Starting Unity

Hello everybody!  Our class has now moved on to a new (free) game engine called Unity.  I feel like it is more programmer oriented than UDK, but I like it so far.

We have to do some Digital Tutors' tutorials to start out with.  I have started doing the "Introduction to Unity" course and so far it's pretty fun.  =]

Here is what I have been building and learning:

     How to put together models in a 3D space,

     making a hallway,

     finishing the hallway,

     installing doorways into the scene,

     finding out the importance of "modular level design" or building a complex scene with a few of the same objects (walls, doors, props, etc.),

     finishing the rooms,

     creating a first person controller and generating colliders (so your mesh is solid),

     adding lights to the scene,

     baking lights into the scene, deleting the lights, and saving game memory,

     adding textures,

     bringing in prefabs,

     adding more prefabs with textures (paper piles and ammo crates),

     sometimes you can bring in simple objects (capsules) and use them as colliders for your geometry,

     bringing in particle systems (FIRE!  UDK all over again eh?  ;) ),

 

     adding sound to the fire,

 

     making glow animation to make the fire appear more realistic and alive,

     creating physics, 

 

     (Like flaming cryotanks rolling towards the player)

     adding pipes and textures,

     putting in more props,

     (Like a room full-o-barrels!)

     refining the hierarchy (it can get messy when you start to accumulate hundreds of objects in your scene) and putting in sliding doors,

     and learning about how to script portions of your game (like the OnGUI Function).

     The rest of the videos continued with going over scripting.  I thought that this tutorial was actually really fun.  =]  Unity is a really cool program.  Here is a video showing a little bit about what you can do with Unity.