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A few more questions part II... :O)

Discussion in 'Editor & General Support' started by taumel, Jul 13, 2005.

  1. taumel

    taumel

    Joined:
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    Posts:
    5,292
    Hi,

    just a couple of questions:

    1) Are exports from max (6,7?) and xsi (4?) supported? I know you're supporting 3ds but what about bones done with character studio or animanium. If not supported yet do you plan to implement?

    2) As for shaders will you also support openGL2SL? Will it be possible to use shaders exported from third part tools like FXcomposer or Rendermonkey without customisations?

    3) As for a rough thump factor, how much would you say is novodex faster than ode?

    4) And how serious are you about XBOX-support?

    And a personal one:

    Meshes are editable in unity right? So that i can deform them let functions run over them and let them be updated...


    Greetings,

    taumel

    PS: It would be nice if you could give me an answer to these soon as i'll be at the presentation for gamedesign final year projects at university today. And maybe i will talk about unity a bit as an opportUNITY. ;O)
     
  2. Joachim_Ante

    Joachim_Ante

    Unity Technologies

    Joined:
    Mar 16, 2005
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    5,203
    Yes both are supported. We import fbx files. The fbx plugin is available for 3ds max and xsi 4.
    The fbx plugin can be downloaded here:
    http://www.alias.com/eng/products-services/fbx/download.shtml

    We will support GLSL in the future.
    Our shader language embeds other shader languages eg. CG, ARB fragment programs, ARB vertex programs, NV Register combiners and ATI Text shaders.
    So naturally we will do the same for GLSL.

    It really depends on what you want to do. Collision detection is a lot faster, the solver is a lot faster. Automatic sleeping is a lot better.
    I have scenes which ran around 10 times faster. This is an extreme case, but novodex really is a lot better than ode.

    We agree that it is something we want to do. I believe it is the right direction to go. We don't have a schedule for it. And no work is done towards it at this point.
    Right now we are focusing on deployment for windows and after that web player for windows.

    We dont support this at the moment. But we will do this during a 1.x release.
     
  3. taumel

    taumel

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    Thank you for your fast answer!

    Is GLSL a 1.x thing?


    Greetings,

    taumel
     
  4. NicholasFrancis

    NicholasFrancis

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    *edit: wrong info *

    I would like to know, though, which features from GLSL you need that Cg doesn't support (or supports in a bad way)...
     
  5. taumel

    taumel

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    Hi Nicholas,

    obviously as i can't run unity at the moment i just have looked up your information but i didn't write a single line of shadercode in unity...but beside of this i would say that:

    First what do we have? There is mainly HLSL, CG, openGLSL and pur assembly shader code.

    So you didn't use HLSL as you were developing it on Mac. But for XBOX-Support? By the way when talking with Joachim about XBOX-support where we talking about XBOX or XBOX 360? I hope the second.

    CG is a nVIDIA product. It's crossplattform for nVIDIA cards. But how well and optimized runs CG compiled shadercode on ATI and when ported to windows on Intel, Volari, Matrox, etc. hardware?

    openGLSL is up to the driver support or the manufacturer. a) The situation of the driver-support will become better - time is working for you. b) ATI will do it's best to get a decent driver out as well as nVIDIA will c) it's crossplattform d) students who come from university mainly learn dealing with open-standard technologies as profs, at least here in germany, dislike technologies which are not open, so when they have a knowledge about shader it will be openGL based.

    And when it's assembly-shader-code then obviously it would be great if it would run if exported from a tool like i've mentiond before.

    If there are no big drawbacks i would go for open widespread standards whereever it's possible.


    Greetings,

    taumel
     
  6. Jonathan Czeck

    Jonathan Czeck

    Joined:
    Mar 17, 2005
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    Taumel,

    I snooped and found your web site and look through some of your director3d stuff. You need to get a Mac Mini and Unity right now. You won't look back ;-)

    Cheers,
    -Jon
     
  7. taumel

    taumel

    Joined:
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    Hi aarku,

    i hope you where not too dissapointed as the website hasn't been updated since years except some hour works in freetime. There are much nicer things we did in the meantime...but due to lazyness and troubles with content which was stolen from our site...

    By the way i also watched yours and BUGTHUG looks nice and interesting.


    Greetings,

    taumel
     
  8. NicholasFrancis

    NicholasFrancis

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    @taumel

    I completely agree that open standards are great - here is my reasoning:

    * Cg is source-level compatible with HLSL - hence it gets us a lot closer to Xbox360(what happened to the 359 others?).

    * Playstation3 is Cg if one day we want to go down that road.

    Cg has one especially nice thing going for it: We can convert it offline to the assembler - that means one less source dependancy.

    But year, time is on our side - especially if you want to use Unity for a standalone game and not browser content (IIRC it is still 50% of all PCs sold today that don't even have hardware T&L). This is gonna get better when the Longhorn comes out.

    I know it sounds like I really don't _want_ do to GLSL. That's not really the case (honestly). Integrating it enough that you could just dump in some GLSL code would probably take a couple of days.

    That, however is the smallest thing. The main problem comes in getting a separated light transport mechanism in. This has proved a very hard problem to solve (we're almost the only ones doing it ;-) and would take a long time to get running in any new language. So GLSL is basically a victim of our strategy that 'when we do something, we do it right'.

    If I had to add something, being able to drop in a CGFX file for shaders seems a lot more bang for the buck.

    Right now, we're working on adding something completely different ;-)
     
  9. Jonathan Czeck

    Jonathan Czeck

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    Oh no, it was cool stuff.. even better that there is jucier stuff offline. It just means you need to start doing Unity demos with me. :) (Go go go! Don't delay!)

    Cool that you liked the looks of BugThug. Just wait until my next stuff gets a little more public... That reminds me, I have to fix a fullscreen bug with BugThug and Tiger. (Most of the bugs are intentional in that game, for once ;) )

    Cheers,
    -Jon
     
  10. taumel

    taumel

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    Well, 360? not 360, which should imply that they want to cover everything. I think as we all know now that unity2 is old stuff you should go for something different: As it's 3d software and just in case you also want to cover everything take it threedimensional which would make it 1080? then or if you wanna confuse people more 4/3pir^3 ... ;O)

    I didn't know that CG is source-level compatible to HLSL...

    Where do you get your numbers from that 50% without hardwired T&L are still beeing sold? Which market do you mean with this number? What kind of chips do you have in mind here? I doubt that!

    What do you mean with a "separated light transport mechanism"?

    And hell what do you mean with something completely different? I'm notorious curious...

    Overall i think you are doing a great job but a few pushes into this or that direction can't be wrong! ;O)


    Greetings,

    taumel

    PS: What really would be cool if there would be support of PSP!
     
  11. NicholasFrancis

    NicholasFrancis

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    I can't remember where I got the 50% from - somewhere on GD algo probably. Seems fairly plausible to me though - take a look at the first catalog page on Dell:

    http://www1.us.dell.com/content/products/category.aspx/desktops?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs

    none of them say anything about graphics chip. Probably Intel Onboard...

    By separate light transport I mean separating the code out so you don't have to write different shaders for each light type (spot light, projected cubemapped point light, etc). This means you need to make only one shader Unity generates all the different variations.

    Thanks for the pushes, though...
     
  12. taumel

    taumel

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    @aarku

    >>>...It just means you need to start doing Unity demos with me. :) (Go go go! Don't delay!)<<<

    :O) Maybe...but i would prefer doing a game instead of a demo.


    Greetings,

    taumel
     
  13. taumel

    taumel

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    @nicholas

    I just don't have the time to proof that you're wrong right now but i think you are.


    Greetings,

    taumel
     
  14. Jonathan Czeck

    Jonathan Czeck

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    A game is even better! See if you can beat me to be the first 3rd party to publish a commercial game. ;-)

    I've got a head start, though. :)

    -Jon
     
  15. taumel

    taumel

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    Oh i think you will win this as i still don't have unity and i'm working on some other things right now... :O(

    But maybe sometime we could really do something together?! :O)


    Greetings,

    taumel