Feedback I'm impressed

You know me, I'm usually the first one to jump on Unity when there's an issue. Been using 2018.4 LTS for a little while now on a new project and I'm getting more than I ever expected from it.

Performance is great, with all the new features / tools it's put me in a position where I'm having to learn and expand into things instead of Unity being a roadblock. Staff have been super friendly and helpful (not saying they weren't before, it's just there seems to be less things falling into a black hole).

Even though I'm using a fair few preview packages in 2018 at least it's been rock solid. I'm currently doing a 30 day project which will attempt to grind Unity to a halt, it's one thing creating a "tech" demo but it's completely something else taking said tech demo and making it a large completely archaic heavy hitting game that makes consoles weep whilst expecting it to run well.

I'll create a WIP thread at some point that'll run through all the challenges.

 

Really looking forward to see your work, just wonder what your take is on the new RTX tech?

I don't suppose you got a 2080Ti card

This guys stuff has had me foaming at the mouth for some while.
https://www.youtube.com/user/tetanoisee/videos

 

Same as always, if it can't run at 60FPS on mid range hardware (one of the reasons I picked up a Vega 56 with 20% transmission loss) it's nothing to get excited by.

Some of them I'm pretty sure you could come close with Unity already, others would probably need V-Ray to get there (like the batmobile one). Also it's a different story when you're not making a shoe box, for e.g. you could get arch viz level renders in UE by cranking the amount of bounces to a 100 and letting lightmass do it's work.

Try that on a scene with 50+ buildings and thousands of meshes / pieces of foliage then it'll crash your game due to memory requirements or it'll look like a blotchy, low quality mess from 2008. It would be nice to try the GPU lightmapper in 2019 but unfortunately it doesn't work right on Mac.

 

Have you tried running the Unity RTX alpha with a GeForce 10 series card? It's totally functional now... but that's about all you can say about it. I was getting 8 FPS at 1440p.

Edit: Neglected to mention the model of my card. I'm on a reference speed (but not reference cooler) GTX 1080.

 

True, good thing a single one man indie dev knows making an openworld game is strictly a no-no in terms of feasible scope

 

I've grown tired of LM, I just wanna see my scene like the one I did below with enlighten, realised in a few seconds, and be able to chuck the objects around in the scene with a full day night cycle

 

I cant get proper results with progressive. Still on Enlighten too.

 

PLM is still orders of magnitude slower than enlighten, sure it reduces most of the 'blotches' enlighten is notorious for. . .

Anyway, the point is this is a difficult problem. There's no sweet spot. Baked LM involves tedious workflows, rebaking, uv-unwrapping, light probing and then having the headache of making dynamic objects appear part of the scene.

GPU LM, hopes to make prototyping faster, but then you're limited to the memory on the card and all the other problems above.

Real time GI / either CE based or raytraced, involves more heavy machine specs. Pick your poison.

The idea of grabbing a 2080Ti for a shoeboxed environment with realtime dynamic GI appeals to me somewhat, but honestly, as a hobbyist type of thing, I'd not keen on shelling out 2K for a bit of toying around. . .

 

Realtime is not feasiable in unity right now if you want photo quality, just look at these horrible point light shadows

 

That looks really low res, are you using all the bells and whistles like high resolution lighting, 4 cascades, etc?

 

Yepp

 

Seems Unity is batching very few draw-calls in this video. Have you tried to optimize for draw-calls already?

 

Yepp, used meshbaker to prebake the modular scene.



200-250 set pass calls aint that chabby since it a mixed mode light and forward rendering. Plus we have not moved to single passed instanced yet, so bathes are doubled for each eye. I tried to enable single pass instanced and it did cut batch numbers in half, but no noticble decrease on CPU time either. But we should move to it anyway. But some shaders break that I need to fix.

edit: umbra is pretty S***ty too, so probably things being rendered that shouldnt

 

If you're using Mixed Lighting, I had great success to optimize draw-calls with this hackery:
https://forum.unity.com/threads/lightmap-index-and-draw-call-batching.688780/#post-4645909

 

Yeah mixedmode with shadowmask mode. Will have a look! Thanks

 

Ah bake tags, yeah, I haven't had great success with those even if I do assign same tag they will not end up on same light map. And like you say, the workflow of needing separate lightmap settings assets

 

Going by the polycount vs visual screen content discrepancy I was gonna speculate you aren't even using any occlusion culling at all.

 

How to get from the "I'm impressed" start of the thread to the "everything is S***ty" complain-fest in 6 posts. I love this forum.

 

Its there, umbra is just pretty bad at it at times.

 

Maybe unity reports double because of two cameras btw, I havent looked into that