Unity 4 Details

Hmm, except of some memory usage tweaks I see no important features. This does not look like major release. Btw, still no streaming, no terrain paging, still obsolete terrain engine. I really dont understand, why they are adding new fancy editors for animations (current animation system is OK), if terrain engine is way behind any competition.

 

Sorry to disappoint, but a lot of people feel let down by Unity and they seem to have for the most part ignored them. I'd feel better if they provided more details about the release. At the moment what they are providing is lacklustre and should have been in 3.6. But they seem to have left out the 3.6 release for 4.0 so they look like there is more features worth buying.
Mechanim looks great though. Although I have no use for it. Workflow improvements is a good thing.


But most of the features (except Mechanim) feel like something they could have done a long time ago but chose not to. Example: Workflow improvements.

Does this feel like a major release to anyone?

 

yeah, um, no. Nobody bought Unity right before the cut off who knew how the pricing system would be implemented or that they would get reamed financially compared to lucky others who waited, even if they knew 4.0 was coming. They probably trusted Unity to do something more sensible. It's a raw deal and they could have stretched the cut off incrementally so people didn't feel so griefed that they lost out.

 

To support indie developers who don't have around $1,000 per year to spend upgrading their pro licences (which is what it equates to if you need to upgrade Unity Pro and iOS Pro every two years when a new version comes out), it would be a better option to provide % share as an alternative. The current pricing model is great for EA or professional studios but not for indies, no matter what the rich kids try and tell you. $1,000 per year is a considerable chunk of change.

There's always the free version, I guess. Like a bike with a wobbly wheel, it'll get you there but it probably ain't gonna be very comfortable and everyone else will be going faster than you.

 

I'm glad that some ex Director people are working for Unity.

This way Unity as a company still has a realistic point of view on what can be earned in certain areas of Multimedia/Online-Games and such things and which features are hot and which aren't.

 

I couldn't agree more. Lot's of these add on features need to be included as separate modules. Refine the Package import system and use it for this purpose. Include the option to hide parts of or whole packages that do not need to appear in the Project Assets pane (e.g editor menu scripts).

Unity used to have a clean editor. now with every new release, it is getting more and more cluttered with stuff that's not used by that many devs. UT should have figured this out after they got to the 'CTRL + 0' shortcut in the 'Window' menu but for some reason, they didn't.

E.g. things that are Core to the engine that should load by default:
Panes/Windows: Game, Scene, Inspector, Project, Hierarchy, Asset Store, Profiler, Console

Some menu items definitely need to be put in loadable modules (e.g. Terrain Almost Everything under the components menu) and of course things in the 'Window' menu (which gets taller with every new release)

 

I'm not sure how many ways you would prefer I keep re-quoting and re-affirming that the blog post being referenced was talking about nice broad things we'd might be working on for future releases - without specifying any specific version. Major or minor or whatever.

 

I could re-iterate that the new GUI system unfortunately is not done and we've not over night become some evil gold collecting dragon.

 

Already been thoroughly discussed, My blue text explains what they would need to do.
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/140344-Choose-your-licence

 

Come on... Where in the world I said Max and/or Maya don't have FBX, or a broken FBX? I just said the FBX standard does not support many features the big boys already have built-in. I'm just pointing trade-off facts since the beginning. I'm not disagreeing with you despite this fbx misunderstanding.

 

To re-iterate what I've been saying a few times in this thread:
No. 3.5 has not been abandoned. As a matter of fact people are sitting right now, as I type, hacking away at 3.5.

 

We currently have a campaign going on 4.x upgrades giving you a voucher for the online store, but once that ends you can still upgrade. If you don't see anything you like in 4.0, no-one is forcing you to upgrade now.

 

A weak campaign if you ask me.

 

I know your probably agitated and I don't want to bug you too much, but what about iOS Pro version 3? Will it still be getting critical updates? Otherwise it seems a bit like users will be forced to update. Anyway, just curious about the plans.

 

I agree, they chose not to do that and instead just play Starcraft all day! Now they saw the boss walk by and they got to work in a week to get this stuff out the door an call it a day!

 

After reading the thread, I think $850 for the PC Pro upgrade is worth to pay it, because the plugin and pro features are handy and useful.
But for the mobile part, the breaking GUI system not fixed, you need a third party solution or make it your self. And no promise even you pay extra 850 to go for 4.x. And you don't go 4.x , the worst is when the platform get upgraded, like upgrading to iOS6/Android 5 sth. You have have noting to do with your 3.x mobile.

And another questions, can I use the $200 vouchers for buying a 4.0 add-on if I am a Unity pro+Android pro user and thinking to get a ios pro too?

 

Okay, we've made it pretty clear to UT that we're not super happy about 4.0. Maybe they didn't do exactly what we wanted them to do, but they've still been working really hard on it. I think all that there is to say that's negative about 4.0 has been said, so come on, why don't we ask some constructive questions now?

 

At the risk of being on the wrong side of the pitchforks and torches let me (one of the not-so-vocal majority) say please don't mess with your business model too much. I happen to like the fact that I don't have to pay Unity additional royalties or anything like that. Accounting and taxes are already enough of a nightmare for a small indie without having to keep track of additional numbers and data to send to Unity to make sure I'm sending them a cut. As someone who has been paying for upgrades since before there was a even a Windows editor I'm fine with paying what to me is a very fair price for what I am getting. Of course always feel free to make those prices even lower. 8)

 

Hear, hear! Please, don't change your business model guys!

 

Critical fixes are critical fixes - regardless of which platform they might occur on

 

Community: Okay Unity you build the defenses, make bunkers. ...40 minutes later... upgrade the bunkers!
Unity: That will cost you 850 minerals per bunker.

 

Darnit! I knew I had seen that nickname somewhere before!

 

Yep. That should work just fine.

 

Impossible, this is not Korea. They probably spent all the time playing Diablo 3

 

BTW, I pwned your base with a zerg rush when you minimized your game in fear of your boss

 

No worries. We have no plans for removing options.

 

Will upgrade pricing be available for pro users who choose to skip a release? (i.e. will 3.5 users be able to leverage upgrade pricing for the eventual 5.0?) This is consistent with other high end dev programs like autodesk and adobe. I did not upgrade to PS CS6 from CS5 because of the expanded features did not add to my workflow, but will most likely pick up CS7 and benefit from being a previous customer.

I upgrade for feature set that adds to my productivity or enjoyment and have no problem paying a reasonable amount for it. When an upgrade doesn't validate the cost I pass for the moment. For me, 4.0 in its current state does not. I would like to continue to learn and develop in Unity Pro, however, if UT does not extend the benefit of upgrade pricing to customers who have kept their licenses relatively current on future releases, I'm sad to say I may have to consider cutting my losses.

 

Correct me if I'm wrong but after 41 pages (in 24 hrs) of this thread, I think we can conclude that this has been the worst-received Unity announcement yet.

 

Easily - this the highest amount of Activity I have ever seen on any forum, ever. I think the announcment enraged the thousands of lurkers here

 

Hmmm.... No one ever complains about getting stuff for free... I would assume mathematically that this can only be compared to 2 previous announcements, and I was not around back then.

I hear, ironically, that the announcement of the "Indie Edition" going free was received with a huge uproar from paying customers that thought it would destroy the community, though.

BTW, all 41 pages here are not negative. A lot of the comments are repetitions from the same posters.

 

Same here. Well, on the plus side, at least UT knows they have extremely....ummm....loyal?...customers...I mean, for everyone to get this mad...

 

Then this community is an anomaly

 

Not at all. It's like this when there's a major release. For some reason not when there's a free minor release

 

Well, by now you should have a script to copy and paste in the forums!!! Slackers... better get that script by 5.0 or else... we will troll the forums!!! ... again!

 

I realise you must be feeling quite stressed, the press release was leaked and you had to deal with this when you were not prepared. If this had appeared at Unite 12 (I'm guessing this is when you planned to) alongside a bug-fix 3.5.3, then the message would have appeared quite different.

Obviously you are not evil gold collecting dragons, but the upgrade pricing is higher than from 2 to 3, and without the welcome pre-order discounts there were then (and were the trigger for me to pay for Unity). The much wider feature set must be part of this. But as the feature set gets wider, so users generally use a smaller percentage on their games, yet have to pay for everything or nothing.

The Asset Store shows that people are willing to buy lots of smaller scale items. Maybe it is time to allow users to pick and choose the components they buy from Unity. It would be the ultimate vindication of the Asset Store if you could buy the core engine and upgrades to it there. Support issues may become more complicated, but hasn't the issue already passed, as you must already take into account any other purchases made on the Asset Store?

 

It certainly is the first Unity announcement where I did not immediately go to the store and hit buy without any second thoughts. And a big fat smile on my face. That's kind of sad because I really love being enthusiastic about Unity.

Last time (3.0), I was totally in awe. This time ... I might wait until the new GUI system is actually part of the package. Even with a big fat "BETA - use at your own risk" button attached to it; I wouldn't mind that at all as long as I can somehow build on something that is "Unity built-in". I moved from UnityGUI to EZ GUI, then from one EZ GUI version to the next, then from EZ GUI to NGUI, then through a couple of iterations with NGUI. Seriously, even if "new Unity GUI release" breaks half the API that was created for "Unity GUI beta" I would feel better doing the porting work than I feel right now.

I'll probably upgrade Unity Pro, though ... just with the mobile packages, I'm not so sure ... on the other hand, if I upgrade Unity Pro but not iOS Pro and Android Pro, I'll probably lose my favorite feature of Unity: One project, all relevant build targets, test Web Player, five minutes later test on iPhone, another five minutes later test on iPad, and another five minutes later test on some Android devices. So in the end, I might bite the bullet and get the whole package; probably one at a time and waiting as long as possible with Android which as a platform I didn't have much fun with so far. Actually, I would be more excited about proper Metro support than anything else right now - but that seems to be out of question for 4.0 which is another huge downer.

While last time, I seriously felt like "awesome, I can give UT money again at last" (no kidding), this time I feel like "ooops, I'm paying taxes for enthusiasm".

 

Keep it positive guys. Remember, the hard workers at unity aren't necessarily the decision makers. Yes $850 instead of $750 stinks. But it's an upgrade cost that doesn't expire as I understand it. This is good overall.

I think the big problem is unity announcing 4.0 when 3.5 isn't, really isn't... finished. It doesn't feel finished. It doesn't feel quite complete, so that's why people are up in arms, they don't feel they've milked 3.5 enough. It's a fine balance to get right, and unity did not get this right.

But to be positive, we can encourage them to keep supporting 3.5 for a while yet with fixes and polished feature set. I'd still like to see gui moved over to 3.5 if only to mollify the enraged customers.

And all those who have bought unity 3.5 within the last 2 weeks, I do personally encourage you to seek a refund if it's possible, then buy 4.0 again right away (as it entitles you to 3.5 in the meantime). 2 weeks is way too harsh

Or contact support to see if they'll upgrade you to the new 3.5/4.0 inclusive deal being offered right now.

 

Tiny, Tiny Fraction you say? yeah in a tiny tiny time span of 24 hrs. Wait till the other (Paying) users of UT find out then we'll see if that still holds. And sure there are a lot more users but check out the ratios for Positive vs Negative comments for other releases. Certainly you can't ignore that.

 

Maybe upgrade prices and GUI system could have been better, I don't deny that, but otherwise there are massive improvements overall. If they released an unfinished GUI system (my feeling isthat ScaleForm integration is not ready yet), you'd complain anyway like: oh my god, why did you release an unfinished feature?? This is so unprofessional!
Let's be critic of course, UT benefits itself from criticism, but let's leave the anger out of this, doesn't do any good to anybody
It's not UT developers vs the community, just saying

I agree with somebody who said that who owns multiple licenses should get discounts. That drives people to buy more and it's a fair deal that is applied in several markets already.
IMHO, please UT don't think I'm crazy, I'd apply a different business model to the Asset Store as well. If the money spent from the revenue that sellers make through the AS is spent on Unity products, I wouldn't take the 30% cut out of that. At the end of the day, you'll get 100% rather than 30% and people might auto finance themselves through that mechanism and so creating a more interesting market (even AS stuff could be part of that Unity products universe, so I sell my scripts and I buy with that money graphic assets because I suck at drawing/modeling. Money moves, everybody wins).
Am I crazy thinking about a system like that?

 

Like this??

Code (csharp):

1.  
2. var majorRelease : boolean;
3. var price : String;
4. var customerHappiness : String;
5.  
6. function Update()
7. {
8.       if(!majorRelease  price == "Free")
9.       {
10.             trolling = false;
11.             customerHappiness = "Happy";
12.       }
13.       if(majorRelease  price != "Free")
14.       {
15.             trolling = true;
16.             customerHappiness = "Unhappy";
17.       }
18. }

 

You pretty much exactly summed up how i think about the Unity 4 announcement.
Spares me from coming up with a text myself. Big thanks for that ;-)

 

That's what I get for saying the word "script" in a programmers forum...

I meant like this:

"Hi guys, we are releasing a paid expansion for bla bla bla bla

As you all know bla bla, playing Starcraft, bla bla so delayed to paid version an bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla.

We appreciate your understanding and just zerg rushed your base!"

 

Its impossible to see anything useful in this thread. Too full of complaints. I personally think its a pretty good deal. And I'm sure there are more features coming, its so early, they aren't gonna start showing off features that arent ready to be shown. So go get a cup of coffee and make your stick death games.

 

If you can ignore the fact that some employees of Unity seem to be too ignorant to understand that V3 was quite disappointing in a number of fields (although i can't hate it due to the fmod support) and the way they introduce V4 can come around as a slap into your face, maybe because they never had to make their living with products they did with Unity on their own, then it's sort of fun due to the reactivated activity, at least it makes people communicate, maybe drink some beer as well, again.

Hey, good news, Torchlight II is said to be released on the 28.8.2012.

 

By the way, how is it meant to let Linux play with DirectX together? Do we need to use a OpenGL substitute here? Or does the Unity runtime come with a inbuilt super WINE version?

 

*rofl*

So that's why there's no new GUI system?? Why Blizzard...WHY?!?!?!?!

 

Well, its a bit hard to not be upset by the increase in upgrade costs. I think there are two main reasons for this. First, people now own multiple licenses with the mobile addons. So its not just a $850 increase, its more like $1700 or more for the updates. That is not even considering people with multiple licenses. Its really disappointing there weren't deeper price cuts for previous owners and owners of multiple licenses.

As I said before, if this sort of thing doesn't change, I won't be able to afford the new updates.(Which is a bit depressing considering I've already spent $3500+ on Unity)

Secondly, as you said, Unity 3.5 doesn't feel quite done yet. I think a lot of people are feeling burned by that.

To try to keep things positive, I'll say that the Linux announcement was really good to hear. Also AngryAnt's support in here has been great.

 

There is something wrong with my account so my pro license (desktop+ios+android) doesn't show as upgrade option in the store, but if indications from other posts are right about the upgrade fee being around $2200 in total I would say it is pretty steep for what it brings to the table, especially with regard to the mobile add-ons.

I was not very happy with the bugs in 3.5, but can't recall that I ever complained openly in the forums out of respect for the hard working sw engineers doing the best they can. This pricing policy however is a pure business decision that doesn't seem very well thought out. Don't get me wrong, I don't want the upgrade for free, and I think the price I paid for the original licenses where good value. I just don't see that I get enough bang for the buck in this case.

Cheers,
Patrik