Hi all,
So there has been a lot happening on UNION these past few weeks!
I have primarily been working on the modding system, which really impacts on all areas of the game. That work is mostly done, but at the end of it I came to a realisation, that Unity is not the right engine for UNION. I'll explain why a little further down!
The other piece of news is that over the past few weeks we've been working with
Isaac Hannaford on the spaceship designs for UNION. Isaac is a brilliant concept artist and art director, whose body of work includes Halo 3, Halo ODST, Reach, Destiny.
Here is an illustration by Isaac containing his first two ships for UNION, the UNION Kite class frigate in combat against two Centauri Alliance Takuba class frigates:
We're keeping these ships low-key at the moment as we'll be putting out a press release with them over the next week or two.
Back to the engine issue. Unity has many positive attributes, but when you start pushing it in directions it wasn't designed for, you run into a lot of issues. The latest of these has been random crashes caused by dynamically loading textures while the game is running. This is an important part of modding, allowing people to reskin ships or add completely new ones. The crashes occur randomly and are caused by something inside of Unity's code (which I have no access to), so I have no simple solution to them, There have been many other issues, but I have overcome (worked around) them. This latest problem is the final nail in the coffin though, I can't risk getting to release only to find we have random crashes.
For that reason I have decided to move UNION to a new engine, called Xenko. The primary reasons are that Xenko is entirely written in C# (which is my preferred language), it is code-first rather than editor-first, and I have access to the full source code for the engine. The full source means that if there are issues I can identify and fix them myself, rather than hoping Unity will find and fix them for me.
The main downside is that Xenko doesn't have the ease of use that Unity offers, with it's mountain of community content (like tutorials, libraries, plugins, forums with info). That is not a major issue though, and I do enjoy a challenge.
This does mean further delays before we can show more in-game footage, but it is a positive development for the game.
Thanks for reading!
Mark
