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Unity 1.5.1 unleashed

Discussion in 'Announcements' started by Joachim_Ante, Sep 28, 2006.

  1. Joachim_Ante

    Joachim_Ante

    Unity Technologies

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    Dear community of wonderful creative and skilled people (and everyone else too).

    A few minutes ago we released Unity 1.5.1.

    Go download Unity 1.5.1 now all you license holders: it's a free upgrade. Everyone else: go download it too.

    Release notes here: http://unity3d.com/whatsnew-1.5.1.html
    Download here: http://unity3d.com/try.html


    This release is mainly about compatibility with old graphics cards and bugfixes. On windows there are tons of people who have outdated graphics card drivers, some of them full of bugs. Most game engines, put their heads in the sand and say upgrade your drivers. Problem is that a lot of people don't even know who made that graphics card and where to get those drivers.

    So instead we spent 3 months working around driver bugs, testing on old and broken hardware. Making sure your games run just fine on what is otherwise a minefield of driver bugs.


    Of course there are some other more flashy things like the grass rendering, updated third person platformer scripts and full unicode support. Go check it out.
     
    Joachim_Ante, Sep 28, 2006
    #1

  2. Eric5h5

    Eric5h5

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    Fantastic! Will take me a while to download though...I wonder if glaring at my modem will make it go faster....

    --Eric
     
    Eric5h5, Sep 28, 2006
    #2

  3. Marble

    Marble

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    Amazing. This update fills a lot of little holes through which things were leaking, and the features, no matter how humble you make them seem, are blessings to us all. I'm sure you'll be seeing a fearsome array of swaying grass in the near future.

    note: the release notes link from the newsflash page still links to 1.5.
     
    Marble, Sep 28, 2006
    #3

  4. pete

    pete

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    woot! :D :D :D

    >>While not the sexiest of "features"

    i'd say that's pretty dang sexy! along with all the rest! folks check out the what's new list... wow.

    eric - think everyone's dling at the same time... i'm glaring at mine too!
     
    pete, Sep 28, 2006
    #4

  5. Marble

    Marble

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    So do the performance improvements for object-heavy scenes have to do with mesh combination? I was interested in the hints there would be developments in that area.
     
    Marble, Sep 28, 2006
    #5

  6. Morgan

    Morgan

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    Thanks! I never made time to test it before, but I'm spending the night with Unity and I guess it will be 1.5.1 :)

    The release notes, as usual, make it clear that this is not such a tiny update...

    EDIT: love the first screenshot in the notes :D
     
    Morgan, Sep 28, 2006
    #6

  7. Eric5h5

    Eric5h5

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    Nope, they just put some GoFaster(tm) code in there. :) The mesh combining is a separate thing (and was possible before anyway if you wrote the script yourself); it's not going to work in all situations.

    --Eric
     
    Eric5h5, Sep 28, 2006
    #7

  8. hsparra

    hsparra

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    Great update! I see something about a "car wizard" yet I do not see it anywhere. Where do I find this new fangled thing?
     
    hsparra, Sep 28, 2006
    #8

  9. AaronC

    AaronC

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    Yee hee, I thought this might be happening so I went to the "Try " page about five hour ago and begun downloading another "trial"...and it was called unity1.5.1...
    whatdayaknow....I guess that makes me the first dialup downloader...And a bit cunning too :twisted:
    wohahahahaha....
    AC

    hmmmm its almost here....

    Justread the whats new-great work guys! My geforce 4 mx440 sends its love...And Ive got a Radeon9200SE 128mb coming for my Pc too....
    Rock on!
     
    AaronC, Sep 28, 2006
    #9

  10. Morgan

    Morgan

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    I notice the view popup changes to "Free" when you adjust it, instead of staying at "Top" or whatever. A nice little change :) That used to bug me a little but I never stopped to think about it long enough to complain.
     
    Morgan, Sep 28, 2006
    #10

  11. Alpha-Loup

    Alpha-Loup

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    I cant wait to inspect that car wizard and that new terrain stuff examples. I am downloading now and I just received a package with a book about character rigging for games some minutes ago. An extended four day weekend is coming up here for me (YEAH!) and i see myself spending it in front of books and my comp. This is going to be great!

    Thanks OTEE!
     
    Alpha-Loup, Sep 28, 2006
    #11

  12. AaronC

    AaronC

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    Hey so where is the Car wizard? Cant wait to try it out
     
    AaronC, Sep 28, 2006
    #12

  13. Aras

    Aras

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    In the Race Demo example project (it is updated from 1.5)
     
    Aras, Sep 28, 2006
    #13

  14. AaronC

    AaronC

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    Choice Aras
    So what do you want for christmas? :p
     
    AaronC, Sep 28, 2006
    #14

  15. Alpha-Loup

    Alpha-Loup

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    I just read that 9.0 and 9.1 Versions of Cinema are now native with Unity. Does that mean, that the 1.5.0 fbx bug with C4D R9.1 is fixed? That would be really great!
     
    Alpha-Loup, Sep 28, 2006
    #15

  16. tbelgrave

    tbelgrave

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    Most devs just work on bug fixes in their own software with .1 upgrades, you guys raise the bar and give us all this goodness in a .1 upgrade???! What... trying to make your customers happy or sommin? Sheesh! :p

    BTW is there a web player for the platform game? PCs here at the office :(

    Cheers!
     
    tbelgrave, Sep 28, 2006
    #16

  17. AaronC

    AaronC

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    Hey that grass is wicked. I guess these things are straightforward to use, but a brief tut, or even VIDEO-you guys do great videos-
    Would be....Oh forget it-go have a holiday, you deserve it!
    \AC
    Edit: oh Sh*t theres a grass how to...Duh
    No more 3am sessions, boy
     
    AaronC, Sep 28, 2006
    #17

  18. hsparra

    hsparra

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    I actually downloaded the Race Demo last night after 1.5.1 but I still did not see the car wizard. I did see the ragdoll wizard though. Can someone help me feel less foolish by pointing out where I need to look?
     
    hsparra, Sep 28, 2006
    #18

  19. nickavv

    nickavv

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    Downloading. This should be cool. And more/better support for older graphics cards may be a saving grace for me an' my 5 y/o computer (though I am getting a new MacBook for Christmas)
     
    nickavv, Sep 28, 2006
    #19

  20. deram_scholzara

    deram_scholzara

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    Yeah, but I still can't import any Maya or C4D stuff natively from my second hard drive.

    Grrrr... I want to go home and experiment with this, but I'm at work on a PC for another 7.5 hours.
     
    deram_scholzara, Sep 28, 2006
    #20

  21. Jonathan Czeck

    Jonathan Czeck

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    *puts on bowler* What's all this then?

    (What's it about?)

    -Jon
     
    Jonathan Czeck, Sep 28, 2006
    #21

  22. Joachim_Ante

    Joachim_Ante

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    When you open the Car project folder, there is a menu item:
    GameObject -> Create Car
     
    Joachim_Ante, Sep 28, 2006
    #22

  23. Joachim_Ante

    Joachim_Ante

    Unity Technologies

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    When you have deep hierarchies with meshes, they sometimes used to get wrong rotations. This is fixed now.
     
    Joachim_Ante, Sep 28, 2006
    #23

  24. Jonathan Czeck

    Jonathan Czeck

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    Ah.. great!

    -Jon
     
    Jonathan Czeck, Sep 28, 2006
    #24

  25. Eric5h5

    Eric5h5

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    Are there any docs/examples for using the mesh combine utility?

    (That grass generator, BTW, is totally awesome.)

    --Eric
     
    Eric5h5, Sep 30, 2006
    #25

  26. yellowlabrador

    yellowlabrador

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    OTEE,

    Thanks for the updates, car wizard, procedural(is it a slinky or a worm?), 3rd person and the grass(tempted to put a cow in there)
    :D
     
    yellowlabrador, Sep 30, 2006
    #26

  27. rom

    rom

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    I wish all vedors were so dedicated to refining there products. Go Unity ! :D
     
    rom, Sep 30, 2006
    #27

  28. terransage

    terransage

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    Downloading, too. I just took a walk through the grass in the Webplayer example, and it rivals Myst! I'm speechless....
     
    terransage, Oct 1, 2006
    #28

  29. nafonso

    nafonso

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    Was there any specific reason for using billboards for the grass other than performance?

    The grass looks great when you are surrounded by it, but on places with less grass (e.g. near the water) it suffers the 2.5D effect, which kind of ruins the looks :(.

    Maybe it shouldn't use billboards, or use a mix, in which the grass further away or away from the "boundaries" would be billboards, just an idea.

    But it still looks great! :wink:

    As for the car wizard, will it be default in a future release or only available on the Race Demo project?

    Keep up the great work!
     
    nafonso, Oct 1, 2006
    #29

  30. Joachim_Ante

    Joachim_Ante

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    It's a tradeoff. Simple cross section polygons don't look very good close up, especially when you look downwards. I really didn't like the look of cross sections so i went with billboarding which is also faster.

    I could have gone with instantiating lots of artist created low poly meshes, which is useful for bush types and lonely plants but that would require lots of different artist created low poly meshes and i wanted to keep the whole thing easy to use.

    Getting rid of the billboarding effect is mainly a question of tweaking it.
    1. Use a smaller width for the grass size
    2. Make sure there are no lonely grass blades.

    In nature you dont have a lot of lonely grass blades either. It's usually a patch of heaps of grass. So when you paint the control maps, just paint with sharp edges.

    We are planning to keep the car wizard in the race demo project for now. If you want to use it in your own project simply copy out all the car scripts into your own project. The Create Car menu item will automatically show up, when you copied the scripts over.
    (Make sure to keep the Wizard itself in the Editor folder in your new project)
     
    Joachim_Ante, Oct 1, 2006
    #30

  31. Venkman

    Venkman

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    The grass stuff is very impressive. Nice work. I was thinking of trying a medieval type scene and the Unity folks stepped up with something o make outdoor scenes believable.

    nice work.
     
    Venkman, Oct 4, 2006
    #31

  32. dan

    dan

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    Thanks for the great update. It seems to have fixed a number of annoying bugs (mainly graphics related, but a few others too) that had stalled my enthusiasm to finish a couple of small games.

    It's great day to be playing with Unity!
     
    dan, Oct 11, 2006
    #32