Unity
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Released Jun 1, 2005
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Unity engine goes free for Indie developers
Unity technologies launches version 2.6 of it's platform and makes unity freely available.
Posted by Henley on Oct 30th, 2009 digg this super bookmark
A few days ago the multi-platform Unity engine had a brand new update (version 2.6) as well as a price drop for independent developers who choose to use the engine for both personal and commercial use from $200 USD to well zero.
David_Helgason_CEO_Unity_Technologies wrote:With the explosive growth in new platforms and performance improvement in our Unity suite of products, we believe that there are no technical hurdles remaining for high quality interactive content everywhere. Now we are removing financial hurdles as well. Unity is mature enough and easy enough to use that it can be the entry point for those developers taking their first steps with the technology.
Now I can hear your eyebrows raising but before you ask there really isn't any catch to this, aside from the Unity spashscreen that is. So there really is no reason as to why your not tooling around in it as you read this go and download it now!
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All right. I'm looking forward to this. Why is Unity so special? It's special because you can develop iPhone games without feeling like your going to vomit because your writing your code in Objective-C.
Also special because it works on Mac too.
So Ive downloaded this version, it says I can only use it for 30 days for free :s
go register for a free licence it will unlock it, remember to read things carefully.
You had to license the software and you could chose to either select the pro 30 day free trial or the free license. You must have selected the wrong option. No worries I think the pro features just turn off after 30 days and you're left with the normal free license.
Ive just downloaded from moddb, didn't get any options or registration forms before the download started. (mac version)
When you install it will promt you to get or buy a license, it will take you to the unity website and you click free license, then it will give you a free license.
But no Linux version :(
I was thinking just that yesterday... No linux -sigh- why not =(
Because all Linux is good at is hosting servers? ;D
Oh wow, awesome.
Not really interested in iPhone, but other stuff is cool.
Although, I find it weird, the example game for Unity that they have makes it seem like a horribly unoptimized engine. Guess I'll find out.
This is very awesome. Unity feels like a really solid game engine to me. Can't wait to see the indie games developed with unity ^_^
Great news for devs, its always good to have more options for engines especially when they are free :)
Look forward to some new games using this including Interstellar Marines.
This is a shame that it is free now.
Why's that?
Many people payed for the this and every Indie developer who did got screwed.
Indie groups/dev's don't have a large budget and every little counts.
Ah, I could understand how that would be frustrating.
Quote from unity blog: Secondly, we understand that people who recently bought Unity Indie might feel really unlucky. Every single Unity 2.x Indie license owner will be offered to upgrade to Unity Pro or to add Unity iPhone Basic to their license for a big discount. And everyone who bought Unity Indie in the last sixty days are alternately being offered full refunds if they don’t wish to upgrade. Source: Blogs.unity3d.com
a BIG discount is a very good thing if you're an indie developer, most of us will be at the stage now where we've got products that could easily facilitate the need of a pro-license. I think that's the assumption there.
Great, now I can get the pro version cheap!
Thanks for that, didn't really look into it.
I imagine maybe they paid for it when it wasn't? Or less exclusivity? *shrug*
EDIT: Late reply, but I was right. xD
Dammit. We just bought a engine license for C4 because unity was to costly and now it goes free that sucks.
Yeah that's kind of bad- I nearly bought a license too but put it off because I wanted to see how the new unity and torque3D engines went. You never know, you might find some uses for C4- but yeah its a shame.
Not bad at all, I'm not sure about C4 but I think it's different from Unity. Specially if you are going to do any multiplayer things like mmo's.
Unity requires you to run services on their servers/server clients. Which means extra licenses.
I was always under the impression C4 was more like a real engine, like source etc, where you could just use it as a game server and have the DB etc be something different.
I could be totally wrong here of course.
Making unity free only changes something for the indie/hobbyist that wants to make some standalone game.
Where did you hear that you have to "run services on their servers/server clients." Its a regular game engine capable of building a .app, or .exe standalone game, publishing to iPhone app store, or building to web. And when I say web, I mean you can host it on whatever server you want and make www calls to any server you want from within the game.
Great stuff. New Tiger Woods browser game from EA uses this.
I don't get it, if it's free to use, why isn't it open source?
Not saying I have problems with the engine, I'm just curious. Afterall, I assume the reason it's being made free is due to the dev team moving on to something else.
Just the indie license is free. The Professional version still has to be bought, and its nearly the same thing with some added features. So their still working on the engine.
Because other engine developer's could steal there work!
That's why UE is never open-source, even if you pay for the damned thing.
This is great news, I am going to mess around with this now and see how easy it is to work with.
Yah c4 engine is more off a engine like source, ut etc but if we could of got Unity free would be been better. still probley need to pay more anyway as our devolopment is a professional sold game anyway.
After making 3 games so far (student, and a personal iPhone game), I can say Unity is my favorite engine to work with. My engine experience consists of UE2, Source, C4, Virtools, Trinigy Vision Engine, and GameMaker, so I know I haven't tried them all. Unity is just my favorite among the ones I've seen and my opinion seems to be shared by a bunch of people.
After reading this and looking at the unity products page, it looks like the iphone version of unity isn't free. As it had its own license and wasn't part of the "indie" license that was made free. That might want to be changed in the article.
If I'm missing something tell me, cause I would love the iphone version to be free.