The bad news for me is that I’m in the middle of a Flash project, and I can’t really allow myself to play with Unity yet! NNOOOOO!

I guess this is what separates the boys from the men. Self control such as this… er, I think I’ll go download it now.

Unity3d is one of the many reasons I wonder why big companies are still making boxed retail games at all. For that matter, I often wonder why small indie developers are making downloadable games at all! I will never make another non-browser game in my life, unless there’s a huge incentive or it’s an optional download version. It just doesn’t make sense anymore to put up a barrier to entry like forcing a download and install.

There are two things I don’t like about Unity: 1) the development tools run on Macs only, and 2) I can’t use Java even though the tools use Mono (which supports Java).

First point, I have nothing against Macs (heck, I own one). It’s just not my development platform of choice. I have a bunch of nice tools already that I’m comfy with on my Windows machines. I don’t wanna have to build all that up again. That said, Unity holds enough potential that I would.

Second point, I don’t dislike C#. It’s a lot like Java, maybe even better in some ways. The reason I don’t want to move away from Java is because that’s what all the server code is written in, and it would be really nice to only write the classes etc for one language! Again, though, I think Unity has enough potential that I would bite the bullet and do it anyway.

Oh, point three: it costs $1,500 bucks. Ouch. I know there’s a cheaper version, but it’s too crippled for me–you can’t even publish to Windows! So, really there’s only one price point. Like the other two problems, I think I can overcome this one because I am so enchanted by what I could do with this engine. Lila Dreams in 3d? You never know….

Well, I was just distracted for a few minutes (again) by the tropical demo, so I wanted to get this off my chest.

Update: Sweet goomba! I just learned that Unity 2.5 will be the first Windows release for the authoring tools! *weeps with joy* But also the indie license will allow publishing to Windows now. And the indie version costs $200. *faints* Discovering Unity has blown my mind. It solves so many problems. I must have it!!