Official News and updates

This thread is going to collect important updates on the project, milestones, and more.

 

We just updated the project to Unity 2019.4.11f1, the latest LTS available at the moment.

We also updated the following packages:

• com.unity.addressables: 1.8.5
  
• com.unity.cinemachine: 2.6.3
  
• com.unity.ide.vscode: 1.2.2
  
• com.unity.polybrush: 1.0.2
  
• com.unity.probuilder: 4.4.0
  
• com.unity.textmeshpro: 2.1.1
  
• com.unity.timeline: 1.2.17

They're all minor updates and shouldn't bring any new functionality.
If you notice any problem related to the upgrade, please open an Issue on the repo.

 

At the request of the community, we have created an Open Projects Discord channel on the Official Unity Discord server.

Feel free to use the space for discussions, feedback and socializing. If you want to make official suggestions to the project, please create a thread here in the forums so everyone can contribute.

We will also be making a special role for Open Projects Contributors, you can message myself (AskAlice) or Ciro to get the role on Discord.

discord.com/invite/unity

 

Close call, but don't miss out our first livestream, happening today on the Unity YouTube channel:

 

We have made main the default branch on the repository, instead of master.

All open PRs have been retargeted to main. On your end, you don't need to make any change: if you had a PR in flight which is stemming from your local master branch, you can totally keep using that branch on your machine and we will just seamlessly merge it onto main on the official repository.

Also please note that on your existing fork, the default branch will still be master. For new forks, default branch will automatically be set to main.

Please make all new PRs against main from now on. Thanks.

 

We just posted a short survey to do a first round of voting to choose the title for the game! Please go ahead and vote for the ones you prefer, then we'll do a final survey with just very few selected ones, so we can settle on one.

Vote for the game's title

 

In other news, on Tuesday we're going to have the second episode of the bi-weekly livestream about this project: Open Projects: The Journey - Ep.2. In this episode, we're going to look at the latest progress, the state machine solution we (you) created, most probably the scene loading system, take a look at the latest developments on the graphic side, and more coming in hot.

Since it's a livestream, you can already set a reminder on YouTube by going to the link below:

 

Next Tuesday, the third episode of the livestream is almost upon us!

As usual, you can use the link below to set up a reminder so you'll be notified when we start it.

In this episode, we'll reveal the title of the game (as chosen by the community), see how the graphics for the game are coming together, talk about new game systems in development and, finally, reveal new tasks that you can take on as usual.

See you on Tuesday!

 

The BIG MERGE is upon us!

I have just pushed the big merge we mentioned in the livestream the other day to main (and also to art-assets). You will now have access to brand new testing scenes, all the latest 3D art and shaders, and some animations too!
It even includes the Bard Hare (although he's not yet rigged).

In addition to that, I have upgraded the project to use 2019.4.14f1, the latest LTS available as of now. The upgrade was seamless!

Also, I have upgraded packages to their latest versions, so:

• com.ide.vscode: 1.2.3
• com.unity.textmeshpro: 2.1.3

In addition to this, I added a new package which we will use soon:

• com.unity.animation.rigging: 0.2.7-preview

And yes, it's in preview, so we'll test it out for a bit before we decide whether to keep it or not. (in any case, it should be pretty stable - I've been using it since last year!)

Two things:
- Some PRs might have conflict now. Please fix them if you can, otherwise we'll look into it (if it makes sense)
- If you find issues with this merge, report them on Github as usual

Hope you enjoy the merge!!

 

Just a big/small quick update. We have just reached 200 contributions on Github, between Issues opened and Pull Requests. 200!! In less than 2 months!



This is pretty cool and way above our expectations. And this is not including all the conversation going on here, the art posted, or the code reviews on Github (* though we do track these).

Thanks everyone who pitched in, even with just a one-liner PRs or a post on the forums.

Keep the contributions coming, and let's make this game!!

 

Late reminder, but I hope you know already since you are subscribed to the Unity channel

Today we have the last livestream of the year! Be there, or we'll see each other in 2021!

Oh also, if you're a Google Calendar user, you can subscribe to this calendar to see Open Projects Livestreams and Devlogs directly in there
https://calendar.google.com/calenda...obW5zbTB0c0Bncm91cC5jYWxlbmRhci5nb29nbGUuY29t

 

The second devlog is up! A condensed Open Project learning experience

Hope you like it!

(leave a comment if you do! )

 

PSA: The team will be on a break until the first days of January, so forum replies and PR reviews will allow down considerably.

You can of course still open PRs and keep the discussion going if you fancy! We might join here and there.

Also, we're going to do the first 2021 livestream (Episode 6) on the 12th of January.

See you next year!

 

Small update, we updated these packages:

• com.unity.recorder: 2.4.0-preview.1 > 2.5.2
  
• com.unity.render-pipelines.universal: 7.5.1 > 7.5.2

PS: In the next days we will be updating the Unity build too, from 2019.4.14f1 to 2019.4.17f1 so download it if you don't have it!

 

Quick one to say: don't forget about the livestream today, in about 7 hours from now!
Today we'll touch on scene loading (Amel), animation (me) and more game architecture (Chema), plus the usual community contributions, etc.

As usual, you can set a reminder on the video itself if you so wish! See you later!

 

Big small news: from today (yesterday?) the project is on 2019.4.18f1, aka the latest 2019 LTS available as of now.

Packages have been updated too, mostly small bugfixes. Nothing should break in the upgrade.

As usual, since they are very minor version you could probably open the project with a previous 2019.4 and it should still work, but please, double check your changes and only send the files that are strictly connected to your change (i.e. don't send files that have changed because you downgraded the project).

 

New devlog is out! This time it's about input. As usual, you'll find the pre-migrated demo to 2021.1 in the appropriate branch (

devlogs/3-input

) on the repository, linked in the video description too.

So much of what's in it is your contribution

 

Hey all, tomorrow we have our 7th episode of our bi-weekly livestream, The Journey!

Come check it out! Same time as usual!

 

Hey all: we're dismissing side branches like

state-machine-improvements

,

whiteboxing

and obviously the temporary ones we make for ourselves, like

localization

or

Quest-system

.

Where to make PRs?
We plan to roll forward with just

main

, to which you can make all your general purpose PRs, and

art-assets

, for art-related PRs. (should we drop that too?)
We obviously still encourage you to create local branches on your machine to work on your PRs, but they should always point to these two branches.

Other branches
In addition to these working branches, we created a branch called

release

which contains version we consider more clean and that can be built to an executable. You can use them for testing the game from a QA point of view.

Finally, all the branches that begin with

devlog/xxx

represent demo branches associated with the video devlogs, so don't make PRs towards them. They generally don't get updated in time.

 

Updated a few packages:

• com.unity.addressables: 1.16.15 > 1.16.16
• com.unity.localization: 0.9.0-preview > 0.10.0-preview
• com.unity.inputsystem: 1.0.1 > 1.0.2
  
• com.unity.scriptablebuildpipeline: 1.16.1
• com.unity.render-pipelines.universal: 7.5.2 > 7.5.3

All minor changes and fixes.

Maybe start downloading the latest LTS (2019.4.19f1) so you have it on your machine, since we will update the project soon

 

More packages updated, and we're moving to the latest 19 LTS: 2019.4.19 (f1)
Packages not listed as it's all very minor version changes and fixes.

 

Livestream coming up in 2 days!

WARNING: This time we'll air 2 hours earlier than usual. So it's going to be:
8am San Francisco / 11am in New York / 17:00 Central European / 19:00 in Moscow / 21:30 Mumbai/Delhi / 01:00am Tokyo
More times

 

Please note that we updated the project to the latest LTS, which is 2019.4.20f1.

As usual feel free to use older 19.4 versions to work on your contributions as changes are minimal, but never push the updated or changed ProjectVersion.txt file! Cheers.

 

Hey all, a little-big update for whoever follows us on YouTube.

As we move towards the final phases of the project, there's more and more contributions and issues and they are harder and harder to integrate. So with Chema and Amel we have decided to slow down the schedule of the livestreams to allows ourselves to work more on the game and be more reactive on the project.

We also feel like we got to a point where the improvements are many but small, vs. the beginning where we had a lot of new things to talk about. So since we value your (and our!) time, we thought it doesn't make sense to force a 2-weeks schedule and make boring livestreams.

So the next livestream will be not this coming Tuesday, but on Tuesday the 2nd of March.
See you then!

 

Hey all, livestream upcoming!

See you next Tuesday, usual time, for episode 9 of The Journey!

8am San Francisco / 11am in New York / 17:00 Central European / 19:00 in Moscow / 21:30 Mumbai/Delhi / 01:00am Tokyo
More times

 

Hey all, we just pushed an update to the project which officially brings it to 2020 LTS.

We evaluated the upgrade from 2019.4 LTS to 2020.3 LTS and honestly, it was quite smooth and painless. The game works fine with the new version so we decided to move forwards. This brings more stability to some packages which are in preview (Localisation and ProGrids - though they were stable enough already so no breaking changes here), and now we have Animation Rigging as verified.
As usual we're not looking at adding new features, so we won't be adding any additional package.

So please from now on, use 2020.3.0f1 (current LTS) to work on the project.

 

Hey all, we have just finished putting together Devlog 4 for Open Projects. I'm quite excited as I think it's going to be really useful to a lot of people! The video goes live tomorrow, but we thought it would be nice to share it with you as a preview! (so you have a chance to get that coveted "First!" comment )

We hope you like it, feel free to leave a comment if you do - even from now:

 

Hey all, we just released all the audio assets, which includes not only the final mixes and SFX (we had them in the project for a while) but also music stems, music sheets, and midi files. We thought it could be an interesting resource for aspiring sound designers, composers and musician who want to jump into this world.

Find them all at this link:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1IyutdVA05yyRfGPmf0PRK1KVpvF7zxrl




I made this silly animation to celebrate (which of course uses the stems to break up the Town theme):

Enjoy!

(in the meantime, discussion on audio goes on in the SFX and Music threads)

 

Hey all, we just updated the project to Unity 2020.3.7f1, the latest LTS available at the moment.

As usual, other 2020.3 patches should work too, but we encourage you to get the exact same patch mentioned above to ensure maximum compatibility.

 

Small update: we have a little welcome screen and link panel in the project now. You will see it the first time you open the project the next time, and it looks like this:




It's made using the In-Editor Tutorial framework, a package which I suggest to check out if you're making a tool or release sample projects, or have a big team and you frequently need to onboard new contributors.

By the way: if you want to check out the welcome dialog again after you close it, you can do so by deleting a little file called InitCodeMarker, located in the root folder of the project:



We will probably expand on the usage of this framework later on, as we finalise some of the game's systems.

 

Hey all, the project has just been updated to the latest release of 2020.3 LTS, aka 2020.3.12

One note. While previously we said that you can use any patch version (for instance, open the 2020.3.7 project with 2020.3.5, for instance), in this case one fix to the animation system has changed the behaviour with the attack animation clips. I fixed it for 2020.3.12 so please, open the main branch with that specific version.

If you attack with the PigChef and you see something like this:



You need to update Unity

 

Hey all, we have a little/big announcement to make. As you know we've been hard at work on the project for the last few months and we found, as expected, that the last 20% actually accounts for almost 50% of the work. Making individual systems is kind of easy, but tying them together and making them work in unison is kinda hard. Who would have thought

Anyway, the news is that we're trying to hit a v1.0 of the game by the beginning of August. When we say 1.0 we mean functional, fully playable, even though there might be some rough edges that we would like to fix.

To give you a small example, if we think that it would be great if the combat was more challenging or refined, that is not something that will block us from releasing 1.0. If the combat is broken, then we would have to fix it before release.

So, for the remainder of the month we'll look at finalising what we have and really evaluate things in order of priority (which has always been exposed on the roadmap, check the priority of each card) and move towards an initial release.
After release, we'll work on updates and patches (if needed) and on upgrading the game to newer Unity versions (in the long term).

We'll have more details on the details of this "launch" soon!

 

Hey all, building on the previous announcement: we are still working on the project, but we missed the finish date we hoped for by a large margin. Since we will have to share our time with other internal projects and tasks, in order to finish this game and call it a 1.0 we are temporarily asking to stop all contributions. Once we reach a good 1.0 version, we will resume them for small tweaks and additions.

So, a few things:

• We have removed or marked as in progress (blue) or taken (gold) almost all tasks in the roadmap, except for the very few ones that are basically just an inspiration to use the project for something creative (they are grey).
• There's no way to stop Pull Requests on the repository unless we make it private, which we don't want to do. So we just ask you not to open new PRs. We will work through the ones already open.

We still appreciate putting bugs (Issues) on Github though, that is going to make the game better.

Thanks!

 

Hi everyone. Sorry for the long radio silence. After a long hiatus, we come with some news. Long story short: we have decided we're putting a stop to Open Projects and to the development of Chop Chop. Let me explain why.

When we planned Chop Chop, education was the main goal. We weren't trying to prove the engine or to make money through a commercial game. We wanted to provide a unique learning opportunity for anyone not just to move their first steps in Unity, but to become more skilled with it. An environment to try something more elaborate, and to experience how it was to work with others.

We designed the game around this, establishing some key outcomes and identifying features we wanted to cover on this journey. Characters, animation, world building, shaders, input, localisation, game architecture, asset packaging, ... in short, many, many common game components. To deal with all this complexity, we decided to skip one thing: the game design and the fun. We chose so in order to make things move along and not to get entangled in designing the game, something which could have been impossible with such a distributed team.

So, when we look at the goal Open Projects was trying to achieve, we realise that it gave all it had to give. All the learning opportunities have been exploited, we produced a ton of video content, a ton of code to explore, and documented the important parts. We became better coders ourselves and we hope you did too, we explored the intricacies of using Git in a big team, and learned so much. As we approached the final stages of the game's development, we couldn't imagine how doing more work on it would actually produce more of this value.

That's why we decided to wrap it up, and to dedicate ourselves to something else. Although we can't disclose yet what it is, it will be equally and maybe even more useful, exciting, and bring a lot of good to everyone in the long run. We hope we will be able to share soon.

Of course, all of the learning materials and the project itself will stay online and available. As for Chop Chop, its spirit lives on in other initiatives we are working on, so keep an eye out and you might spot Hamlet the pig chef pop out here and there in Unity things in the near future.

Finally, if somebody wants to take the whole project, finish it, turn into an RTS, or use it for anything (including commercial uses) the project is open-source and it’s yours as much as ours so you’re totally allowed to do that.

To wrap up this crazy journey and to address any question you might have, and in general to have a chat together, we’d like to host one final live session on Monday, the 13th of December, at 18:00 Copenhagen time (CET)*, which you can join it using this link. We’ll be using Zoom this time rather than YouTube.

Hopefully see you there!


PS: if you want to drop some comments on this announcement now, we encourage you to use the Feedback thread.


* Equivalent timezones:
9am Pacific Time / 12pm Eastern Time / 10:30pm India Time (IST) / 2am Japan