Announcing Unity 3.0! iPad, Android and PlayStation!

There is no plan to ship a sprite engine with 3.0 - we wanted to get it in but had to shelve it for a later release

 

D'oh

So Apples strike back with the extra effort is now cutting stuff that would have made games better to make it possible to make games at all for iDevices?

 

Any plan to add the terrain object in unity iphone?

 

In related news, sales of Sprite Manager 2 soar

This is a bit of a bummer though, but I'm glad you guys came out and said it now so people can make development decisions (such as purchasing the aforementioned SM2)

 

Indeed. If Unity iPhone even continues to exist, I wonder what's still coming for it. Deferred rendering and whatever this sprite deal was intended to be are already out.

 

@Jessy: Why were they meant to be out? They were mentioned as part of Unity 3 and / or Unity iPhone 3, which neither of them is meant to be out anytime soon

 

I don't see your point. It says here that the sprite engine comes with Unity 3. Now nicholas says it does not. Regardless of when Unity 3.0 comes out, we'll have to wait longer for one of the features I cared most about (and not really for 2D gameplay, either; I want it for faster and easier GUIs, primarily. Maybe the "faster in-game GUIs" will happen without the sprite engine). No particular feature was ever promised for Unity iPhone specifically, but Tom Higgins said deferred rendering won't be; any lack of cool feature from the announcement, for the only Unity product I use, is a disappointment.

 

Ah I understand, missinterpreted the out there in the wrong context.


Well Unity iPhone 3 got, as you can see on the blog, a cool new feature and thats native code calling for all.

That, together with hopefully an upgrade to mono 2.6 too on the iphone side too (or no mono anymore at all) would already be a massive gain.

Also, while deferred makes totally no sense for the iphone (it would die already when trying to calc lights / shadows on their own), programmable pipeline was among the feature additions listed, another big thing.

 

Yep. I'm glad they said it so I can go ahead and buy Sprite Manager today. At least I can start playing with that this weekend.

 

Yes, you will have to buy the upgrade although you can either (a) do it now at a discount, or (b) wait until you're ready some time after. You'll have had this version in your hands for many months by the time it's shipped so we think that's fair enough. If you have any ultra-cringing issues over this then drop me a line privately and we can discuss your case individually.

Sorry Jessy, but sometimes things don't go according to plan and if you'd prefer it we could simply say nothing about possible features and avoid disappointing you like this. Or, you can roll with the punches and allow us some room to be human and at times, need to retract on features when things don't go according to plan (he only said not in 3.0, he didn't say it won't appear in 3.x). I think you'd rather we stick with the latter, right?

 

I was also hoping for a better GUI system. At least a faster one, i have now more than 20-30 drawcalls only for our main HUD, its pretty heavy. Removing the entire HUD, adds more than 200 fps to the game.

 

You do understand that it's not cancelled overall, just delayed past the 3.0 release in specific (as in it will appear in a 3.x release instead, where x > 0), right? I just want to be sure you understand what's being said here.

 

Hi Tom
Any plan to add the terrain object in unity iphone 3.x?
Thanks

 

It's my understanding that terrains will not be supported in Unity iPhone 3.x (nor in Unity Android). So for now, no.

 

@HiggyB I understand; I'm not hung up on the 3.0 vs. 3.x difference. But that doesn't mean that I don't still look like this! :cry:

 

The hardware still isn't powerful enough to actually use it.

--Eric

 

Might I recommend buying Sprite Manager 2? I grabbed a copy when my UI got up to 36 draw calls, and was amazed at how easily it could be converted to sprites and got things down to 2!

If you dig through the threads on SM2, you may see reference to the new EZ GUI system...that will be well worth your money as well.

 

Hello,

Ennanzus GUIX Designer, seems pretty cool to use, that a GUI creation system i'd like to see in Unity 3x.

Any chance to have it or something equal in Unity 3x ?


Thanks a lot.

Best Regards.

 

Doubtful. The request is right at the top of the list, and has not gone into "planned" or even "in review" status.

 

Why wait for Unity 3, you already have it now.

Also GUIX is more than just a gui designer. its a whole gui system which easily outpeforms Unitys OnGUI so investing into it is hardly never an error.
and since Unity iPhone 1.6 you can use the generated code from the editor on unity 2.6 and use it on the iphone in .NET 2.1 mode too!

 

GUIX is amazing, and quite easy but it relies on Unity GUI system. That means, one draw call per visible gui object.
However, am going to take a look at sprite manager2, tanks melmonkey for the recommendation.
Cheers,

 

Will the use of System.Data finally be fixed in 3.0?
For instance, as far back as I can remember, in C# code, we could never use the following statement at the top:

using System.Data;

It could never find the DLL, we have always had to copy the System.Data.dll from:

C:\Program Files\Unity\Mono.framework

Into our Assets folder to use it, never could understand why, quiet a few framework libraries that have always been this way, a problem that can be fixed by just dragging all DLL's from the framework folder into our assets folder then we can use them as we wish, just wondering if this is a fix in 3.0 or something planned for 3.x and didn't make it into 3.0?

 

Yeah, the new 2D Sprite system and the new GUI system are tied together so neither are making it into 3.0 as Nicholas said. But we're really excited about it, Nicholas has a lot of cool ideas, and in fact a significant amount of work has already gone into it so most likely it will make it into the first 3.x release.

But, as always, I just want to add a little disclaimer that this is not an official UT statement of future plans or release goals... this is just me giving a little personal insight about the status of the new GUI system. I just wanted to point out that even though it hasn't been tagged on feedback yet as "planned" it is underway in some form.

 

HI there i just want to understand it correctly

Preorder Unity 3.0
Below, you can now preorder Unity 3.0 with an early adopter discount. Get Unity Pro or Unity iPhone Pro for $1200 instead of $1500. Unity iPhone for $300 instead of $400. Upgrades from earlier verions are available at $500 for Unity Pro 2.x to 3.0 or Unity iPhone Advanced 1.x to Unity iPhone Pro 3.0 and $100 for Unity iPhone Basic 1.x to Unity iPhone. After 3.0 has been released the upgrade prices will be raised to $750 and $150 respectively.

Well i bought unity pro clicking on preorder button that is on the main web page Unity 3D i got it and i have 2.6.1 ( of course ) but if i read it correct i bought Unity Pro that will be updated to Unity 3.0 for free right beocsue i bought it for ( 1500 $ ).

 

You would optimally contact the support.

If you payed $1500 then you likely didn't buy the preorder and wouldn't get an upgrade cause the preorder was $1200 right from the start and when it became available, ordering 2.x became impossible when I remember right

 

i pay 1500 $ not 1200 $ becouse i am from Europe not from USA and there is a small note that if you are not from USA you have to pay 25 % more.

(Cross-border sales in the EU attract 25% VAT unless
the customer is a VAT liable business.

 

You still payed $1200 to UT.
The additional fee you payed is required to be thanked for to the EU, thats VAT.

Only EU inhabitants have to pay that, its nothing about US and non-US (I'm from Switzerland, we happily are not EU although we are enclosed by the EU)

But yes if the actual fee you payed for unity was $1200 + VAT you bought the preorder for Unity 3 Pro with access to the current one

 

dreamora so if i understand you correct i bought 2.6.1 with the possibility to get update to 3.0 for free becouse i bought preorder

 

No you bought Unity Pro 3 and got access to 2.x to have anything to do till that happens and have some basic understanding till the preorderer only builds happen so you can use them (thats my guess on it).

in the end the idea of this long upfront information is that nobody can claim to feel tricked anymore as UT has a 6+ months "free upgrade timeframe" that was even publically announced.

 

Hello,

I got a technical question about the forthcoming Umbra :

Does this Occlusion Culling work on a per-object basis (like the actual Unity OC), or a triangle basis ?

More precisely : If I want OC to work with Umbra, do I have to split my whole level into separate sub objects (Level1_building1 + Level1_building2 + Level1_bridge, etc) ?
Or can I go with a unified whole mesh (triangle level culling) ?

One whole mesh don't have culling, but is better to avoid batching errors and reduce drawcalls to 1.

Culling is nice to reduce unseen objects rendering, but can lead to far more drawcalls.

Performance gain between the two solutions are very scene dependant, which is why this final technical detail could make a level designer change his whole workflow.

Thanks

 

The new Occlusion Culling system is object based.

 

Thank you

 

Is there any batch rendering for Unity3 (Like the one on Unity iPhone)?
Umbra + a killing batch rendering = winning rendering speed!
Cheers,

 

Don't the non EU customers also still have to pay tax, hmm I guess it depends on their country's policy?

Also if you have a registered (EU?) company you don't have to pay tax. I guess that also depends on local policy

 

Hi Guys

Will Beast have these features?

-http://www.illuminatelabs.com/products/beast/features

or is this just a basic light-mapping tool creating maps from the standard lights/shadows etc//

Regards

S

 

We are trying to integrate every single cool feature of Beast into Unity. Do they all match up 100%? No, but I'd say we have the large majority of them in there and we'll continue to improve it beyond 3.0.

Don't worry, it's a professional lightmapping solution.

 

Hehe, I saw it ... and actually found it pretty funny (but I won't tell anyone) ;-)

I'm so looking forward to 3.0!!!

 

Yeah, I'm getting better at editing my "snarky" responses

 

Is Beast and Umbra support still going to make in iPhone 3.0?

 

Yes to both. iPhone will use slightly different lightmap shaders and implementation, but for the most part it's the same.

 

YES! Oh YES!

 

Will the batch rendering be introduced on Unity 3? Or its only an Unity iPhone 3 feature?
Tanks for your support and your hard work!

 

Batching will work for Unity and Unity iPhone.

 

That's cool, we won't have to re-merge our objects for an iPhone to everything-else port

 

Yes!!!
Tanks.

 

Cloth physics? OK, I'm putting my pre order in even though it's a little fuzzy on the details at the moment.

 

Sad news on the 2d part as that's what i would have been after the most but then at least we took the right decision. As there also have been some talk about physics will we finally get support for softbodies? Personally i have almost zero needs for cloth physics yet.

 

Yep, no 2D anymore is sad for me too, as it was just blowing all my already achieved 2D work out into a pause state, waiting for this new engine to revamp 2D things.

But now, as it is returning back to old Unity 2D management, this just made me lose some time.

It's not very cool to announce such a big feature with flashy news, and then taking it back monthes after.

Anyway ... Let's move on.

 

Its been stated several times that nothing is official.

 

I understand, that's why i'm not nerd raging all over, don't worry

But it was on the blog + in this very announcement, which kinda made me feel confident about a release.

Anyway, announcing anything that big, even if it's not "official", put any parallel personal framework (like Sprite Manager) in a pause state. I'm building a personal 2D framework, which I had to pause when I read that news (never my framework would have been better than Unity's integrated one, that's why ^^). Nothing assures me that Unity's 2D framework will be out just in time for my game's release, so I have to make decisions.

So well ... I'm not blaming anyone here, just saying it's "not optimally cool", lol