[RELEASED] UniStorm 5.2 - AAA Volumetric Clouds, URP Support, Weather, Sky, Atmospheric Fog, & More!

Well there is something to be said about the whole interface, maybe while you are at it write a convenient to use UI for the editor to control basic parameters of the entire system.
e.g. sliders which control

- Wind speed (breeze - storm)
- Percipitation (drippling - downpour) (and yes one could make it pour out of a blue sky)
- Fog (clear - Foggy)
- Season (colder - warmer)
- Time of day (night -day)
- sun set coloring (natural - exaggerated)
- Cloud cover and how many layers (clear blue sky - thick dark clouds)
- some presets. (with some good and bad weather cycles; sunny pleasant days with few clouds; Rainy to stormy days; snow and ice days ... )

last but not least there could be weather zones that can be defined by circles or any shape in the editor. Like I would draw a circle over in a valley and it would rain exactly there. Another circle up on a mountain and it would snow in that defined area while the sun shines in the rest of the world.

And still under the hood it stays possible to script every aspect for those who are deeper into scripting. Being more of a Landscape Artist, I would love to have easy access to controls of the weather system in my scene.

 

UniStorm Version 1.6 has been submitted to the Asset Store and is awaiting approval.

 

An improved editor with sliders is something we'd like to implement and you have some great ideas, but from what I understand you have to create an editor script that would have to call every component from the main UniStorm script, correct? I don't think some features would be available, like choosing the colors and applying the game objects. Unless you can add sliders to the actual UniStorm system script than that would be easy and we could do this in the next patch.

As for zones, I'm not sure this is something we're going to do at the moment because it's more of a global system. Later on I could see there being an option for global weather or zone weather.

 

UniStorm Version 1.6 is now on the Asset Store!

UniStorm Version 1.6

 

@BHS

I have a question, I will change my review:

My camera far view is 600 but uniStorm seems to need a lot more, is there a solution? I'm not sure if there is currently a solution for that. would there have to be a hack for this or does uniStorm actually support this?

Thank you in advance

 

You have to have it at 15,000 the clouds are distant objects.

The solution is you can also use a second camera and have that second camera only render the clouds. This way you can keep your main camera view at 600.

 

Oh. realy good! thanks you!

 

Am I the only one who gets some shadder errors on an empty project, that the registers are exeeded (10 of 8 etc.)?

 

I get quite a bit of warnings that state:

Shader warning in 'Hidden/GlobalFog': Relative addressing not supported (compiling for flash) at line 138

and

Shader warning in 'Hidden/GlobalFog': MOVA unimplemented in AGAL (compiling for flash) at line 138

On lines 99, 112, 125, 138

Also, Unity crashed when I updated my scene with Unistorm 1.5 still in it. After loading up Unity again, I was given a bunch of compile errors and had to reimport my image effects (Pro) again.

 

Same here. I reimported Image Effects.

 

Did that fix the warnings? Mine still has warnings after I reimported image effects.

 

I haven't checked if all are fixed, but some are.

Am I right, that this whole system with snow effect included is totally useless for large worlds since update because it only supports one terrain?

 

Same here, all flash warnings can safely be ignored though, nothing strange there. But they are sure a bit annoying.
They can be removed with the " #pragma exclude_renderers flash" command. I would recomend the creator to maybe include this to remove the confusion.

Also i get 15 errors on import with
"Assets/UniStorm_v1.5/Scripts/UniStormWeatherSystem.js(3836,66): BCE0005: Unknown identifier: 'CustomTerrainScriptAtsV3Snow'."

Edit: Seems like the script is missing from the package? Also, just a friendly hint, you may want to read up on good code procedures and try to split that 4k rows file a bit into classes or something : p

Edit2: Just realized its mostly 2 functions, that's kind of unacceptable if i want to make some custom edits to the script. I would have at lest as a minimum have every weather type in its own file. That would greatly help clean it up and also make it a lot easier to modify. Great system though : )

 

I think you may have also forgot to rename your folders and files to correctly represent that this is unity 1.6, and not 1.5. Even the 1.6 demo scene is using the name 1.5 in it's prefab.


Also, the demo scene is running at 20 FPS in the editor, but building it out it gets a solid 60. Any idea why?

 

I also get a lot of "UnassignedReferenceException: The variable XXXXXX of 'UniStormWeatherSystem' has not been assigned." errors because such objects like horizon, clouds etc are not included in the prefab. So it's not working out of the box like in version 1.5.

 

Without even putting Unistorm into my scene, some funky stuff is happening with my old terrains. It's hard to explain, but it looks like there are strange bump map textures on the ground, and if I add shadows to my directional light, it makes the terrain transparent. It also makes the lighting on the ground (which looks washed out and terrible) flicker as I move the camera. Again, this is without even having unistorm in the scene in one of my old scenes.

 

We're sorry everyone we didn't update the prefab so don't use it as it will be missing game objects. Just copy the UniStorm system from the demo and paste it into your scene.

Unity would not let us rename the UniStorm v1.5 to 1.6 so just ignore that.

As for the terrain issues and other issues please the documentation it will give you solutions to most of your problems. It could be Lar's snow shader that's causing the terrain problems.

For everything else we'll release a patch today that should fix everything. The flash errors are not errors they're just warnings, we'll also patch this.

 

Yay : )

 

Reading through the documentation, it seems like this snowpack really made Unistorm more complicated to set up than it previously was. Also I can not find any documentation regarding my terrain problem.

 

The terrain problem can be found on the first paragraph on the first page.

Everyone wanted dynamic snow and snow on the terrain is still a new feature, it will be improved.

If you don't want the dynamic snow you can disable it. You can find out how in the documentation.

 

I think what you're referring to is the "switch to deferred lighting" section. After doing this, there is still issues with the terrain lighting blinking.


Also, following these instructions:

Deactivating Dynamic Snow
If you want to disable dynamic snow you will uncheck the Dynamic Snow Enabled checkbox in the UniStorm editor; be sure to do this or it will cause an error, and delete the CustomTerrainScriptAtsV3Snow script. This will allow the normal terrain shader to be used and allow UniStorm to skip the dynamic snow shader functions without causing errors.

I don't even have unistorm in my scene, but deleting that script throws about 15 compiler error that all say:

Assets/UniStorm_v1.5/Scripts/UniStormWeatherSystem.js(3388,66): BCE0005: Unknown identifier: 'CustomTerrainScriptAtsV3Snow'.

I had also disabled it in the unistorm prefab.

Edit:

I've now deleted the whole unistorm directory and am still having the same visual issues. Its definitely some shader effect being left over. How do I get rid of it?

 

You are lucky you had that file : p

 

I guess I just had to restart Unity after deleting it.

 

I just updated from 1.5 to 1.6 in Unity 4 and it broke all of the Standard Asset image effects. When you do the patch, can you make sure you haven't accidentally included anything that overwrites the Standard Assets folder?

Edit: Sorry, I see other people already reported this on the previous page.

 

Also, it looks like a bunch of snow projectors were added into Standard Assets / Projectors. Could those go somewhere else? Putting things into the Standard Assets folder causes a lot of pain for anyone working with a large project or multiple plugins.

 

Why am i maxing 24FPS? No it's not the computer

 

Just keep in mind there are games out there that have different weather zones and climate zones in the same game..

Maybe we don't have to create weather zones, just the ability to assign weather types changing the global weather when the player enters the before mentioned zones; like a script that can be visually assigned to the terrain.

 

Also, I'm not sure if this is just an import error on my part, but most of the Cloud Layers were assigned no shader, and were thus appearing as solid purple spheres.

 

I had this problem as well.

For now I've just removed Unistorm from my game. I'll just have to wait until things settle down with this.

I thought I should mention that going through the thousands of lines of code, it was very apparent that there was tons of places that could have easily been modulated into functions. I recommend that before you move on with any new features that you take a look at which code is being reused more than once and break them into coherent functions.

Is there any possible way I am able to get a version of 1.5? I need to make some videos of my game in the very near future and don't know how long it will take to get 1.6 stuff fixed.

 

I removed it from the game too, very slow for some reason....

 

Imo, the asset store needs to be made more robust.
It should allow buyers to download previous versions of an asset that were posted.

E.g., even though Unistorm 1.6 is showing as my download, i should be able to select 1.5 or earlier to download.
Similar to how one can download different versions of Unity.

* The snow falling and related sound effects in the main demo look good!
(For me, the snow wasn't accumulating, but i presume i have to activate that.)

 

http://imageshack.us/a/img152/5699/untitlezzd.png

please direct me -

2 Cameras -
the one that culls the clouds is set to depth 1, clear flags set to Depth only
camera with 600 far view is depth 0, Clear flags set to skybox.

Please

 

Yes, I’m not sure what’s causing it; I think it’s a Unity problem, especially since Unity 4 is still in beta. The image effects must be included in order for everything to work properly. If you want a workaround you should import UniStorm 1.6 in a blank project and remove all the image effects from 3.5 version of Unity and add the Unity 4 image effects back to the camera. You can find which ones in the documentation. Then export your own UniStorm package and import it into your project where it’s needed.

No those aren’t needed we forgot to remove them so just ignore them.

I have no idea. On an okay laptop I was getting 80 to 90 fps. We’ll look into in and fix it. Have you tried testing UniStorm in a blank scene in a new project?

Could be an import error because everything was there when we packaged the system and we didn’t remove any shader components so I have no idea why Unity would make them lose their materials or shaders.

The shader is under particle effects and is called Regular Cloud Shader, just reassign it.

What you’re going to do is have 2 cameras, remove any image effects off the Camera 2 as it will be rendering the clouds. Create a layer called Camera 2 and assign all of the clouds the Camera 2 layer. Go to your main camera and uncheck the Camera 2 from the Culling Mask settings, set the clear flags to depth only, and set the depth to 1. Go to Camera 2 and set the Culling Mask to only Camera 2, set the clear flags to skybox, and set the depth to 0. You will also need to assign the sun and moon the layer Camera 2, also the horizon if you’re using it, and it will render everything properly with 2 cameras.

As for the performance problems we’re not sure what’s causing it. In a blank scene on a decent laptop we got about 90 fps using the same project we used to submit UniStorm 1.6. We will try to figure out all the problems and release a patch by either today or tomorrow that should fix things.

Update:
The bad frame rate seems to only be with the demo scene included with the update. I have no idea why, but every other scene I get a blazing 90 fps. I double checked every component and setting so there must have been some Unity bug causing the bad frame rate. I even disabled the UniStorm system in the demo scene and there was still the sluggishness and bad frame rate.

 

As we're working on patching UniStorm we're also designing a much improved editor. The patch should be submitted by tomorrow and will included the fixes as noted in previous posts.

 

I don't mean to be a pain, I tried my way and then i followed your steps, it just seems to be this: on a new project

http://imageshack.us/a/img140/6307/85249127.png

Create a second camera
remove any image effects off the Camera 2 as it will be rendering the clouds
Create a layer called Camera 2 and assign all of the clouds the Camera 2 layer.
Go to your main camera and uncheck the Camera 2 from the Culling Mask settings,
set the clear flags to depth only,
and set the depth to 1.
Go to Camera 2 and set the Culling Mask to only Camera 2,
set the clear flags to skybox,
and set the depth to 0.
You will also need to assign the sun and moon the layer Camera 2,
also the horizon if you’re using it, and it will render everything properly with 2 cameras.

 

Does your main camera move? If so, Camera 2 has to have the same movement. Other than that all your settings are correct, it works when I tested it. I'm not sure what it could be. Did you test this in a new project?

 

Yes the camera does move. Yes every time i do this i just start a new project.

They are literally the same camera duplicated from your scene, so they ahve the same transform.

 

Make sure you have the second camera enabled, and its far clip distance is 15000. The two cameras should also have the same Projection, Field of View, and Normalized Viewport Rect settings. I'm doing this currently, with the sky camera as a child of my main camera, and it seems to work so far. The image you're getting looks like it's only displaying camera 1.

 

Yes, it should be working I'm not sure why it's not. Have you got it working yet?

 

looking forward for the new mobile version

 

Just had a look at 1.6 and I really like the improved visual quality. Clouds, particles and sky improved a lot since 1.5 and the snow looks better than it does in quite a few AAA games out there - well done!

However, to me it's getting clearer and clearer that you have to make the setup easier. It's quite hard to customize the UniStorm prefab to work with the personal camera, character and world setup. You could think about implementing an editor script that creates the single or dual camera setup, the weather system and all things that have to be moved with the character.

The folder structure also needs some rethinking, you should put all files of the demo scene into a separate folder and put all core scripts, shaders and assets into a UniStorm folder - importing only that one folder should be enough to get it working in a project but it shouldn't contain any unnecessary meshes, textures or scene files that are in there for demonstration purposes only.

Keep up the good work!

 

Yes, the new mobile version is being worked on and will include a much improved editor, seasons, more weather types, and snow.

Thank you.

We actually just released a patch, version 1.6.1, that added a much improved editor. This editor uses sliders and other custom editor components making it much easier to customize and set things up. All the components are categorized, number inputs, sliders, color adjustments, and then game objects. We will work on further improving this.

Some files have to be located in the assets/xxxxx folder; this is just the way Unity's system is set up.

 

Version 1.6.1 is now on the Asset Store.

1.6.1 fixes some minor bugs, added the proper UniStorm 1.6 prefab, removed unneeded assets, and most important a new editor.

This editor uses sliders and other custom editor components making it much easier to customize and set things up. All the components are categorized with, number inputs, sliders, color adjustments, and game objects. Everything is better labled making it easier to customize or add your components. We will work on further improving this. Suggestions for the editor are welcome.

 

I am curious if I can add support your Unistorm to my RPG starter kit?

You know support save / load feature, forecast and other things that can work together.

 

Nice!
Just have so say one negative thing about this pack, and that is that it puts files all over the place and makes a real mess, and the code is also a big mess.
A lot of other systems don't seem to do this so i guess its possible to fix.
Other than that its a very nice system and it seems to work well : ) Best weather system out there without doubt!

 

I'm not sure PM and we'll discuss it.

We will be cleaning up the code in the next patch so you won't have to wory about that. As for the folders, we are looking into ways to better this and clean things up. This will also be part of the next patch.

 

I think the issue most people have with your folder structure is this:



Because demo scene files should be separated from the weather system.

 

In UniStorm 1.6 snow will appear in winter season and season control by temperature am I correct?

I can't get the snow to keep falling because temperature keep change everyday.
Are there anyway to stop the temperature without stopping the time?

 

Thats not what i thought of, but i do agree on it.
My issues are more that it puts stuff all over the Standard Assets directory so its no way of knowing what files belongs to Unistorm.

 

I agree we'll take care of organizing everything better. The version listed in the folder cannot be changed we've tried. I think doing so might cause issue but well try forcing it by doing it out of Unity.

Yes, if you go into the UniStormWeatherSatem script and search temperature in search of the script system and look for the if statement for winter and change the random temperature range to only below 32 degrees.