Thoughts on Unity 5.0

I've had a play about with it over the last couple of days, I'm familiar with Unity anyway and I used Unity 5.0 in beta so it wasn't hard to pick up where I'd left.

Pros:

> Performance: Great performance, I had a scene with thousands of meshes and complex lighting / post set up, 60+ FPS (low latency) on a 780m without even trying. This is without baking occlusion or doing anything to it really..
> Dynamic lighting system is a massive improvement, especially the ambient lighting section.
> PhysX and Mecanim: I used both and they both worked right, which in Unity 4.1 wasn't quite the case (last time I used Mecanim).
> UI tools are quite impressive, simple to use compared to the old version and intuitive.
> Some of the new particle demonstrations, look so much better than they did (like fire complex). Not sure why (I didn't check) but kudos.

Cons:

> Enlighten is way too slow for complex scenes, neither did it add much to the equation. I was perfectly happy to keep it switched off, if you look at UE's Photon Mapping solution it makes drastic changes for the better although of course there is no semi-dynamic option.

>Lack of tools, I know it's early days guys but no World composition tools, no Material editor, no visual scripting, no cinematic tools, lack of terrain tools, lack of decent post effects.

>Lacks additional functionality to become a real graphics powerhouse: DFAO, TXAA, better shadow maps etc.

On the whole, impressed it's a major step up from Unity 4.0 looking forward to seeing what you do over the next year.

Edit: I found a colour grader.

 

Yep, I've been in the beta program for a couple months now, and all there is to say is, it's cool. And it's better. I'm especially loving the much better physics performance. It will help portions of my game out tremendously.

Unity 5 is just really cool. But as you know in the tech business (you know it better than I do Shadow), that you continually have to keep striving to do better. Are there better engines out there, yes. But Unity offers a unique blend of price for performance that can only be matched by one or two other engines right now -- and those engines are not as user friendly to me.

Btw how is your game Shadow? Did you guys release it already? Are you still using Unreal at the moment?

 

Completely agree, we are years off Velo at the moment. We got too big for our boots and having to scale back, at the moment were at 300,000 meshes, 30,000 lines of voice audio and 4X20KM2 terrain modules which is most likely to be halved.. It's equated to getting nowhere fast, I know it sounds odd but at least Unity introduced some boundaries which Unreal doesn't so we got too giddy and suffered for it ..

We are still using Unreal, it's good for what we do. Eventually were going to do an FPS so Unity will be in the scope when we do the project management side.

 

That's cool man. My jaw almost dropped at the size of your game though lol. That's a lot of work right there. I know the feeling about being "years" off. I think my own game is still about one year off. I'm hoping it will be within a year though.... At least you're figuring out where the scope of your game will be. And that's always good to know.

Good luck with everything. I hope your game turns out to be amazing

 

My only complaint was it broke simple rigid body box collider physics hard. Thy went through mesh collider walls, made the other rigidbody colliders pop out of existence when collided or went right though the box collider floor. Lighting was great and commented on by client..but the physics bugs had me have to roll back to 4.6.2 o complete it by deadline at midnite tonite. Seems to me since i have not heard similar complaints that it may be that I upgraded the project instead starting fresh?..or missed some new setting.. I checked and unchecked everything in the colliders and rigidbody component and each version had some breaking anomaly. Is there a guide somewhere for smooth transition from 4.x to 5.x physics? My framerate did go from 110 or so to 150.

 

ippdev, during the beta I was experiencing some odd physics issues as well, so don't assume it's just you. I was seeing mesh colliders not follow its parent object given a set of specific scenarios. I can't remember off the top of my head what was actually happening because it was a month or two ago, but I do remember it had something to do with the rigidbody constraints.

I ended up having to turn off rigidbody constraints, move my object to the position I wanted it, then turn back on rigidbody constraints, and it ended up working for me. I did this all through scripting though.

I mentioned it on the beta forums and people mentioned it had been fixed in subsequent beta versions. So, I guess, if you're noticing bugs, you'll have to report them. That's too bad you have a deadline tonight and it's not working for you I'm in no way a Unity physics expert though, so I have no idea what could be causing it.

Also, there's a new "option" in the physics settings that you might want to try playing with to see if it solves anything for you. I believe it's called "Adaptive force" or something like that. Try checking/unchecking that.

 

Hmm not sure, mine was a fresh project. Just a simple mess around anyway, didn't do anything particularly fancy I'm always tied to Vsync so didn't notice framerate.

 

Your experience with resetting constraints may be the ticket but unfortunately do not have time to try it for this project. That is the one setting I did not mess with. I did notice when I set the MeshCollider walls to Convex that the green widget delineating them in Scene view caused the collider to flatten down and extend like twice as long as the 250 unit section of track.

 

Thoughts on UE4:

So were several months down the line with UE4, this is how it's ended up and where we go next:

Pros:

• Lightmass looks great, very efficient and works quickly.
• Tools Tools Tools, Material editor is very efficient and a great way to create materials. Although I'm not a fan of coding shaders, in Unity you can use a standard shader across the board easily and effectively (yes I am aware of instances).
• Cinematics tools rock.
• World composition is great for building large levels quickly.
• VFX looks great.
• Ample amounts of post
• Vertex (decal) painting
• Epic staff are awesome people.

Cons (A fair few)

• Major issues with different types of hardware (mobile GPU's)
• Poor performance across the board (in open world (dynamic lighting situations), one 4KM segment with 50 trees and 800 grass meshes equated to 20FPS on a 780m, and 45 FPS on a 780TI. On our test bed 660TI, most demo's and our game ran at 4 FPS. Lightmapping large scenes is not worth it..
• Generic lighting inconsistency, it was always difficult to get lighting just so in Unreal. Skylights wash out scenes, shadows too dark (unless you use a skylight), post process like auto-exposure just needs switching off, Obviously you can get great results but you may need a lot of faffing about.
• A lot of crashes, added a mesh today and crash, ran lightmass crash, opened material editor Ctrl C + V = crash, persona added rig crash. I think you get the picture..
• UI is a little convoluted, make sure to click on advanced options often.
• API generally a pain to code with, I don't mind C++ as well but just a preference here not fond of it.
• GUI was a mess last time I dared to touch it.

What were aiming for? This:



After experimenting in Unity 4.0 with (assets trying to re-create something similar):



Yes I understand it's not Witcher 3 worthy, but in my defence Unity 4.0's lighting sucked and 64-bit editor stopped from going too far. But it's close enough that Unity 5.0 could be the final ticket. Plus it ran at 60 FPS on a GTX 260, which is ancient .. This picture hints after just a small mess around how we can get what we want quickly.




Conclusion:

Unreal 4 to me feels like a bit of a showcase tool, keep it very small and easily within reach of a lightmap and you're golden. Stick away from outdoor scenes, (yes I am fully aware of their latest attempts and I bet just like the others it requires a NASA computer to run it properly).

It still doesn't feel quite ready to take on full production games, It's fine if you have the manpower to take the engine in whatever direction you see fit.

 

Just need to update with a couple of things:

Firstly:

> I found out there is a colour grader in Unity 5.0, a basic one but it's there.
> I found a use for Enlighten, it's a necessity when doing terrain. The bounce light feature from a directional made all the difference as the lighting was black at one side on meshes and trees etc.
> Tone mapping and Colour correction (sat etc.) is a necessity, which I never really needed before.
> IBL isn't as good as marmosets, it was great to tweak generic ambient lighting but I've still found quite a few lighting consistencies which luckily enough Enlighten filled the gap with it's real time GI.
>Still want some better post, I have a BIG scene layed out 9X9 tiles and it runs 200+ FPS. I'll trade you 100 FPS for some post ..

Secondly:

It's taken a hell of a lot of work and third party products, but I do believe I'm getting to the point where Unity 5.0 is pretty..

I'll show a terrain sample when I'm done .

 

Yes I already read all about it and tried it out, a couple of hundred meshes and my framerate plummeted through the floor, it's either buggy or I'm missing a trick.

I fully understand how it works and it was still a pain, I used DFGI and DFAO. Which looks great and also plummets frame rate.

Always use RT shadows with it. P.S thanks all the above scenes were done in Unity (besides Witcher 3 obviously )

 

The mobile tempo struggles to hit 50 FPS on my 780M, never mind when you start adding multi-tile terrain components with thousands of grass and tree meshes. It really didn't work very well, LOD's were all speedtree..

I found the performance of UE4 in general horrible, DFAO adds -6ms on average. Even without DFAO and everything just on medium settings I struggled to get 30FPS on something much more powerful than our release target, so if you keep scaling back to the point where it starts looking ugly then what's the point?

Also not a fan of extensively faffing about, if tweaking the LOD's didn't work then I'm not going to spend weeks and weeks making sure every component is slightly tuned.

You may love it, but I found every step a PITA!.

 

This is a thread about Unity 5. If we want to know about UE4 we will go there thanks.

 

My thoughts on Unity 5 at present:

1. it's faster than UE4 across the board. I understand epic might have showcased something cool on the Titan X that costs more than my car, but it remains to be seen how well it works in practise on typical hardware. Unity could perhaps benefit from instancing too.

2. Unity really sucks at showing off. Basically, we found the samples to be incredibly sub par (the 3rd person controller is glitchy and not really good on terrain at all).

3. There's a requirement for having a ton more visual blog postings and guides. Unity 5 is a visual creature yet there's no evidence of that in user's hands from Unity. We get a video of a blacksmith but no hands on evidence of it. The viking village demo was poorly optimised, and ultimately empty and boring. It's these rose tinted glasses that need to be removed. Viking village could have had a horde of vikings invade or a giant odin smashing a house sized hammer into the ground. Lots can be done and excitement sells.

4. The new-user experience in Unity 5 is somewhat horrible with lots of broken 4 examples and being guided to use them is a mystery. I sat down with an experienced developer that I'd invited to use Unity with, and he became confused with the constant upgrading unity did, broken samples and samples that did work, didn't work anywhere near a high level of quality ie ethan on terrain. I know these are samples, but samples aren't an excuse, and part of the reason Unity gets a bad reputation vs UE4.

This comes off somewhat harsh but that's for Unity's benefit as well. It's a truth that can only be fixed by doing something about it. In my view, Unity is actually the better engine at present overall, but does not help users discover how to tap that. I've been using it for 5 years, and I do know how to tap that. It just makes me facepalm a lot with missed opportunities for others.

But if you can get past that and make your own thing, then Unity 5 is for me at least, the better tool for the job. I won't say much about Unreal Engine because it's not the thread for it.

 

So far, I'm really impressed. I had a complex project and I was able to migrate to Unity 5 in an afternoon. Of course, I still have to redo light mapping for all levels and switch a few more models to the standard shader. Still, I'm actually blown away by how great Unity 5 is out of the gate. I had much lower expectations from an initial release. Unity team are really upping the game. Competition from Unreal and others has clearly had an impact.

 

That's awesome. Getting that kind of performance is the key. All you need is for someone to create some kind of mega post rendering FX asset and you're golden. Even if it eats up 50 fps worth of performance you'll still have plenty of fps left to implement the game-play systems.

 

millisecs dear boy. millisecs. One simply doesn't measure with fps

 

Ha ha! Yeah I know but he measured in fps and actually we can still use that as a gauge... in terms of saying if he can buff the presentation to his liking while only dropping from 200 fps to 150 fps. Of course we could just say increasing from 5 ms per frame to 6.67. Apples and oranges.

 

I can't +1 this enough! For the love of Unity, can we get either a dedicated demo team or outsource these demos? Putting a couple internal guys on demos is a huge mistake, Unity is finally capable out of the box to match Unreal Engine and you guys really dropped the ball on showcasing that. Let's get a real, badass, sexy, full demo. The last one was a huge, great, step up, but it still really needed more. Much more polish, much more action, much more detail. Let's see you guys push this engine to its limits.

 

Do it man

 

OK, Just to note this is from our actual game not the mess around shots so it's a heavy WIP I've been allowed to show it!. Of course all this runs @ 60 FPS on a 1440P setup (We all have 27 inch big ass monitors).


Tell me what you think, personally I think some better AA for the leaf cards and were pretty much on a winner. There's lots of grass for Chariots too .

 

Ah I know you can do better! I want that additional A in that AA.
Looks awesome

 

I told you I was making fences ..

 

Looks witcher 3 quality.

 

Nice screenshot man, are those alpha to coverage in your foliages? Somehow i see alot of noise (or maybe i'm just tired... ). And yeah kinda agree with you, a couple additional post would be nice...
btw no CC??

 

No nothing yet, I should really look into Alpha to CC with a better AA post. But I'm hoping Unity will do that for me hehe!. It's a bit on the last thing to do..

So I agree it's a bit too dense at the moment causing noise artefacts, I'll crack on it. Were still replacing all the pre-bought assets .. Things like ladders / barrels / rocks etc. aren't worth replacing, just slap a PBR tex on them but for main stuff like the towers and housing units, they're in the middle of being finished and replaced.

 

First of all, welcome back to the Unity forums Shadow lol Secondly, I really liked what you said -- "Unreal 4 to me feels like a showcase tool, keep it very small and easily within reach of a lightmap and you're golden."

That helps me understand Unreal 4 in a nutshell right now, even though I've barely used it. I've created one or two builds in Unreal so far, with one character running around a very small area, and even then how low the fps was during that surprised me a bit -- but the graphics and particle effects were better than Unity's.

Here's the "vibe" I'm getting from what I've read and done so far: Unreal 4 has amazing capabilities, but they're very hard to use and get to perform well. Unity 5 has slightly less options, but utilizing them to the point of being "good", is so much easier than Unreal. That's just the general vibe I'm getting, although I'll admit, I havn't used Unreal 4 that much at all.

 

I think Unity 5 is great! Only problem i had so far is that sometimes our character moves through our mesh collider a bit and gets stucked (capsule collider used by the way). This is an upgraded project and never happened in Unity 4. Else i cannot really complain

 

@hippocoder : btw any news from the closed beta section about the new image effects in Unity 5.x? last time i heard they working on SSR and adding velocity buffer.

 

I saw a portion of Shadow's game I feel like I'm getting away with something.

Looks pretty nice all around. Looks like you could still make them "pop" a little more though graphically. I don't even know how to explain it, and I'm not even one to critique it. Maybe it's the terrain textures that look too flat. But I'm just nit-picking there really. Overall it looks good, but I know you said it's a WIP.

Cheers.

 

I would like to know if there is some work is going on to fix baked light, light probes and etc.
A lot of bugs with graphics on Unity 5.
Seems like UE4 forced Unity to do early release before they could fix all bugs. I'm pretty sure the issue with baked light and light probes was very easy to see.

 

Another good thread ruined by dark theme whiners that derail it more and more till it gets locked...

 

Yeah good point, I'll move those threads to the existing locked dark thread so there's a record of the posts from people for unity to read in one place, and will simply delete dark ui thread posts from this point since it's been raised on beta as well.

 

Well still plenty to do, firstly as said the art assets like the tower etc. will be replaced with better ones. As were new to Unity 5's PBR, we'll need to re-write the shaders to match what were after (POM / Tesselation etc.) there's no NM multiplication for ground textures or it wouldn't of been too bad. There's no color maps added, or NM's for terrain tiles yet..

A lot of it will be trying to improve the post effects, I've got an improved SSAO shader. The Bloom is Unity's standard and still looks a bit odd, this hadn't been color graded yet as well AFAIK.

I will have to find a better AA setup and use FXAA for lower end systems, even console should be able to handle better than FXAA now.

There's some super shiny in-door scenes on there way, terrain is by far the toughest to get right. Probably what will happen is we'll remove a lot of the foliage in place of meshes, meshes always look better, so fill it out with rocks etc. lower the base control textures so it's not as dense.

 

I thought that was just exaggerated until I read that yesterday in their forums. And even with that high-end card, it runs only with 30fps.. Wow, just wow.
I really dig that demo. It's awesome. But what's the point? The best graphics doesn't matter when almost nobody can run that.
Maybe I would use UE4 if it had a better performance on mid-level hardware and if it wouldn't crash that often. But it seems Epic's priorities are more about eye-candy first.

In the meanwhile I've made that with Unity5.



Runs with around 20ms on my old Macbook with a GTX650M at full resolution and tons of FX.

I really like the easy of use of the standard shader. All I need now is a node-based material editor and better post fx and I'm completely satisfied

 

Point I was making all along, CryEngine can just be as pretty and it was running 80 FPS on our old 6850's.. Hell UDK looked more than great towards the end of it's life and that ran well on some right pieces of crap.

There's not enough difference between unreal 3 and 4 to justify the expense in rendering. Unity is on the brink of catching up as well, it's becoming a pointless endeavour.

Wait until you see all our stuff with custom shaders .. Just messing around with it tonight and it's 10X as smexy.

 

Maybe it's been touched on since (or I misread something there?), but Unity 4 has a Standard Assets package with a bunch of post-processing effects in it. From my quick look at the Unity 5 examples it at least has a couple as well. And I was using a colour grader from the Unity 4 package just a couple of weeks ago.

 

Yup I noticed it after I said it, somewhere down in the middle of the thread.

Still prefer amplify color though ..

Oh on a side note, reason I was holding back on some roughness and gloss to make the terrain look a little more in tune with reality is because I kept getting little white spots reflecting off the camera with Unity's in-built bloom post effect.

So I have a spare bloom post I made and I think I have SE bloom somewhere as well. Now that's solved should be able to focus on just making things look as good as possible.

 

So did I get that right. You switching back to Unity5?

 

Ummmmm...

No comment.

 

Wow amazing work, have you used substance designer/painter for this?.

 

I'll take that as a "yes"

I used Blender for sculpting, modeling and baking. 3dCoat and Photoshop for the textures.
While I have Substance Painter too, it always crashes when I try to import a mesh. So I don't bother with that one at the moment.

 

Woah, how did you composite this?! Which effects are you using?!

 

Can't see the second image btw...it's not loaded

 

Fixed that (I hate google Drive btw.) Should be working now.

Nothing special I think.
I just put together some assets that I did for a freelance gig. And then slapped some of the build-in image effects onto the camera. The effects are DOF, SSAO, Vignette and Chromatic Aberration, Bloom (just a pinch), Global Fog and AntiAliasing. Plus one reflection probe for that scene.

 

I think one of the trick is is use lower res texture. If you play even one of the better looking games like Far Cry 4 or Assasins Creed Black Flag, notice, how low res textures they use, but they cover it with normal maps, shading, reflections, light, distortion etc....

Sometimes when you get closer to rock or wall in these games, you can notice how funny those low res textures are So I think many, many Unity 5 previews or demos that are currently out there are getting lower frame rate, not because Unity cannot handle it, but sorry to say it, they cannot handle their engine in more advanced level and what`s in the background. (I mean advanced graphical level)

 

I have plenty of right thank you very much, I was using Unity 5 when it was way back in Beta!.

Yes I am "fixing stuff", new post, re-texturing bits and pieces etc.

The "weird noise" was actually being caused by the ambient occlusion post. I've made a new one, it's not exactly the engines fault now is it if it's anti-aliasing or AO?

I've also written a new AA shader, which drops the framerate considerably but it looks nice.

To ensure someone else doesn't get their undies in a twist, I've removed the ones above and I'll post a better one later today... Happy now?

 

Look at this stage it's nothing more than a play around with Unity 5.0, not like I'm going to spend tons of time making it release ready for a thoughts page. But still, I'll post some more stuff later..

In the mean time, why not show us some of your AAA megastuff? It's something we can work towards.

Also I thought shaders were part of GFX?

 

@ShadowK, thanks for sharing your experience. It is most informative...

 

Yer one snippy little widget of a pip squeaking trollmeister if ever one did venture cross these here forums. Pipe down junior. You don't have enough talent or skill to merit such comments.