A few years back I did some modding on Sid Meier’s railroads, which used Emergent’s Gamebyro engine {licence $180,000USD}. RT4 had a lot of potential but so broken. My thoughts back then were that Unity3 could be the perfect platform to do a RT style game without the hefty licence fee. But life got in the way, and the project found itself on my ever increasing to do list, which now resembles a roll of toilet paper.
Having just recently rediscovered OTTD {great job all}, and this post has re-sparked the interest. So I downloaded the latest version of Unity4, you can grab a free version here:
http://unity3d.com/unity/download/ and thought I’d take it for a quick test drive.
Created a single Unity terrain tile {you can have as many as you want, you just stich them together}, jumped into Photoshop and made a 64x64 pixel grid, and applied it as the terrain base texture. Using Unity’s terrain editor I painted in the hills, lake, added water and plonked down some trees.
Next a couple of real scale models {untextured}
A quick stress test {loco is just on a half a million polys}
Overview {slab that covers the 64 px grid is 15sqm} Build time <20min.
Unity is just so easy to work with, have dropped in a FP camera which allows me to run around the scene using wsad/space and see it all from a FP perspective. Unity also has orthographic cameras so you could switch between them on the fly.
Now that I have a scene, I can hit the build button and make a version for distribution. This can be made for any format i.e. PC, Mac, Linux, Web Player, Flash, IoS, Android, Xbox, PSP, WiiU etc.
This is one cool app guys, and did I mention it’s free
![Wink ;)](./images/smilies/icon_wink.gif)
Their also releasing a 64 bit version {3rd quarter this year}, it supports C#, javascript, boo etc
Cheers all