Unity 4 Details

Hi Tseng,

I Don´t think unity deliverys a half finished product or features, we gained a lot of flexibilit with navmesh for our game. it´s simple and static for now, but improvment comes in new updates.we tryed diferent solution for pathfind and navmesh before, and i´m 100% sure the unity navmesh is one the best solution in the market for navmesh and pathfinding.

Now is very easy to create better AI to interact with the environemnt.

in unity 4 they will suport dynamic obstacles and avoidance priority

sometimes people make confusion about navmesh/pathfind with AI system.

I Igree with you about ios and android pro license, i wish to a license exclusive for ios development without other build opitions, like if you have ios you can build only to ios. maybe some time they can do something like this.. is a wish not for my work or games, but for developers focused in this systems

cheers!

 

Same here. Just 5 months ago I paid $$$$ for Unity Pro and Android basic. And now, I have to pay $1,100?????
Unity, please take a look back at your upgrade pricing. As it is now, I will not upgrade at those steep prices for an upgrade.

 

So you bought something and now you're upset that it didn't include additional functionality which hadn't even been announced at the time of purchase, despite the fact that there was no indication that it would include any additional functionality?

You got exactly what you paid for. No one is expecting you to upgrade, you're allowed to use Unity3 after Unity4 is released.

 

Definitely a business genius, he saw the gaping hole in Unity's core and filled it with something usable.

The one reason I really invested in Pro in the first place is because I am using very high res 2D images, and the editor would always crash if I tried to throw them into Resources, so I bit the bullet and got Pro because it provided me with Asset Bundles that would solve that problem because they would not be included in the build, everything else Pro had to offer was a bonus. After playing with the GUI system in 2.5 I really thought Unity would upgrade to something akin to Flash for 2D GUI and make a decent sprite management system (and yes that was touted again and again a couple of years back ) so I used Brady's Spritemanager 1.0 and custom modified it to help me create all the animations for the GUI and the characters as a stop gap till they had a better system. Well the new system never came, and I am still using my custom system for character sprites, and NGUI (an extra I paid for) when I really needed something better for the GUI that I did not want to take the time to code myself.

It's just really sad that Unity dropped the ball on this, if they would have improved their GUI and gotten in a better 2D api and sprite management system, I know a lot of developers that would have leaped into Unity right away. 3rd party solutions are a stop gap, at any time they could be unsupported, or cease in development, and in the case of a core element like GUI, it seems immature of a company to ignore it in favor of other "features" when something like this should have been improved and finished from the get go. Coming from a Flash background, it was like going into the Stone Age with 2D in Unity. But as it is, Unity is a 3D engine and focuses on 3D rather than a "game" engine, but I imagine most are game developers that license Unity, and ignoring the 2D core component in favor of shiny new 3D features will burn them after 2 years of nothing new in a core basic component of game development.

I love using Unity, I am happy that I purchased previous licenses, but watching the development and working with it for 3+ years now, I see the flaws in the way Unity is creating their software. Basic components should not be glossed over or left to 3rd party solutions, it leaves a bad taste in the mouths of veteran developers that have worked with engines in the past and seen the rise and fall of tool sets over the years.

What Unity does right though is having multiple scripting languages (I don't know of many that do more than their own custom C based language, C++, or LUA), a customizable user interface and editor, and a decent shader system. They have implemented many, many things that make development easier, but I think they should really focus on getting core things right, introduce new features as "Beta" or "Alpha" features that are incomplete or previews for the next iteration as to not confuse customers into thinking that these features will mature along with their current software license. I'm sure I am not the only license holder that saw pathfinding and new particle system as something that would be fully implemented and not held off for the next major release. They certainly never said they were "Beta" or "Alpha" features that would be completed in the next major release, so when developers started implementing and using them they were not assuming they were going to be left unfinished features during this license period. I've been a solid supporter of Unity these years, and I am not very vocal on these forums for lack of time, but I do believe the customer in this case has a right to feel miffed.

If not for better communication, I believe all this could have been avoided, (50 pages of forums and what not) had Unity been clearer in their agenda, putting in fixes before features, and fixes for current features, then maybe many would not be verbalizing their displeasure at the plight of upgrading to increased prices, and what seems to be the end of the line for support for the product they purchased.

 

Do you realise you can use WWW and the file:// protocol to load images?

 

I'm sad that the new animation system doesn't get more love. I really applaud the Unity team for looking at what I see as one of the most overlooked aspect in games, animations! When I look at the UDK4 presentation, all I see is focus on better graphics. Natural looking movement to me is the future. Proper foot planting etc, not floating feet and repeating exactly the same animation over and over again (I assume small tweaks runtime will be possible, like angle of spine or whatever to make it look more organic). I like the video presentation of the system, but I actually think there are a lot of impressive stuff that you could point out with this system that people might not realize is there.

This together with AngryAnts behaviour tree system (AI and animations, that's where it's at!) is what makes me choose Unity over anything else out there. Thank you!

 

Unity + Directx 11 + Mobile Shadows = F**K YES!

 

You don't pay twice for the same feature.
But at least it shows where some mobile devs draw their missconclusion from.

The regular Pro is what pays you the feature technically at all, without pro you wouldn't get it as the mobile pro don't cover the engineering effort for the feature itself. The mobile pro cover the massive engineering effort to make those desktop focused features run at all on mobile and then also run performantly and within reasonable resource usages.
Just cause the code is technically there for desktop does not needfully make it of any use for mobile.

 

Mecanim animation system
Linux deployment

 

What you're describing seems to be that you'll be "forced" to upgrade to some 4.x once that has a feature set you are looking for? How is that so terribad?

 

Yeah I'm disappointed about the GUI not being ready, but I am excited about the new animation system if it's what I think it is.

I know mecanim has many features/benefits, but does it also do proper foot placement similar to the locomotion unity extension? I saw in one of the videos it mentioned proper foot and hand placement for things in the environment. I tried to watch that video again to see if I could understand it better, but can't find it.

I think making it easy for us to avoid floating feet etc.such as on big steps or cliff-sides in our games would be one of the coolest features so hopefully mecanim also does this.

 

You'll have to take that up with stutica.

 

4.0 does not break backwards compatibility, so a 4.x mono upgrade is not out of the question.

 

There is no incentive to me to pre-order Unity4. The $200 voucher for a later purchase in unity store is not an option. Having the experience of the previous releases i will wait with the upgrade till 4.0 version is stable enough.

P.S. As an European consumer i feel gimped by the prices. I think 400 euros is a more reasonable price for upgrade than 650. Considering the fact that I have to pay the VAT too, the upgrade for me is 806 euros, which is way to much in this times, when clients are thin and their pockets are even thinner.

 

Oh really? What happens when Asset Store's addons begin to support Unity 4+ only?! (because Unity will force them to do that)
Sticking with outdated versions isn't viable, but upgrading isn't worthy either for many users... Im glad I've only got art assets in most cases.
They just rushed a 4.0 release and seat back many fixes and upgrades for 3.x that was already taken as a matter of time both by their own words and community expectations; what these guys crying here are trying to say is that they feel betrayed...
3.x bugs are not fixed and 4.x will introduce even more issues; heck they didn't even update Mono for a major release.

I don't really care though... Unity is not the only tool around, its editor is good not god.

 

Not sure, but I hope so. They talked about IK on the hands when grabbing the ledges at the older videos. And also the animations seem to adjust to the ground. You can see this in the old videos too, where the actors jump from different heights with same animation.

Maybe AngryAnt can shed some light on this? *wink wink*

 

I suppose they're quite busy right now... I've been contacted by "my" account executive at Unity, replied to him with some questions and didn't get answers yet...

Be patient, young padawan...

(gosh... I don't even like Star Wars... but there's no Star Trek quote fitting)

 

That is an excellent idea! /me heads to do a signature change.

 

Sure, but it was too slow, I needed the async loading for it to work properly and that is only with Pro as well.

 

Well, if you take a look at the profile of those who complain, if you look at their "Posts:" counter, you'll see that most of them are long term Unity users. Personally, I'm in since 2009. And current plans do not foresee a change of that. Not only because of my game project but also because I'm going to give courses about Unity and Game Development from the end of the year on.

So, I'm double "forced" to upgrade

 

Hehe! Yes! Raaaarrrr!

Yea I think part of this... ah, disagreement, comes from people misunderstanding this initial campaign feature highlight as the full feature delta. We will indeed go into more detail as we approach release, but we will not clutter our campaign pages with in-depth specs. That will just lead to even more confusion.

 

GUI is an asset because it can implemented as such. No need for native engine support. So I am wondering, why hasn't any company built a nice one, when there is such a "massive" demand for it?!

 

From what they've posted the new GUI is supposed to have a timeline (I guess similar to Flash?) and is integrated with the animation system. With the animation system itself being changed with Mecanim I guess that explains the delay.

 

I believe NGUI already makes a fortune satisfying that demand, and EZGUI too I believe. It could be nicer, but they already are trying.

 

GUI was never shelved. It has hit production snags and undergone numerous iterations. When finally rolled out of the garage, I think you can appreciate why.

It is extremely unfortunate that it has taken this long - longer than we planned, but it has never been a project we have taken lightly. Quite contrarily.

 

Have you seen me cheer? For the game I am developing, Unity 4 delivers almost everything that I urgently needed. So why shouldn't I be happy with it? Honestly, I was thinking about quitting development of this particular game. Unity 4 has revived it ^^.

I am developing a custom GUI system for over two weeks now based on NGUI, which is start but nothing more, so I wouldn't be too happy if Unity 4 would bring a killer GUI. I am almost done .

Unity wants AAA money? I think they are very well aware of that they fill in a hole in the market. Without the Indy developers, they are dead.

 

We will not force asset store publishers to require 4.x. What kind of fascist setup do you take us for?

I would expect that for quite a while packages on the store will require 3.x minimum as the publishers would presumably want the largest target audience possible.

 

I'd feel a billion times better about preordering if that voucher was for the ~asset store instead of the Unity store.

 

Please call back later, we're rotating shield frequencies? Naw...

 

What are the problems so many people have with the current Mono? I don't get it...

I mean, MonoDevelop is pretty buggy (especially on a Mac), but we've never had a problem with Mono itself or its limitations, and I'm wondering what exactly it stops people from doing.

The GC performance spikes I can understand as annoying, but as someone who worked with XNA on the 360 in the early days I learned pretty quickly how to keep it out of my way.

 

Why so much hate on Unity 4.0?????

Sure it would have been good to get GUI etc but stuff like this happens and we should all be happy that Unity sells for a decent price.

I also love the way everyone is so quick to tell unity that they have screwed up but no one will give any opinion on how to fix these problems.

 

cause UT hintend for an eternity that a native refresh is coming. which sane 3rd party invests tousands to tens of thousands of dollars to write, document and support a fullscale one if you can expect to be backstabbed by Unity itself 'just next month' never making back the investment? Nobody could have forseen that this 'soon' would be in the range of 16-24 months.

 

Could you please explain so why I had to upgrade from Unity 3.5 to 3.5.x just to be able to buy some art?
What kind of incompatibility a 3D model has that it can't run in previous Unity??
And that wasn't the only situation, in many other iterations it was all the same... "This package requires Unity x.x blah blah".
So how is that not the case? Im not calling anyone "fascist"; just saying what happens in the Asset Store.

 

The asset store is all about guaranteeing that the assets just work out of the box. That assessment can only be made on the store based on the version of Unity used to upload the package (as clearly the assets imported into that version), however it cannot guess about compatibility in earlier versions.

So all one has to do to make a package available on 3.5 with 4.0 out is upload the package with a 3.5 install and not a 4.0 one

 

The issue with gc in Mono 2.6 is that most people starting out with Unity don't realise it's a problem until they start pushing their dev machines and wonder why they are getting horrid frame rate stutter due to the cpu spikes when gc kicks in. To actually uncover why it's happening requires days of trawling the forums and a lot of frustration. Once the problem is understood, it's time to look to a solution, which is where object pooling and variable caching comes in. And that requires rewriting an awful lot of code. Basically, discovery and resolution eats up a huge amount of time.

Given, once learned pooling and caching become standard practice, but it'd be nice if it were well documented as an issue in the Unity documentation and not just in forum posts. That would potentially save people a lot of man-hours.

Quite a few third party components don't seem to be aware of this issue, as their code contains allocations and object destroys in Update(). A faster gc might remove the need to rip apart and reconstruct such components. Sometimes the sticky-plaster approach can be enough to get a product out the door.

But as you say, once you're aware of it, slow gc becomes less of a problem, but I'd wager the majority aren't aware of it.

Edit: I forgot to mention that I recall there was some association with OnGUI causing the gc to kick-in. Someone suggested garbage collection of UI elements didn't go through Mono GC, but when I ran tests I recall that Graphics.DrawTexture was directly causing CPU spikes. It's at that point I ditched OnGUI and went over to NGUI. Faster gc may make OnGUI usable, but I'm not going to test that.

 

Well, im not eating memory barriers for breakfast as of now, but i can already feel limited as some fancy shader ideas cant be done with the current unity 3.5.
I want geometry shaders.
Aaand i want a decent gui, assetstores top seller gui utility is a shame for Unity people.

 

There is a lot of things wrong with the Mono they use.

For my personal needs i.e: I cannot pay for a game-guard system like "X-Trap" and I built my own.
It protects the client against invasive programs like CheatEngine and many other memory debuggers...
It is working perfectly fine, most gamers won't be able to cheat in my clients anymore so I dont need to worry about cleaning up leaderboards and making constant checks of gamer's behaviour all the time;
BUT it works only 'cause I wrote it in .NET and execute a external service when the game starts and it fights back any debugger from there. I need to run that external process just because the Mono that is used by Unity is old and buggy, some very important functions will simply generate crashes for no reason.
If that was not the case I could build the game-guard right inside the game itself.

 

@gamesfoundry:
We're aware of the need for more documentation than just Unity components and API and we're looking into it

 

So it was an error of the sellers themselves... Hmm... Good to know, thank you.

 

Write a review and in it request that the person selling the package not use the latest version of Unity to upload their packages if there's not a good reason for it. So far I always use 3.4 to upload mine. It would be nice if there was some more convenient system, but as I said when this was discussed elsewhere, I'm not really sure how else they can do it. But it would be helpful if it was made more clear that this is what happens, at least, so people need to be more careful about what version of Unity they use when uploading.

--Eric

 

Trawling the forums and finding the solution made me a better programmer so I'm not overly complaining. Clouds and silver linings and all that

 

Yea maybe we should make it more clear in the submission tool. I'll look into it.

 

For the love of Abbaddon's beard, people!

If you can't make a game with the amazing tech in 3.5 indie, the engine is not the problem, it's not Unity Technology's fault, and "better" features will not help you. (Although, $100 gets you an awesome GUI library, if you check the asset store. You don't even need Unity Pro to use it.)

If you can't afford the price, then make something awesome anyway, and sell it so you can afford to upgrade.

Some people wait for things to happen, and some people just DO IT.

 

I don't think we should buy anything just because we can...
We are just arguing about the real usefulness of this update. It is not useful for me, but maybe it is a must have for others.

 

Ask the artist who uploaded it why he didn't care about his customers, not Unity, as it is the asset store sellers error.

 

It's more likely that he just didn't realize how it works.

--Eric

 

Lol, I think my question got lost among the clutter. I'll ask it again just in case.

I have a question about the flash support. I have Adobe CS 5.5 Master Collection (I'm getting CS 6 soon), would there be any point in buying the license? I do plan on learning actionscript 3.0 and possibly Stage 3D with Starling. I guess I just want to know what the benefit would be before I purchase.

 

Well...do you want to publish Unity games with Flash? Then you need to buy the license. Other than that it's not really clear what the question actually is; if you're familiar with Unity then you presumably already know what the benefits are.

--Eric

 

We're looking into making it more clear to the publisher which version will be required to use his package.

 

That's cool. I actually wasn't trying to harp on you about it. I just wanted to clarify to dreamora that the publishers are likely not intentionally trying to make things more difficult for customers.

--Eric