@Marshall: Everything I have heard about Ryzom indicates that the code would be considered spaghetti and poorly documented. Now, making it open source could allow some dedicated and hard-working folks to clean it up perhaps and turn it into a decent product. And that would definitely be exciting for the Indie community.

http://dev.ryzom.com/news/13

You probably heard that Ryzon has released its engine under a GNU license and art assets under a Creative Commons license. I don’t know much about the game itself, but releasing a commercial (i.e. generally functional) 3D MMO as an open-source alternative does seem like a potential windfall for indie MMO development. What do you think?

It seems you share our experiences exactly. While the demos work great, and Unity is fantastic for artists to see their models in action, it falls apart when you are finishing an actual game. We do run into crashes and bugs on a daily basis, including some very painful data-loss issues with prefabs loaded into a scene. We run into scaling issues in nearly every project, and sometimes the functionality to fix them just isn’t exposed by Unity. I have a bunch of issues open in Unity’s bug tracker. Sometimes they are fixed, sometimes they are closed without comment (which might mean they are fixed), and sometimes they just stay open forever.

I don’t mean to bash on Unity here, since it is a fantastic product. I am just coming to believe it’s better suited for mockups and tech demos than actual polished products. Documentation in the product is good for beginners, but it’s too light on the advanced features. The actual GL classes have to be figured out by trial and error.

I had the opportunity to try out Unity 3.0, and I agree with what Aras says. We were mostly able to convert our project in half a day of work. There were a few changes here and there- places where the API isn’t backwards compatible genuinely needed the API improved anyway, so I don’t mind there. Unfortunately, it seemed like some key drawing features might be removed and not replaced. I asked Samantha how final those changes would be, but they never got back to me.

I’ve also heard a few other Unity old-timers lament the decay of the quality of the community…

Why we aren’t talking about more details: because of bad past experience. Every time we said “we’ll try to make this work, but don’t hold your breath”, people read into that as “this will definitely ship”. So we’re trying to talk about the things we’re 190% certain will ship.

One thing I’ve wondered, will it be shipping with the .NET System DLL? Currently if you want to use sockets, you end up needing to include this 1mb DLL in your downloadable program. It makes it harder to get file sizes down small.

I have a lot of technical questions… I guess I am just surprised that they don’t have an ongoing Q&A to talk about Unity 3 in more detail. It’s all been very closed.