Enable dark mode in unity for free?

To be fair this isn't the first time we've had a third party make a dark theme available to everyone.

https://github.com/zios/unity-themes

 

One more reason why 100th thread will be helpful.

 

On the contrary it's yet another reason why searching past threads is very important. Because while it's been brought up many times in the past there is no guarantee that it will be brought up in the future. By creating a new thread you're placing the burden on everyone else to remember what has been brought up and it's inevitable that some items won't be repeated.

 

A company needs to evolve and compete in the market it lives in or lose business and potentially fail. Unity lives in a market where being able to customize the user interface is provided for free by pretty much all software. Charging for a dark theme is becoming increasingly difficult because your main competition continues to give things away for free and its making Unity look bad. With that said, people can not have it both ways. Unity doesn't have royalty fees so it needs to charge for its tools and products in some way. Maybe Unity should offer a royalty based option and make everything free.

 

I'd say that dark theme doesn't really matter, because in the long term the important things are API, documentation and technologies.

People talking about dark theme aren't really bringing in the money being free users.

Also... I've looked for "Unreal light theme" and can't find it. There is one abandoned project, but that's it.

 

Hey I'm a bit curious how do you get a calibration?

 

I recall the official Unity twitter account responding directly to a similar query last October and they stated that there would be an announcement during 2020 on this topic.

Whether their solution pleases everyone or not is anyone’s guess, but I get the impression things won’t remain as they are now for much longer, one way or another.

 

I'm new here, but is this a satirical post? Are you really comparing people who prefer a dark theme to someone self-administering a poorly-tested medication in some sort of snake-oil hope that it will stop them from getting the corona virus?

Anyways, I think it's absolutely ridiculous to hide QOL/a11y features behind a paywall, not to mention the absolutely confusing decision to provide three different rendering pipelines to choose from and not making one, actually universal pipeline that lets a user select from all the features they need (for example, I'd like physically-based skies but I don't need all the other features of HDRP, like the enforced feature of texture filtering -- it would have made more sense IMO for Unity's devs to focus on an engine that lets you plug and play features at will). Maybe I'm missing something here, but it makes no sense for me.

Not to mention the fact that all the documentation now needs to be split between the three, and there's no telling whether the tutorial you're following is even compatible with the render pipeline of your choice. Just try to figure out how to adjust exposure in Post-processing with URP... please, try to figure it out, I still don't know how.

Honestly, at this point (two weeks of running into brick walls) if I could run Unreal on my macbook without it lagging like crazy, I would be making my game in that.

Edit: turns out I'm entirely wrong, and that's what the Unity devs did do (with the SRP). Cool. Although I wish HDRP and URP shaders were cross-compatible so that we could pick and choose.

 

Yes. Just because it's not in the form of prescription medicine doesn't mean it can't be dangerous. Tylenol and advil, for example, are over the counter medication that many people take for minor pain but long term use can cause damage to your kidneys. Likewise just because the dark theme is more comfortable doesn't mean it's necessarily safer.

Always seek medical advice from a qualified doctor just like you would receive legal advice from a qualified lawyer.

That said I don't want you to confuse my viewpoint on the dark theme with my viewpoint on the pricing model. I'm not at all in favor of nonsensical pricing models and this is definitely that. It's right up there with making Windows S only able to run apps that are on the Windows Store and selling a monitor stand for $1,000.

 

https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/c...manual/Post-Processing-Color-Adjustments.html

This one or another one?

 

Why is dark-mode not available to ALL Unity versions? Unity can you explain?

 

It is a business decision they made.

In the nearby thread, there was a mention of pixel art software called pro motion.
Here's the fun part:

Right column corresponds to paid version, the left column to free.

It is nothing new.

Unity has no obligation to make dark skin available to you. You're free to walk away and choose a different tool. Given the nature of your posts, you probably should've done this long time ago.

 

"If everyone is asking for it clearly it's a very important feature and should be monetized." - Management

 

Well, to be fair, it didn't happen this way. At least we don't really know if it happened at all. Dark theme was in Pro ever since it existed, then when they created the much cheaper and more convenient Plus version, they put it in that package as well.

 

You're amazing! Or I'm stupid (or both ). Awesome. No idea why auto-exposure isn't supported in URP, but I guess that's a conversation for a different time...

 

My themer works again in 2019.4 https://github.com/kamyker/UnityDarkenThemer

 

There is still an announcement regarding dark theme to come:
https://forum.unity.com/threads/cool-things-in-2020-1-you-might-have-missed.889786/#post-5904041

 

Took me 3 seconds: select the keywords you wrote here, right click, search on google.

 

Oh yeah, it's literally the first result. Not sure how I missed it as I was googling like crazy.

Anyways, decided to move back to HDRP (for the volumetrics). Liking Unity a lot more. Still miffed about dark mode.

 

I couldn't get it working unfortunately . The colour of the text changes (from dark to light) but everything else stays the same. Followed the instructions on Github and restarted a few times.

 

The best way is to pay a few hundred dollars for a pro to come on site and calibrate. They have calibration equipment that costs thousands of dollars plus they know what they are doing.

Second best is buying a calibration hardware, for example a spyder from datacolor. Both methods will produce a color profile that you use in windows.

 

I recommend buying a device that isn't very old in relation to the manufacturing date. I've read the color filters in front of the light sensors deteriorate over time and may lead to bad results.

 

You should calibrate your monitor often. Atleast 6 months apart. Because like you say displays change.

At our office we use eizo IPS monitors and I must say they have changed very little over time.

Edit: ah you meant the calibration device

 

Afaik flat screens don't change much. CRT screens used to change a lot over their lifetime. Not sure about oled etc., I haven't kept up with screen tech. In my experience LEDs fade, so those screens might change more than older tfts, but I'm just speculating.

The calibration devices have color filters in front of light sensors to measure the colors and those supposedly are changing more over time than a flatscreen does. So recalibrating the same screen often with the same device over a long time would actually be worse than doing it once with a fresh device and then leaving it like that till you buy the next screen.

I once read a review for these devices where they tested several of the same type, and the spread between the results was fairly big (delta E ~5 iirc). They compared the devices to a pro doing the callibration just by eyeballing it with on-screen test image assistance, and he was roughly as far off as the devices were apart from each other. So if you profile/calibrate and in the end you think "this can't be right" it probably isn't. I've seen some results that were way too reddish for example. The problem for someone without the experience is, there isn't a good way to actually know if it worked correctly or not.

But still, you're probably better off just trying it, and if it doesn't look obviously wrong, trusting the calibration, compared to however the screen looks out of the box.

Bordering on nitpicking, but technically an important destinction: profiling is not calibrating. Calibrating is changing things in the screen, profiling is changing what you send to the screen to compensate. Profiling is done with an 8bit LUT, leading to more colorbanding the more the profile has to compensate for inaccuracies of the screen. So calibrating is always better, but consumer grade screens usually have just rgb sliders to adjust an internal LUT that (hopefully) has more bits than 8 per channel. High end screens have higher bit depth internal LUTs that can be changed via calibration software, so that ideally the profile doesn't need to change the LUT on the 8bit GPU/OS side.

For that reason it can be beneficial to give it a couple of tries to adjust your screen to the most neutral setting you can get via its options, before you profile it.

 

Btw. those people that want dark mode so much, I guess they are not programmers. Because most of my time I'm in VS when doing unity3d projects.

 

Its mostly brightness that change on a IPS panel (probably same for TN (you shouldn't use TNs though )) but that's important too. More so if you do a stealth or horror game we're shadows etc play a big role.

Last time I did a pro calibration of my eizo I first did a spyder 5 calibration to test how off it would be. Actually it waa pretty decent. Pro calibration takes ambient lighting into account not just brightness but also how it affects image.

A tool like spyder 5 only adjust for ambient brightness.

 

Switching between dark and light themes is the worst for eyes.

Btw seems like you do easy unity3d projects that don't require playtesting

 

I'm actually want Unity to revamp their light theme to use lighter colors, instead of that kind of dust grey...

 

I would say those are small project when you are programmer and QA at the same time.

This is my game (sole programmer) if it is small or big project judge by yourself. It took us almost 5 years.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/337820/The_Mims_Beginning/