Unity 3.5 Update

If its not mentioned, I doubt its there. Not sure what you mean by essential for you though...

3.5 is a free update, so because there is no nested prefabs, you'll refuse to update?

Nested Prefabs would be cool, but far from essential. 1000's of games have been made with Unity without them.

 

It's good to also point that if developers can expect the visual GUI editor and new GUI system in a patch like 3.5.1 in january or it's something to be postponed much.

 

Thank you for the floating-point backbuffer support.

 

Hopefully the GUI update is released in the next month. And keep up the great work!

 

this also applies to all other features mentioned in this list. and with essential i mean that with nested prefabs i can achieve what i want in the most conventient, elegant and time saving way without using dirty hacks or "workarounds". so they are far more important for me than lod or navmeshes. i'm sorry when thats a problem for you.
and i also wont deny the update to 3.5 when they are not included. i justed wanted to state that there are other things important to some people beside the missing gui. i can also "wait" (do other parts) when it comes later. all i want is to know what i can expect.
and i'm not sure why you agress me this way. do you refuse other people to have different priorities than you? as far as i read no one has been offended for crying for gui system not beeing included in 3.5.

 

Um, I wasn't being aggressive with you, nor meant you any dis-respect. Your definitely entitled to your opinion and your own feature priority lists. My reply was based on your wording. In english, "essential" generally means "can't live without" and thats just not the case. I can see why you would prioritise nested prefabs over other features, if they are important to you, but you didn't say that in your post.

 

i'm wondering how you are able to evaluate what is essential/important for other people. you took the time to reply to my post and invalidate my statement because it does not fit your opinion and thats somehow agressive from my pov. you even substantiate your statement with your own opinion (lol).
if you dont share my priorities its fine. but its not kind when you refuse me to have this. or what intention did your post else have?
english is a foreign language for me so its possible i say something people with english as mother language would have formulated in a different way.

as i stated i'm waiting for nested prefabs since they are announced and i have pending the work in the area since then. so yes nested prefabs are pretty much essential for me since i dont want to do work which is deprecated, useless and to be done again two months later. beside the new gui this is the most required feature for me. everything else is just nice to have currently (though may become handy later). so please be so tolerant and let other people (wich you dont even know) have other opinions and priorities. thats all i want.

 

Why this feature list do not match the one from unity feedback ?

#1 Platforms: Linux Player / Web player Support
#2 GUI: Visual GUI editor (like GUIX) (started, ok, but delayed again)
#3 Terrain: Voxel-based terrains
#4 Platforms: 64-bit Unity Editor
#5 Graphics: Decal system
...

 

Because that's a wish list from the users that spans any period while the list for 3.5 is the list of what UT have decided on and are able to give us in this release.

 

Regarding Shuriken and mobile optimization: This has been a focus throughout its design.

Regarding flash: As someone rightly pointed out, this has not been slated as part of 3.5, but is an entirely parallel thing on its own. We will not let either delay the other by making them interdependent. Things are going great on this front as well and we will update you when we have news.

This post, however, is regarding 3.5 which is also doing well on its own. We really can't wait to share all this cool tech with you

Regarding feedback and our changelist: Feedback is an awesome wishlist setup which gives us insight into what the most vocal users and potential users would like to see in upcoming versions. It is, however, not the only source of information we consider when putting together our roadmap.

You have many other means of making your wishes and workflows known, like when you discuss issues and wants on this forum. We're paying attention and factoring this into our decisions as well. Obviously our internal strategies and goals make an impact as well.

I hope this sheds some light on things.

 

Totally valid points but why didn't at least say that you can not talk about the GUI thing?

I feel that sometimes unity practices hiding things from community. unfortunately if it's true and has no good reasons it's a bad habit of big corps and maybe is the reason that Tom is not with unity anymore. These are partly guesses but partly they are based on facts.

 

Its especially unneeded practices if other people on the hand give gamasutra interviews etc hyping out things that did not happen in the 20months since the interview and alike.

Either be open or don't talk about upcoming stuff at all instead of cherry picking what could work as a hype to then not deliver it with the same focus and dedication with which the hype was built.

 

Oh and i don't want to sound unthankful of the great work done and the great engine but i think unity at least a little lost it's roots of being completely open to community. missed those days that helgason himself were bloging all good and bad news with full trust.

I am thankful of you guys and your engine changed my way of living so how can i be rude to you but please be as open as possible and go back to those lovely rutes which are only found in new startups. i don't want Nich and Joachim to post on forums again. it's wasteful but being open is not.

 

Agree 100%.
That is the reason I will never understand why many people do hype a project they dont even got started yet, this kind of marketing drives me crazy, I simply hate to death all that...
When I see Unity Tech doing the same, its a shame to me because I respect Unitys a lot, as mentioned before they helped me out to change my life too and I just dont want to see them doing hypes about things they cant do at the moment.
Anyways, the performance improvements are enough to justify the update;
From my point of view, there was not any reason to mention the new GUI if it is not ready yet.

 

I don't think of it as a hype and doing something targetet. they just thought that they can do it in time and they couldn't but now when it happened it's good to be clear and say for example, it will not be ready till 3 months or so

I meant more on features that i think they actually don't talk about maybe for announcing them on GDC or any other reason that i don't know. features that people are using for months. by people i mean bigger customers.

 

If the new GUI is as smart as the rumours then they're going to tightly couple it with all these different platforms and make it seemless. That's not exactly easy. I would guess they'll release it with 4.0 to be sensible. Big things are usually bundled with major paid upgrades though I'm not complaing about this 'minor' free upgrade. I'm not going to even hazard a guess when 4.0 is due.

 

will flash feature be free or we have to pay like ios?

 

1. GUI has repeatedly been said it's a work in progress. Unity already has a gui and literally dozens of gui solutions. They want to make sure their gui is ready for prime time. I can respect that.

2. Tom Higgins? this isn't the mother russia during the cold war, its just a company (and a good one at that) making a great game engine. Please don't try to see fire and smoke when there is none Tom Higgins did move on, why not ask him yourself why instead of worrying.

 

I'm not sure how we're apparently hiding stuff. David did not post this announcement, no, Nicholas did - one of the founders sat with development every day and Nicholas is even the one in charge of GUI. I'm missing your point here

Regarding hype, we've not talked about GUI before we started working on it. Nicholas and his team have been iterating on it for a while and as mentioned, we are not satisfied with the result yet. Frankly, regardless of a clear desire for this feature, we will not be releasing half-baked solutions.

I don't get the talk of one side wanting more openness and another wanting complete closedness. I don't see how we've dramatically changed that aspect of our communication? Aside from us blogging our ideas for the future a while back that is.

And no, Tom stopping has nothing to do with company conspiracies and sci-fi information policing

 

I duno, I'm pretty sure Unity Tech is a part of the Illuminati, and that you're all a bunch of lizard people.

I don't really mind.

Keep up the great work guys. Looking forward to the release, whenever it happens.

 

I think most people hyped up 3.5 GUI all by themselves, because they want it really bad. Unity has said very little on the subject matter. There have been no demos. The only thing thats been said officially is that its being worked on (isn't this openness?) and isn't ready. The informal pieces of information that Unity employees have given out clearly suggested a product that was not up to standard.

 

Regarding David and Nicholas, surely we as devs are careful enough to see this before posting. what i meant was this, previously most announcements on the blog were done by the CEO himself even when things were crazy with Apple's new license for the ios. it was pure awesomeness. it wasn't good but UT's path was clear to everyone. I also by no means did not mean that the founders are not involved with the project anymore. so my point was not about this post, my point was about a company that everything in it were clear enough that bad news could be posted by the CEO. I am sure that there is lots of good culture there but things changed a little. For example there is a possibility for licensing Linux servers for those who are interested but i think 95% of the community is not aware of that. i don't know how many months ago the first Linux MMO server started in production but i am sure that they are being used and they can even be licensed by us if we want them. You were not hiding it but it's not present in your website.
As said before it might have good reasons like it's not stable enough or platform support is not complete or maybe UT wants to create a business model for it's product as MMO middleware at first. I don't know but as said if there are not good reasons behind it, it's not a good thing and behaviour.

About Tom, i just guessed and wrote that it's my guess. I think David himself and some other members of the team know that i truely love the engine and it's staff. lots of good habits and culture can not change itself all to stupidness and turn itself to Apple. maybe how i wrote my comment was not the best way of expressing it.
Previously i talked to David and i think Graham about these changes on unity's culture. surely when you go from 5 people to 150 things will change but if you don't care mcuh your organizational values will become a piece of paper somewhere that is totally forgoten. it did not happen to UT yet and you are not even close to that at this time. by following aras on twitter (which is one of the most awesome creatures in the world) and by following the great lucas you can know too much on what's going on in UT's offices so you are not a close company.
But friends, awesome guys, powerful and hard working developers at the awesome Unity Technologies, please be careful of what's going on. sometimes you are not doing something wrong by your willing but it happens by itself. as said, my example (the Linux server feature) might be just something that is not completely ready but getting it to some people and even don't talking about it with others can bring bad thoughts up.
There were other times that i did not feel good about Unity. for example one time i got angry of Ricardo unfortunately (my bad and failure, Sorry Ricardo). If someone talks to UT about serialization of prefabs and gameObject references and the possibility of exposing them in the public API, things sometimes will fade to gray. There are other small examples too but i think you can get the point.

I think, Dreamora (which loves unity too and is a long time user and good person) and i and other fellows had slightly different ideas.

 

+1

 

What I don't understand is that at this time, unity's graphics are fine enought for most people here. More advanced graphics capabilities are great too, but at some point, only big and skilled teams can use all this potential. How many teams can do Skyrim here ?
From an other side, Unity GUI and Network are very bad now. Improving those two parts will help more people to do what they want with unity.
Multiplayer games are more easy to do than solo ones. Less content needs to be built in most case (not talking about Battlefield, of course), while solo game require a lot off content to make the player busy enought time (20 to 30 hours min).
You are working hard to provide an AAA graphic engine that can only be fully used by big team on solo games wich is, in my opinion, not the best way to improve unity at this point.
Complete GUI allow games with a lot of features (like RTS or RPG) and Network allow games with a few content but based on players vs players (like Counter Strike or Left 4 Dead).
Solo games with great graphics needs Skyrim, Assassin's Creed or Mass Effect quality and massive content...

 

Do the text-based scenes and prefabs mean proper SVN support ? If so, I'm going to love Unity 3.5 Hopefully also for indie

 

@Acropole
Surely high quality graphics are required for two reasons. first of all many customers want them from studios and don't having them will prevent studios from using unity so don't just think of indie small games. think about visualizations and many other projects. secondly the part of the community that brings the most money requires those features and the other part of the community requires that for unity to continue it's work.
also wanna recommend you to take a look at www.muchdifferent.com for a great but yet not fully known multiplayer solution for unity. it's awesome.
and it's different from those GUI solutions in the market. it's fully complete and advanced.

 

@acropole
Except networking and gui solutions already exist. No point in unity implementing solutions that are worse than 3rd party ones.
UT are rightly focusing on making working in large groups easier (it's a joke that you can't have 2 people working on the same scene before)
Patience is a virtue.

 

And that was not a fun joke while working even on a small demo of an android project (with unity's android trial) with just 4 people. the joke caused us lots of headache. self implementing most things is great but prioritization is an art. there was not a great solution for GUI so they are working on it. there were good ones but not great ones and the GUI was slow.

 

I meant in the long run since some of their statements contradict it'll be "just that", anyways I don't think they'll be able to compete once HTML5 is stable. I imagine the Flash IDE deploying to HTML5 some time down the line, or fading away. Just an educated guess, time will tell

For the record, I do agree with Unity's reply on twitter (about a similar comment I made) that they're entirely interested on developing HTML5 deployment as soon as the technology is a bit more mature. So far even the basic HTML5 standards are still on W3C's draft format, yet the new Bejeweled and some other early efforts are too impressive to be ignored.

 

HTML5 has a long way to go, and integrating unity into HTML5 will need some magic that does not exist yet.

 

So...no update on ProWater4? (sorry I know you guys busy on major upgrade).
I'm just curious maybe there's something new about this like infinite ocean or something

 

@rea - no upgrades planned for Water4 for 3.5. Ole, our super shader programmer who made the water, had other obligations for this release like HDR, tonemapping, and linear lighting (as well as upgrading existing image effects to work with these new modes).

 

Congratulations on finishing the new release!

Antenna tree, are you aware if the unchecking of the "Gerstner Displace" script is working in the build now?
Because right now it is working only within the editor.

 

Did many or any of these great features make it into Unity Basic?

Cheers
AaronC

 

I see...well i'ts no biggie . Still can't wait for 3.5 release, Congratulations guys

 

Yes, but we can't go into specifics about that yet ;-)

 

That navmesh pathfinding would have to be my pick of choice, and that LOD management system sure sounds interesting!

Great work you guys
AaronC

 

All of the features are actually so cool that at the least with 3.5 I'll be buying a Pro License.

Can't wait for the release to happen

 

Neat! I just pooped out a filmic tone mapping shader so it'll be good to get that going with HDR/linear space.

 

I can't wait.

 

Great news!
Can you tell me, what exact changes were made to improve work with subversion?

Thanks,
Alex

 

Just a few weeks ago Ole told me he was going to expose water height / surface normal in Water4 for 3.5. Is this not happening?

 

You're the only one where who's aggressive ^^

Essential is, as he said, something that "must be in". The new Occlusion Culling for example is essential, because there is no way for a developer to add his own occlusion culling (which can compare itself with the built-in in terms of performance).

Cache Server is kind of essential. Everyone who had to switch back and forth from PC/WebPlayer to Mobile Plattforms (especially the PowerVR ones, whose texture compression is extremely slow), it can takes minutes even on very small projects (~170 MB project size, ~10 MB webplayer size). Big Projects may take an eternity where you're locked and can't do anything.

The particle system is quite essential too, as the currently built in support is mediocre to say at least.

Text-Based scene and prefabs ARE essential, because currently it's impossible for two people to work on the same scene or prefab without messing up with the other guys changes.

Multi-thread renderer is essential, especially on mobile devices, where every bit of performance is necessary.

That lighting stuff, Google NaCl, or that iOS improvements aren't really essential, same for webcam support.

Especially trying to make some graphic improvements most people will never use is quite of pointless. There is no need for Unity to try to make their engine to complete with CryEngine or Unreal Engine, because most of Unity developers are indies or smaller teams. No one is going to make the next Skyrim or Battlefield in Unity, because the resource requirements are huge (not in terms of engine, but of assets and human resources). And everyone who can afford to pay 50-100 people to do assets and quality for the next Battlefield, can also afford to purchase the license of CryEngine or UT Engine.

Well yes, the new GUI is essential and I'm quite sad it didn't made it in 3.5, just because the current Unity3D GUI is the most horrible thing I've ever seen. Working with it is like programming 30-40 years ago...

 

So does each individual game made with unity have to be specially compiled to NaCl format to be played in the chrome browser or?

 

It's an additional checkbox in the Webplayer Build settings

 

So good, its worth quoting twice. Do you have any tips or tricks where I can begin converting all water to beer? I feel the majority of the forum will benefit, so IMHO it is an essential feature of unity.

 

Now THAT would be a cool engine feature!

 

This promises to be the best update yet. Can't wait.

That said I sure do hope Terrains get some much needed love soon.

 

so when is the expected release date?