> only a "dogfighting" portion is currently playable.
for most kickstarters/buyers, it's alpha 1.3 which has the
hangar (ship previews/ weapons testing),
combat (pew pew),
flight (racing)
and the social module (running around a small city level and emoting to other players).
1.3 is threadbare, but it's not designed for content, but to test server infrastructure and design choices. The UI is horrendous, combat is confusing, but you can get the sense of the art and an outline of how the game would work, if/when it were finished.
Realistically, it's going to be 3 more years before the MMO aspect comes along, just to handle the scope creep of being a kickstarter project. (There will always be a new feature to test/design/fund, thus the time will get pushed back, sic.)
Alpha 2.0 is being touted as the multi-crew module, but it's also integrating a lot of in development features to flesh out each of the segments in 1.3. The belief is, there'll be a "Persistent Universe" P.U. test solar system with ship movement, open combat areas, travel/navigation, AI crew on ships, trade and quests, before 2016. featuring most of the citizencon demo features from the video.
A FPS combat module which will be a lot less polished, is coming out after that, sometime between january 2016 and the Squadron 42 game.
Realistically, here's some videos of the current state of the game.
Suffice to say, it is entirely powerful and possible to create incredible games. Ori and the blind forest, Hearthstone, and plenty of AA and indie games use unity, lots of kickstarter projects.
To the chagrin of gamers, Steam has greenlit several terrible unity based games, that only use free/cheap unity store assets, namely Airplane (?) and DayZ (sic) , which are quite infamously reviewed by Jim sterling on YouTube. Enough to cloud the market for games created by any future indie dev.
Advice is plentiful, though you do have a lack of great sources to ask questions.
IMO, devs starting with unity are almost drowned in advanced features to get started from concept to prototype. Easy to learn, hard to master, easier to edit store bought prefabs than to DIY. They can become a crutch very quickly.
The unity store can be a boon and a roadblock to progress, because it doesn't always help. Starting out, it won't give you the best direction or how to code, but it will take you forward to developing a playable prototype. Sometimes within hours of starting a new project.
If you have a team, unity is going to be the source of frequent anguish, but it is still more flexible than it ever was.
the biggest hassle will more likely to be assets, and far down the road, dealing with rigid bodies, collision, raycasthit, and the PhysX implementation of mesh and mass collision.
For most devs, the initial unity workload will be around 70-80% asset creation to 20% game coding, and about 290% of the budgeted time, debugging.
A good idea is to build a prototype, get the mechanics working while the art is being developed. Once the code is in place, debug/playtesting is critical to developing assets that then can be designed, built as mesh, and imported within the prototype in a few seconds.
Character controllers are generally easy, more dynamic mechanim is able to avoid some pitfalls of the capsule collision system, and there are ways to add crouch/jump use cases with pathfinding and AI,(which is a good bit of work.)
Unity does excel at getting a walking mesh going, using mechanim to blend animation and mesh collision, and 3d art assets designed in Maya or 3dsmax, etc.
When I started with unity in 2012, it took forever to even think about how to build a menu system, until NGUI. It's improved drastically since the store was added.
FreeNAS, which is generally the set and forget ZFS option, wants 1gb per Tb of data, but can cope with 1gb per 3tb. It's more of a cache issue with the Cluster and drive size.
IIIRC, 6gb or 8gb on FreeNAS enables the read ahead caching and a few other tweaks. But it's still not fast.
Once the initial file write/read cache is empty, you get the regular throughout, which is 5-12mb /sec on a slow system, basically however fast the CPU and HDD can search for and supply the data in surges.
setting up a HP N54L microserver with 5x 4tb drives and the standard 4gb, (getting the compatible non registered ECC DDR is ridiculous), Gigabit transfers just slow down to USB v1 speed. Booting up with 16gb ECC, I get 85mb/sec Gigabit transfers with no problems.
For a box that's job is storing movies and TV, music and photos for plex, it doesn't have to do a lot. Transcoding would be nice, but not worth the extra. All up, 20tb was $1500,$400 on top of the wddriveWD red NAS drives.
I configured a SuperMicro board with a Pentium G2030 and 32GB ECC, 4 x 3TB drives in raidz, and 2 x 2TB in mirror. Copying multiple TB of data in either direction to the raidz saturates the GigE link steadily.
for most kickstarters/buyers, it's alpha 1.3 which has the hangar (ship previews/ weapons testing), combat (pew pew), flight (racing) and the social module (running around a small city level and emoting to other players).
1.3 is threadbare, but it's not designed for content, but to test server infrastructure and design choices. The UI is horrendous, combat is confusing, but you can get the sense of the art and an outline of how the game would work, if/when it were finished.
Realistically, it's going to be 3 more years before the MMO aspect comes along, just to handle the scope creep of being a kickstarter project. (There will always be a new feature to test/design/fund, thus the time will get pushed back, sic.)
Alpha 2.0 is being touted as the multi-crew module, but it's also integrating a lot of in development features to flesh out each of the segments in 1.3. The belief is, there'll be a "Persistent Universe" P.U. test solar system with ship movement, open combat areas, travel/navigation, AI crew on ships, trade and quests, before 2016. featuring most of the citizencon demo features from the video.
A FPS combat module which will be a lot less polished, is coming out after that, sometime between january 2016 and the Squadron 42 game.
Realistically, here's some videos of the current state of the game.
i.e. The social Module in 1.3 https://youtu.be/38gofAbkilE?t=60
MultiCrew, as demo'd for the con, is not ready. The press demo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrpeLpQWzTk covers some FPS, travel, and landing / takeoff.
only recently have they refactored the UI i.e. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSNZ6oWAjZ8