Unity3D is a game authoring application for OS X, which can deploy standalone binaries to OS X, Windows, and a Web Player Plugin. No Linux build yet, unfortunately.
I decided to investigate Unity3D because I read that it supports Python for scripting game objects. I've found this to be untrue. It supports Boo, which is not really Python, however it looks a lot like Python in most cases. Unity3D also uses Javascript, which is what I chose to use when running through the tutorials.
I decided to persevere and complete a few tutorials. I'm glad I did, as I am absolutely blown away by the power of Unity. It really is an amazingly productive, and flexible tool. It combines a generic 3D engine (with support for shaders, different lighting models etc) and a generic physics engine with a very intuitive GUI which ties all the game objects together using drag and drop scripting, which can be coded in Javascript, Boo or C#.
If you run OS X, and you want to write games, I recommend trying out the Unity3D demo, and running through a few tutorials. It won't take you long to realize that simplicity and ease-of-use has not been achieved at the expense of flexibility and power. You'll having a working game demo in a few hours, with animated particle effects, colliding objects and whatnot.
If you don't run OS X, and you want to write games... it is worth shelling our for a new machine, just so you can run Unity3D. Yes, it is that good.
3 comments:
Haha!
Rob, send me an email, I don't have your address!
-Sw.
Heya
try fielddays [at] gmail ...
Rw
I've spent a lot of time with inexpensive game engines for independent, low budget work, like 3D Gamestudio.. wow Unity blows them all out of the water, its component based architecture is stunning, the scalability fantastic.. the wave of the future.. people will definitely be playing console quality games in their web browser over the next 10 years, as unity3d's plugin becomes what flash did for 2D into 3D.
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