What language is this? Home grown? What IDE does it have? Static typing? Code completion? Debugger? JIT/assembler output? What kind of debugging features, and how are they integrated with the editor? These are all incredibly important questions which Unigine makes impossible for anyone to find out the answer to on their own.

Why does the asset files being in XML matter? Are users expected to write their own tools or modify the files directly? Or were just commenting on them being nice files even though that point isn't important?

For static Meshes the workflow is quite easy - Unigine provide a tool that will convert many common formats including obj and collada. For animated assets you need one of the packages supported by plugins Max,Maya or SoftImage. Better support for Collada,FBX is on the todo list for this year however.

This is damning. There shouldn't need to be a wait for better FBX support. It had damn well better be amazing from day one. With all features. Many freaking student game engines do that.

This is one of the places that will sink or swim a game company, especially a small one. If the content authors have to take weeks doing things that should ideally take days, that's a ton of time and money that the company loses.

[Kano]

@kayosiii

Most ppl would expect that a game using unigine engine would provide extra gfx effects compared to other common engines as they have used that in heaven already. If you dont use em at all whats the reason to use it?

Also if you really want to sell a Linux game you HAVE TO test on ati as well. I would even try it on latest Intel onboard, but that could be a bit tricky. Somebody should profile the opengl variant to find out what is so much slower compared to dx11. It is really unlogical when the visuals are identical that opengl is slower. There should be opengl profiles added for cf as well, only dx11 is boring...

[kraftman]

Eye candy is only important to the people that have ruined PC gaming by turning it into a dumbed down click fest that won't allow you the option to explode a child like a blood sausage. Story, writing quality, depth of character, consequences to actions, those are important. That's why people are still playing Fallout and Fallout 2 rather than Fallout 3.

Eye candy just allows you to sell your games to idiotic kids.

Yeah, I'm still playing in Fallout 1, 2 and Jagged Alliance 2. The only game I can imagine that's close to their level is Fallout: New Vegas. Fallout 3 is a broken mess. I don't care how Wasteland 2 will look like. I liked Van Buren (true Fallout 3) look.

[RealNC]

Eye candy is only important to the people that have ruined PC gaming by turning it into a dumbed down click fest that won't allow you the option to explode a child like a blood sausage. Story, writing quality, depth of character, consequences to actions, those are important. That's why people are still playing Fallout and Fallout 2 rather than Fallout 3.

Eye candy just allows you to sell your games to idiotic kids.

Eye candy was important in Fallout 2. Does that mean that it was made to sell to idiotic kids?

[curaga]

At the very least, Unity3D games can run on Linux in Chrome thanks to NativeClient.

Yes, and a significant portion of users will never install that piece of malware. Hardly a solution.

[UrpbBojoing]

Say what?

Indeed, it is one of the weak points of Unigine. A couple of years ago I tried to get th eevaluation kit, but no, it is just studios. Had access to the SDK as part of the Dilogus project, but inmediatly when the fate of the project became unclear they cut my forum access. I tried to google for tutorials and videos: nothing available. But a week ago a friend of mine downloaded Unity3d and he is already doing a lot of things. Even CryEngine has a community forum.

Hi. I had to register just to respond to this post. A bit off-topic, but... As someone who has followed Dilogus for over a year (and subsequently given up on it), I'm intriqued by that remark. Fate became unclear? When did that happen? Were you booted out? What about the rest of the team? Do you think the project is being mismanaged? Extracting info from Norbert is as hard as pulling teeth, so I'm not even trying anymore. Their forum is pretty dead too.

[kayosiii]

At the very least, Unity3D games can run on Linux in Chrome thanks to NativeClient.
What language is this? Home grown? What IDE does it have? Static typing? Code completion? Debugger? JIT/assembler output? What kind of debugging features, and how are they integrated with the editor? These are all incredibly important questions which Unigine makes impossible for anyone to find out the answer to on their own.

It's home grown but close enough to C++ that you can use a C++ IDE to develop it in. I use KDevelop for my development in Unigine, With that I get syntax highlighting, code completion, grammer checking (for all but the few constructs that Uniginescript has that C++ doesn't). It's statically typed. It has builtin types for all the data structures you would expect in a high performance game engine. Debugging could be better than it is but the logging when the engine is running in debug mode is usually verbose and useful enough to nail the problem.

It's worth noting here that in Unigine Linux is a first class citizen not just a redheaded stepchild. Everything runs on Linux, the Game, the editor tools, everything; 99.9% of the code you write for it will run on any of the platforms without thinking about it.

Why does the asset files being in XML matter? Are users expected to write their own tools or modify the files directly? Or were just commenting on them being nice files even though that point isn't important?

It's important if you want to build custom tools or customise the existing tools to maximise the efficiency of your workflow (in my studio we have needed to do this for every game engine we have used, artist hours are expensive) - I guess the main point here is that the majority of the asset files are not binary files, but XML is important because there are a lot of great software libraries and tools for dealing with the format (which cuts down on developer hours which are also expensive).

This is damning. There shouldn't need to be a wait for better FBX support. It had damn well better be amazing from day one. With all features. Many freaking student game engines do that.

Yes FBX/Collada support should be better (not that I give a flying f**k about FBX - talk to the blender devs if you want to know why). But if you are using 3DStudio Max, Maya or SoftImage this isn't a problem since Everything is covered by the plugins provided by the SDK. I can't comment on the specifics of these plugins except for the Max one since that is the only one that gets used at my work. This approach seems to be more reliable than Collada/FBX but if you are using Blender, Cinema4D or say Houdini there will be difficulties.

This is one of the places that will sink or swim a game company, especially a small one. If the content authors have to take weeks doing things that should ideally take days, that's a ton of time and money that the company loses.

Yes It can. Unigine gives you a lot of rope which you can hang yourself with. We are a small team (one non artist), We have done over 60 projects in Unigine. I wouldn't take Unigine on without a pipeline guy, but then I wouldn't reccomend doing any game production in any engine without a pipeline guy.

[kayosiii]

@kayosiii

Most ppl would expect that a game using unigine engine would provide extra gfx effects compared to other common engines as they have used that in heaven already. If you dont use em at all whats the reason to use it?

That's a good question - we use just about every other feature in Unigine, we just don't happen to currently have a need for the tesselation. This has as much to do with how many man hours it would take to make the assets as much as anything else. Other Key factors in choosing a game engine are how easy it is to extend, How easy the company/project is to deal with business wise, how much it costs for licensing, what the terms of the licensing are and what the particular skillset of people in your team are.

Also if you really want to sell a Linux game you HAVE TO test on ati as well. I would even try it on latest Intel onboard, but that could be a bit tricky. Somebody should profile the opengl variant to find out what is so much slower compared to dx11. It is really unlogical when the visuals are identical that opengl is slower. There should be opengl profiles added for cf as well, only dx11 is boring...

I was talking more in terms of being an Artist/Developer. I personally wouldn't use anything other than nVidia/Linux or Windows in a production environment obviously I would want a testing box if I was releasing a product for that combination. IIRC Unigine supports one Intel Chipset so far. One of the good things about buying middleware is that somebody else deals with the hardware compatibilty (This is something that Unigine seems to do a really good job at from our perspective).

[kayosiii]

Valley is in "preview" state until the next Unigine SDK update - we are adding stars system (actually, implemented yesterday) for the night sky and new improved clouds. So the sky will look way much better in the next build.

I would love to see some Screenshots -either here or in the unigine forums.

[Bestia]

I don't know why you are considering Unigine as a slow engine. I have Oil Rush and it runs great on my machine:

AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4400+
nVidia 9600 GT NVIDIA Driver Version: 295.20
GeIL 2 GB RAM DDR 2 800

I'm playing it with Graphics set to Ultra and Textures to High on 1920x1080 fullscreen without Anti-Aliasing. I get more than 30 fps with drops to 20 (when looking in the smoke) and that's on Unity Ubuntu 11.10 32bit (using Daniel van Vugt PPA's for Compiz and Unity). If I run it in E17 or Razor-qt then it's even faster. I get there about 50 to 40 fps and it even goes as high as 60 fps when looking at some areas of the map (for example glaciers).

Tesselation is a very taxing graphicall effect. Crysis 2 without it runned very good even on old configurations, but when it was added the performance got a huge hit.

The new Valley tech demo looks very impressive on screenshots in the devlog and judging by what binstream says it will look even better when finished.