UNITY 3 beta preview

The new Tree Creator Tool looks like a treat. Nice surprise guys.
When will Terrains get their due?

 

I just watched the new audio demo on the unity blog. It looks amazing.

http://blogs.unity3d.com/





The reverb zones and lowpass filters in particular are a game changer for me. ( No more manual reverb zones FTW )






P.S. Holy crap there are a lot of point lights in that scene, I didn't realize deferred rendering made that large of an impact.

P.S.S Is that going to be a demo level in Unity 3?

 

PPS: If you mean by that the sample project to work with, then no.

 

Yea, point lights without shadows should be darn near free on modern PCs, and also makes it possible to have things like particles light stuff, since lighting is pretty much a transparency effect. The biggest thing holding back Unity from looking as good as Unreal and others, IMO (but then, there's budget, no technical trick beats a big budget ). Lots of great stuff in Unity3, for sure.

 

I Want a playable demo of Dark Unity
That cloth physics is amazing
Tree Generator
Unity 3

 

Same here, more importantly I want to tinker with it in the editor. Although I guess that won't happen, but UT said that they are replacing the island demo with a new project. What will that project be?

Oh, and what's the rate of beta emails being sent out? I hope I receive my email soon.

 

http://blogs.unity3d.com/2010/06/04/3-0-upcoming-demo/

 

it won't be this one at least, that was stated in a few cases in the past.

 

Sweet! That demo would be better to play with than Dark Unity for sure. But I do hope that we can play a webplayer of Dark Unity in the future.

Great job you guys! This is turning out to be quite amazing. :wink:

 

Is the polygon limit on convex mesh colliders still 255 faces in Unity 3?




I realize that going over that limit is overkill in most cases but I am just curious.

 

If any mesh can be turned into a cloth mesh, would that mean that in theory at least, if you had a long cylindrical model and applied the cloth component to it, it might behave similar to a rope?

Even if it wouldn't, I can still think of tons of other cool things to do with it

 

I think thats a PhysX limit not unity. Hmm

 

Yeah I know, I am wondering if Physx being upgraded to 2.8.3 changes the 255 face limit.

 

Anyone know if local caching has had any more love since it got started 2.6, is it going to be available for all users now in an easy to use manner?

 

I know that Eric, I don't want to make a cave with the heightmap, just have the ability to cut a hole in the terrain and then add a mesh model to hide the edges of that hole and then go on to make a cave or whatever with the added mesh object.

 

The latest sound features are insane.

The way you are bringing this tool is kind of artist friendly (= simple and intuitive). I guess this will make a lot of sound engineers very happy to play with

This will be as simple as the gamedev suddenly saying : "hey [insert your favorite sound artist here], I finished the level, do you want to explore the audio possibilities for that level directly in Unity ?"

Sweet

 

I spent some time this morning exploring the cloth physics. It has so much more possibilities then just cloth.

http://www.burgzergarcade.com/blogs/petey/unity-3-cloth-physics

Fall of the Jellymen!

I can just see all of the ballistic gel dummies in a mock up of a shooting range!

 

Thanks BurgZerg ^^

Another question regarding Beast lightmapping :

Is it possible to export the result of a Beast calculated lightmap texture mixed with a custom lightmap texture, but following the new, optimized Beast UV ordering ?

Example :

- I have an UV map for custom lightmapping,
- I have another Beast lightmap UV map texture
- I want to mix both, and export them in a new, automatically Beast optimized UV repartition

This stuff of mixing custom lightmaps with automatically rendered lightmaps is ultra hard to properly do, manually, as you have to reorganize all the UVs in your manual texture to fit the ten times better mapped auto-UV.

But I guess it's not that difficult to implement as an automatic tool (deploy custom UVs, deploy auto-UVs, mix both, export in an auto-optimized new UV map).

That would be a serious killer feature, as a lot of artists have to create custom lightmaps (glowing parts, for ex)

 

Yes, very nice video indeed.

I too have a question regarding the UV for use with Beast. (sorry if this has been asked before)

The game i'm currently working on in 2.6.1 has all the 2nd lightmap UV's created manually. Like mentioned above, these must be better done than an auto-created version (as i spent hours making them as efficient as possible). Can I feed these into Beast and have it create the lightmaps based on these?

Regards,
Matt.

 

LOL, did you read my post ?
That's exactly what I was asking for

 

I read your post as wanting to blend UVs from different sources together.

 

Yup, 2nd lightmap UV coord generation is optional. If you have some UVs you made yourself you can just use those (and have Unity generate on some other models)

 

Thanks Nicholas... that is really great that we can mix and match lightmap UV's between models.

Looking forward to my beta more and more...

Regards,
Matt.

 

Hello,

I wonders if it's possible to create Trees (unit or packages) with Unity 3 And/Or (???) Pro, and sell them ?

Thanks a lot !

Best Regards.
:wink: :wink: :wink:

 

Great, thanks.

 

As good as the Tree Creator is it's not going to magically make an awesome looking tree for everyone as it still takes skill and good source textures... so yeah, I can see a market for well made trees for other Unity users to buy.

 

I have spent some more time playing with the tree generator, and I would like to think that is was time well spent To be honest, all you need some good textures, and time to learn the tool.

I think the market would be better served if you created said textures for others to use as the tool is not that hard to use. Some will opt for ready made trees no doubt though.

 

Has the stability of the connection between Unity iPhone and Unity remote been improved at all?

That would be my most needed fix at this point.

Cheers
AC

 

Yes, it's freaking awesome now.

 

!awesome news! remote stability = less stress

cant wait till I get my iPhone basic beta email!!!(any word on when those might go out?)

EDIT: @aNTeNNa trEE, nuff said thanks for the update

 

We're rolling out roughly 100 a day so it's a little hard to say exactly when you'll get your copy.

 

Great stuff! Thats a big help.
BTW My PrePurchase serial isnt working but I emailed Sam about it.

Cheers
AaronC

 

If you're having an issue with activation please make sure to send that to support@unity3d.com since activation issues fall under their domain (unless it was explicitly said somewhere that Sam was handling this for the pre-release, which I doubt).

 

guys are you rolling 100 every day with the 3 beta ?

 

Thanks for the tip..done ;-)

 

Unfortunately as you can see in this video, I (as a Unity iPhone Basic Owner) can not seem to build for the device.

http://www.burgzergarcade.com/blogs/petey/when-noobness-shines

I have tried reinstalling, and recreating a simple project, but have not been able to get anything to compile yet.

If anyone has any answers, or thoughts, I would love to hear them

 

That's what we're doing at the moment at least. Given the number of pre-orders (which is continuously growing as we speak) we might ramp this up a bit.. not entirely sure though so don't take this as some official statement from UT

 

i treat unity as a family not as a company

 

What a cool statement.

You may not have that many mothers (sorry Caitlyn ;-) ), but you sure have a whole big bunch of dads that are masters at cooking the most incredible gamedev soup ;-)

So does that mean we are all children of Unity? I guess there certainly is some truth in that ;-)

Or were you referring to the kind of family that sends over a few big bad guys to Apple when they have messed wit dem homees and leddem haveit? That would give a whole new sense to the secrecy about the contingency plans around iOS 4 ;-)

 

You might want to alter your analogy there Jashan. I just watched a Scandinavian cooking show where the feature dish was some god awful rotten fish buried in a hole for a few months masquerading as a breakfast food!

If I ever visit norway I'm ordering a pizza!

As far as Unity 3, Higgy had previously hinted at good things for language parity. Does Unityscript now have compiler directives, declarations of multi-dim arrays and whatnot?

Is there a changelog included with the betas that someone can post? I'm as much interested in bug fixes as I am deferred rendering.

 

No change log that I have seen. Would bee cool to see the evolution of the beta though.

 

+1

 

I am sure that they will give us the complete change log once it is no longer beta as they did with 2.5 to 2.6 and the other ones.

 

I still think UnityScript is really evil but heard rumors that it gets some love in Unity 3 and will still get some more before release ;-)

One thing I know is that they're working on getting MonoDevelop to be a proper UnityScript editor ... but since I avoid UnityScript, kind of, someone else probably has to say more about this ...

I kind of liked this thread over there: http://forum.unity3d.com/viewtopic.php?p=341729 ... like, replace Java with JavaScript and ... no, wait, the other way round ;-)

 

question is for what you will need unityscript with unity 3

var skankFoo -> not needed, C# can do that too

but on top of that C# also has LINQ, anonymous functions, objects etc

 

I've only used monodevelop for C# coding. I was under the impression that its main language support is only for C#(not JS, etc). I may be mistaken. I know you can use monodevelop for coding nearly anything, but I thought the intellisense only worked for C#(classes, libraries, etc)

IMO it seems that Unity is choosing to move things towards C#(monodevelop), and possibly lessen the focus on JS, etc.

 

I wouldn't mind that at all.

 

You're right that MonoDevelop originally has been more geared towards C# - but they're trying to make it the one code editor for Unity to rule them all, I guess. So better support for UnityScript is coming to MonoDevelop. And it seems Boo is also not left out ... so everyone should probably be happy (*anything* will be better than Unitron, I guess).

But hey, something completely different:

I just switched my AudioManager / Default Speaker Mode to 7 - and this is just WORKING. So cool! I can walk around my audio source and when I move past it, I can hear it behind me.

This is just too cool!!!

 

Primarily a syntax that makes more sense and is more closely tailored to Unity, so it's more productive and less painful to program in, plus some other stuff like dynamic typing (useful when you don't need maximum speed and aren't doing iPhone apps).

Yes.

--Eric