There is more than 1 way to skin a cat after all, and you seem to be saying that if it cannot be done your way then it must be worthless. And given your attitude I wouldn’t want to work for you because I know that if I wrote something you would eventually be in there mucking with my code. All because it doesn’t suit you.

As a CTO of a decade old game company, I don’t even understand why you’re here berating on the unity staff in the first place. If you NEED the source code, then you can GET the source code. But it is not available by default so they can bring the price down to a more manageable level. They even said as much in reply. As for sealing the API, I’m sure that is to protect their source. They have to be just as mindful about keeping hackers out of their code as you do.

In short, go troll someplace else, your concerns have been answered multiple times.

Shipping source code doesn’t mean you don’t support your product. Plenty of development libraries have shipped in this industry with source code AND full support.

But, as I mentioned, this would be less of an issue if you hadn’t gratuitously sealed so many of your API classes. If I could inherit and modify I wouldn’t need to change source. As is my first experimental Unity project hit a solid dead end and had to be abandoned because I need API behavior your engineers hadn’t thought of and I cannot add.

JK

That said, “no source code by default” has it’s upsides as well. I heard from a lot of folks that this way they feel that we focus more on fixing things (instead of “fix it yourself, you have the source code”) attitude. Also, without the source code they can focus more on their games instead of trying to resist the temptation of “I’ll just go into the engine and tweak something, how hard could that be?”.

But yeah, no source code definitely has it’s disadvantages. That’s why we do provide the option to get the source code, but frankly a lot of people manage to do without the source just fine. From all the source code licensees, most of them don’t do any modifications either; they just get it as a security measure and a way to investigate issues themselves.

You actually make things *worse* in Unity 3 by needlessly sealing API classes thus preventing modification through inheritance.

As the CTO and chief technical decision maker of a more then decade old game company, I won’t consider your tool as an option without source. In my opinion, without that, its not a professional tool– just a neat toy.

Jeff Kesselman
CTO Blue Fang Games

A debugger for Unity is already on our road-map:
http://blogs.unity3d.com/2009/04/10/unity-roadmap/

It’s probably because they are Unity users already. They know the limitations and Unity meets their project requirement. I know many professional developers who are unwilling to work with an engine that doesn’t have source code. (I’m aware that Unity has source code license but this topic not about the availability of source code license) And I also know many engines that didn’t have source code license initially but later changed it to include. Why do you think that is?
Rune, it’s that you are not attracting many potential users if you have closed policy, meaning, source code license is optional and information not publically available. I say this because from your post, I feel registance or warning about giving the source code license. Even if they do, it might be too expensive for most of users

In my case, I’m giving a try for a simple project that doesn’t require high-end features. But right now the biggest road-block I have is getting UnityWebPlayer to work as ActiveX (http://forum.unity3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=21715). Without the source code, I’ll have to rely on Unity dev to patch it. But so far I haven’t heard anything back from the dev. If Unity dev can be more responsive to user’s request, yes, I can see your point, however, looking at the past release schedules, I’m not totally convinced.
Although Unity is more like an authoring tool, it’s very flexible and powerful but I’m sorry I cannot agree with you on this topic.

BTW, where is the debugger? At Unity, I’m sure you guys use debugger with the complete source code but do you seriously think that “print log” is sufficient to develop a large-size game? Sure you can but at the sacrifice productivity.. Debugger is also essential when you are first learning the tool by stepping though the code…. You can’t even step though your own code but with the source code license, I suppose you can.

Well, that doesn’t seem to be true with all the serious game developers that are using Unity.

> There is no perfect engine that can embrace all types of users. Period. I wish there is a such a thing.

That’s technically true, but that goes for any game engine, no matter if source is provided or not. Having the source doesn’t make an engine magically suited for all needs; it still may take longer to modify any given engine to your needs than to just start from scratch or use a competing engine.

> Debugging is impossible with the blackbox. It’s hard to tell if you err on your side or else.

In reality it’s not a big problem. In the few cases where people have been in doubt, it has typically been sorted out quickly by the community or our support.

> Adding custom features that requires core modification. I already have few list I would like Unity to have. It’s not that you need to modify massively, but simple task may require accessing source code.

“Simple tasks” rarely require accessing the source code. Of course there may be some things you can’t do (ask us before just assuming it, though!) but you have to weight it in against all the advantages that Unity provides.

> If you are targetting casual game developers, it’s probably good enough but if you advocating to professional game developers, you will face the resistences over and over.

I’m happy to report that this does in fact not seem to be the case considering all the high profile clients we are getting!

If you are targetting casual game developers, it’s probably good enough but if you advocating to professional game developers, you will face the resistences over and over.
I heard that Unity is not a middleware from Unity, doesn’t it mean something?

It also didn’t hurt that integrating our conversational AI system with Unity was mostly just dragging and dropping our .NET version into a Unity project’s assets folder.

I also have to say that this comment:

“Users of Photoshop don’t complain that they are limited in what images they can create because they don’t have the Photoshop source code, and the same goes for users of 3ds Max or Maya, or most other creative tools.”

probably hurts the statements you are tying to make as it makes no sense. 2D/3D artists never work with low level source code (they do however sometimes deal with scripting) but programmers do.

Other than that, good article.

i am agree with James and others about comparing artists and programmers and generally it’s not a good idea to compare crazy programmers with any other community.

Also the comment you made about how 3D artists don’t complain because they don’t have the source code for Photo shop or something is just ridiculous… Programmers and Artists are completely different people. Even if the artists had the source code, they wouldn’t even know what to do with it! Not trying to be jerk or something it’s just you should probably look a bit more into researching the needs of game developers before making posts like this. Trust me if you where to express right out in the open saying “by the indie license with source code” You will defiantly peak the interest of a LOT of developers, they love to tinker and see how things work. Either way Unity is great though, does a lot of good stuff right out of the box! Keep up the great work.

That at least, should give you a little warm glow inside!

Please understand that I’m not trying to knock what you guys do, or how you go about it. I just find it a bit misleading for somebody to try and say that a 3D artist doesn’t get the source code to his or her preferred modeling package but they do just fine, when comparing it to games development.

I’m not saying that this is a bad thing, because it’s not. The vast majority of your targeted customers are not video game professionals, but rather, people who more than likely only want to make games in their spare time. Why add an extra obstacle in the way of those who want to adopt to the engine, by increasing the required knowledge level that allows them to get started?

But you’re giving very misleading arguments in using Photoshop, Maya and 3DS Max as comparisons to Unity. Unity is more than just an editing suite, like the fore mentioned packages and making games is not like editing image files.

I’m currently toiling with the decision if I should go back to Torque, roll my own Ogre based engine, roll my own complete engine or give Unity a go. So with that in mind, I’m going to download the 30 day trial of Unity and see what it’s like and what I’m capable of doing with it.

Another issue with working with an engine’s source-code: If the engine is enhanced as quickly and significantly as Unity, having your “own branch” is very likely to give you trouble when a new version of Unity is out. Just compare Unity 1.6, 2.0, 2.1 and 2.5. I wouldn’t want to miss an update; and I also wouldn’t want to merge my changes with an updated version of Unity, either.

In the end, what you do as a programmer with Unity also is not really “scripting”. You could do that – but the way I see it, what you are really doing is extending Unity with your game specific functionalities, using the existing APIs (basically, you are developing / software-engineering, using powerful game-related APIs and an extremely powerful game-related authoring tool).

My $0.02