General HDRP discussion

The documentation on Occlusion Probes is missing. Yet again I see an awesome feature that is not usable or ready and thrown in as experimental. I have seen more and more of this behavior arising from the Unity team.

I want to make this clear. Serious developers know the potential of a game engine but if you are not seeing this potential occur then that's because something about your engine has made it seem incapable of living up to the amazing potential that book of the dead is claiming for example.

Recently I have found a good number of key features that make games look great that all compliment good art and level design. Such as high performance shadows, lighting, indirect lighting such as occlusion probes, atmospheric scattering and maybe a touch of Vertex channel effects for water on the ground (substance doesn't work anymore).

The book of the dead looks good because of these effects, without them it's just a standard Unity scene for example the Occlusion Probes and Atmospheric Scattering really made a difference.

Unity have now divided and made things much harder on themselves with the introduction of these unnecessary new render pipelines. Now they have to worry about Unity Vanilla and these two as well....no standard user needs that level of control they just need features that work as promised. We have abandoned features that never worked right like the Atmospheric Scattering in the Adam Demo, new asset store that's doesn't work for me half the time and separates reviews from the old and new versions of the store, asset store plugins that were not given heads up to the new render pipelines, experimental features being thrown in that are undocumented and unsafe and Github is now part of Unity...

Let me give some advice. Stop and re-evaluate while you can.
As a user of Unity all I ask for is some stable core features that will compliment and work along side my good art and level design. Features that do their job, come as part of the engine and work as intended. I didn't get this effect with most of the features after beast and I think it has to do with the fact that the people at Unity are reaching far further than they are ready for and leaving everything else in the backseat. They are working as half-wits rather than as one.

Maybe it's time to stop developing new features and focus 100% on polish and restructure before any new features are announced and introduced. Once it has been proven that Unity is a stable and complete engine then we can focus on the next stage. One step at a time.

I prefer to stay in Vanilla Unity because I get the most control and freedom. As the comments came out most users preferred the LWRP too and said it looked cleaner and nicer in comparison to HDRP. I agree too. I don't want to make games that run at 30 fps and are really just mega-scans taken from a website which will drop to 20fps once characters and game play elements are added. I want clear proven 60+ fps video games that are ready to go, cross platform and exciting. I will be sticking with Vanilla Unity because there was nothing wrong with it from the beginning. I don't understand who is making the decisions at Unity but those people are doing it wrong, sorry. Unity it's not too late but it will be if things don't change.

Also for any naysayers who have objections about what I said, I will tell you this, something is wrong and it needs to be figured out and addressed.

 

Even with much simpler scenes using HDRP, I can see the difference the improved lighting model and some other things make. And the term 'just a standard Unity scene' is really quite meaningless to me, and of course the HDRP looks good because of all the different parts, this isnt any kind of misleading con, its how game graphics work.

I have some sympathy with that, but for me the pipelines are part of the solution, it just requires more time for them to mature. And I would far rather have access to them during this time than have to wait till they are mature before I can learn them and experiement with them. Those that dont want to take this approach, can just ignore them for now.

I will never agree with that, and I dont think it makes any sense at all to speak of 'restructure' and 'complete engine' whilst writing off HDRP and calling for no new features.

I dont understand this comment at all, scriptable render pipelines give me more control and freedom than the built in renderer ever will.

I do not recognise this version of reality at all. And I'm not saying that because of my own opinion, but because it is not what I have seen other Unity users saying at all.

Just because there is a focus on photogrammetry at times, and the Book of the Dead demo makes use of that and other quite heavy stuff, doesnt mean this is where all the focus is. I can get some stunning results in HDRP with much simpler art assets too, and I get framerates that I am very happy with.

The chances that I would have moved to another engine in the last 18 months if HDRP was not on offer were really quite high. If you are happy with standard renderer then good for you, I was not, and I am not alone.

There will always be something wrong somewhere and things that some people will not be happy about, and some mistakes and questionable decisions made along the way. There are some things I am not overjoyed about, but I will give it another year to see how far they can get. There are unlikely to be any key 'make or break' moments or decisions as far as I am concerned, though I do expect that some of the questions in my head will be answered when I see what some of the specific things due in 2018.3 are actually like. Certainly I think the term naysayer applies more to you than to those who might disagree with things you are saying.

 

@elbows You have told me that you were going to move from Unity if HDRP was not offered. What was so huge a problem that HDRP solved for you that made you choose it over the standard vanilla.

*My comments do come from a background where I use asset store purchases to solve every shortcoming with Unity. I suppose if you remove the asset store then yes Unity doesn't effectively do much of anything sufficiently and a switch in engine would be very likely so if the HDRP solves that then I can understand that.

I myself offer my opinion for Unity to tone it down because people like me have to deal with the after math and leftover clutter that these big changes make to plugins and purchases. These are breaking changes that makes me wonder why don't they just complete the feature before shipping it so when it hits it's a lot easier to update plugins and adjust rather than release 20 breaking iterations and make life hell for us developers. This is not ok. Thankfully Unity has begun to understand the impact of including modules. A modular engine feature set especially for experimental is a really good idea and I give credit to them for that.

 

Well I am a big fan of the asset store too, but I dont want to have to rely on 3rd parties to add functionality to the rendering/shading/lighting side of things. Especially when in the past changes Unity have made to the standard renderer inside Unity versions have also caused asset incompatibilities and asset store developers to moan or get burned out. eg I remember a lot of moaning during many stages of Unity 5.x release cycle. So some of those issues existed long before the modular approach was taken. And I dont see why Unity should not release stuff until it is 'finished' to everyones satisfaction, especially since asset store developers dont have to support these things until they are out of Preview (eg I dont demand asset store developers make their stuff available for HDRP now, they should wait till its more mature).

As for which features make HDRP so crucial to me that it is the difference between sticking with Unity and moving to another engine, it is a combination of things, not one feature on its own. And also slowness in the pace of improvements to built-in rendering pipelines due to legacy baggage/messy code that has built up for Unity over the years. Things like the lighting model used in HDRP are much improved, along with performance and the switch to compute-shader based approach for various things, camera relative rendering, the list goes on. And this list includes things that it would be almost impossible for 3rd party assets to fix, and even if they did, there are issues of 3rd party assets not being aware of/fully compatible with other 3rd party assets. I wanted a cohesive base, a modern pipeline made by Unity themselves, that can see iterative improvements at a rate the standard render pipelines have never had. Being able to see the code for the pipeline also matters to me. As does having a Unity-provided shader graph that everyone using the pipeline gets, not a 3rd party asset that some have and some do not, that could be deprecated at any time.

 

@elbows Ah yes the cleaning up of legacy code....any move to amend bloatware is a win for me.
Sounds like it's promising so far. There are two scenarios I can see from here:

1.I will have to give it a go 3 years from now when it likely will have past pre-alpha.
2.I will give it a go much sooner because Unity finally got it right this time.
We will see.

I have done some analysis and performance testing on the default scene and an empty scene and I see no advantage at all for the average user. In fact now all of the old Unity tutorials will no longer be relevant and will cause them confusion and slow their education and results.
HDRP gives me bad performance out of the box in every way even with effects and shadows disabled which is unheard of.

A new empty scene with a plane and a few cubes and nothing else aside from VSync off is barely getting me over 70 fps. I am using a dated graphics card with a GPU score of 1000 and the same thing in Unity vanilla looks better and gives 500+ fps.

I now have settings scattered everywhere that I don't need, more steps to achieve the same thing and lose in every corner. At this point I guess the word separating simultaneous timelines and parallel realities has convinced me that we really must be in different realities. I am not joking about that lol.

 

Sounds like your mind is made up. Good job it's optional then, by a completely separate team that in no way impacts the rest of Unity.

Also I haven't seen a game that has the same quality level as book of the dead yet. I'm sure there will be with the new nvidia cards coming.

Which will also need SRP to be used.

 

Same base reality, different variables, different priorities, different scale, different focus, different GPU (1080Ti in my case).

 

@hippocoder Half mile shadows aren't used for games and getting a few thousand draw calls shouldn't be a thing nowadays with all the tools available to clean up optimization.

Even if you are two right about the improvements you said it very clearly, most users of Unity might get lost and only a few hardcore developers will take advantage of it. So the math doesn't add up. I myself make these games as a one man team aiming as far as feasible in Quality. I spent years learning the current engines ins and outs and seeing the HDRP only echo's past nightmares of learning stuff that should have worked right from the start. Pump and Dump is what Unity seems to be doing a lot these days with their demos and features. A lot of misleading.

As for the shadows I think it would have just been easier to implement a new shadow system like Sunshine or go full screen space shadows. Instead of introducing a whole new system why not just improve the current vanilla system feature by feature so it doesn't need these new divided render pipelines which will only create resistance and shakeups.

They introduced Enlighten for baking but it was replaced by Progressive. All this within the same engine without much need for retraining etc. If Vanilla is to be phased out I find it really difficult to believe right now....

If I had time I would do it myself but I really would like to see someone recreate book of the dead within Unity vanilla. I know it's possible because the Adam demo impressed me too. I actually believe if they tweaked things a bit that it would perform faster and look more or less the same.

 

I'm not getting into any game of convincing myself that what works for me and helps form my own personal opinion, is also conveniently what 'most users of Unity' just so happen to want. Just wait and see. I've nothing else to add and I dont have much interest in trying to convince vocal critics of the modern Unity approach that they are wrong, just wait and see what happens over the next year (certainly no need to wait 3 years). The safe bet is to assume that it will be a mixed picture, there will be some great new stuff, some solutions to old problems, and yes some new problems.

 

Finer performance impacts are better detected on on lower end hardware.
I test thoroughly before making my opinions and I go by need versus want which is the most important factor here. Want versus need has created the problems Unity has had over the years and I was directly impacted by all of it.

People needed a better shadow system like how we got to choose between enlighten and progressive to easily replace the current system while the current system would be a fallback if it ran into any issues. Instead it looks like Unity decided not to do that and skip that entirely for a new render pipeline. We needed a working atmospheric scattering solution which was introduced in the blacksmith demo but was abandoned especially when users needed it most. They showed off how cool it was and then just Pumped and Dumped it on the asset store with reviews about issues just ignored. Then recently instead of updating it for vanilla users which is part of their obligation they decided to port it to the HDRP for Book of the Dead and repeating this process.

But anyway there is always a chance that I could be wrong here. I won't be making any more comments or complaints about the decisions Unity is making from here on out, the opposition and lack of support hints that perhaps subconsciously there is a desire from the users of Unity to accept this dodgy relationship of master slave, unfinished and broken promises so who am I to say then and of course if you are right, that it is really a true improvement then great!

 

Unity made the best move depreciating the builtin renderer. It has abysmal performance (on both CPU and GPU) that cannot and will not scale going forward due to the outdated DX9 era design and legacy cruft it's built up over the years. In fact (any shader programmer will agree with me) it's an absolute nightmare to extend. It reached it's limits in Unity 5.

It's a great engine if you just want to mess about but it is not capable of doing book of the dead. It would die from bandwidth abuse, assuming you wanted the same level of quality and features. You should also consider that the book of the dead scene is not optimised at all for game development. It is purely a visual exercise IMHO.

HDRP is about using compute shaders and modern techniques to minimise bandwidth, which is the number one bottleneck in modern rendering.

It is more like a tsunami of demanding customers forcing Unity to upgrade their features on a constant basis. If anyone is the master it will be power users like me who constantly moan for performance, features, etc and keep linking the competition - which is stressful for Unity, but it keeps them relevant and on their toes.

Absolutely nobody sees Unity as any kind of master and we are quick to complain.

 

I don't mean to be rude, but does this discussion really need to be in occlusion probes thread? I'd really like to get some answers but my questions get pushed out of the view when people debate about completely different topics here.

 

I have cleaned up for you

 

The non-gaming uses of various sorts that engines like Unity and UE4 have given some attention to in recent years is another driver. Both the film and automotive stuff has seen increasing, obvious competition between Unity and Epic along the lines of particular graphics features and tool integrations. HDRP is starting to become at the heart of a lot of Unitys work in these areas, and this is only going to get more obvious as time goes on.

I am so looking forward to the GPU VFX system for HDRP. This will likely be another area where the results of this 'new era' become obvious to a wider range of Unity users. Sure there are a few GPU particle systems available on the asset store for a long time already, but having such things from Unity themselves matters to me. And yet another area where the timing in regards to what Unity are starting to deliver on this front is somewhat similar to what UE4 is delivering. I kinda wish Unity were giving the new VFX system a snazzy name!

 

Another reason I say 'give the pipelines some more time', is not even related to their maturity and ongoing development.

Its because people are often quite conservative about things, and about suddenly having new choices and new learning to do. I am not criticising this phenomenon, there are some very good reasons why people will have these reactions. But such reactions should not be confused with how well the new stuff goes down with users eventually, once people have come to terms with the change.

 

The VFX stuff is very much up my street, going to be using it fully. Have not tried it out yet but I've seen some nice vids on twitter.

 

Haven't seen any of those, didn't know there were vids outside of what was shown in the roadmap talks. I'm also really looking forward to the VFX editor

 

I dont think it can be tried until 2018.3 beta is available.

Not sure what videos you are referring to. One reason I wish the system had a non-generic name is to make searching for stuff about it on twitter etc easier, since terms like Unity VFX will turn up a lot of stuff that has nothing to do with the new HDRP VFX.

 

Well I have 2018.3 just saying I haven't tried the VFX thing as it's a different set of testers.

 

Lucky you

For now I am busy enough with other aspects of my life that I am still content to just watch the commits being made to the vfx/hdrp branch on github, but I bet by the end of next week I will start to get impatient to try it for myself haha.