Goblinworks Executive Founder
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Since GW has decided to use Unity as their base engine I am really leery about donating too much, too early. As of today there are only two full MMOs either using or planning to use Unity as their base. One is a kid friendly console like button masher (FusionFall from Cartoon network) and the other has no real game information out yet (Game of Thrones by HBO).
The vast majority of games using this engine are either mobile or browser games. Each of the Unity programmers i have talked to also do not know exactly how GW will make this work as they will still need to leverage Net code, UI, and art assets outside the base engine. (Mind you, this is information from my programming friends as I have no idea when it comes to programming.) While it is always expected that a company will need to create their art assets in-house and their current 18 man team ( I think this is the number) seemed fine to accomplish this. However, needing their Net code also created requires a lot of work and many more people. This still does not solve the largest stated issue with Unity, the UI. UI's seem to make or break MMO.
I am still backing the KS, but with my current information on the the game engine I cant seem to justify to myself let alone my guildies/ RL buddies to back at higher levels (or back at all in some cases). We only have 6 days left before this becomes moot; good or bad. I still want the KS and PFO in general to succeed but i need some help to remove my own fears of an overly ambitious game failing to meet expectations in addition to a strong argument to present to my RL buddies/ guildies in order to help persuade them to back the game.
Goblin Squad Member
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That's part of the reason for the Kickstarter. It's so they can hire more people to create the game. Without the Kickstarter they have a quite long time before release. If they raise at least $1 million, they can shorten release to 2016. At $2 and $3 million they can shorten it further to as early as early 2015. Beta is roughly 9 months (iirc) before the release.
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Goblinworks Executive Founder
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The great thing about Unity is the assets. If I were to guess I would imagine they might use Photon for there networking and an awesome UI is NGUI, which I've used myself and Unity has asked the author to work on their in house UI.
While not specifically designed for MMOs it is a really great base to start from and any lacking pieces have already been built out for the most part by the Unity community. The engine itself has a lot of benefits over those base MMO engines and the pieces missing should be relatively easy to addin.
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Goblin Squad Member
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well I dont know. However remember that GW has been in talks with Unity for a while now. I bet everything you have brought up is something they talked about with unity. they didnt just see unity and go...ohhhh iv heard that lets use that.
remember at least two of the members have MMO backgrounds, including the server programmer. As to UI, Unity has no effect on the UI, thats something the Devs will design.
Just remember just because people make things for unity to sell to developers, that does not mean that GW will not make their own software for things. I would be surprised if the version of unity the devs are using is the $1500 version on the unity website.
Anyway i wouldnt worry too much about it. The people making the game are not some random folks with no experience who have no idea how to make an MMO. They are experienced game designers/programmers with experience in the MMO market, and more importantly in sandboxes.
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Goblin Squad Member
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In previous thread:
Hey guys!
I hope you are as excited about using Unity as I am. I'm sorry the post yesterday didn't have too many details in it - we just finished negotiating for weeks in order to get Unity, and we just put a very quick post up because we were excited about it.We're planning to do a more detailed video or text update about the engine choice today or tomorrow. Yes, Unity will definitely require more work on the server in order to support a single-world MMO. But we've factored that into our schedule, and I've done that work before.
We'll keep updating everyone with more aspects of the engine choices over the next couple of days.
It's a topical question concerning the Netcode, so that might be particularly of interest in any updates. Also for interest: Wasteland 2 used Unity and described some things that led to that decision: Unity Chosen to Drive Wasteland 2
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Goblin Squad Member
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Given the nature of what GW has said about negotiations and contracts and whatnot on their middleware, I would probably bet they are definitely using the $1500 version, maybe even bundled with a bunch of assets in Unity's developer store. I'm not sure if they would be able to purchase one version as a company or need to purchase a copy for each developer, but regardless, that cost would be lower than if they instead paid salaries long enough to generate those tools from scratch.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I would expect they negotiated a site license and the terms for using appropriate art asset libraries. Knowing the level of skill of some modders I can bet with confidence doing so will shorten development lead time considerably, at least as far as artwork modelling and motion capture goes.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Since they went thru a fairly extensive negotiations they probably licensed the source code (which is possible with unity but it is a process that varies on case by case basis).
This would implicate that they do have a lot of room to tweak the Unity engine to their own needs; they can easily implement their own low-level net code and all the little things that need tweaking.
