2017.3 Editor Bug : Unable to reach transforms past 15,000 from origin

Hello,

I am hoping that someone from unity will read this. I recently upgraded to unity 2017.3 from 5.6.

I am building a space sim and I have gameobjects at 300K+ up to 5 million meters from center.

Floating point accuracy is not an issue for me. I am using floating origin and objects in the distance are massive so the decimal point accuracy does not effect what I am doing.

The 2017 Editor will not goto/view an object at 300K when you make it a child of another gameobject.

Thus I am not able to click my gameobjects in hierarchy to view them because nothing happens.

You can easily duplicate this bug, create a new scene. Create a Gameobject, create another gameobject and parent it to the first.

Move the child to 300,000 on x and try to double click it in hierarchy to view it in editor... presto.. absolutely nothing happens.

You are unable to reach the objects to view and edit them.

I just spent alot of time porting it over so... im just frustrated that now that i have everything working.. the simplest of thing is preventing me from using 2017.

 

Actually, the cut-off happens precisely at 100,000 units (inclusive, so 100,000 is OK, 100,001 isn't).
Well, I wouldn't use this big numbers even if it were working, the best solution is if you convert everything down one step. (Or continue with 5.6 if it works for you)

reasons: http://davenewson.com/posts/2013/unity-coordinates-and-scales.html (it's not written yesterday, but still relevant)

 

This is stupid for them to limit it in editor. There is no reason to limit it in editor. They are making a restriction that it is un necessary and will prevent me from upgrading to 2017. And not only that it will prevent any kind of space Sim game from being built with unity.

There are ways around floating point accuracy.. namley floating origin. My PlayerController/Ship never leaves 0,0,0. It is forces to vector3.zero each frame allowing me to travel indefinitely in any direction.

Space is in fact infinite with the proper setup so they are absolutely WRONG in that article.

The only limitation being Clipping on the camera. When you render something large at 5 million meters you have to extend clipping on your far camera relative to the distance you are from it. I use multiple camera setup with a near and far camera in order to render objects in the distance (anything outside of the ships interior).

I can also fly to these objects seamlesly at velocities over 50,000 meters per second without any issues.

I can upload a new video if you like, i have put over 500 hours in since my last video of the extremly early prototype which you can view here:

I have already demonstrated the systems in this video.

I can fly indefinitely in any direction and.. infact space is actually infinite with my setup only limited by the "editor". Which was not a limitation in 5.6. I have no issues going to objects at 5 Million+ meters and editing them, sure the accuracy is off on them but it didn't stop me from doing the editing I needed to do to make everything work.


The only work around for this is to move objects to 0,0,0 to edit them but that is a pain in the ass for sure. I suppose i could write an editor extension to save it's state and move it to zero and back without any manual work for editing. Thats the only work around i can think of unless they fix it.

 

Well, maybe, maybe not, I understand both point of view. The decision is yours. I'm not arguing with you, just showing alternatives and telling you that I wouldn't go there because it's fairly easy to scale down appropriately. Maybe submit a bug report regarding this, I can imagine it's not intentional (the focus stuff, the warning is intentional, I'm sure).

 

Im going to go ahead and reupdate my model .When I upgraded to 2017 it lost all of my material settings on my models.

Going to make a new vid with the past 500 hours of work ive put in!

Lets say I scaled down the world, what effect would that have on RB's?

Can cameras actually be scaled down to something tiny? Because the ship would literally be a spec... if I had to scale it down to fit within 100K

it would be nearly impossible to edit in the editor ... lol

 

now im getting
"
Screen position out of view frustum (screen pos 0.000000, 0.000000, 1.#QNAN0) (Camera rect 0 0 1244 616)
UnityEngine.GUIUtilityrocessEvent(Int32, IntPtr)
"
on new scene..... no matter what I do... the editor is completely screwed up.

 

That's what FoV for. But yeah, I see your point as well. Scaling down an existing system maybe too complex task. I would definitely submit a bug report.

 

Yeah, Unity hasn't been built for this scale you're doing.

 

Isn't that the point of unity. To be able to do things that it wasn't "designed" to do... with a little imagination..

It's a game engine for everyone. And I disagree. It was designed and is fully capable of doing what I am doing. I have been doing it and using floating origin since unity 4 without any problems.

So what if something is slightly off its float at 5 Million meters from center from origin in the editor.. It does not effect gameplay or my ability to edit it.

The only solution i can think of to get around this in 2017 is to move objects to 0,0,0 to edit them then move them back to where they were. That will become more time consuming as to actually "see" the objects i will literally have to play it and fly out to them in the ship lol.......

 

Went back to unity 5.6.5, everything is working fine without any problems. As you can see here I have the ship positioned at 520K and have no issues at all navigating to it in scene view.

I'm not really ready to make a video yet but im uploading one anyway to show you guys what im working on.

 

And/or submit a bug report... if you don't tell them that you need a functionality, they won't know if they don't know, they won't fix it.
Maybe they will tell you that they don't change anything because you're the only one who uses it and they have other reasons to do this, maybe not, but if you don't tell them that you have a problem, they won't have the chance to fix it.

 

Scale like you're creating at is very niche. It's considered a feature to support what you're trying to do. Virtually all space games made use the standard floating point tricks to deal with the large scale issues or other design tricks to make you think it's all part of the same game-space while its actually smaller zones and scenes. Games are all about smoke and mirrors.

You're going to need to make tools to get around this, like editor tools that shift the scene contents to the origin so you can work at massive scales with floats. There's actually information online and/or on the store that helps or solves some of these hurdles for you to some extent, but you'll probably need to extend them to support your specific case integration.

 

I'm just going back to 5.5 for now, if i must switch to 2017 later ill make the tools to move things to origin for editing.. would be a pain the ... you know what but it's still do-able.

 

I highly recommend compartmentalizing your world spaces into zones and editing those zones or going fully data-driven.

 

Check it out, sorry the first part of the vid got cut off.. for some reason lol

 

I'm going to go ahead and do the seamless transition system and fly out of the launch bay, land on a moving space station, walk around on it, then leave it and fly to a second ship with an interior.

After that I will look at doing that. I was already planning on doing that with a scene loading system. (but not for objects within a scene).

 

Does this look like smoke and mirrors ? ;P