

Unity Game Engine to Get Official 2D Game Support and a Built-In Ad Solution - evo_9
http://m.techcrunch.com/2013/08/28/unity-game-engine-to-get-official-2d-game-support-and-a-built-in-ad-service/

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acgourley
Note that many 3D games need 2D components for menus, HUDs and general UI.
Most Unity developers were paying an extra 100-200 dollars for 3rd party
plugins that brought in better text handling, sprite atlassing, drop shadows,
etc. Even if you're not planning to make a 2D game it's a big upgrade of the
tool.

~~~
socialist_coder
fwiw the most popular 2D libraries are less than $100.

2D Toolkit - $65 ([http://u3d.as/content/unikron-software-
ltd/2d-toolkit/1Wi](http://u3d.as/content/unikron-software-
ltd/2d-toolkit/1Wi))

NGUI - $95 ([http://u3d.as/content/tasharen-entertainment/ngui-next-
gen-u...](http://u3d.as/content/tasharen-entertainment/ngui-next-gen-ui/2vh))

Uni2d - $90
([https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/#/content/3826](https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/#/content/3826))

All of these have more features than what Unity just introduced so I don't see
their usage declining anytime soon- until/unless Unity makes some serious
improvements to their built in 2D library.

~~~
acgourley
I noticed some cool features in their unveil - such as polygonal sprites
rather than rectangles. This means it's cheaper to fill each texture to the
screen, and it means the sprite atlases can be packed tighter resulting in
less draw calls. They also changed the 2D UI so that you cannot select a
sprite where it's alpha is 0 under the cursor, which makes it way easier to
move and manipulate in the editor. Finally, they added an animation framework
for the sprites which is powerful.

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hdivider
I feel sorry for the guy who made the 2D Toolkit [0]. It's a very solid asset,
but with a new built-in official competitor I think it might die, or at least
slow down over time.

Would it be too cynical to think that this is part of the point of the asset
store? To let independent devs run thousands of experiments at their own
expense, let them all run, give them their 70%, then just reproduce and
integrate the very best of these assets with the next version of Unity?

I suppose from the Unity team perspective, it looks like they can't do
anything right: don't add enough features and people will complain about over-
reliance on the Asset Store - but add too many features and Asset Store
publishers complain.

There's probably one of those 'yeah well, sounds obvious' lessons in here:
don't make your product overly dependent on somebody else's platform. Easy to
say that, of course.

[0]:
[https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/#/content/908](https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/#/content/908)

~~~
aras_p
FWIW, all the "2D extensions" asset store publishers have known about Unity's
upcoming 2D features for a while (have been part of the alpha testing etc.).
Yes, their toolkit sales will probably drop, but that's what you get when
targeting a missing feature of a product - sooner or later the product will
add that feature. They are smart folks so I'm quite sure they will find
something else to do though; or will build even fancier extensions on top of
base functionality.

"I suppose from the Unity team perspective, it looks like they can't do
anything right" \- I don't think we have this problem. If there's a big
missing gap in features, we _will_ close it sooner or later. Yes this might
upset some asset store publishers, but that's how things are. On the other
hand, many of them will have had several years of really, really good sales of
their packages.

 _(I work at Unity. YMMV etc.)_

~~~
FrojoS
So, obviously you are right and this is an issue with any platform. But I do
wonder if there was a better way. Couldn't you in many cases offer these
people a job at the company? I mean, I guess Unity is hiring a lot anyway.

~~~
aras_p
Well, if you look at it... RageSpline guy (Juha Kiili) is working at Unity (on
the same 2D stuff for 4.3), and NGUI folks (Michael Lyashenko & Philip
Cosgrave) are working at Unity on the upcoming GUI system.

That said, some people do not want work for any company; they just want to be
"independent". And that's ok.

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FrojoS
Some day they might even support proper wireframe rendering (without third
party plugins)! Code based .unity scenes for easy version control? Anyone?
Unity3D, what a love hate relationship I have with this thing. I will admit
though, that the love grows with every day! It still boggles my mind how few
issues I had developing a major project with Unity3D+C#. No stack overflow or
segmentation errors, hardly any crashes. The ability to play and pause in the
editor is just as great as the multi platform ability.

~~~
doctorpangloss
Unity scenes already support text serialization in the YAML format.

~~~
Kaali
Have you tried merging those scenes? Even if the format is structured and in
plain text, it does not mean that a human can manipulate it as a patch. The
format is so convoluted and full of magic numbers, it would require a lot of
experience to really merge them; or support from Unity itself, and then the
choice of serialization is not really that important.

You can manage team work somehow with prefabs. But I would like to see
something like Havok Vision Engine's layering system, where every layer of a
scene is it's own file, thus with file locking you can work on a single scene
as a team. For example, you could split the scene in layers by developer, and
then have someone integrate them in proper layers. Or you could just split
specific work between people with lighting layer, static layer, collision
layer and so on.

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socialist_coder
A little backstory about this- the most popular 2D plugin for Unity was NGUI
(now I would say 2D Toolkit and NGUI are equally popular, but 2D Toolkit has
more momentum).

The guy who created NGUI was hired by Unity about a year ago to work on their
new built in UI / 2D system. And, this is what he's created. It's still
massively lacking in features compared to the 3rd party 2D plugins but I think
this is just a start and we should expect to see a lot of great improvements
over time.

These are the 3 most popular 2D plugins for Unity, and they're all less than
$100:

2D Toolkit - $65 ([http://u3d.as/content/unikron-software-
ltd/2d-toolkit/1Wi](http://u3d.as/content/unikron-software-
ltd/2d-toolkit/1Wi))

NGUI - $95 ([http://u3d.as/content/tasharen-entertainment/ngui-next-
gen-u...](http://u3d.as/content/tasharen-entertainment/ngui-next-gen-ui/2vh))

Uni2d - $90
([https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/#/content/3826](https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/#/content/3826))

Personally I use 2D Toolkit and I know for a fact he has plans to make his
plugin use the new built in 2D Physics system and I'm sure he's looking at any
other ways he can squeeze better performance and useability out of the new
Unity 2D features.

I would _love_ to stop using a 3rd party 2D plugin but I don't see it
happening anytime soon.

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sandycheeks
I wonder if the timing of the release is tied to the release of iOS 7. There
is a Sprite Kit 2d framework in iOS 7.

~~~
dualogy
Since Unity is targeting iOS, Android, Blackberry, WinPhone, Mac, Windows,
Linux, Web all equally, I don't see a big correlation there. Also seeing
Android's global market share, iOS is basically a fringe target for me these
days, just _slightly_ above BB and MS in terms of relevance.

With their Asset Store, they can easier gauge what Unity users need so badly
they'll even pay for. Unity is used a _lot_ for 2D games, yet is very
3D-centric, so there are many popular and I presume profitable 3rd-party
extensions to make 2D first-class in Unity. So it makes a lot of sense for
them to cater more "natively" to this segment of users.

~~~
straight_talk_2
Interesting - there are hundreds of millions of iOS devices out there and
their average user spends more money on apps than the Android counterpart.

Are we already at the point where Apple is irrelevant to the app vendors?

~~~
austinz
I don't think so, because larger mobile operating system share (especially
global, where you have to account for the Chinese and Indian markets) doesn't
necessarily mean more people will actually be interested in your app, can find
your app, or can run your app on their phones. Your potential market is
larger, sure, but out of that larger customer pool how many will be able or
willing to download and use your app, especially if it's something
performance-intensive?

For a lot of people, the smartphone they buy is already fully functional for
their needs out of the box. They get an Internet browser, media player, e-mail
client, and some other utility/PDA features that are bundled with the OS. A
lot of people will add 'service apps' like Facebook and Dropbox to access
services they were already using, and then stop there. There is less of an
incentive for people to go out and look for apps to make their smartphone more
useful, like a 1990s computer purchaser going out and buying Microsoft Office
and Quicken for their new otherwise-useless Windows box, and so I would argue
that marketshare by itself is less meaningful a metric for comparing mobile
and desktop platforms.

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wslh
Now it's competing with Cocos2D.

~~~
bsaul
Yeap, except it's a complete different league. Cocos2D-X (which is the real
cross-platform equivalent) is an absolute nightmare for beginners. Last time I
checked, there was no documentation except in chineese, and you wouldn't even
know where to look when you wanted to do some networking.

Unity truly is a marvelous piece of technology and ecosystem.

~~~
sharms
I actually bought "Cocos2d-X By Example Beginners Guide" and it was very easy
to get up and running with a demo application. The samples included with the
framework itself show off a features and nothing has been all that complex,
and I have made a bunch of 2D test applications already (XCode + iPad
simulator)

~~~
evo_9
Thanks for mentioning this book, I've wanted to dig into cocos2D for a while
but the lack of a good beginner book kept me from getting too far. I picked it
up last night and it's exactly what I've been looking for. Awesome thanks!

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juskrey
Having some solid experience with Unity, have to say that it was already great
environment for creating 2D applications. Only sprite management and object
alignment support had to be reinvented from the scratch, but some very solid
addons are present on the market for pretty long time. If I recall correctly,
the author of the most popular one, NGUI, was hired by Unity to implement
native 2D support.

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Kiro
Funny. I was googling for exactly this earlier today. I love the thought o
using such a mature engine and tool as Unity but I mostly make 2D games so
this is very welcomed news.

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alixr
Still waiting on that PS Vita support they promised.

