Official Unity 2019.3 Is Now Available

You're confusing art with technology. Epic is not providing art for you, they provide the technology to, in this case, free up some art time by not having to worry about authoring LODs or baking lightmaps. Art time that, should the developer desire, could be reallocated towards better models (or more realistically, spending less on art overall). Plus you get the artistic freedom of every light being dynamic GI. I can't really see where you're going with the hidden loading screens, would you rather have a real loading screen instead of a few seconds of bright sunlight that don't break your immersion? In a real game that will use a small fraction of the geometry that was demoed here to show just how far Nanite can be pushed, the loading times will obviously also be lower, likely to the point where these tricks will no longer be needed.

If you're big enough you can negotiate to pay a large sum of money for UE4 upfront and reduce or completely eliminate royalties so this is not really an issue for AAA studios. What is an issue though is how efficiently they can work with one engine or the other. There's a reason why AAA studios don't tend to use Unity.

 

I'd rather not have to have loading screens (or equivalent tricks) at all. These tricks very much do break immersion, because people are catching on to them. You can find plenty of YouTube videos explaining exactly why there are so many tight passages to squeeze through in games these days. People know they're just a gimmick to do a loading screen without "officially" showing a loading screen.

There is no such thing as magic. It's the same tradeoff you see anywhere else in software development: you can either compute things at compile-time and swallow the upfront cost there, or at runtime, pushing the computation cost off onto your users. "Baking" is just a gamedev-specific term for "compiling, except for graphical assets rather than code". If you're not using a baking process to precompute this information, it has to be computed at runtime.

While I have no inside information to base this on, as a software developer I strongly suspect that that's what's going on during this loading time: it's not spending time loading the assets into memory, which the PS5 architecture would help with, but rather it's taking a bunch of CPU/GPU time analyzing the data once it's in memory, crunching all that math every single time you run the game, to save developers from having to do it once when they build it.

And when you look at it from that angle, that's pretty much always a bad tradeoff.

 

I bet the hi-poly assets only exist in the source project. Once it is built, there are only baked million-triangle meshes, instead of the billion-triangle meshes. Doing at run time would be completely insane. So this tech would probably increase build times a bit. Nothing magical, just a cool and useful technology in the dev pipeline that was badly needed for, logical next step in the evolution of game dev tools. Nothing new in the final game builds though.

 

If so, then what do you think all that "loading time" is going to, on a platform specifically designed to eliminate the concept of loading time?

 

Loading times are and will remain a thing forever in gamedev. You can't just expect to load an entire level chunk into memory synchronously in an instant even on the fastest SSD. What the marketing speak of "eliminating loading time" really means is that now that consoles finally ship with SSDs (lol) it gets quick enough that you'll be able to stream these in without the aforementioned tricks. In this particular case, instead of needing a good 5-10 seconds to load the next part of the level it will be done in 1 or 2. Don't forget that the UE5 demo is extremely detailed to show the limits of how far the engine can be pushed and a real PS5 game will only have a fraction of the data it needs to load.

 

Really sorry to say but Unity 2019 is an utter disaster, things have gone bad terribly.Even a simple asset import of particles is taking more that 1.5 hours.The purpose of product evolution is to increase ease of use not increase in frustration.

Please Unity team get your act together and deliver a product that we can use with confidence not with fear of project breaking bugs

 

How old is your dev system? I was having issues like that, but they went away when I updated to some reasonably modern (not even bleeding-edge or super expensive) hardware.

 

SSD is an absolute requirement to have any reasonable editing performance. Both Unity and your project should always be on SSD.

 

That is big problem for me. What happened for this sudden change?

 

If by "sudden" you mean "the writing's been on the wall for 10 years now"...

 

Yes my system is running on WD SSD with dedicated gfx card.
Import iterations + Texture compression for android platforms are really taking a lot of time in Unity 2019, which as per me is a big performance degrade when compared with Unity 2018 LTS.

If you have got any suggestions do let me know.

 

you use asset cache or accelerator ? initial import will still be slow, but repeated platform switching benefits a lot

 

@LeonhardP

I was thinking today. You guys should make it where when you create a new button on the UI. The raycast target for the text component is turned off by default. Someone needing that turn on would be a super rare case scenario.
I honestly can't even think of a reason to have it on.
Any hover over effects you would want the raycast target to be on the button Image.

I have a game that probably has around 1,000 buttons and that raycast target is checked on on most of them cause remembering to shut it off is a huge pain. Plus I didn't really think about it when I first built the game.

 

+1!

All text(meshpro) should have it off by default. I don't know many cases other than hover-tip themes that might require raycasting on most UI text. Even in such a case, if it were important, a simple setting to have default values on newly created objects would suffice there as well.

Definitely agree on it being raycast=off default. One artist on the team had forgotten about this during our initial migration to Unity, and we had to go back through a lot of windows (30+) and disable it on all text objects lol.

 

You can use default preset for text component for both - regular text and TextMesh Pro. I am using default presets for most components, it speeds up things a lot

 

Default presets? Is that in preferences somewhere?

 

https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/Presets.html
https://blogs.unity3d.com/2019/10/1...date-decisions-and-avoid-errors-with-presets/
https://unity.com/releases/2019-3/a...41833.1590500909-856581304.1579650664#presets