Jeeper wrote:Unity pro costs $1,500 (or $75/month), that is not too much even if you are a hobbyist. You are right that them charging another $1500 for android pro and another $1500 for ios pro is quite greedy, but again, if you actually finish and publish games it should not take all that long to break even.
Only if you don't lose a hell of a lot of sales due to piracy. And $4,500 just to be able to put your games on the most popular mobile platforms is a pretty big amount if you're just a hobbyist. It's telling when you notice that the less popular mobile platforms, Windows Phone, Windows Store and BlackBerry, are free with Pro but iOS and Android cost out the wazoo.
Jeeper wrote:I don't have a lot of experience when it comes to 3d in Lua or Unity. That being said, are you really saying that one could make an actual 3d game in Löve that could stand up to a unity or unreal engine game (both when it comes to the final result and the time spent). I ask this because I am genuinely interested as I would prefer to use Lua if I would ever find myself wanting to make something 3d.
Of course not. Just don't expect to do the really cool stuff for free. At least the free Unity can do OS X and Windows, but there's still a lot of missing features. (All the really cool stuff requires the Pro version.) But if you want to prototype something and test the waters, then maybe later have a Kickstarter when people start showing interest just to pay for it.
That said, if you're serious about 3D then yes, Löve isn't the place to start. My experience with 3D is riddled with garbagecollection issues and unpredictable framerate. Plus you have to code it all yourself. It's really more of a hobby thing. An "I can do that because it's cool" thing. If you release a Löve game in 3D, good for you. Just don't expect anything amazingly groundbreaking without a bit of work.
That also said, this thread was about "fake" 3D. Not actual 3D. DOOM and Wolfenstein are not 3D. They're 2D projected upwards to give the impression of 3D and both are totally doable. Maps are either a simple grid of tiles and objects (Wolf) or a list of polygons with height data. (DOOM) Wolfenstein-style is easier to do, but I'm sure someone could make a DOOM-style engine with a bit of work and playing around with BSP trees and other stuff like that. The textured floors and ceilings would really be the harder part to pull off on both engines since the method the original DOOM and later Wolf clones, that had textured floors and ceilings, is way too slow for Lua. But with a few shaders it's totally possible. Since DOOM has varying height floors and ceilings you would have to draw each floor and ceiling segment separately whereas with Wolfenstein you draw one floor and one ceiling. Also Wolfensteins raycasting is much simpler since it's tile-based whereas DOOM's is based on line segments and an engine would need BSP trees to split maps into pieces that can be handled much faster to prevent iterating over the entire map all at once. (The reason you can make a huge DOOM map and still get a fast framerate because the map editor will take its time going through every sector in the map to create a tree full of lists of what other sectors can be seen from every other sector so when you enter a sector it simply refers to that sectors table to see what other sectors it should consider for rendering. Without this you'd be iterating over every single sector, including ones that are behind you or off in the distance behind solid walls or way out in the wilderness where you'd never even be able to see, which wastes a lot of CPU time and gets even worse when you have hundreds and thousands of sectors each with at least three linedefs to check every frame.) With work and some ingenuity you could pull it off fine.
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