GDC 2019 Keynote - Discussions

Well, like I didn't see any discussions or opinions about the first keynote of Unity, I guess I could make this post so we can all talk, slur, rant or chant the new things that are coming to Unity.

 

I will start: No dark theme for free! So whatever.

(Otherwise it was super-impressive, I like the direction we're going)

For those, who don't know me: it's an ironic joke. I have the dark theme, obviously.

 

The Heretic demo impressed me. Unity made a huge leap recently, technology but also (or perhaps especially) content creation wise. I wish they make similar improvements on the overall engine- and editor-robustness.

There are probably further equally impressive things in the keynote, but I only watched the demo yet and I'm already blown away

Spoiler

 

The Heretic was really good and I believe it was a major improvement from the past 2 cinematics. I would love to read more about everything that happened to have the details of each topic. Hope the blog gest updated quickly.

 

AR foundation: FINALLY! Definitely will use it in my future project. Was waiting around the time for this to get done.
I don't use high graphics in my games or work on mobile games so most of the other stuff wasn't that interesting to me.

I really wish Unity would have more AR/VR support.

 

One more: I'm a little bit disappointed that the GameFoundation will be mobile-only/mobile-centric. These things should be general and structured on a way it can be puzzled together on any way.

 

Indeed.. a HUGE improvement over the previous two. I don't mean the technical part (which is great) but content wise. The last couple were so abstract and stylized (except for the foliage) that it was difficult to really judge or make a comparison. Using an actual human and mostly realistic environments is much more telling. Looking at them it is easy to tell if they are hitting the visual target or not. Hard surface isn't really a huge problem really, and strange abstract wood people doesn't really demonstrate engine ability, just artist ability. And you can't tell if they actually achieved the desired target. Much better choice to focus to showcase the engine over the demo team's creativity.

 

Anyone interested specifically about physics from GDC 2019, we have discussion on ECS forum section.
Unity Physics Discussion

Also, linking relevant time line.

Edit:
Fixed timeline

 

The heretic is a beautiful work, but I'm still not too happy with something about Unity's lighting. While the scene looks very realistic, there is also something dull about the presentation of it. It's like some values have been crunched that shouldn't be. Especially at the end, where the scene should have been really breathtaking, this effect is clear.

I also wish they didn't add such heavy AA to the scene, it blurs everything too much.

Anyway, it was a good watch, and definitely a better, more comprehensive show-off of different parts of the engine.

 

Is there any other information on the Graphine acquisition? Is their plugin going to be an available package now or are they working on something new?

 

too soon

 

I'm wondering about some short term plan for Granite integration now too Usually after Unity has acquired company with some tech, they first rebrand it, do some small tweaks and release it as separate asset before doing any major rewrites.

However Granite's native side is kind of bigger thing that could live on engine side and Unity doesn't tend to put things like that in packages themselves (I'm talking about the native dll's that Granite requires to work right now) so I'm not expecting to see Granite just repackaged as is now.

For those who missed it, here's Graphine's blog post about the acquisition: https://graphinesoftware.com/blog/2019-03-19-unity-technologies-acquires-graphine. No new info there though.

 

Unity won't release the video of the gdc outside of keynote?

 

They are coming. It usually takes few weeks for Unity to process and upload the first videos after an event.

Do note that Unity will most likely upload the sessions held at their own booth to Youtube. You can expect the official GDC sessions to be uploaded to GDC Vault. No idea if Unity will upload these to their Youtube channel as well.

Either way would expect to start seeing these videos this or next week.

Sessions that will arrive to GDC Vault will be here eventually: https://www.gdcvault.com/browse/gdc-19, for Unity Youtube you can watch for GDC 2019 playlist or their channels all videos list.