Unity 3D is free on Android and iOS until April 8th | Hacker News Reader

Unity 3D is free on Android and iOS until April 8th

store.unity3d.com

176 pointsnjs1234541 comments

We've been using Unity for the past year to develop a couple of games and we've had very good success with it so far.

The best part, for us, is the fact that it uses Mono as its scripting engine (if you want to call C# scripting). This unlocks things like LINQ, iterator coroutines, .NET sockets, etc. It also allows us to share code between client and server. We can reference the same core DLL on both, as well as share game logic between client (for offline play) and server (for multiplayer anti-cheating).

We tend to do most of our development in VS, but we deploy to Linux servers and will be deploying clients to web, iOS, android, and possibly steam. The way we use the actual Unity editor, it ends up being just an asset pipeline on steroids; but many other users use the drag-and-drop scene building features.

We've found Unity to play nice with git, especially with the 3.5 release which lets you use a textual format for asset metadata. They were previously binary making merges impossible.

In all, this offer is very worth checking out if you are interested in game development.

But of course, to be allowed textual format for asset metadata, you have to buy the pro version. Or did they change that in 3.5?

You do need pro to make scene files and stuff text, but the most important thing for source control (the use of .meta files) can be enabled in the free version now.

Note that you cannot use the non-pro version if your company has a turnover above $100k/year.

...at which point the $1500 dollar version doesn't sound like a bad deal...

It's actually ($4500 * number of developer seats) if you still want android + ios. Unless the entire company revenue comes from your unity3d project, this may certainly be a dealbreaker. Definitely makes it impossible to use on what would otherwise be a one-week project.

Yea, I just ran into this at work the other week when we wanted to take a look at Unity for a small side project. Just because the company that you work for is making several $100k (or even million)/year doesn't mean your tiny little department down in the guts of that company is seeing that money.

I would hope the total required is from revenue generated by your Unity project, not total revenue of the company. If not, that's a huge mistake on their part as it would encourage companies with unrelated revenues to go elsewhere. Which was exactly your response.

If it's just for the project inside the company, a big company could set up an internal "project" for just the Unity stuff, and not pay for the full version. So no one would pay for the full version.

The full version does come with a bunch of extra features not in the free version, so there are reasons to buy it even if you aren't forced to by the licensing requirements.

From the license: "The free version of Unity may not be licensed by a commercial entity with annual gross revenues (based on fiscal year) in excess of US$100,000, or by an educational, non-profit or government entity with an annual budget of over US$100,000."

My reading of that is that it is the total revenue of the company, no matter how small the Unity project might be.

I agree, the wording is total revenue, gross at that, of the company even before you start on a Unity project. But hey, it's their engine so they can license it however they think works best for them.

But I wonder how it works if a company with that much gross revenue hires a third-party that does not make that much revenue to create the content for them. I guess the rule would apply to the third-party.

Lots of assumptions. If you happen to be be self-employed selling something with a 3% margin and $100k gross revenues, then Unity+iOS+Android costs more money than you made all year. Gross revenue tells you nothing about profits.

Its a pretty good assumption given the market. If you are selling software or services at a 3% margin you have a bigger problem than license costs. You might as well go open a grocery store.

Yes, I remember a grocery store manager telling me if someone steals a pack of cigarettes - that they have to sell about $200 in groceries to make up the difference.

> Note that you cannot use the non-pro version if your company has a turnover above $100k/year.

Hmm, 100K is about the salary for one developer - how can a gaming company not have revenue of at least that amount? Unless it's a side project people do in their spare time?

100K is the salary for one developer at a large game company in North America. There are tons of us indies around the world running a lot leaner, so to speak.

Well ok, so two developers at half that, that's still 100K. I guess outside of North America/Europe/Japan/South Korea salaries are cheaper, but in most of the market, 50K is low. And most projects have at least 2 people, don't they?

I am currently in SF at the Game Developer Conference, and I have been using Unity w/an iOS license for the last year for a side-project. The timing is great for us, since we are just now working on re-deploying our project to Android for testing.

If you have ever considered doing any type of game development, I would strongly encourage you to take advantage of this opportunity.

Unity has allowed me to be immensely productive working relatively few hours a week. Being able to prototype up a game idea in a few hours and experience that on your mobile device is hugely powerful.

Wow, this is truly amazing .. I'm currently running the sample app "AngryBots" on my iPad, and I'm sold: I'll be upgrading to Unity3D with iOS and Android PRO licenses as soon as I can.

Nice move, Unity Technologies! You've got a new convert!

What were you using before?

The Blender3D game engine, as well as hacking on my own 3D engine (mainly a curio, nothing great) .. but Unity is just so much more productive. After an afternoon spent on the Unity tutorials and hacking on AngryBots, I'm sold.

I'd like to point out to anyone on the edge that they don't even take credit card information, just an email and a physical address.

This seems like an amazing deal.

Yep, I was happy to see I didn't need to feed them a CC number to get it. I may not use it but I snagged it anyway, you never know. It'll probably serve it's purpose since I'm more inclined to fire it up to play with it.

Plus I'm contemplating getting RageSpline in the asset store as it's on sale for 66% off to correspond with the module giveaway. That's a strong looking tool for $25.

Getting to the review order page, I get:

Temporarily Down for Maintenance You are seeing this message because the page that you were trying to visit is down while we make some changes to our servers. This is a temporary thing, and we hope to have things restored quickly, so please check back in a few minutes.

Looks like it's back up now.

I recently bought an iOS Basic licence and got an e-mail from Unity stating that I get 25% off my next purchase just because I missed this sale.

Great customer support!

Is this a license/sub type of thing or an "I get it permanently for free" once I've downloaded it once type of thing?

The latter, from what I understand.

Judging by the tweat (https://twitter.com/#!/unity3d/status/176767532936605697) it seems like permanently free!

This is totally legit. 100% free - for the 3.x releases. Can't recommend this enough....especially as I just dropped £300 on an iOS licence a month back :E

What's the normal price?

$400 each for iOS Basic and Android Basic.

How does Unity 3D compare to the Unreal Dev Kit?

UDK is more friendly to large dev teams (collaboration and source control). There was a great comment on reddit[1] by a professional developer on why this was the case but sadly he has deleted his comment.

[1]http://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/nua84/from_a_profes...

Thanks for your patience, The Unity Team

How does Unity compare to something like CoronaSDK for 2D games? Unity clearly seems geared more towards 3D gaming, but I've seen some references to locking the Z-axis to create 2D experiences.

Unity is really not less than a total 3D environment for developing games .. you can definitely use it to do 2D style games (or 2.5D games, where 3D models are locked on the Z-axis, as you say) but in my opinion if you want flat bitmap-style 2D games you'd be better off getting into something like MOAI (http://getmoai.com/) or Corona or LÖVE2D to get the job done .. (my pref is MOAI right now, its just so fresh and fun..)

There a lot of plugins to handle 2D (2.5D) games on Unity, I am currently using 2D Toolkit ($50) for sprites and it's awesome. I also recommend to check RageSpline and RagePixel, this tools provide features totally integrated with the IDE and really easy to use.

I haven't try CoronaSDK but I can see a lot a potential in 2D games with Unity, not just 3D. I fact, you can see a lot of nice 2D games in his showcase, for example Zombieville USA and Max & The Magic Marker.

- http://unikronsoftware.com/2dtoolkit/

- http://ragepixel.com/

- http://ragespline.com/

- Max & The Magic Marker http://goo.gl/H9Hl0

- Zombieville http://goo.gl/fzZP0

- Showcase http://goo.gl/g4uux

Is anyone able to compare and contrast this with the UDK which seems to be a similar license (free until you make six figures)?

I have fooled around with both, but I am probably not competent to speak on the matter. The UDK is just the UDK, the free Unity is missing features that the paid version has. Unity has more ease of use features.

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