Unity engine for Adventure games

[Imari]

Hello, usual crowd....   

I've spent the last two nights watching and rewatching Unity tutorials and I'm pretty sure that one could use the engine to do a 1st person or 3rd person game in 2.5D by fixing the camera angle and projecting your prerenders onto a series of planes and primatives for your backgrounds.   This is how Autumn Moon made A Vampyre's Story.  Characters, if you choose to use the 3rd person route are 3D meshes. 

Setting up the scene seems to be pretty much import, then drag and drop.  After watching the videos and reading the manual, I think that I understand how to do that.  I can export from Vue as a C4D file, one of the accepted formats, so I'm going to experiment with a simple scene this weekend.   

Also, DAZ3d has started a new system for licensing their meshes for use in video games.  It's not cheap, but I think its still cheaper than a place like Turbosquid for the quality of items, plus the figures are customizable by you.  You need their Daz Studio (free) and then a set of tools (priced at $105 until June 1st) that will decimate the Daz figure to a usable poly size, compress the dressed figure into a single mesh, and map all of the textures for clothing and figure into one texture.  The third tool will export the rigged and animated figure from Daz Studio in FBX format good for use in most 3D game engines. 

[ad7venture]

Hmm.  Hope that works out, Imari.  I've often thought it would not be hard to use a 3d engine in that way.   I'm not sure how one would do hot spot's, though.  You may be able to attach another plane or something.  I guess one thing at a time.  That's what I do, anyway.  The nice thing about Unity is there is a huge user base where you can get help with questions. 
Blender does cubic mapping in a weird way and I don't think it exports in any standard format, unfortunately.  I'd have to try to cut away the 6 pieces in an art program or something.  I'd probably just use it for sky maps anyway, though.
The characters are probably out of my budget,  which is a used shoestring budget.   They would probably be helpful for small indies. I never do realistic characters in Blender.  I should probably try it sometime. 

[Imari]

I just found a utility for Unity that makes and keeps track of dialoque trees and also supposedly makes interaction with objects easier.... for later investigation.   Looks like it's about $100, though.

http://ninjaportal.com/NinjaPortal/UDE.html

Discussion of it on the Unity forums is here ---> http://forum.unity3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=29629&start=0&postdays=0&postorder=asc&highlight=dialog

And someone has just released a script editor that's supposed to make writing the code easier.  A work in progress appaerently.  Discussion of it on the Unity forums is here ---> http://forum.unity3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=51129

[ad7venture]

The dialog editor might be something to think about if you get the other things working.  It sounds like a lot, but programming time adds up and he probably is going to have a tiny customer base.  It would probably be best to do some of your own programming before purchasing something like that, though.  It probably won't do it all and you'll need to make changes and modifications.

[Kickaha]

Glad to see you investigating Unity Imari, look forward to hearing where you get to.

Does it support orthographic projection?

[NigeC]

Unity is very impressive, I hope you manage to get it working
The character format always seems to be the sticky point, getting them into Awakening was always a pain, but even hi poly they still worked, the Candy game used a poser 4 character

[Imari]

Thanks for the encouragement, guys.  I know that I'm no coder, but if I can just get the basic framework set up and a pipeline for the assets, I'll be half-way there.  And  looking ahead.... maybe this game is all prerenders projected onto primatives, but in the meantime I'll just might learn to use Unity, then the next set of assets can be used to do a true 3D game with the types of "fixes" we need.  We'll see....

Kickaha, it does have a little gizmo in the upper right corner of the stage in the editor that allows one to flip through each view and then back again to the perspective view.  It's also one-click to see what the scene looks like in game from that camera position.  You can also hit "play" to turn the camera "on" and see what everything looks like in game.   

I'm going to first see if I can lock the camera at the center of a cube textured with my cubic panoramas and go from there.  Getting the 1st person camera into the scene looks like a snap... there's a premade cylinder object that you literally drag and drop into the scene.  At least it looks easy. ;P

Again looking ahead to the future.  Unity is really made for people who can use Blender, Maya, 3DsMax, C4D, etc., but I know that I can export terrains from Vue into C4D format.  I can slso do skybox textures in Vue and export static meshes in OBJ format.  I'll have to experiment with how easily this could be done in Unity.  It looks like you can apply animated textures and run AVI's and other movies, so for now I'll try to put most of my interactions as hotspot movies.  If things seem promising this weekend, I'll probably buy the Daz kit for future use.  If I do, I'd be happy to decimate, texture, and convert for you guys,(if that's possible) but you'll have to buy the licenses for the items that you want to use. 

Meanwhile, I'm also really, really, really, hoping that Agustin Cordes will release Kinesis soon, because if it has all of the features that he wants to put in it, it'll be the dream engine for prerendered adventure games.

[NigeC]

Big problem I had with a cube is the edges distort as the camera moves down, In Awakening we used a geosphere and a dds cube map, then a special DX shader to flip the image and stop it recieving shadows
Unfortunately Awakening used DirectX7 so the quality was pretty poor, but Unity looks a lot better.

Yeah I sometime wish Augstin hadn't mentioned it and just dropped Kinesis on us as a surprise lol

[Imari]

Yeah I sometime wish Agustin hadn't mentioned it and just dropped Kinesis on us as a surprise lol

Hee.... yeah, sometimes I just pull up the PDF description document and read about the features to make myself feel happy and hopeful.  It's really sad.      I do have faith in Agustin, it's just that I need to see something put together.

Thanks for the tip on the cube.  I have no clue if it will work or not, but for starters, I was planning on flipping the normals on the cube and just applying the textures and adding a light.  I also thought that I might experiment with the skybox object.   I figure it's worth a try.  We really need so little to make our type of games and I get so frustrated that I've got this digital pile of assets and no engine.     

[Imari]

I want to report some moderate success.   It's almost been too easy, so I'm still very cautious.   I thought that I'd first try cubic pano textures on a skybox.  I now have my textures on the skybox without visible seams and with a fixed camera rotating at center.   

I can go into detail if anyone is interested, but basically all that has been needed so far is to start a new project, drag the prefab 1st person controller into the hierarchy (delete the maincamera), add my textures to the skybox folder, created a new skybox material and added it to the scene.  I did have to "clamp" each of the textures to the sides of the skybox to get rid of seams.   I expected to have to do some lighting, but it doesn't seem so thus far.   

Next to create a second scenes with a second skybox and see if I can connect them.   No, actually, I suspect that it's possible to simply swap out the textures on the skybox in order to "change rooms".   We'll see.

[ad7venture]

Next to create a second scenes with a second skybox and see if I can connect them.   No, actually, I suspect that it's possible to simply swap out the textures on the skybox in order to "change rooms".   We'll see.

I don't think I'd recommend that course.  The hot spots etc will probably be needed to be specific to the scene.  The Amount of extra poly's is extremely minimal, so it wouldn't add to the game size much at all.  I've only looked at it briefly, but Unity appears to be a scene scripted engine where you attach scripts to objects in the scene.  Also, it's going to be a lot easier to keep organized if you use separate scenes.

I'd like to see a demo if it's not too much work.

[Imari]

I think you're right, Ad.  I was reading a bit more.  I'm also not at all sure that I can attach hotspots, exits, or movies to a skybox... so I ventured off into looking at centering a cube and texturing it.  In the skybox, I might be able to attach hotspots to transparent planes, I dunno, just mulling ideas.   

I am probably way way out of my depth, but it doesn't hurt to try.  I haven't given up on the skybox, since it was so easy to set up.  I just have to read and experiment a lot more.  I think that I see though how a 3rd pperson game could be set up nicely.  There are "built in" controls on the camera to limit rotation and I really do think that one could set up a series of textured planes or a sngle plane with a wide shot on it to do a Syberia-like game--- basically what you can do in Wintermute.  For me, this engine seems to make sense somehow... wiring of the brain, I guess.  I tried several times to work with Wintermute and was dead in the water each time.

I certainly will share anything that I might come up with.  Just kind of poking at the thing at the moment. 

[ad7venture]

In the skybox, I might be able to attach hotspots to transparent planes, I dunno, just mulling ideas. 

Yes, there are planes that always face the camera.  I forgot what they call them now, but they are commonly used as is transparency with planes.  I, personally, don't think that part would be that big a deal from the tiny amount of time I looked at Unity so far and my experience with other engines.  It should be pretty easy to add square hot spots.  I know there is a mouse over function for objects.   You could probably ask on the Unity forum, also.  See what kind of ideas they suggest.  Personally, I think using the skybox would be the best way to go.

[Imari]

The more that I go through the Unity tutorials and manual, the more I want to start over again and do the game 1st person, but 3D and not prerendered.    I guess that I'm currently at the curious and hopeful stage of investigation.   

Seriously, Unity just seems to be a wonderful and very flexible engine.   The problem with it, as with 99% of the engines out there, is that it's not designed for an Adventure game.   Yes, tons of coding, but there are several templates to use as the "bones" and snippets of code everywhere.   

There's a nifty tool for working with 2d sprites that some of you might find very interesting (though it's not free) ---> http://www.anbsoft.com/middleware/sm2/

and a free pathfinding kit if you use a 3rd person character --->
http://www.arongranberg.com/unity/a-pathfinding/

At this point, I'm thinking that skyboxes are probably not the way to go, but I just don't know enough yet.  I'm sharing the way that I added my cubic faces to make the skybox though.  If nothing else, I can use Unity to preview my cubic panoramas while awaiting Kinesis. 

1ST PERSON CAMERA:
1.  Make new project in an empty folder
2.  Save scene and name it (call each scene by the node name)
3.  In Project>Standard Assets>Prefab, drag & drop First Person Controller to Hierarchy (It loads in position 0,0,0, but you can check inspector to make sure)
4.  Delete main camera in Hierarchy

SKYBOX:
1.  In your project folder, put your cube face images into the folder Assests/Standard Assets/Skyboxes/Source Images and wait while Unity loads them. (I used PNG and JPG files at 1024 and 2048 square and both worked, but the PNG files flickered at run. The larger 2048 files looked only slightly better, but it might depend upn the type of scene you wer trying to view.  JPGs at 512 square are used by the premade skyboxes.)
2.  In Project>Stand. Ass.>Skyboxes>Source Images - click each of yout images and in the Inspector window change the Wrap Mode for each from repeat to clamp. If your textures are larger than 1024 then you'll have to change that too under Maximum Size.
3.  In Project>Stand. Ass.>Skyboxes - rt click either of the two premade skyboxes and select create>material to create a new skybox and open up a new inspector window
4.  Click on the new skybox in the projector window to rename it.  (I named mine the same as the scene node.)
5.  Drag each of your cube faces from the project window to the appropriate gray square on the Inspector window.
6.  On the tool bar select Edit>Render Settings which pops up a new inspector window.
7.  Drag your new skybox from the Project window to the Inspector window and drop it on "None(Material)" in the Skybox Material line.
8.  Click on the Game Tab and you should see a static image of your cube
9.  Click on the Play button to toggle the in game viewer on (and off),  On this screen there's a "Maximize on Play" button in the upper right corner that expands it.
10.  If your faces are out of place, click on the skybox in the Project window again and swap them around, then repeat steps 6-9.

Add a new node/scene:
1.  Create a new scene and save it.
2.  Repeat all of the above steps in the two sections above.

[ad7venture]

Thanks Imari.  I'm a little undecided about Unity.  I've got plenty of time to think about it at the pace my current Flash game is going.   

I'm not sure it's the engine for me because I'm not sure I can get hold of the underlying classes.  I'm used to extending them for my own purposes.  I'll have to do a thorough check out once I finish this Flash game framework.  There are so many general purpose engines around now.  I think, truth is, I don't like the idea of a scripted engine right now.  I 'd like to have the source code.   I may change my mind.