Unity 3.5 Update

We will have to pay to use FREE software as Subversion inside our projects? Is this for real?

 

@Paulo, um that's the way it has been setup in Unity 3.x. See "external version control support" here http://unity3d.com/unity/licenses
Personally I use Git. Everyone is just speculating about 3.5 features though... The text-based scene file format is a new feature.

 

So, if unity already supports external SVN wath is this new feature present in 3.5? Im confused.

 

To quote the OP, "Text based scene and prefab formats make it possible to merge scene files."
That's actually a pretty sophisticated new feature, I think. Prior to Unity 3.5, your scenes and prefabs are binary files (therefore they are treated by external version control as such, just like any other binary file such as a texture)

 

Yay!
Soon? 2011 2012 Jan Feb Mar?

 

Magic 8 ball says: "Absolutely!"

http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~ssanty/cgi-bin/eightball.cgi

 

@Jaimi
First time asking:

 

Ive been postponing to complete most of my project's main parts according to the announced features of 3.5 upgrade since august or september now.

Still no release. It was a very BIG mistake by unity people to announce it so early.

So, release it already as its current state and do a rapid bug fix later on as you did with 3.4!!

I can live with small bugs here and there.

 

Can't wait for this. Really looking forward to the pathfinding. I'm gonna re-start my project to take advantage of all these cool new features.

I'm hoping for a christmas release, with a week off of work I can spend some good crunch time with Unity.

 

I rather take an arrow to the knee... I put my project on hold so I can solve the cloth rendering issue that i keep running into... it's driving me crazy

 

If they release it on the 2nd of January (my birthday) then I will be over the moon

 

Any chances that lines (splines) will be imported via FBX???

 

Sounds to me as though the "very BIG mistake" was postponing most of your projects months early on the basis of a bunch of bullet point features with no mentioned timeframe.

 

You have birthday one day after mine ^^ 1/1
despite having a birthday, Id rather unity 3.5 to be released ASAP instead of a birthday present

 

so the favorite feature of unity version next would not be neither GUI nor 2D framework. just make it happen to make beer right inside a game engine and make it from pure water
+1 Aras everyone loved it.

 

I am not working on some cheap mobile game that will be finished in couple days or weeks, but needs longer time than that and alot of careful planning.
So, i need to know in advance which way unity is going if i dont want to rewrite the whole thing from scratch everytime.

Aaand the mentioned timeframe was mid of october or at worst december!!

 

That would be one hell of a birthday gift...

 

@anomalous_underdog

That's a neat idea.

 

If they didn't announce it, then they'd get hammered by people for not announcing it.

The rapid 3.4 bug fixes weren't planned; 3.4 wasn't intentionally released in beta form with known unfixed bugs. Doing so would be a big mistake.

The mentioned (hoped for) timeframe was late 2011, but as always that was never a guaranteed firm date.

--Eric

 

Yeah that wasn't really my question, I would certainly hope that would be the very minimum, what I want to know is if the old code will still get the benefits of any new low draw call solutions.

 

This is sweet as hell... never really played around with the particle system in Unity, but I may play in it now...

Definitely awesome... I have some levels that have crowds and I would def love to give this a crack...and LODs are a nice addition...

This is the number one feature I am looking forward to..especially since I build a lot of HDR maps for Mental Ray rendering, and I do have metal objects in my scene... I surely hope this makes it into Unity Free **prays hard**...

Definitely some killer lighting features...does this finally mean I can use the shaders I made for the terrain?

Awesome!! No more scene slowdown... will it matter that I have a hex-core CPU?

Finally, no more single clicking every single object and changing a property... does this also mean that I can like apply a mesh collider to all selected objects for example... I think this is the best update of Unity and what a way to open up 2012 for you guys...

 

I was thinking about the LOD system and how Unity knows when to load a different LOD mesh. I assume it's just using a distance check which is something like

Code (csharp):

1. (someObject.position - mainCamera.position).magnitude

If Unity is now doing these calculations for the LOD system, should we be able to access this directly for our own purpose with out having to do the math again? Seams redundant. Something like

Code (csharp):

1. someObject.lodDistance

Just a thought.

This would only work assuming you need a distance from your camera.

 

Just look at the Unite 2011 Video to see the LOD system in action.

 

@NiPoCo: I saw the video and know what LOD is, but now i'm thinking about how to exploit this. Unity will have to be doing some distance calculations, and can we access those calculations for something completely different. Thus cutting down on our own code.

Say for example i want to know if i am a certain distance from an object to be able to interact with it. This object is using LOD which unity is calculating distances to determine when to change meshes. Since unity is calculating the distance to the object could i access that distance information on the object instead of executing my own distance math in my script. That would be calculating distance twice when i could only do it once with the LOD math.

This was just something i thought would be neat if it could be done. Since it's not out yet well just have to wait and see if the LOD's information will be exposed to scripting.

 

Mine is on the 3rd, and I'd rather get a working version when it is ready, than a rushed version sooner.

 

Btw. is the upcoming pathfinding solution able to deal with dynamic environments where for instance cars are driving and platforms are moving or is it more a prebaked based static solution?

 

Navmeshes are in this release confined to the position in which they were baked. However you could easily get away with implementing moving platforms and cars as off-mesh links (custom connections). These cars or platforms could then in turn be navmesh agents themselves - navigating the navmesh and avoiding other agents.

 

Unlikely, as LOD is not a per object property, it's per camera-object combination. An object viewed from two cameras can and will be drawn with different LODs in the same update cycle. It's also possible they're using an algorithm that doesn't use the camera to object distance. Then again, it could still be valid during camera.render. *shrug*

That said I'm looking forward to the LOD system as well as it fits our current project. Engine-level LODs are much more efficient than anything we can put together in game code.

 

@AngryAnt
Okay, thanks.

 

That looks pretty delicious and apparently Unity 3.5

 

...Holy...sh*t........are those HDR reflection too (I mean cubemap)??

 

That is just one amazing scene in this video. Amazing.

 

I thought the announced RVO solution took care of dynamic obstacles.

 

Indeed. The component type is NavmeshAgent.

 

and another day without unity3.5 in my hands passes ... Awesome video by the way

 

our team has been using unity for a little under a year now and am really glad we picked the perfect game engine. Keep up the great work.

 

Hi,

If I got it correctly we do not have an ETA for Unity 3.5 so it would be pointless to ask for an ETA for the new GUI system, right?
Can I at least know what the feature list of the new GUI system is? Our project has reached a point where we NEED to get a final decision about the GUI framework and if we need to create one on our own, at least I would like to know what to expect from the new Unity GUI system. Thank you very much!

 

My ios/droid game really will need navmesh and crowds. So any optimisation tips on release will be appreciated

 

@AngryAnt
Another btw.

Can such an agent also be defined in a way that he ignores certain other agents in order to keep on track, like for instance in a Frogger type scenario where you don't want the cars to avoid the frogs that are trying to pass the street but maybe some trucks?

 

When I first heard that the new GUI system wasn't gonna make it in, I was immediately angered. But in hindsight, the anger was silly. I'd be significantly more angry if a crappy, half-baked, barely tested new GUI system was provided to us. So I can live with the further wait, though I'm quite confident that I'm gonna have to shell out cash for it (a.l.a. Unity 4.x), but I can live with that.

The new feature list, though, rox. Too bad there aren't any notable Terrain system updates for mobile, as far as I can tell.

 

I'm sure that AngryAnt will have a more definitive answer, but from what I understand the RVO (reciprocal velocity obstacle) solution (dynamic obstacle avoidance) is based on the RVO work at UNC GAMMA. I had played around with their code a few years ago (even converted c# to js) and to answer your question - yes. It's just a matter of tags. You could have car tags and frog tags. Frogs avoid other frogs and cars, but cars only avoid cars.

 

AFAIK that will not be possible in the initial release. It is, however, possible to have agents only do pathfinding and ignore obstacle avoidance entirely.

 

I personally would like to see a video on the current state of the new GUI system. Just to see what its doing, hows it doing, and why its not sufficient so far. Just for the interest.
I mean, the so far videos of unity 3.5 features where also not final and are already some month old. So why not?

(But i am afraid that quite some other unity users would get that in the wrong throat. German expression, sorry if thats confusing.)

I also like the idea mentioned above, the one with the frog tag. I think Unity should have that as a standard tag or even layer! Frog and Cars. Yeah! Maybe in unity 3.6? PLEEEAAASE! It was anounced here!! Gimmy gimmy gimmy FROGs and CARS already!

 

I'm surprised to hear that putting different types of agents in layers or using tags to selectively avoid collisions is not an option at this time. So this limits RVO to only general crowd behavior where every agent avoids colliding each other - still a very useful behavior in itself, but was hoping for some ability to vary an agent's behavior with regards to other types of agents.

Looking forward to future enhancements with RVO.

 

Looks like tomorrow (Thursday) is the day:

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/39298/Finally_Flash_Support_Comes_To_Unity.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+GamasutraNews+%28Gamasutra+News%29

 

Yes! It comes out on my birthday. Well that's UT's birthday present to me. Unfortunately, it's only the beta, but that's better than nothing.

 

Wait does this mean 3.5 is in open beta? Or just that Flash feature?

 

Both

 

@AngryAnt
Thanks again.

Is the AI written by Unity or is it based on some middleware? If it's the second option which one? I would be interested in looking up what could be possible if everything would be exposed.

 

The navmesh generation and runtime navigation is based on the Recast/Detour project.