So about Unity and why we're choosing it over T3D.
Legions, as it is, is a heavily modified TGEA engine. Many engine patches have accumulated over the years targeting additional features and bug fixes. The base code for the current incarnation of Torque, T3D 1.2, has changed enough from Legions' diverging branch of TGEA such that the task of merging the Legions patches into T3D 1.2 is somewhere between quite problematic and impossible. Especially for a small team like us. This means we'd have to basically start over anyway, porting over scripts one-by-one, and modding the engine as necessary.
Now the workflow for Torque involves writing a good deal of C++, which is quite possibly one of the most powerful and unproductive languages in existence. Its powerful because it can be optimized at a very low-level. Its unproductive because it takes a long time to write, compile, and even longer to debug. Again, since we're such small coding team, that's not really a hit we can afford to take.
Unity is our time saving secret weapon. They've taken a different approach to engine interaction which involves exposing many interfaces at a low-level to Mono, an open-source port of the .NET CLR. This alone buys us a whole lot of things, (including programming in any .NET implemented language, C#, etc.) and drastically increases our productivity. The release of Unity4 is right around the corner (its in closed beta now) which looks even better than Unity 3.5
Here's a few big advantages:
- Modify low-level code, create animations, and import assets directly into a running game instance in a tightly integrated development environment.
- Huge community constantly releasing Unity resources for sharing and purchase (trees, cameras, etc).
- Reference and leverage any Mono libraries, e.g. http://www.communityexpresssdk.com/sdk/ for Steam Integration.
- Great looking rendering, lighting and animations.
The bottom line is this: Since we're not facing a short development time anyway,
even if we use T3D, why not choose something more modern. We can bootstrap our project with tons of available resources, and make the most efficient use of development time we possibly can. And make the world weep with joy at the beauty we have created, while our enemies flee in terror. Or something.