There is the Demo file for Book of the dead to download after GDC?

'Never' is not true, unless you deliberately restrict what counts as a Unity demo. I'm not going to run through the whole history but Courtyard and most recently Fontainebleau leap readily to mind. And Fontainebleau has quite a strong overlap with some of the newer graphics pipeline stuff being demo'd in book of the dead. And it contains photogrammetry assets with a nice unrestrictive licence, whereas book of the dead also uses megascans which are commercial and that I dont expect to be given for free.

 

That's true also. I am really talking about the big ticket demos like blacksmith and botd.

In my defense, I didn't know that courtyard or fontainebleau existed

 

Check out the blog post about fontainebleau because its covers the case for using the layered lit shader in the HD pipeline. It was already linked to in this thread but since it seems to be a little off the radar for some, here it is again. https://blogs.unity3d.com/2018/03/1...aking-real-world-objects-into-digital-assets/

 

Well Unity is doing things right because there are far, far more published Unity games than UE4 can ever hope to catch up on. What you lack is perspective and numbers. Epic says and shows a lot of pretty things but the actual real world published output is very low compared to Unity. And that's a fact.

So I'd say there's something lacking over there rather than here. People keep finishing games here. And shipping them.

If Unity is so bad, why do most people successfully ship more games in it than its comparable competitors do?

 

Some features stayed as demo and didn't made it in UE4 releases.
There is no procedural terrain creation outside of MarketPlace, same for herds animals AI they are not available out of the box, and i'm not sure dynamic navmesh is available out of the box.
The demo was to heavy unable to run below 16Go RAM, high resolution assets took minutes to load and launch the scene. It's a demo not a some game able to run on average PC or on consoles.

Most of the time demos are very un optimized , they are bad example of level construction, but good graphics showcase and advert.
Try Unity 3D Kit game, it's a very bad example of how to not make a game, there is hundred of models made of sub models instead of using something like HLOD or combining static meshes that will never move together.

Anyway, demos are just demos.

Epic is more about less games, but more quality ones, and big studios like Square Enix for example, even if there is indies.
It has always been like that if you look at UE3.

 

If people are struggling to finish something in Unity, it is because they ultimately do not want to.

 

Square Enix is using Unity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lara_Croft_Go

 

For mobile games yes, lol

 

Yeah so is Valve, at least with Campo Santo.

And regarding whole "well that's more important because AAA have used it" argument, well how's that gonna help indies on this forum just like you? You would prefer the product which is NOT proven to help indies ?

Think about it for a second outside of the fantasy bubble.

 

Yeah. Also last year Gaben said that the new full games they are working on are done with both Source 2 and Unity. They also used Unity with The Lab and various other smaller things like SteamVR room setup.

 

Again, I'm not arguing that UE is superior or anything. No need to compare engine size. I am a big fan of Unity.

My comment is really just hoping that in the future, major Unity demos are less aimed at marketing buzz and more aimed at realistic usage and improvements that end up usable in engine by users.

The UE clip was just an example of an approach that I'd personally prefer to see Unity take.

 

Nor am I. But the thing is, people are pointing out what they perceive to be weaknesses and I'm not saying that they aren't weaknesses - Unity's demos are often arse over tit but I'm actually arguing a new point, that evaluating an engine's rights or wrongs falls down to how well it lets you ship your idea, be it for business or pleasure.

So I don't really think it's important any more to focus on what the competition is doing because the competition is not doing well enough. With HDRP, Unity is leading in a big way. I'm not joking when I say when I look at this design, the implementation and the source, I am really quite impressed with it .I think given sufficient time and (C++ side support) this could be easily a slot in replacement for AAA studios.

It took 2018.1, Jobs, ECS and HDRP for AAA to take Unity very seriously as a matter of how much Unity can save money. Managing an engine in-house for multiple platforms costs a twisted amount. I guess time will tell, and AAA is a funny word, I think 'high quality content developer' is what I mean.

I proudly identify as HQCD!

 

Also, the demos being made wastefully and badly echo what will happen in tight deadlines or with tiny studios - things can get messy. I'm seeing these demos pop up time and time again in Unity's optimisation talks, blogs and media. For example GPU baking? out comes blacksmith again like a cheap VHS rental! and that's fantastic. We also see viking village host regular parties whenever optimisation is needed.

I took a look at the 3D template platformer recently and it's put together like some kind of ill fitting jigsaw puzzle. I expect this will be used for quite some time to investigate automatic LOD, for example.

 

At the very least, I like poking around these projects to better understand things like the overall visual composition. I rarely go in for things like code samples (if ever) but I often go in for things like a sort of... overview of how to best utilise the engine from a design standpoint.

 

What is best is using ECS + Jobs + SRP. The "what is best" should be divided up piecemeal rather than one demo because everyone wants different things. I would be asking to start:

• best visuals open world (DX11) for 30fps
  
• best visuals VR with specific hw requirement for 90fps

ECS + Jobs + SRP aren't done, and those are miles beyond builtin and standard scripting. I would like ongoing case studies how to do the best navigation, lots of objects, rendering and so on... using the new technologies not the old.

For me, the book of the dead demo is about how the visuals are achieved, so I will gain benefit from that. Insights.

It would be nice though if there was a lot more case notes behind everything. Seems so opaque why Unity does certain things. I have had to tell people who didn't believe me at all, that Unity's demos aren't necessarily best practises.

 

As one of the more skeptical, my main concern is verification that you guys aren't presenting misleading materials.

My personal main concern is the lack of a standalone exe release at time of demo. I can fully understand if the project is not fully released, perhaps ever. But if what we're seeing is a realistic representation of possible in game experience - why isn't a standalone build made available at publication?

I understand that for UT - there are other concerns, mostly around the unfair reputation of Unity. That you guys want to highlight the top end capabilities of the engine, but you might better achieve that with these kinds of demos accompanied by detailed presentation on the techniques used.

Book of the Dead looks great. But can Unity really deliver that experience to a game with any amount of realistic player input? How do the LODs work on the vegetation, what about open areas or vistas, could a 1080 handle that scene with long range view at quality? Almost every scene in view capped at around 15 feet with narrow fov.

When I watch BotD, I say to myself, "sure that's nice... but how many years are we away from seeing an actual unity game with those kinds of graphics on the market?"

Will we see it in 2 years? 5 years?

 

Like many 3D engines demos, it's all smokes and mirrors.

 

And smoke and mirrors have always been a big part of making games, and realtime graphics techniques. Combine that with the idea that you need good looking art assets to get good looking results and here we have almost infinite potential for people to pointlessly complain about a broader reality that is well beyond the scope of anything Unity do or dont do. In the same universe as the 'make game' button and what I imagine will be future complaints that the realtime raytracing stuff various companies were hyping at GDC features a whole new set of smoke and mirrors.

 

That's very, very true. Maybe I am being unfair to UT. I could also be in the vast minority, as most people seem to love the current approach UT is taking with Adam and BotD.

But who knows, maybe a wee bit more focus on real game usage would help make the next UT demo even more successful.

 

https://blog.megascans.se/2018/04/1...how-megascans-sets-the-bar-for-game-textures/

While the game (made by @Seith) does not use Unity 2018, it does make use of photogrammetry (in this case, Quixel's Megascans) - same as the "Book of the Dead" demo.

Check out "Ghost of a Tale" on Steam!

 

Said in a much more benign manner than I would choose.

 

I think it would be interesting to have a second team of devs do reworked "best practice" versions of your demos or template projects, accompanied by a written outline of what and why they have changed (and why they did not pick certain alternative solutions), and how it would affect performance when scaling up things to larger scoped real-world usecases. I think this could be a good intermediate level learning resource for people who can do some things in Unity already, but are confused about what are "the proper" ways to do things.

 

I don't think I have seen a single released game that hasn't used Smoke and Mirrors for various mechanics, visuals and systems.

 

Coming with the proviso that I actually prefer Unity to UE4, Epic tends to produce demos that are more useful as learning tools whereas Unity has demos that are more "look at what can be done using Unity" along with sometimes getting some of the assets to play with separately.

Epic demos like the Showdown VR demo you can download the project and open it to view exactly how everything works and is set up together. While some corners may be cut or everything might not be best practice it does make it a lot easier to jump in and start tinkering, making changes, seeing what happens. Understand that isn't necessarily practical for Unity due to relying on more out of house content creation and just company goals in general, but whenever I see people comparing the two approaches to engine demos that seems to be the big point that comes up.

Edit: Should add that the way Fontainebleau was presented was absolutely perfect and I hope is the model used for future showcase projects.

 

Come on! Stop being so overprotective! It's starting to feel like a Blender or Linux forum, were you can't point at a problem without being called an heretic!
Following your reasoning, I could show you a Unity demo and then tell you: "Here! that's a Visual C++ demo highly representative of what you can do with Visual C++! Now it's up to YOU™ ! "
I'm a very happy Unity Pro customer, I love Unity and I'm not switching anytime soon to any other engine, but if I can't say my opinion in the forum about something I find a little off about demos because I will be thrown to the lions, I think this will very soon become an echo chamber were only pre-approved lines of thought are allowed.

 

You are definitely entitled to you opinion and expressing it... however you need to keep it civil and not argumentative. Others are entitled to theirs as well, are are just as entitled to disagree with yours. Keep it civil and you’ll be fine.

 

I can't really agree with this sentiment more. We may be off topic on this thread - but by no means should we pulling punches on anyones account. If mods feel as though every thread must be 100% on topic then they have the right to push to make a rule that rigid forum policy - but until then the community has the right and the responsibility to object to the failings of UT whenever and wherever we feel it crops up.

Speaking for myself: I still believe that Unity is the best engine out there, especially now that the 2018 cycle is on track, but that doesn't mean I'm happy with everything they've done thus far. The net effort is great but UT needs to hear constructive criticism, regardless of whether they think they need it or not. The mod team needs to do their job and make sure it's given a place and a time, not battered down for being "off topic" all the time.

 

Can't deny that's one impressive looking game, even without HDRP ..

 

No of course! Seith is a damn wizard. I remember his very first posts (video, maybe?) and it was practically a finished product. But he kept picking away at is for about, 3 more years. No idea how he has the patience - but regardless, I think it's probably the first game of its scale made (for the most part, I believe) by one bloke.

 

This thread deserves death now, it's had a dragging, laboured life, but one last trick I'm afraid:

Does anyone know when the BotD asset store set is due? They said April in March and there's been no word since then that I've been able to find.

Cheers.

 

Has BotD been released yet? I can't find anything other than the teaser. Or is the teaser the final demo??

 

Hasn't been released no. I think last word was due for sometime in the "fall". Which, contrary to what you might expect isn't what happens when you try slack-lining after 4 pints - it's apparently, autumn.

 

I was actually able to use the Volumetric Fog from the Adam demo in my own game. It was a super legit asset.

 

I don't believe that is part of SRP, which BotD was created to showcase. There's plenty of volumetric solutions out there and I believe the demo team whipped that one up specifically for Adam. Which is not the same thing as shipping that functionality.

 

HDRP will contain built-in volumetric lighting.

https://forum.unity.com/threads/volumetric-fog.527667/

 

Sheesh things like that make me wanna upgrade my mac-mini . . . holding out though heh

Spoiler

Still happy with my 4FPS https://forum.unity.com/threads/pos...scape-design-and-quality.431089/#post-2788220

 

Macbook Pro 2015 15" with Intel HD Iris Pro 6000 here

 

im a student so*

Spoiler

that being said i just got an email from the prince of nigeria promising me to share 4 million pounds worth of gold bullion if i transfer just one grand into his offshore bank account. Seems like it's worth the gamble. *additionally if i was to upgrade, as much as it pains me to say this, it would prolly be a windoze machine with a beefy nvidia GPU, better value for money -and all that is based on the assumption i'll be making a AAA game which ain't never gonna happen so there's that.

 

Yes I was aware of that. My point was that the solution used in Adam is likely not the same solution to be shipped with 2018.

 

Check with your school's computer department and see how they handle older hardware. It's not unusual for universities to auction off older hardware for a fraction of the original cost. For that matter check any local rummage stores for systems that a local business may have donated.

Furthermore thanks to the whole Spectre and Meltdown nonsense there are a ton of used workstations on eBay. Buy one of them, insert a new graphics card, and you can very easily have a gaming machine for about $250. Example video below.

Spoiler

 

It's a deal!

Spoiler

As long as you pinky promise to play WOW whilst chit chatting over skype with me every weekend. <3

 

Do not update your system! You have the perfect test-machine in terms of performance. Using a high-performance machine to develop games gives you the false idea that everything is okay, because you're met the 60FPS. Yes. On your 1080Ti card and with your top-of-the-line CPU... Using your old system to test your game is a good way to find out if people with similar systems would be able to play your game. (Buy a separate, more performant one if you want to work with other software during the development).

(Unless, of course, you don't care about people with outdated/mediocre computers)

 

The Volumetric Fog in the Adam demo (https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/VolumetricLighting) was super legit. It requires deferred lighting (as the HDRP does), but also worked in VR, which HDRP doesn't support yet.

 

The whole environment of "Book Of The Dead" has been released on the Asset Store today!
» https://assetstore.unity.com/packag...-projects/book-of-the-dead-environment-121175

It "requires 2018.2b8 or higher", though...

(src)

 

So I was barking up roughly the right tree (pun intended) when I made these comments, at least the latter part of what I quoted above, because in other areas I was dead wrong. In that customised features are a part of the Book of the Dead environment released today. So we are not magically in a completely different era where demo-specific stuff can be assumed to make it into base unity or unity packages like the HD pipeline. At least if people moan in a very specific technical way about this (ie which custom feature you want to see become part of HDRP) there is a better chance of it affecting future development than when these customisations were off in their own universe completely unrelated to things like SRPs. Thats no guarantee of any particular feature making it into the mainstream, and there will sometimes be technical reasons why that doesnt happen. And I'm not sure I really expect to see any cast iron confirmations from Unity on this front right now, its the sort of thing I will be more likely to judge them on in the future when the pipelines are more settled and mature.

 

I have downloaded and compiled the book of the dead environment project in Unity 2018.2.0b9 for people who just want to try it out:
https://goo.gl/QAn6ZS

Just unzip and keep the files in the same folder.

 

Thanks @SquareR00T - very much appreciated!

 

Be reminded that downloading files from an unknown source is at your own risk bla bla etc

 

I would like to give my 2 cents here too. Can we please have some advanced demo focusing on something else than graphics?
We get it, you have to change your reputation of Unity=bad graphics, but I think we proved that point already.
I would like to see some demo which showcase how to tackle complex animation controllers, traversal, AI and so on.
I have lost count of how many hours I spent developing some system only to discover it could have been done easily with something Unity had integrated and barely spoken of.
Few days ago I saw these videos of some Unreal assets. This is the kind of real world playable demo I would like to see and tinker with:

The latest Unity demo instead focus 99% of awesome looking assets and lighting effect which is impractical for most Unity devs.