Unity 3D

As the saying goes… it was love at first sight, then I took a second look! You had my first impressions from a previous post. It is indeed a very user-friendly platform for the indie developer working on smaller projects. However, when you scale up, there are several glaring issues.

First and foremost is asset management. When you have a team, or even just more than one person working on a project, you want some way to be able to synchronize your efforts. The defacto tool I’ve been using for this is Subversion. However, Subversion cannot work well with Unity iPhone. A lot of their linkage meta-information is stored in binary files that do not merge well in case of conflict. Unity Pro, for other platforms is supposed to have some switch to enable subversion support. But for the iPhone, we are bone dry.

The solution to this, is Unity Asset Server, which comes in at a hefty $200 per head in addition to your Unity Pro license. From the reviews I’ve been reading, it isn’t that good at doing its job either, making it difficult for me to recommend to my studio head.

The second problem is compilation and import times. As the number of assets grow, it takes a longer time for Unity to grab them and put them within the development environment. Also, the time it takes to compile to device also seems to grow almost exponentially. So not only do I have my developers hovering over one machine waiting to link their scripts in, but those that are actually on it are twiddling their thumbs waiting for the binaries to compile. Not exactly the pinnacle of productivity.

The final nail in the coffin is performance. On the iPhone 3G(S), our small demo level runs at a steady 30 fps, which is all fine and dandy. However, on first-gen or second-gen devices, this drops to a dismal 10 fps. We shudder to think what the bigger levels would run at.

So we bit the bullet and said goodbye to Unity, and all the licensing costs we invested in it, and looked to other alternatives. Shiva, being similar in concept, would most likely be the same deal. Irrlicht has reportedly been successfully ported over to the iPhone and used in a few commercial projects. Unfortunately, these ports are not publicly available, and I’ve no appetite for grinding my own. The SIO2 engine looks ready, but I didn’t quite like the structure and documentation.

In the end, it’s back to Ogre. Even though the iPhone port is on RC1, and getting it set up and ready to work in our production environment took a bit of legwork (so spoilt from plug-and-play SDKs), it seems fairly stable and performs reasonably well. With 20fps as my lowest cutoff benchmark, I could render 20,000 triangles onscreen on a first-gen iPhone. 30,000 for a second-gen. And a whopping 165,000 for a 3G(S).