4.2 is LIVE!

Will the Express version of the Visual Studio 2012 be enough for Windows Phone 8 deployment?

 

Of course! Haha! But here the announcement of the 4.2 release was faster than my unity software to see that the update was actually there. Had to download the 4.2 manually.
I think the source was pretty confident in what he was talking about about ( schedule of the next releases : 4.2 / 4.3 and 4.4 ) though of course it becomes truly true when there is an official announcement. 4.2 was already in some developers hands for a little while. Anyways thanks for always keeping this software as top notch as possible.

 

Seems to be working. Thanks much!

 

At least in 4.2 audio doesn't get interrupted every time anything more than a trivial GC takes place. In 4.1, music, sound effects, etc would get small interruptions any time there was a GC (of any significance). 4.2 audio is as smooth as silk so far... and that's awesome.

 

Wonder if this is gonna fix all my animations now... that would be nice

 

A small one, but I appreciate it - the console icons now grey out again when there are no errors or warnings. It's so nice to not see a bright red or yellow alert icon displayed when nothing is wrong

 

Nope, that was RC4

 

4.2.0f4 is the version i downloaded as the release here, is there a newer version?

 

Fair enough, so let me ask:

My saved layout refused to load, and I received editor errors pertaining to this. The top toolbar didn't have Playmaker, Playmaker Add ons, or NGUI as options.

Is there a process in which to go through to ensure my project loads as it was saved from 4.1.xf?

 

Well, then RC4 is the release version. As I still have RC4 installed and it has the same version number.

 

Fine. I'm publicly demonstrating a deficiency here...

...I installed to a fresh directory, avoiding installing over the old install I did initially, and now everything is fine and everything I had said earlier in this thread is a falsehood.

Is the fool a liar or merely immune to common sense because he knows he's always right?

 

Wonderful update! Thanks!

 

As a current Unity Free user I was quite happy to hear about "...is 2013 so we're adding real time shadows from directional lights..." at the Unite 2013...

but what is this?
one real time shadow from just one directional light, and only a hard shadow?

and when I've tried to mix this one directional hard shadow with my baked environment... wow... it looked ugly...and I mean really really ugly and bugged.

I do not know if this is intended... but is far from the promise "real time shadow"s" from directional light"s" "....
I know that Unity is pushing hard to help indie devs, and I was so excited about this new feature available to the ... "1.8 milion free users"... like me

Real time shadows sounds great...
Real time directional light shadows sounds nice...
Real time directional light hard shadows only sounds ....ok...

but Real time ONLY ONE directional light HARD shadow .... sounds a little bit like a joke... especially after you start to see the quality of that shadow...relative to the baked ones.... and the problems with blending them together....

sorry that I cannot be more excited about this release...
maybe next time

 

Just cant please some people.

Maybe you should buy the software.

 

Is this really a surprise, though? Unity download sizes have been rising steadily with each release.

And, sorry, because I haven't been following developments - is Win8 app deployment free? And don't really care about Blackberry - the market for that died ages ago, thanks to RIM not being able to compete with Apple and Google.

 

I really cannot afford it.
I wish I can, but it will not gonna happen any time soon....

Also, there is not about "pleasing", I am quite pleased with Unity Free... is about this release... and the "free direct light shadows" that we found about at Unite...
2 months ago...
somehow, some of us believed that "real time direct light shadows" really means "real time direct light shadows"....not "real time only one direct light hard shadow"

that is all.

 

But not by 33% each time. Does it still include the demo project? (Haven't gotten around to installing it yet).

 

I see your point, but this is a software product. It's always safe to assume that they'll be some caveats.

 

Yes it does. They should also remove MonoDevelop.
Both of these should be put in the Asset store. I think they are working on it though.

 

Probably because they keep including the Angry Bots demo project (even though it's on the asset store) which adds a full 300 megs to the download size and because they still haven't added a patching system.

 

Unity 4.2.0f4 is the officially released version. It's always been this way, where the final RC is the released version.

That's what they said, real-time hard shadows from one directional light. Under what circumstances would you use more than one directional light at once with shadows anyway? I can't think of any games that do; as far as limitations go, that's pretty much a non-issue. Multiple shadow-casting light sources are always point lights or spot lights. I can see wanting soft shadows, but really, they didn't have to make any realtime shadows functional with the free license at all. Hard shadows can look pretty decent, though—you just need to get the settings right for your particular scene; they're never anything where you can just click a button and instantly get optimal shadows. Different games require different settings to look right so you need to spend some time tweaking them.

--Eric

 

Congrats on the release UT it looks really nice and seems to have addressed some previous issues I had. Nice work!

 

Has some weird issues when installing 4.2 over the 4.1 location ... icons of games objects not showing etc ... weird. Fixed that installing freshly the 4.2 release in a new location. Still have a weird issue with the water pro feature ... killing the frame rate in play mode when it was running super smoothly on 4.1. An error is showing mentioning to check out the profiler window in play mode. really weird can't figure out what 's wrong exactly.

 

They said it was going to be that at the Unite conference and there was a big blog post about it too. Also, you'll need to use a custom shader if you want lightmaps to play nice with shadows, hard or soft.

 

Rolling back, lots of problems...

Some scenes no longer work, auto crash unity. Some were very basic(several cubes) but had a special shader(which worked fine back to ipad1). Didn't even bother checking stuff relying on augmented reality plugins. (I'll check in a couple hours when Unity 4.1.5 finishes importing my backup. metaio and vuforia)

Camera clipping issues, actually got better the closer I moved the camera to the character, at a distance you could see halfway through the character's body and see body parts through the clothing/cape/other meshes(mobile unlit basic shader).

I look forward to 4.2.5+ :grin:

 

You are always going to have problems with plugins like Vuforia until they update their project to account for any changes made in the new version of Unity. I believe in this case there are some changes to iOS code in Unity that means they will have to update, but that there are also some other updates in providing better access to texture creation on the idevice that may be beneficial for them to make use of.

As for your custom shader and clipping issues I doubt these will magically improve in later versions of Unity, but that you'll simply have to update and determine why they no longer work. Odd that it introduced clipping problems though, can't think of a good reason for that to have happened.

 

Surprised no-one has mentioned one of the more exciting new features, the inclusion of access to the stencil buffer, though sadly its a Pro only feature. It has a wide variety of uses and enables a few interesting effects to be achieved, such as real-time stencil shadows, portals, masking etc. Unfortunately it can only really be used in forward rendering, as deferred makes use of most of the stencil buffer itself.

I posted up a little demo showing off one method of doing portals using stencils in the Unity Showcase sub-forum here. It just has a video currently, but i'll be posting full source of the project and some documentation soon.



There are quite a few nice little improvements to Unity 4.2, such as the ability to add custom window dimensions or ratios directly to the game view, instead of being limited/tied to the player settings. One of my favourite improvements is the inclusion of the iOS platform in the player settings whilst on Windows. Personally I still prefer to develop on Windows, so this will be really useful.

 

Understandable. However, I also heard the same thing about BB OS 10 for Playbook (which is never coming to PB now). I work for a publicly traded non-gaming software company, and the longer I'm in software, the better appreciation I have for a product like Unity3D. My employer just switched to FogBugz (which Unity uses) which does help manage releases dates/milestones pretty decently compared to other systems. Generally only glaring showstoppers should cause a release to slip, even if a milestone is reached.

Smart. Especially if you have alpha/beta clients still sending in bugs. My employer does something similar but when you're publicly traded it makes slipping a release date a much bigger issue.

As was already said, they were very explicit about what we were getting, and I'm glad it's here!

 

i still don't see anything about dynamic navmesh obstacles , that would allow us to have dynamic environments, currently everything has to be pre-baked (the navmesh).
To make an RTS where we could not build buildings, it's kind of weird.
Any news on when this will be in unity ?

 

the new version of 4.2 may be available now .But I don't try it now.

 

Depends, as most RTS have the turrents on a high places where the enemies can't touch them in the first place.

 

Might you be confusing RTS with Tower Defense? As the majority of RTS games that I have played allows of dynamic placing of buildings.

 

Are there even third party possibilities for this? Can you rebake a navmesh in game? depending on the speed it might not be to bad needing to rebake when a building is placed.

 

I'm having really good results rolling my own custom RTS-style collision/navigation system that would have no trouble dealing with that kind of thing. The navigation part is currently quite trivial but there's no reason that it couldn't be expanded upon later.

To be honest, depending on the number of units I'm not sure I'd want to use the built in system anyway, because with the number of agents I'd probably want a system optimised for how my game worked rather than a general purpose one.

 

Any update in shader editor?
http://chadchatterton.com/post/39384121557

 

It would be great if Unity could share some info on whats happening with the new GUI

 

I'm having trouble locating the new demo, anyone know where its hiding on Mac?

Cheers!

 

Yup, there are no different requirements for deploying Unity to WP8 than any other app so Express will work just fine

 

Has anyone noticed any difference with the shadow batching? I opened my project yesterday expecting a nice performance boost due to that but noticed if anything, maybe a performance drop?

Does this apply in-editor or only in standalone? Anyone have any insights as to how it works, is it automatic or does it require some setup? I already set the static flags for the static and their drawcalls are getting batched just didn't notice any performance difference with the shadows (which I was really looking forward to as far as features in this release)

 

ps. 4.2 builtin shaders link is broken,
http://unity3d.com/unity/download/archive

working link,
http://download.unity3d.com/download_unity/builtin_shaders-4.2.0.zip

 

Actually the performance with multiple agents at least in my game is quite good, but I'm not using 200 units in the game or anything similar to that.
But besides RTS's, any kind of game that needs dynamic environments which this days, it's pretty much all games, the Unity system it's useless.
I know they are working on it, I saw it already in the blog, that's why I was asking if it was out in this version, but I already seen that it's not.
At this pace my game will be done before Unity adds this

 

Is anyone else getting errors when trying to sync project in Visual Studio Express 2012? I can't fully open any of my projects; VS doesn't like the: "~snip~/Assembly-UnityScript-firstpass.unityproj" file.

 

This. Would make my level editor 100x better.

 

You'd need a Remesh system, i.e. http://arongranberg.com/astar/

 

hi,

Thanks for your reply,we waiting for Strumpy Shader Editor work with dx11.

Dev

 

Woah. Free shadows, huh? That's really unexpected, considering dynamic shadows were one of the biggest pulls going for the PRO version, That being said, I guess it balances out because of all the cool new stuff that PRO is getting, and because the free shadows are pretty limited. I'm excited to download this and try it out!

 

What
This is the second time I downloaded it