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UNITY 3 beta preview

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by nikemerlino, Jun 23, 2010.

  1. HJP

    HJP

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    I have components/scripts .... in addition, not rendering/volumetric light beta or volumetric lights ....

    curious :?:
     
  2. antenna-tree

    antenna-tree

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    You need to import the "Image Effects (Pro Only).unityPackage".
     
  3. Ippokratis

    Ippokratis

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    Dreamora, Mr Dude thanks for the answers.
     
  4. Aiursrage2k

    Aiursrage2k

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    I keep getting this error in the command editor but I dont know what the problem is.
    m_TypeTree->m_Index != -1 m_Overrides->size()
    UnityEditor.DockArea:OnGUI()
     
  5. Iron-Warrior

    Iron-Warrior

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    Great stuff...seems like it's been kept on the down low, havn't heard anything about it.

    How exactly does this work? Is it basically just checking off an option on the controller that lets it be pushed by (and take friction from) rigidbodies, or is it more complicated than that?

    Either way it has me all excited. Properly coding moving/rotating platforms to work in all contigencies is pretty tough, so it's nice to see this added in.
     
  6. theinfomercial

    theinfomercial

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    Any tips on using Umbra? Results are great but render times are quite long in production mode for a relatively small scene. Also, what do the occlusion areas do really? Are they for building the occlusion solution yourself, or something else?
     
  7. Dreamora

    Dreamora

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    add view areas so it only calculates the pvs for your camera within those area.

    they are enabled through one of the two checkboxes of Component - Rendering - Occlusion Area
     
  8. Frank_Geppert

    Frank_Geppert

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    How can I activate the deferred renderer?
     
  9. Dreamora

    Dreamora

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    you need unity 3 pro

    if you have that, it will normally be the default, but you can configure it in the player settings
     
  10. Frank_Geppert

    Frank_Geppert

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    Yes, I have Unity 3 Pro Beta. That is why I am posting in this thread. But where are the player settings? Shouldn't it be in the render settings? It is a rendering feature.

    It probably is not the default renderer. When I added a point light it told me that it cannot render shadows with a forward renderer.
     
  11. Dreamora

    Dreamora

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    its a rendering thing but you set it globally for the whole player build, you can't switch around.

    where you found the render settings, there you will find "Project Settings" right over it, within this menu tree there is player settings :) (and there rendering path)
     
  12. Frank_Geppert

    Frank_Geppert

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    Thanks dreamora. Now I have shadows in my test scene as you can see below:

     
  13. WinningGuy

    WinningGuy

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    That's an impressive looking test scene.
     
  14. klaymator14

    klaymator14

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    Sorry if this is a n00b question, is the iPad/iPhone capable of deferred rendering? Or is that only available on Mac/PC? Thanks :D

    -Blayke
     
  15. Dreamora

    Dreamora

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    desktop only, on the iDevices, you do neither have deferred nor realtime shadows
     
  16. klaymator14

    klaymator14

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    That's what I thought, I was just making sure of not missing out on another feature by having the basic license :p
     
  17. Dreamora

    Dreamora

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    hehe :)

    naw the stuff there is pretty much in sync with desktop generally.

    exception is that on the iphone, both licenses can use the iphone form of plugins :) (which is nice, means I can finally start working on my iphone plugin bundles that I pushed back as I have no interest implementing the playerprefs bridge, its inadequate in 90%+ of the cases)

    though with iphone basic you will get neither, if you preordered Unity iPhone 3 (non pro) then you will get it ;)
     
  18. klaymator14

    klaymator14

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    Yes, I have pre ordered Unity iPhone 3 basic. So I can use iPhone plugins? What exactly does that mean I can use now? Thanks for your help :D

    -Blayke
     
  19. Dreamora

    Dreamora

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    you can check out the unity iphone 1.x docs, advanced iphone topics - plugins :)

    basically you can talk to C functions to talk to the iOS from within unity
     
  20. klaymator14

    klaymator14

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    Wow! That's amazing! So I could theoretically get access to Game Center and such within the iOS?
     
  21. Dreamora

    Dreamora

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    yupp, you get access to what iPhone Advanced licensees already have access :)

    Just keep in mind that Unity is no UIKit thingy, so it can become tricky to hook stuff up
     
  22. QFS

    QFS

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    Now that Unity 3 has Umbra, dual-lightmap system, and deferred rendering is there a preferred method of map/level creation that utilizes these features more efficiently?

    The combined-meshes technique of 2.6 doesnt play too well with Beast (especially if you want to push it to the max to save draw calls) and probably partially unneeded with Umbra now available.

    And the completely modular approach still scares me since it'd be really easy to sky-rocket the draw calls (unless UT has some trick up their sleeve like creating some management system for dealing with instances of the same mesh ... which I hope :) )
     
  23. Dreamora

    Dreamora

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    combined meshes are a total no go cause umbra does not do occlusion on triangle level but on object level
     
  24. klaymator14

    klaymator14

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    Oh by the way... once 3.0 is out of beta, do I lose access to this?
     
  25. Frank_Geppert

    Frank_Geppert

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    Can you please explain this a bit more deeply? As you saw from my last image I was working on a sci-fi corridor construction set and now I want do some Umbra testing with a complete level layout.

    Currently I even did the opposite. I did not build the entire corridor from one mesh. I split it into several groups of lets say 4 k polygons. This way I thought it will help to render less polygons when a certain part of the room is behind you. The view frustum culling will remove it.
     
  26. Frank_Geppert

    Frank_Geppert

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    Ok, I did some more Umbra testing with my corridors and it works fine. I made a small level from 3 corridors and a corner and distributed lots of lights. As far as I know I can go crazy with lights in a deferred renderer as long as only few of them cast shadows.

    Here are some images (all textures are made from real high poly geometry):







    But I realized that Unity is very sensitive to screen resolution. When I run in 1920x1080 then there is a big difference compared to 800x600 as an example. But reducing the quality level does not make significant differences. So the size of textures or the shadow quality is not an issue.

    So what can we do to have even more optimizations?
     
  27. duke

    duke

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    I wonder if you could loop through all objects located within a portal or whatever Umbra creates, and combine those?

    (and if 1 object is in more than 1 portal, it's excluded from the combine)
     
  28. Frank_Geppert

    Frank_Geppert

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    Ok, here are some more results of my performance testing of this sci-fi corridor level (1920x1080):

    • about 100 FPS with a deferred renderer with almost 100 lights but only 1 or 2 per room casting shadows
    • 35-50 FPS in the same scene when I add SSAO (medium quality)
    • 150-200 FPS with a forward renderer (but it automatically removes lots of lights and all shadows from point lights), so it looks remarkably worse
    • 50 FPS in the same scene (forward renderer) with SSAO in medium quality

    I think this is quite impressive. I really prefer the deferred renderer, looks much better in this scenario with many lights.

    Here is a scene with a few more post processing effects applied (in Unity) to achieve a more cinematic feel:

     
  29. loken

    loken

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    That looks really nice Frank.

    I think the screen resolution thing is a result of deferred lighting, as it's performance is dependent on the number of lamps lighting pixels on the screen.

    Forward rendering most likely doesn't suffer from that problem, though post processing might have an effect on perf based on resolution.
     
  30. Frank_Geppert

    Frank_Geppert

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    I am sure, you are right loken. I saw that post processing brought the deferred render a bit more down than the forward renderer. So it must be an accumulated per-pixel effect.

    But nevertheless. When I remove SSAO but add something like edge blur, then it renders really fast. I am more than impressed by Unity's new rendering technology.

    And with Umbra I can now expand this level like crazy without suffering any FPS problems.
     
  31. ivkoni

    ivkoni

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    Frank,

    is this a corridor pack that you are making?
    Any chance we could soon buy it at dexsoft-games?
    :)

    thanks
     
  32. Frank_Geppert

    Frank_Geppert

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    Exactly. And in addition to the models and corridors you will get this Unity scene and all materials prepared.
     
  33. ivkoni

    ivkoni

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    You are golden :)
    Can't wait!
     
  34. WinningGuy

    WinningGuy

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    Frank,

    Is there any chance we might be able to see small vid of just a camera panning through a corridor?
     
  35. Frank_Geppert

    Frank_Geppert

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    Yes, I even thought about releasing a downloadable demo. But first I want to add some more content to this scene.
     
  36. WinningGuy

    WinningGuy

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    I look forward to seeing it. The scene is quite impressive.

    I guess a lot of us will have to relearn how we structure our levels for optimization.

    I am sort of dreading going back to levels that have already been created and having to reorganize the meshes.
     
  37. WinningGuy

    WinningGuy

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    Perhaps my search skills are just horrible, but I have a question.

    Is deferred rendering available for browser-based games, or only on stand-alones?
     
  38. Eric5h5

    Eric5h5

    Volunteer Moderator Moderator

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    There's never any tech difference between web and stand-alones, only a few deliberate omissions like local file access for security purposes.

    --Eric
     
  39. HJP

    HJP

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    @Frank, very nice ... I think, I will buy it. 60 better 100 fps on a average PC/Mac would be a good value.

    We need a few fps for:

    AI
    Gameplay
    Network
    Special effects
    Animations
    Physics
    Panels

    and so on ...

    I think, the average limit for everything is 24 fps.
     
  40. Frank_Geppert

    Frank_Geppert

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    HJP: As I already wrote, it renders with about 100 FPS on my (quite old) machine. It is a Core2 Duo E8500 @ 3.16 GHz plus a GeForce 9800 GTX.
    I am not sure about a Mac though. I have read some Steam benchmarks and Mac tend to be significantly slower than PCs.
     
  41. Dreamora

    Dreamora

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    that machine is not exactly old if we consider old = weak.
    Thats more than just a bit above average with its gpu actually, as the average is somewhere between 9400 and 9600 which are flattened by a factor of 2 - 6 by your card :)

    and in case of deferred rendering its all about the gpu actually, a 9400 for example won't have much if any joy at all
     
  42. Frank_Geppert

    Frank_Geppert

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    I just checked here:
    http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/videocard/

    There are more users with a 9800 than with a 9600. And more than 70 percent have a DX10 GPU. But this statistic is talking about gamers, not about office users.

    A sci-fi game based on content like this is not for a casual gamer. And when you start to work on a game like this today then it will not be finished tomorrow. It takes some time and more powerful GPUs are standard then.

    But if this still is not ok then you can go the old-school route and bake lightmaps. When you reduce dynamic lights to only a couple per room then you can even use the forward renderer and it renders indeed faster. I tried it.
     
  43. crafTDev

    crafTDev

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    So Im trying to upgrade my iPhone license in the store to preorder the new one and its greyed out and wont let me purchase...
     
  44. Dreamora

    Dreamora

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    Not to frustrate you, but the steam statistics tell as much the truth about the reality out there as the tv series Andromeda or democratic votings any dictator driven country (or CNN)

    All none dedicated gamers left the platform left and right when they started their rippoff in 2009. As the stuff there is now more expensive than just going into store to buy it and binds the stuff even to your acc it has lost more than just a handfull of users especially for casual users (ie the ones that don't throw out $400++ per year for their hw upgrades) and those not willing to pay equal to more than in store while getting significantly less.

    The impact on the stats (which never were representative as only gamers knew about the platform at all) is, that the vast majority of users left on steam are people with cards targeted at gaming and most of them expect that you provide corresponding visuals too.
    If thats your target and your 6 figure project budget enables you to do it, then its a reasonable hardware stat but really only then.

    If you want reasonable stats, you might want to look at UTs hardware statistics gathered by the webplayer, they are at least representative cause all kind of users use it, not just dedicated gamers.
    It will give you a much better picture of how reality really looks alike
     
  45. Frank_Geppert

    Frank_Geppert

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    dreamora: I think your post is a bit too negative. Actually I know a lot of happy Steam users, especially because of the crazy cheap bargains. There was a time when I bought 1 or 2 games each weak because of the great savings, sometimes 5-10 Dollar per AAA game.

    But I agree, when you are after new released games then you will not save much. But I dont buy the latest stuff.

    And again: If you want to render geometry faster, then you can also bake textures and use less lights with forward rendering, this works fine in Unity3.

    But a sci-fi corridor set is not interesting for female casual gamers looking for farmville or match-3 clones.
     
  46. Dreamora

    Dreamora

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    [OT]
    Only if you live in the usa. in any other place where steam is available, its commonly cheaper to massively cheaper to just go into the store. Thats what I meant with rippoff in 2009 when they introduced euro pricing forcefully, applied VAT to all even those where they are not eligible to collect it (and don't refund it) and came up with the idea to convert the USD prices 1 : 1 into euro

    In europe, steam is 50-300% more expensive than amazon.co.uk / amazon.de, just to get an idea and even game stop is cheaper commonly

    On new ones the difference steam vs amazon.co.uk especially is massive (I pay about $40 on amazon and about $85 on steam, at that price I get the disk version in store, which is inacceptable for a pure digital download where no middleman takes away money and where I lose my legally granted law of replication for fam / friends and reselling, point)

    the last good digital service, impulse, is more and more trashed by the publishers by just not giving impulse global distribution rights and I'm seriously hoping that the Activision and EA decision makers will burn in hell for all eternity for their goddamn greed and ignorance towards the idea of digital distribution.
    I'm no fan of piracy but in case of such practises I truely hope and pray that all their multimillion dollar projects are pirated at a 10 : 1 rate until they finally stop this rippoff game
    [/OT]
     
  47. Frank_Geppert

    Frank_Geppert

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    No, I am from Europe / Germany. And there were great summer deals on Steam, some big AAA games for under 3 Euros.

    Only new games are the same price like on Amazon. But I understand this. EA, Ubisoft and others still sell most games on traditional retail channels. They will not destroy this just to please some Steam users. Many of their employees are living from retail, getting percentage and similar. They all want to keep their jobs. It will take some time to change old structures.
     
  48. Disaster

    Disaster

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    Can anyone give me any information on the new depth of field effect? I've always wanted to add some decent DoF to my games and I was wondering if it's much better than the fairly crappy shader we have with Unity 2.

    I'd also like to know if you can switch it on and off without hurting performance too much? For example, if you were switching from first person view to looking down the sights of a gun, could I easily toggle DoF on to make it slightly more realistic?
     
  49. Dreamora

    Dreamora

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    the answer is likely "try it".
    such answers are very context dependent.

    Also I don't understand what you mean with "crappy shader we have with unity 2". Its not that bad and after all you have the sources of it to make it better for your usage.
     
  50. crafTDev

    crafTDev

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    So I just downloaded the Unity 3 beta, how do I access the Unity Remote after downloading it? It is in the Unity folder but it doesnt work...