Unity - Game Development Tool

Unity (or "Unity3D" as it was first known as). It is currently at version 2.5.

It is a multi-platform game development tool, designed from the start to ease creation. A fully integrated professional application, Unity just happens to contain the most powerful engine this side of a million dollars.

Besides publishing standalone games, it has its own web player add-in (the download is about 9 MB) for browsers and IPhone publishing (at an additional charge). Currently in two versions: Unity Indie (US$199) and Unity Pro (US$1499).

"Unity supports three scripting languages: JavaScript, C#, and a dialect of Python called Boo. All three are equally fast and interoperate. All three can use the underlying .NET libraries which support databases, regular expressions, XML, file access and networking.

Scripting is frequently thought of as limited and slow. But in Unity your scripts are compiled to native code and run nearly as fast as C++. You get the fast iteration times and ease of use everyone loves about scripting languages."

[Source: Unity3D.com]

That seems very believable after viewing their Tropical Paradise demo.

Also, according to some bloggers, it is apparently easy to convert a game written with Papervision3D (Actionscript) to Unity. Something which they mostly do so as to publish their games to the iPhone.

Something to comeback to once I made something with Flash.



Update:

Here are some reviews/comments on Unity:
DevMaster.net - Engine details of Unity
StackOverflow.com - What’s the best indie game development environment?

Using Actionscript for 3D

Recently, I have toying around with 3D in flash. There are several frameworks to produce 3D graphics (e.g. Papervision 3D, Sandy, Away3D, Yogurt3D, FIVe3D, etc) which you can use together with other frameworks for physics (Wow-Engine, JigLibFlash, box2dflash, APE), object distortion (AS3Dmod), augmented reality (FlarToolKit), etc.

When working, I quickly realized that using primitive shapes to build a 3D scene with ActionScript was only useful to a certain point. To supplement this, some allow the importing of COLLADA models, which is a standard that represents models with an XML file and an image used for texture mapping.

When searching for some models to use in my projects, I stumbled on Google's 3D Warehouse (a place that stores 3D models that people created) and SketchUp (a tool to create 3D models).


[Source: papervision2.com]

Hope you found that interesting.