Announcing Unity 3.0! iPad, Android and PlayStation!

Great stuff guys, epic congrats. Kudos for being on the ball and answering every annoying question that pops up.

//wonders when the Utech/Autodesk partnership gets announced..


Enjoy the GDC!
AC

 

Hopefully hell will freeze, mankind will die out and sun will stop burning before that point cause I would hate to search for a new technology

 

But that's only because you have it backwards in your head.

You see... UT will be the one buying Autodesk!

 

look like 3.0 going to be promising an dopen new door into dev things hehe

thanks UT guys , great work as usual 8)

 

+1 about adopting Scaleform. That would be a great productivity boost:

http://www.scaleform.com/products/gfx
http://www.scaleform.com/products/integration

@HiggyB
(about buying unity iphone 3.x)
I tried accessing the normal "buy unity iphone" option (not the upgrade option), and then using my previous serial number. It shows $100 as the final price. Is it correct? If so, when I want to upgrade my unity 2.x pro, will I have to upgrade unity iphone 3.x again?

(about discounts and the eternal frustrations)

I would be nice if UT had a policy against future frustrations. Something like:
1. Every new dot release is freely upgradable (already in use), so...
2. Future discount are given acording to the following policy:
a) There will be a basic discount (available to everybody)
b) Previous purchasers will have an additional discount based on how many (rounded) months ago they bought their copies of Unity. For instance:
1 month = +200 discount,
2 months = 150 off,
3 months = 100 off,
and so on up to, say, 6 months. I´m sure everybody would be happy with it.

More 2 cents

R.

 

WOW, 3.0 looks amazing!

 

Its realisticially impossible to please all people, there were even people pissed with the generous Unity Indie -> Unity payback - upgrade reduction offering thats to my knowledge unique in the whole business.

 

Hi dreamora,

I do agree with you.
I was thinking about a future upgrades/discounts policy to stop 90% of frustrations every time this happens.

R.

 

I guarantee you that if that happened the forum would be flooded with posts from people who bought it just barely over 6 months ago.

It always feels crappy to be barely outside the window, no matter how long the window is.

 

there is only one way for that and that one pisses me off: No reductions and early adopter offers at all so all pay full independent of when they bought it.

 

Well, they could start this policy from version 3.x on, why not?

The point is there would be no big losses for UT, if the basic + previous purchasers discount are well set. This would be a way to avoid people that bought previously stopping being frustated and "learning" to hold new purchases. You just need a clear policy...

That´s what I think...

R.

 

they didn't lose anything.
Its not like buying Unity now gets you anything right now. The app is still further off than they would get a discount even by your table.

The difference is just that you can get access to its betas and get a $250 reduction on the actual upgrade fee if you buy it before release (which is higher than what yours would offer at all). So even by your scale: nobody loses anything

 

mmm, Scaleform is awesome, I dont mind paying extra $50 for license to get it included in Unity...

 

Yup, we do that now.

No thanks.

We offer existing users the upgrade discount and I think that's great as it is, especially when combined with the early purchase discount and pre-release build access. You assert that this is better and I would suggest that's largely because it takes care of you, but what about the next person who would then be just outside some other line we craft? In reality all this does is move things further out, but there will still be some number of people just on the other side who will then do some hand wringing about that policy and say things like "and so on up to 9 months as that would take care of most of these cases, right?", or "but you should give $200 out to X months instead of Y!". Or a different slant to the sliding scale or ??? We have a simple and straightforward scheme here that I feel is quite generous in both it's timing (how many companies give you a heads up this far in advance so you can plan against the release?) and general nature (how many companies let you pre-buy and get pre-release build access so you can plan against the release?). Are some folks caught just outside those lines? Yes, but as I noted above that will *always* be the case.

Keep in mind, I'm not dismissing any feelings folks are having, but the truth is that no matter what we do and how, there will always be folks just outside the bubble and rarely is the bubble's limit seen for what it is fair or not, it's simply seen as unfair as to the person speaking it feels exclusionary to them and thus the issue is being raised. Which is understandable, it's hard to just miss something that you're keen on and that could help save money, but we have to draw a line somewhere.

 

@Higgy

As I said in a previous post about starting that kind of policy from 3.x on, I wouldn´t be benefited by it right now (or even never). That was just my 2 cents, really...

Anyway, thanks for the attention...

R.

 

Wow, I knew XBox support was coming, but this announcement is way cooler than I was expecting. Looks like I made a good investment in my time to start learning this tool:

http://www.newarteest.com/unity/unity.html

 

A very nice surprise. The upgrade looks brilliant and nice upgrade pricing to boot.

 

re: Beast Lighting
how flexible will this be for the developer? beast, as an api, can do a lot! Will we be able to feed our data to the baker as we see fit and bake our certain maps? From the comments on here http://unity3d.com/unity/coming-soon/unity-3
"Unity seamlessly fades to real-time lighting so you get full shading and bump details. "
...it makes me think you'd be using a single modulative lightmap, whereas you could use 'radiosity normalmap' lightmapping and get all the bump details all the time with no dynamic light cost (check UE3 and even HL2 for this)... just an example where a developer may want to use Beast for different things. What about bent normalmaps, or just wanting AO maps? etc etc...

haha - perhaps the question is "can we use Beast more like an API?" ...

re: Defferred Shading
A few projects I've worked on used defferred shading and, to be honest, the cost was often not worth it (gbuffer memory, fillrate cost), especially for consoles, and we'd have to revert back to forward rendering.... and some cases, such as outdoor scene where, in defferred, a directional takes a full-screen pass to shade, it was faster to use foward rendering...
So, the question here is will forward rendering still be there? As, at least from my experience, it's a project by project decision.


All these new features sound very exciting - it would be great to get a more technical rundown on how Unity has implemented them.

Cheers!

 

2.6~~jump to 3.0~~

 

Congrats guys, we all knew it was coming but its great to see it finally announced. We look forward to seeing it all in action at GDC

 

[quote="HiggyB"

We offer existing users the upgrade discount and I think that's great as it is, especially when combined with the early purchase discount and pre-release build access. quote]

Tom'

If you upgraded unity iphone to advanced with the holiday discount then you paid about 1740
870 from unity to unity pro +
870 from iphone basic+ unity pro to iphone pro with unity pro

If you upgrade today the cost would have been about 2200.

which means if i ignored the holiday discount and upgraded today i would have saved myself 1700?
I may be just confused by the cryptic sales page but can you clarify?

 

The lightmapper, occlusion culling, and deferred rendering have me sold. Now if I could just find my wallet...

 

The upgrade policy seems to be not fair for old and recent users.

I bought unity pro 4 months ago (2009 Oct 29) for USD 1499. To get v3.x, I need to pay extra USD 500.
If my friend buy it now, he just pay USD 1200

My cost = 1499+500 = USD 1999
Friend's cost = USD 1200

The price difference is USD 800!
Even after the promotion, he only need to pay USD 1500 to get v3.x

IMO, the old and recent users should be benefited from the upgrade policy for their loyalty.

 

It doesn't work that way anywhere else, and it shouldn't work that way here. You got to use Unity for several months more than your friend. I also think buying Unity four months ago and calling yourself "loyal" is overshooting just a bit. :wink:

 

I only used unity once in a while and features of free version (unity3d book works for both version), while my friend often uses the free version too. It seems that I don't have any advantages over these 4 months.

IMO, the final price of unity pro should be USD 2000,
setting the final price to USD 1500 seems to be a punishment of those buying unity3d so early.
(If I buy it after it released in summer, I will get v3.0 for the same money (ie. USD 1500))

 

That's your fault, not Unity's! Be more diligent!

 

Unity is excellent. Just the upgrade policy could be better.

 

Glad to see my Occlusion Culling system submission to the Summer of Code last year was rejected for a good reason. You were already working on it .

Excitement about this new version couldn't be higher.

And may I add..

SQUEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

 

Wow! A major announcement to be sure, and, to echo the sentiments of previous posters, awesome, exciting, magnificient and generally filled with amazing double-chocolate-birthday-cake-like goodness.

Thanks to the entire Unity team for continuing to do astounding things!

And now, if I may make so bold, a question. I have read the entire thread up to this point and while I think I found one example of my situation, the answer was still unclear to me.

I currently have Unity Pro2.x. I am in the middle of a trial of Unity iPhone. My trial expires in a couple of weeks and I had planned to purchase the existing iPhone Basic before that happens. With this new news, however, I am uncertain how to proceed. I certainly intend to upgrade my Unity Pro2.x to 3.x. It seems I can add Unity iPhone to that for $300 and that's quite agreeable, but... does that mean I will have to wait until 3.0 is released before I will again have access to iPhone development after my current trial expires?

Or will the pre-purchase entitle me to use of the current Unity iPhone 1.x until 3.x is released?

Any light you can shed on this (mapped or realtime ) would be most helpful.

Thanks!
Mal

 

This is cool. While it may not fit everyone, I think the upgrade / preorder plan is excellent news.

 

Don't see why.
Those who preorder it now get Unity Pro 2.6.x + Unity Pro 3.x for a price thats lower than the regular Unity Pro 2.x license.

Don't see how those who preorder now are punished.

Those who bought it earlier aren't punished too, as they bought Unity Pro 2.x for what they got, not what they might get (thats the idea of as-is software). if they were unhappy with what they got, its really their problem and either they really deserve punishment or their technology researcher, but its not UT fault for offering such great (and actually price percentage wise normal) upgrade paths

 

I think the upgrade pricing is great for a small business studio that publish and make profit from games.

I guess you can always use the free one if you can't afford it. The free version would be a lot more palatable if it had shadows ;P

Either way it's good value. I have been waiting the last few months because I figured we were past 2.5 and predicted this situation. I Expect I'll be coughing up the dough sometime after April 15th

 

Something tells me that Unity will get shadows with 3.0 actually as the pro side got enough new stuff (Umbra, Beast, ...) to allow the free one getting the shadows

Question is if the free one will get the deferred renderer or just the current, though my assumption is: the new one too - just without the lightmapping as beast is a Unity Pro only feature.

 

Wow, this is a big update.

Any more information about the audio magic and the physics update?

 

I've been stalking the forums/twitter for the past day waiting for what I suspected would be tidbits at GDC about 3.0; when I finally get to see it, the announcement's already been flooded with pages of replies .

Deferred rendering, occlusion culling, built-in lightmapping, source debugging and even an easy to use asset organizer on the side...

Unity's pretty much addressed everything we've felt was lacking. 2.6 already pretty much rocked, we need a new word for this release when it comes out . :wink:

 

If I preorder v3 will that be a "full" v3 license that will be counted as such when later upgrades comes?

 

Pixero, of course, you buy the real FULL version, you just pay it in advance and get the 2 added benefits of having early beta access (when it begins) + some rebate.

But you really buy the full product

 

Educational upgrade price ?

We bought 17 licenses and received the Pro version. I don't know how much we (the college) paid.

How much will our educational upgrade cost please ?

Thank you.

 

that will be cool

 

Shader, I guess thats something to discuss with unity sales and not here. Also, if you don't know hoz much your educational institution paid for the licenses, then you are probably also not the person to discuss the upgrades for the institution...

 

OMG !!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

Is THAT all there is!
Just kidding, already upgraded to Pro 3.
I was just asking (yesterday?) when we would get a Global Illumination solution
that worked INSIDE of Unity.
Will this beast be true GI and all renderable inside of Unity?

 

I cant wait to final release...

 

How long is going the promotion to last?

 

as written several times: Until unity 3 is released (somewhen this summer)

 

I have just remembered a common user request... is it 3D Connexion technology going to be natively supported in Unity 3.0 editor?

http://www.3dconnexion.com/

 

True to the bold text in the press-release, I was blown away (off my chair).

You guys have really taken things up a notch with the inclusion of otherwise very expensive 1st-class middleware libraries.

Fingers crossed for SpeedTree in Unity 4

 

I'm busy for a few days and miss the announcement of Unity3. Wah!

There are some seriously awesome features in this release. Before I state any questions that have already been answered I'll read through the thread and press release ... but already: Awesome! Very cool features and tech integration. 8)

I'm not even sure if I should congratulate or thank you for all the effort that goes into Unity