Hi,
It is true that we are working on this version. As we stated in our 3rd anniversary post, the end of our distributions deals has given a huge blow to the Unity Project. We had to refocus our workforce around what we had here and now to stay alive: The Windows/Mac version.
I'll make it clear in one sentence : We have no release date, no detail on which version will come first and it is true that development of this version is slowed down right now. We are looking for solutions, but have nothing to announce today.
Now let's get to the cool part.
A little history
Our lead developer for the Unity version, Mathieu Leblanc, did an awesome job in 2015. Porting a Silverlight Game to Unity is one of the least common things you will see in game development (Pretty sure we are almost the only commercial Silverlight game ever). Silverlight offer all the goodies of a full MS environment with MVVM, data binding, XAML UI system, Entity Framework database models, etc. Porting those features to Unity is not automatic, but at least it uses a common C# programming language (but not the same .NET version). So, anyway, he created a very cool environment where all game data is taken from the old version and is optimized for Unity. The Unity Version rely less on the server because all static data is now client-sided, allowing lot of optimization and lots more players per server than our current version.
In 2015, lot of work has been done to rethink the game so it can be playable on tablets or phones. Our current UI is designed for personal computers, lots of modification is needed to have it playable on a phone. We ended up with a very cool concept, but it took lots of work to get there. (Could talk about this in another blog)
It's interesting that we started the project almost the same month that Unity 5 was released. It was cool, but new version of the engine also meant that we had to work with bugs and hot-fixes. But the Unity team is great, so things went very smoothly. I would say that WebGL did not fulfill all the promises we hoped for, even if some commercial products were released with it, there are some turn down to this system.
An What About now
So what do we have now? I know it’s the question you are asking the most.
Our effort is now on creating the personal computer version (called "standalone"), so a game looking like the old one compatible with PC, MAC and Linux, this version would be used for Beta. Other platform (Android, iOS, WebGL) and the "mobile" layout for phone would follow when the "standalone" version would be gold (released).
We have a game that is unpolished but where all basics (task, combat, dungeons, companions, inventory, etc.) are playable. We are to the point on where one part of the team should be on polishing and the other on adding game features using the current framework of the new version. The server side also need changes to handle web socket communication.
Some screens!
I will add screenshot but take in consideration that no polishing have been done on the UI, it is works in progress.
One of the tests we did is having the menu vertical to allow the game to work better on some tablet or PC with a 4:3 screen ratio.
- TherianSagaUnity_BasicUI.jpg (474.78 KiB) Viewed 29038 times
One of the cool things about Unity is how you create UI, there is no building process when designing, so you create a fake level and use your "prefab" to create the UI element, hit Play and see how it looks. I was in charge of some of the UI and I must say that for an old-schooler developer, that was very odd at first.
- TherianSagaUnity_BuldingUI.jpg (459.52 KiB) Viewed 29038 times
One other thing that we played a with is floating UI, allowing you to configure your own UI. OK, yes, all programmers on the team played a lot of Ultima Online, so it kind of impact on how we see life.
- TherianSagaUnity_FloatingUI.jpg (454.92 KiB) Viewed 29038 times
Maybe not revolutionizing the game but this is something we wanted to do for a long time, we changed the dungeon layout to use a miniature of your hero instead of a portrait. I look very nice, we even have coloring feature to apply light on the hero depending on the dungeon room.
- TherianSagaUnity_DungeonFigurine.jpg (411.76 KiB) Viewed 29038 times
Stay tune for other blogs on Unity (or other Therian's Things).
Falk
(Cloudigger est en congé, je me risquerai pas à vous faire une version française sans lui
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