Unity Game Engine now in version 2.5

I know, the thread title sounds like an ad, but I assure you, I'm just a psyched newbie. When I first got into this project, the Unity site mentioned that 2.5 would be coming, with features like standalone Windows binaries, etc. It looked great. I'm glad I've waited to download the trial, so I'll get to use the new version.

I may be remembering incorrectly, but it looks like the Indy version's price came down, too. it's now $199. Very doable. If I publish with it, my game will have a splash mentioning that it was made in Unity, and I won't have access to some of the lighting and other features. I'm also not allowed to make more than $100,000 dollars per year from games, but since this is a free game, it won't be a problem. Not a bad dilemma to have once the time comes, though.

I'm also starting to suspect that my "high poly" models aren't as unusable as I think. They may actually be usable as is or close. The game engine has some pretty impressive-looking methods of minimizing the computing costs of running the game- stuff like flattening objects that are far away into a 2d image (common in other engines), and organizing the tasks that need to be completed in ways that I don't fully understand.

I do know that I've played a very beautiful game made with their engine with the settings relatively high on my Pentium 4. It's definitely next gen level with no slowdowns on my pretty old machine.

I'm optimistic.