Official: How Can We Serve You Better?

Regarding source code access, personally I'd rather you stay on the route of integrated third-party middleware and keep the wraps closed on source code rather than go Unreal Engine's route (which has its own merits and is really great but no middleware means that developers have to deal with licensing it or that UE team has to reimplement them in some way).

 

I'm not sure of what you've worked on already but in another thread I and some others talked about wanting in the asset store ratings reported:

01) Unity Free or Unity Pro
02) os X or Windows
03) asset was imported into a project
04) project uses platform X as build target
05) # lines in error
06) # lines warning
07) # lines deprecated
08) date of last update
09) more difficult but list of assets used side by side with reviewed asset
10) 'hide' asset from visibility (yes free assets are sometimes 'why not' but don't use or some assets aren't supported or you replaced with better solution)
11) when an app is published, what assets were used
12) More sorting and filtering options
13) Content / Genre Advisories (added to the filtering / sorting options but also to be reasonably respectful with advertising)

We talked about other improvements but it's late I forget...oh, I remember one...browsers checking the asset store scripts for Trojans is slow. In Unity, in Chrome, In IE11...Not sure if it's a browser directly checking or Windows Defender or if Windows Defender browser are both checking.

 

If Unity Free will still be there, it will not prevent UT from the same thing you've described.
At this moment there are two options: limited Free and quite expensive (from hobbyist/indie point of view) Pro. And a huge gap between them.

Once you fill that gap with some cheap subscription + royalties option, not only some of Pro users will want to convert to subscribers, but also Free users will want the same thing. They don't need to be forced to it by removing Free option. Many (I believe, most) Free users can afford $20/month subscription plan at least for some period of time easily and willingly will subscribe. 3 ex-Free subscribers will compensate 1 ex-Pro (without addons) licensee. I think, free/pro users quantities relation is tens times bigger than 3 to 1.

Also, you must be aware that Unity Free itself isn't allowed to be used by anyone. EULA declares that once you have $100000 per year gross you can not use it and must purchase a Pro license(s). The same or kind of restriction can be introduced for possible 'cheap subscription' or 'cheap subscription + royalties' plan. That would prevent studios from converting to subscribers too.

 

As an accomplished internet whiner myself, I don't think that people are going to feel anything less than everything is pointless. Any source access is better than no source access, and most people understand that some code needs to remain closed because of licensing issues. Unreal doesn't share the unsharable parts of their code but I haven't really seen people complaining about that. As long as there is enough code there for people to fix bugs and hook into features, it's a pretty huge plus.

In addition, it's not a terrible idea for Unity to gradually make their code more modular to allow clean separation from the unsharable parts, using IoC or something similar. If you guys could make the Mono binding less tangled, for example, it would let users drop in their own Mono dll, freeing you from any legal issues with Xamarin.

 

You make a confusion again. Of course all are cars.. but in different leagues.. If you put Ferrari, you should put nearby a Lamborghini also to be in same league.

 

Well I'm thinking you've wasted $374,700 because you're still got the same traffic laws the guy in the $300 car has.

 

It is not a correct comparison - car is an physical object, not data. Producing Unity costs money, but producing COPY of Unity is virtually free. So build up pricing ladder that will allow you to get as much money as each customer is willing to pay isn't basically any bad strategy. You are earning money from those who can pay 1500 bucks, but zero from those, who actually could pay, but not $1500 or $75/month. The only problem is to build an fair ladder where no one would feel price he paid is unfair.

 

I don't really think they need to discount Unity Pro. It wouldn't hurt to shake up the feature balance a little bit. Unity Pro seems to include PC/Mac/Linux/web/etc and editor features. You're getting proportionally less for your money with the iOS or Android add-on. It might feel more fair to license the "Pro Editor" (profiler, versioning, maybe non-runtime features like Lightmap GI baking, native code plugins, static batching, etc.) and then have platform addons for all the fanciest runtime graphical bells and whistles (RenderTextures, occlusion culling, LOD, HDR+tone mapping, etc.). Say $1000 for the Pro Editor features and then $1000 per platform. Then it's the same price to release on iOS Pro or on PC Pro. Right now it seems like mobile-focused developers pay twice as much as a PC developer for the same features even if they are both only targeting a single platform.

You could even license the Pro Editor without any platform addons. The profiler and some static batching, baking tools, light probes, etc. would be fantastic for mobile even when deploying with Unity Free.

Those are just idle thoughts with the point being the royalty-free license is great and should definitely stay.

However, a $19 + 5% equivalent would be great, too. For me. I'm a lone developer doing a couple small games in Unity Free and I'd switch to a royalty-based subscription in a heart beat. Once it becomes worthwhile (if sales warrant) I'd want to pick up the royalty-free license leaving Unity with the full license price plus all the royalties I paid in the interim. Unity would make more money than if I'd just stuck with Unity Free (my current plan). Of course, you'd need to have rules for not mixing license types. Once your company switches from subs+royalty to royalty-free, you have to switch all your licenses to stop paying royalties on your released titles. Just like Free and Pro currently.

Unity Free could still exist as is for people who don't need or want any pro features.

 

Howdy Unity crew, nice to hear from so many of you.
Background:
Professional game developer many years, initially from the multimedia/enterprise world back in the day. An artist and an engineer, these days I wear the title of Sr Tech Artist. I do the weird things that lay in between. Best job ever, I don’t do any one thing long enough to ever get bored. Plus I get to prototype a lot, and Unity makes it very easy for one person to knock out a proof concept very quickly.

I have been here at Disney for several years, and am on the mobile/mid-core team working on core IP games. Until recently working mostly in AS3 and native langs. I was for quite a while, that guy in the office who kept advocating Unity for future products. Internal engines are often only fun for those who build them, not those who use them. When we finally made the switch to using Unity for things other than prototypes, I began doing a lot presentations, workshops and training getting our current devs/artists up to speed. Myself and a few others are the Unity evangelists in the office.

Currently:
We are launching a large title next month, our studio’s first Unity title. 50-60 folks in total, about 15ish are engineers and another 5-10 that actually work in Unity everyday (20-30 total). For about half of those, this is their first time working with Unity. I think most would say it is a very positive experience. Several came from another project that didn’t launch, but did get a chance to work closely with some of Unity’s SF staff. Overall, we are happy with Unity and the support they have provided.

Pricing:
Obviously as a company it is very reasonable. Personally, I feel the Pro price is a great deal as well. The plugin prices, I am on fence about. Developing independently, I was easily able to justify the price of Pro, and to a degree, the price of iOS. Android and flash, not so much. The subs, given the price, weren’t attractive as they cost more overall. And I believe that having a free version is great. It is no-barrier way to get into Unity.

Source:
For the last project, we did license the source from you guys. We didn’t for this project. Though I wasn’t on that project at the time, as I understand it, the cost didn’t justify the value, and in the end maintaining and merging updates really didn’t help much. That said, other than contact/support from Unity, we were kind of on our own leveraging it, which meant a lot time and effort just getting up to speed with it. (again, just what I have heard from the devs on that project). If the source was available to everyone, or at least a much wider group, that would make a lot of difference. Unity itself is a perfect example of that. Because Unity is free to everyone, the amount of available resources from people is huge. If I get a error or warning I haven’t seen before, I can pretty much copy and paste it into google and find out exactly what it is. Its seems likely that if the source were available, it would have the same benefits and would increase its own value.

What I like:
A lot of things. A big one is the ability to deeply script the editor. For large pipelines like ours, we build a lot of tools for productivity. Having the ability to do that in Unity directly and not externally is huge benefit. It gives us direct access to the actual things needed for a build. There is a crap ton of other things I like about Unity, but it would take forever to list.

What I would like to see improved:
I know a lot of people want to see visual improvements or physics or things of that nature. I get that. From my perspective, mobile is my primary area of interest, and we typically hit hardware limits long before Unity limits. So my wish list is probably not representative of the larger user base. But they are mostly Improving the Editor UI for better productivity
Editor:
- Many more keyboard shortcuts, and the ability to remap them. Things like view switching and opening closing panels, etc…
- Improving the flow for common actions. For example, if you want to add a new script to an object, you hit add component, type in a name, hit create and double click and you are right there. Why not add a similar flow to other similar objects? Materials for example. When you click the browse for materials, it would awesome if there was a button to “create new” right there, instead of having to create in the project view. Same with animation controllers. Common setup tasks often take many steps to get there, while others (scripts, animations), only take a few.
- Improved viewing/grouping options of things like textures or materials. It is easy for the list of textures to get massive, especially if you have a bunch of UI elements, 2d art assets. A way to group/exclude/filter them on a higher level would be useful (sure you can filter by name, but it still can get huge).
- Image setting presets. When you are in a 2d project, you can default to images being sprites. I would like to see that go further. As even with sprites, I often have settings that I always use that are not default. And with most projects, you tend to use one type of setting more than others. It would be nice to have control over that.
- more alternatives to default actions. Like if I want to drag a bunch of sprites to the scene, but don’t want to create an animation, hold option or something. (unless there is way that don’t know about it)
- ability to “lock” things in the scene. Often when animating, it is easy to click on the wrong thing because of layering. I would love to lock something, but still have it visible, only be a editor state. (not recorded to the timeline).
- improved project view. maybe a column view like OSX or something. the one and two column views are awkward at the best of times.
- folders in the hierarchy. It would be great to group things in hierarchy without actually having to nest them in gameobjects.
Animation:
I love the animation tools in general, the ability to control just about anything, but…
- in editor retargeting and renaming. I can do this manually via a text editor, but a bit unwieldy if there are many anime.
- zoomable Animator view.
- copy and paste more discrete elements. If I want to copy the keys of a single frame from one anim to another, it brings the whole timeline.
- copy and paste transforms. It would very helpful to copy a transform curve or curves to another element.
- improved adding of keys/curves. If i have a multi part animation, using the add curve button is pain, click all the way down to the rotation. And then again for the scale, and then again for the position. Either adding them in bulk, or having a keyframe button in the inspector for any part I have selected. It is very bulky to get setup.

Hmm… wow, that is actually more than I intended, and there are still more. I just kept going once I got started.
Honestly, none of those are deal-beakers or huge pains, just spending many hours a day in Unity, even a handful of seconds or minutes saved here and there really add up.


Anyway, I really hope that this more active visibility and interaction with community becomes the norm. It is much appreciated.

Cheers,
ZG

 

Most basic thing is the quality of the navmesh itself. When working with a terrain that has lots of trees, it is almost impossible to make it create a good navmesh. It creates lots of thin and long polygons that just isn't desirable. I ended up using A* Pathfinding Project, because the navmesh it generates is infinitely better than what Unity can. I've made a side by side comparison of generated meshes before, and Unity one had big problems with large sections of the map being inaccessible and others being very hard to traverse. Settings provided just doesn't allow us to create better quality navmesh.

On top of this, using Unity solution with a large map is a guaranteed crash. Additive loading is also a concern. We cannot generate navmeshes during runtime (from scrach), and runtime modification is extremely limited at this point. I'm guessing U5 will address some of these, but that is still 6-8 months away.

Example: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/141755330/Screenshot 2014-05-15 11.31.52.png

Edit: While we are at it, Unity NavMesh treats all trees on Terrain as colliders, as seen the pic above, the bushes do not have any collision, yet NavMesh treats them as if they are.

 

Some area that is not touched yet is AssetBundle (or object load in runtime in general) support, which has been quite a low priority in Unity updates and fixes.

These are the main problems we have found:

a) AssetBundles are not compatible (platforms/version): This is really nasty feature as we load assetbundles from server at runtime and thus have to keep track what to load in which client app (platform / version updates). Also to build all the asset over an over again when new Unity version is used is a pain (even we have automated that already)... It seems the AssetBundles are only binary serialization of the objects, but it really needs a proper file format to be compatible between platforms and versions.

b) We needed to do some own hacks to get the baked lightmaps included in the AssetBundles. Not nice.

c) Shaders might work/not work when loaded from AssetBundles. We currently use our own AssetBundle loader that reattaches materials to the objects.

Hope we see some improvement with theses someday

BR,
Juha

 

Not sure if it's been said already (thread too looooong), but in my opinion Unity is both too cheap and too expensive at the same time.

Unity's biggest weakness pricing-wise, when compared to Unreal, is the upfront per-seat cost. The reality is, for what you get, Unity IS cheap. The problem is in the TCO across all the platforms people want to deploy on. I thought the $1500 each for iOS and Android Pro was a bit much originally, but given the mature state of Unity on those platforms now it seems ludicrous. $500 for the team add-on, the only part of which I care about is built-in Perforce integration, is also ludicrous.

If Unity Pro cost $2500/seat, for everything, that would be much closer to a slam dunk for me.

The current subscription pricing is bonkers, and does not become a worthwhile financial proposition until your team size is substantially larger than Unity's relatively poor support for revision-control with branching workflows realistically allows for.

I should mention that all of this is moot if Unity can't start delivering things when they say they will. I'm a 15 year industry veteran... With Unreal, I can build anything myself if they don't have it yet. I can't do that with Unity - I'm dependent on you guys to deliver, and the track record has not been great. When new/upgraded features arrive (e.g. Mecanim), they do 20% of what I care about really well, do 60% of what I care about in a kinda messed up way that only really works well in simple demos, and simply don't support the other 2 20% at all (and there's nothing I can do about it).

To me, the fix for this is for Unity to have an internal game team, staffed with real industry folks, building a substantial game. Eat your own dog food. You will feel the pain, and will be motivated to fix it. As an added bonus, you're likely to hire some solid artists who can create demo material that better shows what your tech is capable of. You got a great demo out of a great art team once, but unfortunately it was a non-interactive movie directed in Unity, with a lot of custom tech that didn't get released.

 

Please include tips for facial animation, since facial bones are not in the retarget menu...

 

OMG!! Thanks for taking a real interest in your audience. I was losing faith in UTs interest in the dev community.

I think a cheap subscription price point for UT Pro is a good thing ... maybe at $30-$40 per month ... approx $10 per week. Simply because Pro is packed with essential features and all new developers should have a decent time period to explore them. I own a Pro license but I dont want to spend $600 to upgrade to Unity 5. I have spent around $2000 on Unity licenses and a couple of asset store items and I am feeling the financial pain of a hobby that I hope one day to make a profession.

A new improved optimized terrain system would be great ... caves, decent cliffs, improved draw calls etc.

A road map of future developments would be great. I love Blender and how they plot developments and give insights into meetings.

BUT most importantly the price ... please make Pro more accessible to everyone.

What I do ...
Designer by day, developing a VR event in the evening ... launching later this year.

Steve

 

You didn't include anything about an integrated visual logic system which I'm pretty sure was mentioned more than some of the things on that list.

Your competitor now has a state of the art visual logic system in the form of Blueprints which is one of the most frequently cited benefits of UE4. In addition, there has been a suggestion for one near the top of the Feedback Forum marked "under review" for years, and Playmaker and other visual editors are some of the most popular extensions in the asset store, so there is obviously a big demand for designing logic in more visual ways.

For every person that is good at designing with code there are at least a dozen or more creative and talented people who would like to make games but are more visually oriented. Epic, with the Blueprint system, has not only opened the door but rolled out the red carpet for them.

Even experienced coders, once they get over their prejudices against visual editing, usually come around to the benefits of it. As the technology continues to improve more and more logic development will continue to be done visually. Why has Unity thus far ignored this trend?

 

I'm a hopeful indie dev, currently no games shipped but working on projects part time. Wear many hats, but primarily a coder, with lots of prior experience in C++ and various other languages. Started using Unity about 8 months ago, and by and large love it.

I think pricing is fine; it's very reasonable for what you get. The major, major issue I have with Unity is it's lack of a consistent level of quality. Frankly, UT seems to focus heavily on sticking in shiny new features to attract new customers, then leave them half-finished. To the severe detriment of existing customers.

I would be over the moon if UT took a step back from providing new features, and really spent time on making existing features work. A blog post I wrote recently with more detailed thoughts on this: http://gameoflyje.wordpress.com/2014/03/25/engine-fiiiight-unity-vs-unreal-vs-cryengine/

While, as I say, pricing isn't a particular issue for me, I think it could be for others and that blog post also includes thoughts on that.

 

Me:
Lead developer of small company located in Estonia. Started out with Unity 3.2. We have completed educational 3D FPMMO project containing a lot of different features on PC. Working currently on 3D Android/iOS game.

Pricing:
Historically Unity price has been "really cheap", but it all changed this March, and we all know why. Roughly when you have to buy 10x licenses for Pro/iOS/Android you have to make 1M with your game to pay similar fee to Epic. And to match tools and features with UE4 you have to buy a lot from asset store. And the ability to cancel UE4 subscription any time (still have the tools and ability to ship your product) make it really good for newcomers working on first project.
Unity should offer cheap entry for newcomers and flexible licensing to veterans.

Communication:
After submitting bug report there is little feedback was it fixed, some of bugs still remain in open state even, if i have found them fixed in release notes, why?
Obvious bugs have been marked as features without clear explanation.

Subscriptions vs software licenses:
Epic is able to do both subscriptions and give out licenses at same time (you can cancel subscriptons and can continue using tools acquired during subscription period).

Closed source vs open source:
At current update rate of Unity, open source is mandatory, as it takes years or months to fix showstopper bugs/broken features. If Unity could push out 1-2 minor bugfix updates per month, it could remain closed source.
We still have this kind of lines in our code:
//Workaround for unity terrain / tree quit crash (Case 552192)
System.Diagnostics.Process.GetCurrentProcess().Kill();

And we have to start couple of levels before building a project to avoid AnimationEvent related runtime crashes (AnimationEvent::Transfer<SafeBinaryRead> + 0x14695)

Biggest problems getting game done:
1. Lack of 64bit editor, if you are working slightly larger scenes than 1 room, then you run into a lot of issues and crashes.
2. Unity shipping broken and incomplete features, it take ages to create workarounds (Mecanim)
3. OSX Editor beeing practically unusable since Mavericks and Unity 4.x (hangs, crashes, freezes)
4. Beast/Editor crashing with high vertex counts -> unable to bake lightmaps.
5. Unusable networking solution for anything more complex than, "Move-a-Cube".
6. Lack of GUI system (promised in 3.x cycle now in 4.x don't belive it until i see it )

Thanks,
Imre

 

hello I am Josh I am going to college so I can program for iOS devices.... however there's a problem... I noticed that the only programming languages you have are JavaScript, Boo, C# But the iOS Devices Run On Objective C is there a possible way you could add support for this language? I'm in America.

 

Who I am: I'm a hobbyist developer. Like, seriously hobbyist. I have a couple of hours to spare every week and I want to make them count. I don't have much in the way of a budget either.

I'm a programmer, but I prefer to work on app-specific logic rather than boilerplate/engine/framework stuff. So Unity's design fits my personality very well.

I'm just gonna go ahead and ramble a bit about my experiences. I don't have any structure here.

Super grateful for the Free version. It's really awesome that it can deploy to mobile too. I couldn't use Unity at all without the Free version, and I hope to upgrade to Pro someday when and if I make a game worth selling.

My major frustration right now is my lack of free time, which I'm sure you can't do much about (Feature request for 6.x: time travel?) But a more relevant frustration relates to the release of critical features - I bought both 2D Toolkit and Daikon Forge GUI, both of which were replaced with something a lot better before I had a chance to use them. This is probably my own fault, but it could possibly have been mitigated by having a more detailed roadmap.

Another weakness I recently had to deal with was networking. Whoo that's bad. My hobbyist team barely got our multiplayer top-down movement working and even then it's a house of cards. I do not look forward to implementing health, weapons, and inventory. UNET looks promising, but I don't know anything about it yet, just that it will be "better".

Whenever I'm working on player controls (usually in 2D games or very simple 3D), I feel like I'm fighting the physics engine more than it's helping me. Usually, I'll reach a point where I just want to ditch it and write my own movement logic, but then how would I handle collisions? Should I do Physics checks for collisions every frame?

Finally, even though I've been using Unity for years, I still don't feel like I understand best practices for code architecture. I always seem to get lost after implementing basic player movement. How should I handle the level lifecycle, in a global GameManager object? Should the Health component handle taking damage, or should the Weapon component deal the damage? Should I use SendMessage() to reduce coupling or use strongly typed references for better compile-time safety? What do I have to do to enable pausing (more importantly, why isn't that just built into the engine)? Maybe I should spend some more time looking at samples, but they often seem like they're written for (and sometimes by) beginner programmers, which I'm not - I'm fairly intermediate, I'm just a noob at Unity.

Oh, another thing: It really irks me that I can't set a C# interface as an Inspector property, i.e:

Code (csharp):

1.  
2. interface IControllable
3. {
4.   void SetMovementDirection(Vector3 dir);
5. }
6.  
7. class AIController : MonoBehavior
8. {
9.   public IControllable ControlThisThing;
10. }
11.  

This is kind of a contrived example but I keep finding that I need a component that satisfies a contract, rather than something in a direct inheritance tree.

 

Appears to be many Unity devs watching this space so I just wanted to take this opportunity to say that...

Please stop enforcing the Game View when we hit Play!

Seriously, it has probably cost me hundreds of thousands of mouse clicks over the years. I remember the good old days when it was not so in Unity 3 or 2, and it was so nice. Please at least make it a toggle somewhere in the prefs or next to the "Maximize on Play" or something, its just 2 lines of code. If we're working in the Scene View, it means we want to work in the Scene View, please respect that

Thank you and keep up the amazingness,
Pärtel

 

First of all, I love Unity and I received a lot of help from Unity..
I was worried about the future
Numerous techniques have been born and gone Flash was the best, but now there is no future
Unity is now the best. No one knows the future. Unity do not have a competitor.. Game Engine's war has begun

Of course, I pray for the victory of Unity But the problem is Development capabilities
Unreal team is the best of the best .. But, Company's strategy was wrong and now chose the right strategy

For the time being, the unity will be an absolute advantage... because Unreal has now started .. Unity will have to run faster in the future
but there are ominous of sign. UGUI... took too much time .. NGUI is one man team... Unity Team was defeated by NGUI
becasuse NGUI has been on the market ... and Was verified .. Already received a lot of love.. NGUI 3.5.X is innovative

UGUI product does not exist in the market... UGUI has a long way to go (summer? maybe.. The end of August? It's too late. 5.0 is coming soon..)

I know that you have announced UNET... But reminds me of the uGUI. Great promise, but do not know when it is
The problem is just this.... Unity Made a great plan, but do not know when.. ugui was a terrible waiting
I hope this did not happen, please..

(UNET is similar to the TNET(NGUI guy's another asset) .. To reduce the time as soon as possible hire him.. I hope UNET are not like UGUI .. Time is very important in this field .. I do not want to experience such a nightmare )

 

Well, let me chime in...

I'm a hobbyist with a very concrete idea for a niche 3D game/simulation that I might even make a living off. For my somewhat esoteric game I will need a couple of features from Pro. The biggest problem with the Unity pricing scheme for me is, simply, risk. I am am well aware of the high probability that I'll never get my game out of the door, so I simply can't justify purchasing Pro up front only to write it off because i was just daydreaming after all. A subscription with the current pricing isn't an alternative as well. I definitely wouldn't mind buying a no-royalty Pro license when I'm close to releasing my game, though. So I would vote for a "Pro for everybody, but shipping a game requires a license". Whether this has to be enforced with a watermark, I don't know.

Also, I would really argue for an open source model. Not necessarily in the sense of "the community can contribute to the code", but rather to use this as a base and modify it per project if needed.

 

Hey, thought I'd chime in. I'm an artist and I've been using Unity for a few years, on various projects with varying degrees of challenge and practicality. I'm working on a developing game company currently consisting of two people on a 3d PC game.

From the first post, I really like the idea of having a "non commercial free" version of Unity pro, where you can use it for as long as you want but when you build out it says "not for commercial use" at the start or has a watermark during the actual game. Then of course there could still be the full commercial version that you can buy to use all the pro features in a final, commercialized release. I think this would help a lot of casual and younger developers be attracted to Unity. I started using Unity when I was a teenager, and if Unreal Engine 4 existed at the time I might have chose it over Unity just because it has more features for less of the price (Unity pro matches these features but would have been out of my budget). Keep in mind, these younger people become future buyers (like myself!) Of course, you can't beat free, so I think having basically an infinite trial for Pro would be both a smart business decision and please the customers a lot.

In general I don't like subscriptions. If you guys kept the same model you have now I'm still going to stick with Unity. I just think what I outlined above might be an improvement for people more on the fence.

Personally I don't think you have to release the source code, but if you do it should be an additional cost.

One thing that concerns me a little bit about 5.x is the additional cost for Web GL. Since that is replacing the web player, you guys are basically charging for something that used to be free. This isn't relevant to me at all in the near future, but I can imagine being concerning for some people considering Unity.

I know you guys probably can't comment on this, but do you have a ballpark estimate of when the Unity 5 beta is going to come out? Just a fiscal quarter (I.E Q3), ballpark season (I.E around fall), or just a general statement (some time this year) would be helpful. We started our project pretty soon to when the Unity 5 announcement happened, so we are targeting Unity 5 as our development platform. An example of how this comes into play is, on my end, I'm targeting a PBR based workflow for my art assets. Just knowing when to expect it will help a lot for planning on my team, and I'm sure for other people as well.

Thanks a lot for making this thread, and keep up the good work!

 

That's really excellent to hear, thank you for your response. It's very encouraging to know that these concerns are being listened to!

 

If you don't mind me asking, are there any terrain improvements for 5.x?

 

This is a really exciting post. Sounds like some great improvements are underway.

 

The first patch fixes this "Fixed a hang on quit issue". Yay!

1 GB? Would it be possible in to not have to download the whole thing again though?

 

Excellent - now the fix for the editor hanging on exit (until adb.exe is force-closed) can be pushed out OOPS, is out!
Using Unity at home work is generally great but when the latest editor releases don't even shutdown properly for weeks ( many report it) I do wonder what is going on with the priorities at Unity.

A built-in text editor is also great for quick editing (Livity was almost there and had good auto-complete).

 

Almost. Here's a few other heavily mentioned topics:

• 
  * Address Shuriken - documentation, full-featured API, and updates like 2D support.
  * The subscription is TOO expensive. $75+$75+$75 ...
  * Make Add-ons a part of the Pro purchase. $1500+$1500+$1500+$1500 ...

Gigi

 

hi!

first thanks for unity!

re:

those are very true statements...

really great ideas!

i'm learning/developing with unity and hopefully one day will have something that i could sell on steam desktop (pc).

a pro license with a watermark that would allow me to develop and test using pro features and then only require payment when and if i ever ship a game would really be great for me.

such an option would allow me to put the limited money that i have into assets, such as those found in the unity asset store, and if one day i have a game that gets on steam well then paying for pro license should not be a problem since i have something hopefully that is selling.

i also think that a royalty scheme for pro that gives me access to pro an updates would be great too so long as it is no unreasonable.

finally, the subscription model could also be workable, but it would have to come down in price a lot from what it currently is.

i guess look at what other game engine companies are doing like unreal and see what you could do to make pro more affordable and accessible to indie developers, such as myself.

best regard!

me

 

For those of us who have been around since 1.x days, this rings hollow - because most of the early features appear to have been shipped and forgotten. The list could go on and on. The curve editor / legacy animation system, the terrain system - but more than anything else, the GUI and Input systems. Yes they had bugfixes, but they needed a lot more love - it's cool to release these features half baked, as long as people continue working on them. And all of us who have developed games know that unrelated features do come at the cost of other things. They consume QA time, they require other systems to account for them, they add overhead. Also, god knows how all these systems interact...

I'm about to spend the rest of the day writing classes to abstract input enough so that when a user disconnects and reconnects a joystick, I can at least prompt them to choose which joystick belongs to which player - an onerous fallback which is required since the input system doesn't provide enough information to uniquely identify joysticks or maintain slots - not through the USB position, or any unique ID, or anything....

I sincerely appreciate the enhanced graphics buffers that come in each release. But seriously, why should an existing user touch a 'new' networking package. The last one was barely supported throughout it's life.

The render engine, sound engine, the PhysX and mono core are really the only things I trust to have meaningful improvements made anymore.

 

About me:
I studied Architecture and got into Unity Indie (when it costed something like 200 bucks) just in time when you introduced the free version. I even got my money back from you (thanks, by the way!) I used it for pre-viz in my job (didn't distribute the files, I used it just for internal pitches), but for the last couple years, I've been getting into games. I'm a beginner/intermediate scripter, really good at 3D and music. I've switched project ideas a couple times out of whim, but I'm settled on a third person platformer game right now.

Pricing:
From a pre-viz point of view, I thought that the Unity Pro version was quite expensive, since the only thing it got when competing with the free version was real time shadows, and you could bake those in 3D programs, so why bother...
Now, for games... the $1,500 dollars is not expensive, taking into consideration all the workflow tools your engine integrates, and that a good tool like 3DS Max or Maya costs twice as much (2D programs are way cheaper, so content creation for 2D is also cheaper and I think that's why you see more 2D games, but I digress.) Anyhow, pricing schemes have changed due to competition, distribution options, etc., and like you stated earlier, anyone can make games. From a kid in Vietnam, to a full blown studio. I think you guys should offer different schemes to different backgrounds. If you are really focusing on services, then make it personal.
For example, I'm developing a 3D platform game (ala Mario 64) just for fun and learning, but I do intend to post it at the Mac App store and the iOS iTunes store. I'm advancing at my own pace since it's a side project. But if you guys talked to me, maybe I wouldn't pay you the $3,000 dollars to deploy to OS X and iOS for my first game to see what it comes from it. Not because your engine and development efforts don't deserve it (believe me, they do and I admire you guys), but because my family responsibilities (wife) won't take that chance. How to solve it, then?
Offer the whole Unity features for 200 dollars. Let us develop full blown games and test them within the editor. If we want to deploy them, we could get in contact with you guys, and probably if you offered a final game compile service with a price of 200 or 300 bucks per target platform, I would pay that. No royalties or subscription (in my opinion, that only is beneficial for studios, not individuals or indie teams of two or three.) If my game does not do good, I just go on, keep having fun with your editor and 3D stuff and pay you 200 bucks per major version. If it does well, chances are I'll get a second game out within a one year period, and pay you again another 200 or 300 dollars for the final compile service per target platform.
Why $200 or $300? It's not cheap, nor expensive, might get you more paid users since you are offering Pro features, and doesn't hurt a family's household budget that much if you are a parent, teenager or aspiring developer (I completely ignore if it'd be good business for you, though.)

What I like:
Art pipeline, ease of use, interface (even though some would say it's getting old, I like the fact that is extremely focused.)

Improvements:
I cannot speak from the "extremely programming expert" POV, but maybe you could concentrate more focused tutorials on your website. For example, programming tutorials for the graphic artists, for the musicians, etc. Or tutorials that explain how to create a certain kind of functionality from scratch in plain language (instructors should speak clearly, at a moderate pace and explaining EVERYTHING.) God knows how many tutorials I've found for the third person controller where the instructor says "Ok, let's copy and paste that code here, because that's the code for the vector math we need..." and you end up saying "What?!" There's a lot of material on the net, but making sense out of all the info, especially if you are not familiar with programming practices, is a daunting task. Visual development tools are cool (when beginning), but scripting will always be needed.

Communicating with you
I've only had the experience when you transitioned from the paid Unity Indie version to the free version. I payed for the Indie version, couple of days went by and you released the Free version. I sent an e-mail regarding this, you guys responded and I got my money back in less than a week (if I remember correctly.) Why not apply this to personal, custom licensing schemes only when you need to publish the game. You can even throw in some advice on how to promote and sell your games as part of the process, since what you need is that your customers succeed.

 

Who am I:
My name is Richard Cheek and I started in professional game development back in the late 80's working as a 2D artist/animator on early 8 bit systems. Since then I've worked on way too many games to mention for most systems up to xbox 360/ps3. More recently I've been concentrating mainly on 3d animation and have been working on movies and TV shows as well as TV commercials as a technical director and animator.

What am I working on:
Because I started in games I thought it would be fun to do something by myself on the side so I bought unity pro/IOS pro and started work on a mobile RPG game. It's been over a year now and the project has turned into a massive undertaking, but one I'm still having fun with and will finish eventually.

How can unity serve me better:
Before I answer this, I have to say unity is a great engine and there is no way I could have created what I have so far without it. By myself I've got nearly 3 hours of game play created in a diablo style RPG and I'm only using 1 asset from the asset store.

My main problems with unity are the unfinished features. For example, I bought pro because there where a few features I needed like path finding. After trying it out, I found I couldn't get path finding to work well enough and I had to buy a A* plugin instead. If you have 2 navmesh agents attack each other, they slow down and try and avoid each other, and unless all avoidance is turned off, there seems to be no way to fix this.

Recently I decided IOS was too flooded and took advantage of the free windows phone export with pro. I switched the project over to windows and then found a lot of the features where missing. Even simple things like fog do not work on windows phone.

One of my wishes for the game is to make it co-op multiplayer, but I couldn't find a lot of information about networking in unity and then I find out it doesn't work on windows phone anyway.

The hot topic at the moment still seems to be price, but personally I think unity is very reasonable, actually very cheap considering other software I own cost a lot more. Unfortunately, I can make a lot more money with my maya license than I have with unity, so for this topic I fall into the hobbyist category and find IOS and Android too expensive. Personally I would love to see those 2 combined, but on a more realistic level, they are very cheap for what you can do with them, just not cheap enough for someone who doesn't know the outcome of their game yet. This seems to be the area where Unreal looks like a better option to beginners.

One other problem I've found is this forum doesn't seem to work for me. I can't edit posts or add image attachments very easily any more. I would love to update the first post on my WIP thread to include new screen shots, but last time I tried it just deleted everything and I didn't want the risk of losing the post.

I have more I could add, but there are a lot of good points in this thread already which cover most of it, plus I seemed to have typed more than I meant too.

 

So these "improvements" that should be in 4.x are in 5.x, so once again, 4.x will cease to exist as an updated product, and my $1500 license is worth crap.. So much for listening huh? And no, not a majority said $1500 for Pro is ok. Its about 50/50..... Please sir go back and read through them again, I am sensing you missed a bunch.

 

Yes please!!

 

@ Bib

You missed the Cinematic / sequence editor.

Hands up who would like an easy way to do cut scenes efficiently in Unity? This doesn't apply to PC / Mac / Console only, cut scenes on mobile games is becoming more and more popular.

That being said, the only thing that's a deal breaker for us is being fixed with Unity 5.0 (64-Bit editor). We have a lot riding on getting a demo out before beginning of 2015. So let us know how you get on .

 

Freelance programmer here.

Extended pro trial licenses are already available by email request though, but maybe 60 days wouldn't hurt for Unity 5, every little bit goes towards making you guys look better and it wouldn't hurt IMO.
The current model worked for me, if it wasn't for Unity Free I probably wouldn't have used Unity. The only pricing change I'd recommend is maybe have a rethink about charging 1.5k for every new add-on. Although it doesn't personally affect me, I don't have the resources to release on every platform and if I did then I'd be able to afford them all. I'm usually targeting one platform specifically.

Nope. If I could develop for the Console why wouldn't I have 1.5k?

3D games don't necessarily take more time to make, they just happen to be what COD, GTA, Halo, (insert some extremely popular game) are using and when the "unenlightened" try to make their game it's usually going to be inspired by one of those. There are so many art assets and game code already made for them all, it's easy for them to put together a prototype thrown together. The same isn't true for 2D. Pretty much anyone can come to this conclusion though heh.

I want to see technical blog posts. I want to see some hints where Unity is headed. I want more information on future features. I want some communication. Is WebGL going to let me have drag and drop? Can I access the hard drive from Web GL?(This is a big question and I'd really appreciate if this was answered).

Yeah, I do. I think though maybe it should just be a "nudge" and "encouragement"(Not forced) to post here though. If we welcome them with loving arms, we respond with love and show some appreciation they might be more enthusiastic about their job. I'm sure them not interacting with the community doesn't help their morale, most of us are people with mindsets just like them and are in the same career.

It's very important for me to own my software license and I will never go with a subscription unless the price of the software is unreasonable for me.

Sounds like a lot of work IMO, it'd be really nice but it would be too much overhead/effort and would slow down development time.

It'd take a while to list, I'm just going to say that I'd love to see cross-platform assetbundles even if that means the file is a little bigger and make more stuff that unity does backend in the editor become exposed at runtime. A good example is TextAssets, which don't let me create them at runtime...why not?
Why can't I set the value of a key in the curves manually instead of dragging it around?(Correct me if this is possible without having to write code, the reason I say this is because it seems like it's so basic it should be there).


I've written some tools to get around a lot of the issues I've had to replace basic functionality, so it's kind of hard to come up with a huge list since none of them affect me any more. My code is littered with workarounds, I kind of forget about most of them until I move onto a new project and it's all fresh in my mind again.