They have cost $400 apiece up until this point, now they're free. A little more than a year ago they gave them away for free, I grabbed a pair and the experience of utilizing them led to me getting my dream job as a game programmer and it's fucking awesome.
The greatness of the Unity game engine is you write your code in a .NET based language and can simply port it to the platform of your choice. I use C# and Unity outputs a build I take into xcode and can publish as an objective C based app for iOS, and Unity natively outputs .apk format for android, all from the same code.
At work I'm making apps for national and global brands with it. For fun I've got an asus version of the kinect sensor working with Unity via OpenNI, so you can make .exe games that you dbl click to open and play on a computer. I found a browser plugin that lets you use the sensor for browser games which Unity also publishes to. Just tons of cool shit going on with it. Something I'm making:
[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQwiiNeV_cA]Not Public - YouTube[/ame]
Also useful for non game applications, it's a really intuitive SDK with easy to use API and a drag/drop editor. If coding isn't your thing you could try one of the node based "visual scripting" plugins bought on the asset store that have modules of code snippets you drag/drop as nodes to create gameplay.
It has a www method that lets you communicate to your server, dynamically pulling info/images/video or posting to a db. There's a ton of free resources for assets/scripts/shaders/etc, a good one on the wiki is called "Server side high scores" and gives you the php and c# to implement communication with mysql from your app.
Collision detection is super simple, you can add colliders (hitbox) to different objects and use them as triggers to trigger different functions in your code when they collide, or exit. Great for using monster spawns that spawn only when you get close enough. Or for a moongate to teleport you elsewhere, or to pop up a menu, etc.
The greatness of the Unity game engine is you write your code in a .NET based language and can simply port it to the platform of your choice. I use C# and Unity outputs a build I take into xcode and can publish as an objective C based app for iOS, and Unity natively outputs .apk format for android, all from the same code.
At work I'm making apps for national and global brands with it. For fun I've got an asus version of the kinect sensor working with Unity via OpenNI, so you can make .exe games that you dbl click to open and play on a computer. I found a browser plugin that lets you use the sensor for browser games which Unity also publishes to. Just tons of cool shit going on with it. Something I'm making:
[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQwiiNeV_cA]Not Public - YouTube[/ame]
Also useful for non game applications, it's a really intuitive SDK with easy to use API and a drag/drop editor. If coding isn't your thing you could try one of the node based "visual scripting" plugins bought on the asset store that have modules of code snippets you drag/drop as nodes to create gameplay.
It has a www method that lets you communicate to your server, dynamically pulling info/images/video or posting to a db. There's a ton of free resources for assets/scripts/shaders/etc, a good one on the wiki is called "Server side high scores" and gives you the php and c# to implement communication with mysql from your app.
Collision detection is super simple, you can add colliders (hitbox) to different objects and use them as triggers to trigger different functions in your code when they collide, or exit. Great for using monster spawns that spawn only when you get close enough. Or for a moongate to teleport you elsewhere, or to pop up a menu, etc.