Unity 4 Details

Yes, it's very very different, but I can really say that every single hour you dedicate to learn Blender will worth it. There's nothing you can't do that Max or Maya can when you're working with Unity. There are tons of free tutorials on net. If you want something fast to master Blender x Unity pipeline, I would recomend this training from Blender Foundation:

http://www.blender3d.org/e-shop/product_info_n.php?products_id=144

 

I think this should be the biggest priority right now. Unless Microsoft changes their mind, without Metro Support they will not accept apps into their App Store for Windows 8, a huge economical hit. I was hoping to have my title ready for that App Store near launch day, be early to that party and got to admit, would had dished the upgrade price just for that. It's a shame we will not be able to become an early presence in that market. Oh well... can’t have it all I guess.

I think Hippocoder was arguing against the people that claim the Indie Humble Boundle is evidence you can become independently wealthy by releasing your half assed physics toy demo or top-down space shooter for Linux.

 

Hello,
well it is too much for the Pro License Updates to me...
850$ for Unity Pro Update
850$ for iOS Pro Update
850$ for Android Pro Update

makes 2550$ uffff just for the Update ..... it's like Adobe now...
for me and i'm a Unity User since day 1 or 2, it's too much for the features....
Where are all these promised features for 3.5 and 3.6 ?????
for me things are going wrong like i say'd 2 Years ago... the move to SF and the cost etc...

.... just my 2 cent....

 

Oh please.

I really love Blender, and do most work now in it. Because i cannot afford the big boys. But it is by no means a substitute for the big boys. I even still model in trueSpace because i am faster and more comfortable there. And that one was never a big boy, was a beta software (means it is incomplete and buggy), and is out of development for over three years now. SDS for selection somebody? A proper mirror modeler? Adding vertices or edges anywhere on the mesh, and i really mean anywhere? Select a faceloop, and not just a edgeloop? What i really miss is the point edit snapping tool for modeling. And Blender just got NGon support, which means that there is a big whole bunch of state of the art tools simply still missing that relys at NGons to work. To implement them into Blender is work for the next years.

This all doesn`t make Blender bad. It`s an awesome piece of software, even more when you take into account that it is a open source project. But to state that Blender beats the big boys is just a dream, sorry. And it always will be, because the development pressure behind professional used software like Max or Maya is a completely different one than behind the mainly for hobbyists made software called Blender.

 

All of your points are answered multiple times in this thread. Many on the page immediately before this one.

 

Okay Awesome Unity 4 with DX11 is awesome nice job UT but one thing is there gonna be a upgrade in opengl too since if u make sm5 shaders what is gonna happen if u run it on mac/linux

 

I also found out that Unreal 4 was shown to the public ^^:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VitLyrynBgU&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dD9CPqSKjTU&feature=player_embedded

I mean what the F***?! But still, Unity wins in terms of pricing, platform variety (at least for now), simplicity and low hardware demand.

I know UDK 3 and it was real S***ty. But since Unreal 4 everything seems to be dynamic, which is great since it drops the bar of effort about orders of magnitudes. You don't need to be an artist anymore, and you don't need to be a programmer... Also the UI was improved like hell... I think one can finally use that monster...

 

Phew. In that case this is our luck ;-)

 

Other than Linux builds in the basic product, I don't see much here that warrants an upgrade. I'll obviously update my iOS basic license, and "maybe" my Android freebie, but I can't help but think that this update is missing quite a bit of the "wow" factor that would get me to shell out $1500 or more. In fact, it mostly seems to be more of the same "carrot dangling" business plan, locking more features into Pro versions that, quite frankly, aren't really worth the price of admission.

To add to that, free license aside, the product seems to get further and further away from the "democritization" mentality with every release. What was a $1500 product, became a $3000 product (iOS Pro), then a $4500 product (Android Pro), and now a $6000 product (Flash Pro) to hit all the potential markets with the best possible options. What was approximately 3.75% of the average US yearly income, is now 15%. People throw out "your business should be able to afford it", but the premise was getting this product in the hands of singletons and people working on their free time, not just those in a position to take investment dollars and/or risk their whole savings on a full fledged startup. Plus, I have yet to see a feature release for any of the "addons" that IMHO warrants a price equal to full price of Unity Pro. Feature updates to the addon products have been lackluster, at best, over the past three years. Add to that the now 4 years we've been waiting for a GUI update that will now (maybe?) be in the 4th iteration, and the "value" ratio has clearly gone down.

Don't get me wrong, Unity is still in the ballpark for "reasonable", but rather than becoming more attractive with every release, it's becoming less so. Unity has become the Cinema 4D of game engines. All kinds of carrot dangling and options over and above a product that is rapidly becoming more expensive, but even worse, there seems to be no interest in packaging the whole product together into a more cost effective solution. All backed by a voracious set of fanboys who sing the praises of the product everywhere they go, often with only a small amount of objective evidence to back up the claims. Yet another reason the product is slowly fanning the flames of my disgust rather than admiration.

There's my two cents.

 

Okay thanks for the information. When can we expect Unity 4.

 

I think you didn't answer his question... He wanted to know whether this only applies to DirectX 11 or will you also have tesselation, the new shaders stuff for OpenGL?!

 

I finally managed to read through this entire thread.

My thoughts:

1) I find the upgrade price to be pretty disappointing. I don't ever remember any other software charging more than 50% of their license price for an upgrade, and often much less. It had better have an amazing feature set compared to what I already have to justify $850. I'll reserve judgement on that until we have more details. As it is, this won't be an automatic purchase for me (not saying I won't pull the trigger, but it's going to have to impress me first).

2) Someone said we need a comparison chart of 3.5 vs 4.0 vs 3.5 pro vs. 4.0 pro, and the developer response seemed tepid on that point ("What information would that give you?"). But I have to strongly agree with the request. The current chart does not show me the differences between 3.5 pro and 4.0 pro, which is really what I need to see. Of course I have some idea, since I use the software. It would just be nice if I had a handy chart in front of me to help with my upgrading decision rather than having to rely on my memory (which can be iffy ).

3) There is no chance at all of me purchasing this upgrade until we have a release date (at least a tentative one). Being a software developer myself, I know better than to ask for release dates on general principals But once you start selling pre-orders (especially at $850 a pop), it is not an unreasonable expectation that we will be given some idea of when that product will be delivered. So I would ask that you guys over at Unity come up with some kind of release schedule sooner rather than later.

Anyway, that's my $0.02 on the subject.

 

Sometimes one must choose the lesser evil.

 

Later this year.

 

Btw I'm unity's harshest critic as well as a 'fanboy' and I'd like to stop all this GUI broken promise garbage. For a start, unity did point out several times the roadmap was their intention, and it may not happen. It didn't happen, which is what unity said.

Also, even with built in features, you might be surprised to find it doesn't fit properly with your project. Rolling your own GUI's in game development is sometimes unavoidable. Lets say you need a very specific radar or a different behaviour? look at Physynth. That is so far removed (GUI wise) that it's not even funny.

And the gui part was quite easy: skinned meshes, colliders on bones. There's a lot of options for people right now who want a GUI and they're just too whingy to work for it.

Another note: when you buy unity, you buy it for the features listed on the sales page. If those features end up sucking, you have every right to complain, and I hope, complain loudly.

But if its not listed there and anyone whines about that, then they're just foolish.

If the upgrade pricing does not expire, I'm very happy. If the upgrade pricing did expire, I would be disgruntled enough to consider my options engine wise. I doubt it will expire, reading this thread though. Just the $200 bonus.

So what do we get for what's on the tin?

$850 for mobile gives me: shadows, mechanim, skinned mesh instancing
$850 for desktop gives me dx, new shader abilities, and what mobile has and more.

So far the mobile upgrade price isn't really quite worth $850. It's just not worth it on top of what I've paid. What I need is a far more efficient garbage collector and some sort of decent texture management for bigger worlds/scenes

I will pay, but mobile needs some extra love as it doesn't stand up to other platforms price wise just yet. Unless unity shadows are outstandingly fast, in which case I'll be hitting the store link sooner

 

DirectX 11 only.

 

Any more info about Scaleform in Unity?

 

The problem with a configurable system is that it would be a crazy mess for them to organize. But I think it could work if they broke it down into sections, like pro graphics package, pro ai package, pro GUI package... If they did each and every component individually the program would become a nebulous mess. Mac users wouldn't know what to do if everything isn't simple and stream lined.

 

Okay that is surprising . Any comment's on why you chose it to be that way? I trust this only applies for 4.0 and may well come with 4.x?!

EDIT: Ah Okay, guess what, I forgot that Mac OS is not the fastest with OpenGL drivers, so there it won't work anyway and Linux support is only Alpha... So never mind!

 

I just bought unity 3.5.2 last week. Does this mean that I have to spend another 850 dollar in the after 2 weeks of using unity? Or do I get the unity 4 upgrade with my purchase?

 

What more info do you want? didn't they (Autodesk) already release it for like 1000$ per game, per platform price.

 

"But have no fear, it's still coming as part of 3.x so it will be free as all of our .x releases are." does seem like a broken promise.

 

Well... I need to say that paying $2550,00 (R$5238,00) currently is not worth it... for me at least.
I don't know, I was expecting for more... Much more than just DX11 for PCs only and a animation system that I don't need to use.
But who knows, I will wait and see...

All I want to know now is they updated or not to a decent version of mono; because this old one they use is kinda buggy.

 

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/140376-Suggestion-for-pro-rated-upgrade-window Too bad they didn't do this.

 

The way I see it, you would buy options in the Asset Store, not necessarily packages. They'd be present - but greyed out - in the core Unity program, and activated right after the purchase. Even to my Mac user's brain, this would remain understandable

 

I feal really bad about this. But I read something about a cutoff date, june 1st? Doe that mean that when you bought unity later than that date, you get the upgrade?

 

Yes, there is a grace period. If you qualify for it you will receive an email.

 

Sorry for that, we'll definitely fix it. Did you perhaps file a bug on it? If so, the case number would be appreciated!

 

It will be getting worse if they charge separately for Windows 8 Metro ARM export, then Windows Mobile export..Well, who knows?

 

Yes, please fix this for 3.x, please! : D

 

Does this mean that ShaderLab is going away and we can write shaders in HLSL? (Please say yes!)

 

Normally a billboard has normals that point perpendicularly to its surface. When such a billboard is lit it is quite easy to spot that it's flat and that breaks the illusion of it approximating a volume (e.g. a puff of smoke). "Bent normals" mean that the normals for the 4 vertices are bent outwards, making the billboard lit similarly to a fragment of a sphere, which helps with the illusion.

We currently use that simple trick on billboarded leaves on trees created with the Tree Editor.

 

Regarding Direct X 11 Support.

1. Will it be possible to use true Hardware AA (MSAA) in a deferred setup ?
2. Will HDR rendering also support MSAA ?

I known there is FXAA available but it is not sufficient for our needs.

 

Cool! Feeling better now

 

Would you mind telling us about why you need that? I mean Battlefield 3 is running just fine without MSAA... MSAA is dead, freaking resource waster and boogie man of advanced effects...

Besides there is more than FXAA. I found FXAA not to be the holy grail, but Unity allows you to use other stuff as well, at least if you go PRO. Just try out different AA posteffects and stick with the one that works best for your game.

 

+1.

If UT could aim all their efforts to bring something related to metro even with Unity 4 beta it would be super-ultra-fantastic. Timing to this is counting right now.

Yesterday Microsoft showed their Surface tablet. It seems it will be a very robust product. Just imagining the possibilities... what a dream reaching this brand new app store near lauch day!

In my opinion this worth much more than Flash export addon.

 

FXAA is better than nothing, but it can't fill in missing pixels.

 

If we can bring up 3.5 bugs now in this thread in fear of them not being fixed (**) then I have an issue with Handheld.PlayFullScreenMovie.

Documentation states: "Calling this function will pause Unity during movie playback. When playback finishes Unity will resume."

This is not happening for me.

I have configured script execution order to make sure the movie is the first thing to trigger on a scene, but scripts that start music playback in the background still start playing music.

I searched in the forums long ago and it seemed to be a known issue, didnt report a bug thinking it may be already on the database.

 

Well, looks like i will have to wait a while to get Unity 4... I bought Unity 3.5 Pro Late march, but it will be worth the wait... can't wait to see demos of the post process effects, which a few of them didn't work at expected.

 

I'm using FXAA for my game project and it is looking sweet... now if I only had a screenshot...

 

It just looks better. Also there can be artefacts AA post effects. For most games this is good enough sure.
We need the best AA we can get for product presentations. Performance is second.

See point 5
10 Things That Need To Die For Next-Gen

There are solutions like forward light index rendering. Which has many possibilities. Like many lights, different shading typs not only phong and true AA

 

The point is, if a technology with that one of the most anticipated triple A title (battlefield 3) just looks freaking awesome, is not enough for your needs, then you shouldn't use Unity... End of story.

 

Yeah, it would be more work for them to implement, but it may be the right thing for them to do. They must feel that either it would convolute things too much or be a risky business decision. If selling more smaller addons would mean that customers that otherwise would only have used the free version will buy some, then they make some extra money, however, it would also mean that customers that would otherwise buy the full package might only buy a few items. Ultimately it would be a more fair system that I would like to see done. Only one version of unity that is fee and optional addons made by unity.

 

Funny thought of pixels getting "filled" in by MSAA . For that you would need supersampling.