Lately I have been learning to make games, of course. I’ve played with Unreal Engine for awhile before and never really got too far because I really don’t want to learn C++. So I’ve been learning to use Unity and so far I’m really liking it. I really enjoy playing around and learning how to do everything so far. I purchased a few assets and have been learning to use Forge Networking for the past couple days and things appear to be going well. It seems my previous 15-20 years experience in programming translates to making games fairly well so I am pretty motivated by that to keep going.
I’ve planned on making a few smaller games but couldn’t resist playing around with the assets I purchased and beginning to see how I might work on my larger survival type game. So far things are coming along nicely and it’s quite satisfying indeed. I can’t wait to get more done, but I am forcing myself to write about some of it here first.
Forge Networking seems awesome so far and I’m glad I went with it over the competition so far. The developers and support seems pretty great. Some of their documentation/videos seem slightly outdated but I imagine that will get a revamp soon enough because they are working on Forge Networking Remastered which seems like maybe a complete rewrite. Either way, this seems to make networking things quite simple as I have been able to get my players to spawn in the world and a basic chat system implemented with very little effort. Now to make it all work perfectly. Exciting stuff!
I also purchased Node Canvas which seems pretty nice but will take a little more time to figure out how to use completely. This is a visual scripting tool which is somewhat similar to Unreal Engine’s blueprint system in that it is visual scripting where you drag little nodes around. There were several other visual scripting assets but I opted for this one because of some of the great reviews and the fact it was on sale. Actually all of the assets I purchased so far were on sale.
Terrain Composer and Gaia are some other tools I purchased for terrain generation. Terrain Composer 2 looks really nice and I can’t wait for it to come out. I mostly purchased this because of the drop in price as well as the fact I will get TC2 for only $15. I’m really hoping I can use it to generate terrain at runtime that players can actually edit by digging/mining, etc. but I suspect getting editing to work will take some work.
Gaia seems alright, it makes fairly nice looking terrain and is simpler to use but I don’t think it supports as many features as Terrain Composer.
I have my eye on Map Maker but I was hoping it would go on sale before I got it and I don’t have any money left to spend on assets. In fact I probably shouldn’t have spent what I did and kind of wish I could get a refund due to all the unfolding drama.
Unity’s new restructured pricing model seems to have a lot of people up in arms and plenty of people appear to be saying they may switch to another engine. They seem to be quite concerned about it all and this has me a little concerned too because I just spent well over $100 on assets from the Unity asset store which is more than I planned to spend. This got me checking things out and I realized that yesterday a new version of Unreal Engine came out, version 4.12.
I loaded it up and so far it seems to be more efficient from what I can tell which is awesome. It seems to have a lot of new features too. I’m not sure how much time I should spend messing around with it but it does seem to be nicer on system resources now than when I made my previous post complaining about it so that’s pretty great.
One of the interesting things about Unreal Engine is that it’s open source and the community can contribute patches to it. This is something I’ve always liked and tend to work with is open source software a lot and release most of my things as open source. I can only imagine that in the near future Unreal Engine will far surpass any other engine out there because of it being open source and because of it’s current feature set which makes it easier for people to use, especially without having to spend a lot of money on assets. Note that their source code is still copyrighted and covered by their EULA but it is open and available to look at, learn from, modify or send them pull requests for bug fixes or new features.
Unity has a new release coming very soon as well with a lot of support for VR. VR is all the craze these days and I don’t even have one and I may never have one since I lack the funds. But they do seem quite neat and people are making some interesting things with it. I feel like I’m probably missing out on things but that’s alright with me. I can barely make normal games yet and barely ever play games anymore anyway since I am spending most of my time making them. I probably should go work on something that actually makes me money though so I can afford such fancy gizmos. Maybe I will use Unreal Engine 4.12 for this since it seems much quicker to work with than Unity.