[RELEASED] trueSKY Alpha for Unity Pro - Volumetric Skies, Clouds, and Time-of-Day

Unity sent me a mail claiming that "the asset" requires additional steps to activate that are disallowed under the Unity licence. It's a stock email. It's hard to tell - but perhaps this refers to the fact that it takes the Unity invoice number to be entered on the Sequencer in order to activate it. We did this so we could offer 30-day trials and people could try before buying.

My inclination is to withdraw trueSKY from the Asset Store. We'll offer full support and upgrades, and continue to sell the plugin on our website, and through trusted resellers. But the restrictions from Unity seem to be too onerous, and if I can't even get a hand-written email from them, they're not paying attention.

So no matter if you bought trueSKY from our site or the asset store, full support and free upgrades will continue. We'll press on with the Unity console versions also.

 

That's interesting, and good to hear about.

The way you've got it now, the download on the asset store is the same as one you might have on your website, and just uses the invoice number? Have I got that part right?

I know that other assets available have trial versions or free versions or whatever on the store, and require outside activation or registration. Mostly the Augmented Reality ones, etc which require you to have downloaded and agreed to something else, with the store asset being basically the connector and demo scene. Bit weird that just putting in an invoice number would be too much of a pain in the ass for Unity, especially on an asset of this caliber (top 1% of price and quality)

I get that Unity wants their asset store to be a one stop easy safe secure well known one step idiot proof environment as much as possible, but I didn't think it was a bother to copy in one number...

Maybe, the trick is to offer some sort of trial on the asset store and a buy link to your store within the asset? Is that allowed?

 

Oh, so it was basically Unity taking it off the Asset Store, not you - that is good to hear (even though it's not good news, of course, but it's much better than you discontinuing trueSky which is what one could think reading the - stock - message of the asset deprecation).

That is also great to hear ... I need PlayStation 4 support. We finally moved our project to Unity 5.5 and I'll try re-activating the levels we currently have disabled (because trueSky broke a while back when we moved to Single-Pass rendering and we were not able to get it back running on Unity 5.4.3).

 

Sounds promising. If support is ongoing, I can probably throw it in my sig at some point and spread the word. Only if it's actually faster than horizon's though

Moving away from the wild west of asset store myself too, I think quality > quantity and all that.

 

That's correct, and the plugin is the same software, without restrictions, that large developers are using for triple-A games.

It is peculiar, we're awaiting a reply from a human at Unity, so I'm assuming it's the invoice number thing, but can't say for certain. I've always found their tech people to be top-notch, but we've never had good communication from the business side.

That's correct, and the plugin is the same software, without restrictions, that large developers are using for triple-A games.

Not if the "primary purpose" of the free thing is to make sales outside the store. But we really want the widest availability for this, so we're exploring all options.

But thanks very much for the support, rest assured we'll make sure trueSKY remains available and fully featured for Unity developers.

 

Oops, I jumped to conclusions then. But it's great to see you are continuing with it, recently put it into a scene based around Conwy in North Wales and it certainly makes the scene stand out compared to any of the alternatives. I would have hated having to drop the asset in future projects, thanks for clarifying what happened- seems a bit annoying having to drop it over simply just having a further verification process in there.

 

If Simul ever can talk to a human at Unity, I bet the issue gets quickly resolved.

All too often I hear about something the asset store is doing that is on the basis of one employee making a judgment call without consulting anyone (like the vendor).

Probably a string of other store employees saw this situation and judged one way (approving), and now a new one is judging the other way (disapproving).

 

@aliceingameland or @SaraCecilia might be able to point a human to this asset store issue. Seems a shame to drive customers away from asset store in this vulnerable transition period.

 

BTW, I've noticed that long time store vendors larsbertram (AFS) and David Miranda (Fog Volume) recently got their plugin updates held for a long time then rejected for a simple reason: use of Unity Standard Assets in the package.

I guess that's not an issue here, but it sure would be good to talk to someone in the approval department to see if there is some kind of misunderstanding, or simple way to resolve this issue.

 

It's certainly not what the form email we got mentioned. But talking to a human would go a long way for sure!

 

Definitely, because the asset store rulings are somewhat arbitrary. For instance, the asset store just released a new asset - and a "featured" one to boot - that contains Standard Assets.

As someone else said, probably they roll dice to see which assets pass and which get rejected.

 

The working of the asset store approval system is a strange beast to be sure, would indeed give the impression of being a dice roll process.

 

Hi everyone,

I would like to confirm whether or not trueSKY now supports Mac natively before I buy it. It is unfortunately a dealbreaker as I have to support PC, Mac and Linux.

I ran an evaluation version of trueSKY about a year and a half ago, if not longer. I was of course very impressed by the quality, but I had very heavy resource usage and unfortunately the low performance caused me to turn to another solution. I am now however returning to ask for everyone's opinions on how well the system runs in Unity. I would very much like to use trueSKY for our day/night cycle if it is no longer as heavy.

Thanks,
-Josh

 

I'm trying to decide whether to update to Unity 5.5 or 5.6. Just noticed there's no 5.6 build available yet for tS, but of course, 5.6 was only released a week ago. Do you have an ETA for it, @rvkennedy ? Or does the 5.5 version perhaps work with 5.6?

Cheers,
Jay

 

I just bought Truesky and I've run into an issue


The mountains are about 10km away, but the clouds "on" should be even further away.

I moved the camera a bit closer



I'm using the RTP Shader, I don't know if that's why it's acting like that?
In the Demo scene it was the same, so I tried redownloading and reimporting the asset, and that fixed the demo scene, clouds now position themselves behind the terrain as they should, but my own scene is still .. "wrong".

Talking of the Demo scene, the pointlight seems to have a problem

 

One thing I just noticed.
The scene currently has 3 lights.
2 directional and 1 spot.
When I initialized the scene I allowed the wizard to apply sun and moon, which resulted in one of the directional lights was assigned as moon and the spot was assigned as sun, the second directional was completely ignored.

 

Problem: "Cloud shadows" not working (can't see them in my scene or Simul demo). Nothing changes even a bit.
x64 Unity v5.5.2 / v5.5.3, stable version of TrueSky (also tested on some March builds - same problem). Anyone got them working in Unity 5.5.x?

 

No, I have the same issue with the cloud shadows. And also the precipitation does not work for me.

 

I have no idea what I did but the clouds have gone from being in front of the terrain to being entirely behind the terrain.

Also, I see this was mentioned earlier, but I have these odd "rips" between the terrain and the clouds. It's possible that once I've figured out why my clouds aren't behaving like I'd expect them to (being behind some parts of the terrain, but allow me to fly above them and have them obscure the terrain and water) that that may be fixed too.


All that said, when they aren't bugging out they are incredibly beautiful!

 

OK, I thought it may be simply one of the quirks of being in alpha, but I set up a test project and it worked fine. So whatever the problem is, seems to stem from it conflicting with something in my main project.
I set up a test scene in my main project with just a plane and clouds, the plain simply so I had geometry. and again the clouds rendered behind it, even though they were supposed to be in front.
Next step will simply be to recreate the project and see if I can figure out the culprit

 

Keen to hear how you go, Mr-Logan, I'm getting the same thing

 

@Exbleative So far I've deduced that RTP seems to be compatible, but AQUAS water certainly is not.
That however doesn't explain why the clouds are simply behind everything.

My next step is going to be to duplicate the main project, and then simply rip one component out after the other until it 'hopefully' works

 

Is that some UnityFS sim I'm seeing? I recognise the pink bit on the tail section

Good to hear about the RTP compatibility, I'm about to integrate that part myself.


Also, and I feel it isn't said enough in this thread, to the devs, Truesky is gorgeous and fantastic. We've gotta get into the habit of putting more screenshots up here instead of just oogling our scene views in private, give them a moral boost and make the thread not look like 100% complaints.

 

I snapped this screenshot yesterday while testing. I kind of want godrays too, but can't figure out how that setting works, but even without the godrays it looks absolutely gorgeous!


As for the pink, yes that is indeed a tiny artifact of the UFS standard aircraft

We're working on an open world trading game.
Think Mount and Blade with steampunk aircrafts!

 

Yes, you're right trueSky looks amazing. Two shots from my boat simulation project - "Across the Seas".

 

I plucked everything from the project, except truesky and the clouds are still behind everything.
So what ever is causing it .. is hiding .. xD

I just discovered that TrueSKY has its own error log, it contained the following:


"Project directory: E:\Unity3D\Wings of Steam - Copy
QTDIR
Main.cpp(503): warning B0001: WARNING: errno!=0: Invalid argument"

Edit
What ever it is, it's burried deepish, even removing everything from the project, including truesky, closing unity, removing all folders except the asset folder (that's library, project settings etc), all project files (cs, sln etc etc), booting up unity, reimporting truesky and adding it to a fresh scene, it is still broken.
However the error log is now empty.

 

Kinda bad of me to talk pics without uploading one. Made in SF. Anyone in bris going to the SF thingo in a few weeks? You'll see more of this there.

 

@Exbleative I've written to the devs with my stripped down version of the project, so hopefully there'll be some progress on that point.

In the meantime here's a beautiful morning shot above the clouds!

 

Hi,
I've been out of the loop for a while, so maybe I'm missing something, but the asset store link to TrueSky says the asset has been depreciated and is no longer available to new customers.
Is it true that the asset is no longer supported, or just a temporary issue?

 

It's available from the simul website, you can register your order number there to download.
The versions there, we're always ahead of asset store anyways.

 

Thanks for the info John, I'll register with Simul and download from there in future.

 

Anyone have any idea how I'd include or auto install/prompt the install of the DirectX 2010 SDK when people run my game? Seems some (all?) computers that don't have it installed will cause the sky to be black.

 

@Exbleative this is not the place to ask, and not a problem I've considered, but perhaps have a custom launcher that installs them before running the game?

 

I have an issue with the sky brightness at night. At midnight the sky looks very bright and at around 6 o'clock the sky is much darker. And another issue is the water (PlayWay water), it looks also too bright at night.

The sky at midnight.


The darkness of the sky at around 6am. Looks really nice.


Here ist the same scene with Tenkoku with really dark night sky and the darkened PlayWay water. It would be nice to get the same result with trueSky at night.


Marko

 

Have you tried changing the the ambient light level?

 

Yes, without success.

 

Will this work on OSX? thanks.

 

Have you adjusted the [brightness power] in sky properties, level down from 1.0 to something smaller like 0.25.
This decreases the light level power from the moons ambient light at night.

 

Thanks for the hint John. My current value is 0.25, but if I level up the value it works. The sky looks quite nice dark, unfortunately the water is still very bright.

 

You need set up reflection probe somewhere in level, set updating to "realtime" and size in every dimension to 10000 - that will fix bright reflections ).

 

Thank you also for the help Lex4art, now the water looks also dark.

 

Just a tip to anyone using this with a large body of water that uses any sort of planar reflection, and the camera can get more than 100m above the water...



If you have the truesky probe on the main camera, what happens when you go through a cloud is that the entire skybox will go white. Try it for yourself, all the specular reflections will white out, and the ocean will turn light gray. Because all the probe can see is the middle of a cloud, and the skybox is just what the probe sees.

If you have the probe at ground level, then the reflections will be off as well, and won't 'reflect' the skybox. In the picture above, the clouds would appear on the green lines, as if imposed on a flat plane, and they would look the same no matter what altitude the camera was at.

What you can do is copy the Truesky Probe script, call it TrueSkyProbeAltMat, and change it to use another, new skybox material instead of the default one.

You then have to move the probe's position on Update to have the same X and Z coords as the main camera, but set the Y position to (water - (camera-water)). Basically, if the water plane is at Y=10 and the camera is at y=100, the probe should be at Y=-80, the same distance below the plane as the real camera is above.

Then, on the reflection camera, you add a skybox component (hardly used anymore I think, but useful here) and feed it the material used above with the AltMat script. Make sure to set that camera's clear flags to skybox, and make sure the Planar rendertexture is in a HDR format (ARGB Half, Default HDR, whatever comes up. No need to use ARGB Float though, I think). No need to tonemap it with the reflection camera either, once the reflection is used in objects rendered by the main camera it'll be handled by the main cam's tonemapper, automagically becoming part of a linear workflow.

Talking of which, check the TrueskyProbe's Gamma and exposure settings. I'd accidentally had those changed and it was making things look funny until I found out they were set up for gamma not linear.

 

I'm having the same problem as @Bartolomeus755 but not having any luck on the fix. Same setup with Playway Water.

My sky properties doesn't seem to have any brightness power settings?

 

There are more menus for each SubMenu. You need to click where it has the text Sky to left of the sequence.
So you can access more menus by click on Sky, 3D clouds and 2D clouds. (It's not obvious that there buttons). Also did you build your light maps.

 

Thanks @John-G good to know.

Sadly the brightness power affects the brightness of the sky also.

I think I'm just getting too much ambient light in general. But even if I drop ambient to zero it's still way too bright at night time. Something else weird must be going on.

 

Here's a comparison with tenkoku... which is pretty much on target for atmosphere/GI but the clouds don't look anything even close to as good as TrueSky (bottom).

 

This is play mode and editor screenshots with ambient intensity set to zero and the sun directional light intensity set to zero. Should it not be basically pitch black?! When I disable/delete truesky, it does go black. Where is the light coming from? Uggghhh.... I must be missing something stupid.

 

How are your lighting settings set up? Have you Skybox or Truesky set as the Ambient. And do you have a cubemap probe attached he'd to your camera.

 

Been hunting through forum posts and docs but can't seem to figure out how to: Make my clouds drift across the sky at a set speed and direction, regardless of the trueSky.time. I tried unlinking the day time from keyframes but I don't think that's what I'm after.

I want to be able to + and - trueSky.time in code, while keeping clouds moving across the sky in the same direction and speed. Thanks for any help!