Meh.
Tough couple of days... obviously i have known this was coming a bit in advance, and it's made it all the more difficult being around of late hearing so many comments about how people were looking forward to Unity and knowing myself that it was approaching a stage of, er, Game Over...
We tried, we tried our level best, but in the end it just took too long to be viable on this iteration. Unity needs to be a fusion of many things - light, gameplay, audio - and in the end although it *was* working, it *was* coming together in ways that were pretty much how I hoped they would be, there wasn't *enough* of all those things for it actually to fly, and we ran out of runway... and in the end, better to abort the takeoff rather than go too early and end up crashing and burning.
You can walk away from an abort in one piece and have another try...
It's a really complex process trying to do something like Unity. *Much* of the job is research, but it's research done against the clock... you're not just plugging things in to a formula iterated one more time with better graphics, you're trying out genuinely new stuff. Sometimes you work for a month and you produce something extraordinary. Sometimes you work for a month and then throw it all away because it wasn't leading in the direction you'd hoped. It's hard to do that, and come in on schedule with something that you're happy with inside a commercially viable timeframe.
And in the end if a job's worth doing, it's worth doing well; and in the timescale we had I alone couldn't deliver. I'm truly sorry about that and I owe my apologies to everyone who waited for this with such enthusiasm. I'm gutted too, I really *wanted* to make Unity so that I could play the damn thing. I'll still not be satisfied until one day I do.
But it's not been a bad thing. Research is research; I've done a lot in the last couple of years, and I've learned from it; I'm quite happy on whatever graphics hardware falls to hand, after having had time to find out for myself how it all works. I'm comfortable in 3D
. If and when there is another attempt, I'll be much better prepared than I was before.
And I'm not the only coder at the barn now. Goat knows I never thought I would ever find anyone I could share the Llamasoft vision with, but hey, it happened. And Giles is way better than maths than me as well as being an all-round ninja coder. And with two beasts to share the load instead of just one, I think things will work out much better in the future. We work pretty well in parallel
.
And to be completely honest, I still believe that the best thing to come out of Llamasoft in all the years of its existence isn't Unity or any game at all or even a lightsynth: it's what we have right here, this community that just aggregated around some old coder's site and became something excellent and unexpected, a place that we all somehow call home, something that doesn't "belong" to me or to Llamasoft but something that is shared equally by all of us. This place, and you guys, helped to change my life in enormously positive ways. There is great goodness here, and I am happy and proud to be a part of it.
Many thanks to all of you who have said such kind things despite the disappointment of what happened, and don't worry, I'm not going to give up, and the day I retire is the day they pry the compiler from my cold dead hooves
. There's lots more good stuff to come, that I promise you
.
Thanks, all, iz all.
\
(:-) - Yak
/
Justified and Ancient.
Hear hear!
