Simple Dice: Unity or OpenGL

[zaca]

I want to create something simple, where a button is pushed, and dice are rolled realistically in 3D, with interactions between the dice, table and walls of the iPhone.

I am completely new to 3D gaming, so my question is, should I try doing this in OpenGL in Xcode, or use Unity3D?

And if you could point me to any good tutorials, that would be helpful too

[Tambourin]

afaik a Unity licence costs $500.
do you think your dice app will generate that much money?

[HemiMG]

Originally Posted by Tambourin

afaik a Unity licence costs $500.
do you think your dice app will generate that much money?

If I'm not mistaken, the $500 for the iPhone license is on top of the $250 or so for the base Unity license. There's the little known Shiva3D which has iPhone and Android support built in for, IIRC, $250 or so, and has impressive capabilities to boot. But you'll need a Windows machines or Parallels to use the editor.

There's also the completely free SI02 Interactive, which works in conjunction with Blender, and I believe will do simple physics. That may be your best bet.

Dice in OpenGL won't be that hard, there are plenty of tutorials on how to load in an OBJ file and render it using OpenGL, or you could just texture a cube, depending on the quality you are going for. Physics interactions are a different story though. There are various free physics simulation toolkits out there, I haven't used any so I can't comment on which ones would work best for your goals.

[Eskema]

Originally Posted by HemiMG

There's also the completely free SI02 Interactive, which works in conjunction with Blender, and I believe will do simple physics. That may be your best bet.

SIO2 works with Bullet engine for physics, so it's capable to do more than simply physics, maybe the problem is the iphone wich is powerless to handle realistic physics :P

[nickdunhill]

Try Airplay SDK:
Home | Airplay SDK

It's only $99 for Indies, or free if you're only targeting iPhone.

Because it supports standard C/C++, most off-the-shelf C-based codebases can just be used out of the box. For example Open Dynamics Engine already works, and I saw on the forums that someone had easily made Box2D work also. I assume Bullet is also a trivial port.