Developin' stuff with Unity Engine

[Zharek]

I'm currently working on cloning Tetris with the Unity3D engine. I'm trying to adhere to an MVC framework paradigm for it just as a good practices exercise, and have a little bit of it coded out and an idea of how to write the rest but not quite there yet. Having stupid troubles with remembering how certain data structures work and how much of a pain i want to create for myself later. Anyway, an eventuality of that is embedding a unity player with that game in my website that's able to grab data from my website and load it into a profile for customization, keeping track of score, etc etc. Mostly just proof of concept stuff for getting systems in place that could be reused for other things I might develop later, and for resume fodder.

Anyone else have experience with Unity? Comments, questions, suggestions?

[Arnox]

Well...

On the topic of game engines, what do you think of the Unreal Engine 4? Have you checked it out yet?

[Zharek]

I have not, free is a much too tempting price for me and I don't have any previous experience with unreal. However my brother's girlfriend prefers Unreal to Unity for a few reasons, one of which I can definitely sympathize with is that unity is completely 'component' based where everything in your game is a game object with components. This may not sound like that much of a big deal but it gets sort of annoying when you're doing more complex things than playing with the default controllers and such. Of course you can structure how your code works around this so that you end up with good things, but it adds another layer of design choices to compensate for this.

[Arnox]

I have not, free is a much too tempting price for me and I don't have any previous experience with unreal. However my brother's girlfriend prefers Unreal to Unity for a few reasons, one of which I can definitely sympathize with is that unity is completely 'component' based where everything in your game is a game object with components. This may not sound like that much of a big deal but it gets sort of annoying when you're doing more complex things than playing with the default controllers and such. Of course you can structure how your code works around this so that you end up with good things, but it adds another layer of design choices to compensate for this.

Well, to be fair, it's pretty darn cheap. And even if you stopped paying the sub, you'll still be able to mess around with the version of UE4 that you have as well.

[burroughs]

'MVC' is a bit of a misleading term in general. In .NET world (where I unfortunately live), it's a literal framework, aka some external component which calls your code, rather than your code calling an external component (which would be more of just a plain old library). You seem to be referencing it as more of a design standard, which is not incorrect or anything, just noting. Can you expand on this a bit?

[Zharek]

I'm using the term in the sense of a design standard, yes. In my context it stands for "Model View Controller", where you have a general model that describes the core logic of the application and a view, which is tailored for displaying things in a particular way for a given model, and the controller is the middle man between them, getting data from the model and sending it to the view, getting input from the view and sending it to the model. An important design note about this sort of framework is that the view and the model must have no means of direct communication with each other or it's no longer following the paradigm.

As a final note, the idea is that it allows for you to be able to build a wide range of views for any given, very general model in that you could either have some RPG just be a console application where all the interaction is like >go left >attack guy >use potion etc etc, or full on skyrim, and the only thing that changes between the two iterations is the view implemented.