Announcing Unity 3.0! iPad, Android and PlayStation!

@Tom,
Despite the fact that Unity is a killing game engine, you guys need to showcase more demos like the one above. Theses kind of demos, makes Unity shine even more and thus attract more people and bigger studios!
Keep the good work, cant wait to put my hands on the beta.
Cheers,

 

I'm surprised nobody already asked about this:

Will Umbra occlusion culling be available in the webplayer?


This would be a huge leap for a big upcoming project (visualizing a part of a city).

 

No, Unity will only ship with one demo. The rainy city scene (known as Dark Unity) will not be available as a project folder.

The web player isn't a watered down version of the standalone player so yes Occlusion Culling will be supported

 

Hi

The city scene whont be downloadable?! I really spected it to be there to see how many things in there where made. I got particularly impressed with shaders...

May be you planned this, but even if the free version will come "downgraded". I would suggest that all the downloads come again with the 30 day trial version for new already registered users. This way all will be able tro play-test the new features.

Prior to the launching I would support the idea commented before by other user too of releasing an extensive collection of HD vids + screens of demos, features so on.

 

I'm sure the people who preordered will release a bunch as soon as they have access.

 

Given they are allowed to.
Thats not needfully a given as it is still a beta.

 

I can remember from a preious post that the early acces users are not allowed to unveil features or any information until Unity decides they can.

 

I havent read everything so I might have missed this...

Will the examples be using a serious language like C# instead of javascript ?

:?

 

Hmmm, let's see...

 

aNTeNNa trEE beat me to it.

 

Has integration with vs2010 been simplified with v3 ?

Can I profile with the vs2010 profiler?

Whoever writes a Unity3d 3.0/C# book first will make alot of money.

 

Sweet. I like that Boo is there too.

 

Boo is still alive... for the 5 people still using it

Actually we have a huge advocate of Boo working at UT, Rodrigo B. de Oliveira, so Boo isn't going to disappear anytime soon AFAIK

 

I noticed the 'duck' type in c#, does this mean Mono 2.8 with c# 4?
ps thank GOD the examples will have C# too. I use and teach only C# so it makes it tricky for the students to use unity docs and tutes in javascript.

 

Ooh, that would be bad.

 

sorry if this has been asked before, but is there gonna be any enhancement on the current partical system?

 

This is probably obvious, but here goes...
If you author a game using one Unity license like Pro for PC and WII can you open it and publish in another license such as iPhone without many changes, if you own the license to both?

 

We've added particle rotation and some soft particle shaders for Unity Pro, but besides that the particle system is basically the same in Unity 3.0.

 

Will Beast and Umbra support be included in iPhone basic?

 

This has not been determined yet for public release.

 

Is there any Post blur effect on shadows for point/spot lights? Something similar to the directional light shadows on Unity3?

 

When exactly is "Summer" 2010 for those of us outside of USA. That's always confused me but I've never asked anyone

 

Awesomesauce!



But, how will you export your game to 360 or PS3? Will there be any fee's from Sony, Microsoft, or Unity? What if I want to publish my games under these consoles?

 

When the livin' is easy?

 

CreativeCoding

you need to be a licensed developer and also buy official dev kits from sony/microsoft

 

Unfortunately, no.

 

This really confuses me. With such an overhaul to many other aspects of Unity why are the shadows still being left in their horrible state? Every engine with a real-time shadowmap implementation does it so much better than Unity... I just don't understand why.

 

Define do better.

The feathered out borders of T3D for example does not needfully look better, it only looks better in some cases but in others it looks very strange and abnomal

and that although the effect costs a massive amount of power (potentially more than the actual shadow casting calculation) on spherical light sources.

 

Point lights not having any blurring added is fairly understandable, but they're certainly fast enough in the Leadwerks implementation so it's not like there's no way to do it.

But spot lights... why would they not add it to that? There's no point in using hard shadows or the mostly-hard "soft" shadows on spot lights right now, especially with the ridiculously low max resolution. It looks so bad that they just shouldn't ever be used for any purpose.

 

A spot light is nothing but a point light with a restricted cone.
The calculations are still all going out from a point in a spherical space.

Only directional is non spherical



Can't comment on leadwerks. I know that it does not care much about lower end hardware and gracefull degrade to similar, less powerfull features. It either can use it or just drops it.
Also leadwerks does not support OSX, XBox 360, PS3, Wii. The important point here especially is OSX where his engine stands close to no chance to run due to his dependences on features not available at all in OpenGL on osx from what I've been told.


Also it not being present in 3.0 does not mean that it is no topic for 3.x at all (potentially the shadow shader will become public, then it would be even less of a topic)

 

Oh... any posts regarding shadows in Unity 3 still being substandard is frightening. I'm seeming to be having these visions that 3.0's shadows will again be a let down. I'm hoping to be proven wrong, although, the dreaded OSX may be our deciding factor.

 

I think that guys with interest on Unity for 360/PS3 will ask for this feature to. I'm talking about a shadow filter that you can turn off if you wish (eg: targeting low-end computer/web/mobile). But if you have a low-end computer, you wont provably have any shadows at all.
Also, you cant set the sames features on your engine because some platform do not support (eg: not having deferred-rendering because the iPhone/gpu cant handle it). At least, having the option to turn on/eff the shadow blur filter.
An other thing that i would like to change, is the shadow map size. The blocky-aliased shadow map is hugly. Shadow map size change and shadow post-filter blur options should be implemented "at least" for Unity PC/360/PS3.
Unity shadows is looking now pretty old.
Cheers,

 

I agree that a possibility to set the shadow map size definitely are be needed to scale from "for the majority" to "for those with interest in gaming" quality.

 

I want to have manual control over the split distances for cascades. That would really help in my situation.
I'm also concerned about the nasty transparent edging in shadows. It really ruins the quality for me.
Also some more projection types would help, like lipsm (I know they can look terrible in some cases but with shadows there's no magic bullet and lipsm works great in some cases).
Per camera contol over shadows is where the shadow stuff needs to be also

 

how much control will we have over Beast lightmap textures after they're generated? will we be able to open them in Photoshop? could we render several lightmaps of the same scene with different settings and then write a shader that interpolates between them to simulate the passing of day?

 

Yes.

You will be able to assign lightmaps through scripting so yes.

 

I'm also hoping we get in app control over beast. So procedural content can be nicely renderered. Procedural stuff is becoming much more important and used these days

 

Wow the anticipation Is grueling. Can we get a time line for Beta release other then "Later this development cycle".

Months, weeks, days, hours etc...

 

Cant wait to play with that Beta!
Unity please hurry! :twisted:
Lol, i'm kidding, take your time guys.
Cheers,

 

LOL By all means take your time. But It would be nice to have some idea.

 

Those are many of the reasons why I'm using Unity instead of Leadwerks now.

That doesn't mean they shouldn't make their shadow implementation worthwhile though. They're upping the quality of many of the screen shaders so it's just confusing to me that the biggest problem with the graphical side of the engine is apparently being left untouched. Guess I was just living a pipe dream when I hoped Unity 3 would become a graphical powerhouse on top of everything else I love about it.

Btw, my definition of "better" is not having the awkward halo around objects where the shadows don't show up, having much higher max resolution options, having blurred shadows for all lights so you can actually use them without ruining the look of your game, and having quality settings be set at a per light basis. Those are the fundamental flaws that other engines beat Unity on.

 

The glow bleeding there is something thats hopefully solved, agreed on that.
I was the only thing that visually annoyed me actually on the shadows so far.

 

The glow bleeding and the flickering when the camera is moving certainly need some improvement.
Unity is behind the curve in this area, most engines offer better solutions for shadowmapping.

I also agree to some other posts, it would indeed be nice to have more control. Especially over the shadowmap sizes.

 

Excuse me if this has been posted before, but I've skimmed this thread for 20-30 minutes and haven't seen anything about my question.

Will unity 3 Android be included with the iPhone package, the pro package, or a new package altogether? Similarly, for the PS3, will it be grouped with the wii?

It would (in my opinion) make sense to combine, to get 'mobile' and a 'console' license, but who am I?

 

My understanding was that the Android and PS3 development would be separate licenses, i.e. not bundled with other similar licenses. It wouldn't make any sense for the different console licenses to be bundled together because they are not allowed to issue those licenses until the developer gets the appropriate license from the console developers. So if you want to develop for both Wii and PS3 for example you would have to get the appropriate licenses from Nintendo and Sony, then get the console licenses from Unity for Wii development and PS3 development. This would be done on a game by game basis for the Consoles.

The same logic applies to the mobile market, because you need to be an iPhone developer get the Unity iPhone license.

NOTE: This is my understanding. If someone knows better for sure, or can verify my statement with documentation, please do so. [/list]

 

Higgy tweeted yesterday that it would be separate add-on with the same packages and pricing as the iPhone packages.

 

Yeah, at Boston Unity Day he revealed that the Android license would mirror the iPhone license, with Unity Android being $499 and Unity Android Pro being $1499.

 

HI

I've a question about the new unity lighting system (Beast).
As I find the vegetation placing tool a bit limited as you cannot place it over regular meshes, I was thinking abount using the Antares Brush for placing objets (trees), the tool would work in a very similar way to the vegetation tool but dont know how would it perform with the lighting as the objets are instances of a prefab and dont know if all will result with the same lighting or the Beast will compute a lightmap for each one still mantaining the benefits of instantiated objets.

 

But will the Android license be immediately available with the release of 3.0 ?

 

How much is the 360 license?