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by bob1029 108 days ago
The primary thing I'm going for in a commercial engine is platform targeting and stability. Some of the defaults are certainly "bland", but that ensures I can actually ship this thing to a meaningful % of the available market. Unity's coverage is so consistent that I've been debating using it for non gaming applications. There aren't many cross platform ecosystems that work this well.
2 comments
Zarathruster 107 days ago
Just a polite heads-up in case you weren't aware: for non-game usage of Unity, the licensing situation is... a little complicated. That goes for the engine as well as a lot of the stuff I've seen in the Asset Store. Just a thing to bear in mind, and potentially a reason to use a different engine.
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bob1029 107 days ago
It's not that complicated.

The pro license at ~$2k/year per seat is all you need unless you are making a shitload of money. In which case, you are going to pay ~5k/year per seat.

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Zarathruster 107 days ago
Unless you intend to build "industrial real-time 3D applications like employee training, product configurators and embedded systems." In which case you must use the Industry License, for which you must pay "Custom pricing."

I last looked into the matter when considering RFP's for government contracts for VR software. Didn't feel like haggling with Unity's sales reps, especially since the government hasn't been the greatest client of late.

All of this is before you get to the Asset Store, which largely seems to assume that gamedevs are the customers. I'd rather not re-read the license agreement for every asset I've bought, but I know for certain that a number of them are explicitly games-only.

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bizzletk 107 days ago
What are some things that you'd build with Unity that aren't games?
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voidUpdate 107 days ago
Not OP, but at £JOB, I use Unity most of the time making demo and sales apps for clients to use at shows. The fact that it can build for basically every common platform and (most of the time) not need any special considerations for that makes it ideal for us. Sure, we could write web apps or something, but that's a different department.

I'm also not sure if it's still in the installer, but it used to ask you what you would be using unity for, and I don't remember most of the options, but one of them was "military simulations" or something like that, so they are aware of the possibility

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bob1029 107 days ago
User interfaces for complex physical plants.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_twin

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dwattttt 107 days ago
A storied history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimRefinery
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