Unity 4 Details

Does anyone know if Unity Remote will be improved in Unity 4? I still suffer with iOS development because the Remote functionality is beyond shoddy. Constant lag, non-registering of inputs, etc. Yes, I've gone through the entire checklist of things to improve it, but they never work and resorting to an ad-hoc connection (therefore losing wifi internet) is not an option.

Out of curiosity, why isn't there a wired version of the remote app? I don't know enough about how this all works.

 

I am guessing you would have to tell both XCode and iTunes to get out of the way and let you use the usb dock connector instead. Don't know if that's even possible with apple's APIs but I suspect not otherwise unity would have done it. just speculating.

@helios- just bite the bullet and use ad-hoc networking! It's 1 hop, and low latency. Any other network connection, no matter how good, will be multiple hops, and so a higher latency. If need internet access, simply add another network interface to your mac, for example ethernet cable, or over bluetooth via your phone. But I have found it's fast to switch betwen ad-hoc and regular wifi from my menu bar as needed.

 

Does this mean the Dynamic fonts of Chinese characters can work on iOS and Android ?

 

It would have been surprising if Mecanim wouldn't be part of Indie as otherwise less people could buy animations on the asset store.

 

Looks like some sweet features will make their way into unity this go round!

Edit:
Noticed a spelling error under Editor/Add Component Button:

 

Not according to that table - it's the same as it always was, .NET sockets are supported in Unity Free (standalone and webplayer) but not in iOS Basic or Android Basic.

 

I was really busy so did not look at this forum for weeks and even was not aware of the price change for the upgrades. why? you might ask, simple plane answer, I was working on a project as hard as i can with my team.
We are a pretty small team in Iran which a dollar would cost a hell of much money and $800 is salary of 3 months for many people. But we did not and will never do complaign about the prices. It's great that you buy great things for low prices but they'll not be able to grow. really simple fact. by reducing $50 from upgrade cost no dev will get much but UT will lose maybe something more than $3M (100k pro users to upgrade is my guess, nothing real).
With that money they can do a lot of great stuff. They are about 200 people and even with $4k per person they should pay $800k per month just to cover employee costs.

Thank you UT guys for responding this well and you deserve lots of respect i think. CEO still answers here and you changed the game development world with your products. in unity 3.x there are 3 things which wasn't working well which were GUI, Animations and networking/MMO stuff. the first two are being solved and doesn't require much code anymore and the third was not your duty. You are making a client engine and creating databases and data models and load balancers for servers is not your duty.
Great job. The 4th thing that one might talk about when it comes to unity's weaknesses is lower graphical quality which again is being changed. You have the most flexible and easy to use editor with great scripting ability and a bounch of awesome guys like Aras and Lucas and the founders and many others so It will grow wilder and wilder.

To indies

Please understand the situation well. Currently it's hard to live but you can do really wise things to make it easier. Game Development is becomming easier and many people are doing it and there are lots of products which don't sell well. Consider doing contract work alongside or if you want to do your own creative stuff always then please be like a painter or another kind of artist and don't look for too much money. You are doing artistic stuff. If you are doing professional software dev and love creativity then do both.
App store's problems are not unity's ones so instead of releasing to the platform and become sad about your sails and complaigning here about the add on price, release in better places and build for other stuff and make money.
There were talks on gamasutra even about changing jobs if you feel that you are really great but you are not received well in game dev.

If your product is not that well and you are just learning, you don't have the right to expect lots of money from it because people are not stupid. If your game is good and self publish on app store is not a good option anymore, don't do it. If you have two devs and in 2 years with 4 games you can not earn enough to pay $3000 for licenses, why do it? think rationally.

And the last important thing is that you always don't need to upgrade at first day. If the project doesn't need it then don't do it. you don't have to. being on the edge is great but reality is painful sometimes.

We even did not upgrade yet (despite the love to do it) and will do as soon as we have a need for it or have some money saved ($10k or more).

To marketing managers
As David said it's a painful fact that many people can not buy all licenses. Economies are different and countries are different. In different countries different industries earn different amounts so it would be great to have more flexible prices but it's really hard to do. Due to the high amount of piracy in our country we had lots of talk on it before and some people even think that we are stupid that we are buying it. Better pricing models could avoid piracy in some situations and could be more fair in some others. It's really different to be in south Africa from being in US when it comes to revenue and ...
I think it's really hard to do but you might come to help

 

Unfortunately, no... For me, Unity consumes 900 MB with not much stuff in the scene graph, only GUI components primarily, since most other stuff is runtime generated. If I start the game its around 1300 MB, which is weird enough with the profiler saying that the game consumes only 200 MB. So with a few click in it, we are easily at the 1.6GB limit and Unity stops the game with an OutOfMemory exception. Pretty neat, considering that I have 32 Gigs in my machine LOL.

 

Are there any news on the release date? Like anything at all?

We have stopped all animation related work in out project and work on other parts of it instead because we want to change our animation pipeline to Macanim.

 

@Jack Trades: You better don't rely on a soon to come 4.0 release. And even *if* there's a 4.0 release, I'd say: Don't switch to a newer version in the middle of the current development cycle...

 

In fact thats true though normally biased as other aspects are ignored.
To be fair priced it would need to ask a lower upfront fee for mobile in those countries but bound to a rev share or a massively higher 'later on fee' to be fair as income is not that high to afford the 'start into the mobile world' but once in its the same for all independent on where they life, just that it is infinitely cheaper to life in low cost countries, due to which the licensing costs should be correspondingly higher than in countries where larger amounts of the income are instantly gone due to taxes, upkeep and paying your life costs.
I doubt it would as such help the piracy problem as the people then would disagree again on why they should pay more just cause they have a higher amount of money left from the revenue generated through Unity.

 

dont do that of it will be like duke nukem forever again

 

You are right that living in countries with less revenues is cheaper. $1000 is a really good amount here in Iran for example and a family can have an average life with it. It's not true in your expensive country by no means but as you yourself said. At first if i want to start, it would be really hard to pay that money.
Once started making games, we know can get contracts for prices as low as $20k for a month for the entire 4 man team and have a good amount of money and even if we charge $7-8k for some specific times/projects , again it's a good amount to keep the office and ourselves alive.

 

Why I wont be upgrading my Unity Pro, Unity Android AND Unity iphone pro:

I first bought Unity Pro so I could make some game ideas for iphone. The idea I had included lots of shadows. I soon found out that shadows didnt work off the bat in unity iPhone pro.

Very disappointing, I continued to learn C# and unity. I bought a TONNE of plugins and enjoyed fiddling and learning.
I even bought an expensive 3d modelling software to make my graphics look pretty. Add to that books on C#, etc. I spent A LOT OF MONEY.

Then I thought, one day, Unity will add shadows for iphone. So I'll wait...

So I thought, OK, in my business of writing code for mobile phones I should allow for some money wastage. Take for instance, I used to make a living from Adobe Director, but the work dried up. I spent a few thousand on licenses for my Director software but the return was good.

But with Unity, for the single developer, the returns are pretty low. (unless of course that great successful game comes along...) So I took a decision a few months back to forget about Unity and concentrate on learning new things. I was already paying $99 a year for my iphone dev license from apple so I decided to play with XCode and learn more about objective C.

There was one classic post I kept seeing online, it goes somethign like this... "Dont use XCode 4.x with Unity because Apple have broken the link with Unity." This comment sums up for me how rubbish Unity has been in making the right choices in progress with new versions of Unity. What a waste of time and resource in making Unity work in Flash! Perhaps they didnt realise that Flash was being dropped? Or was the technical challenge too inviting...

So now we have some character animating feature that looks amazing, but for me, another feature that I cannot use in my work. I dont have characters. If the tool can be broken down I could use that tool in time managed events and FSMs but I doubt it can be tinkered with.

And all that apart... I still wonder, is the new shading feature available in the cheap version, or the pro version. Will Unity work in iOS 6? Will more time pass by or should I, as I have decided, continue to ignore Unity 3D and see my money wasted on licenses.

Thankfully, I have the time to invest in learning objective c and I can now make interactive games (and other things) without any need for Unity3d. And because I intend to only spend $99 on the Apple license (which I make back with a few trashy things on Android), I dont need to work so hard in trying to find $3k every time unity decides to upgrade things I dont even want or use.

Happy days for me, good luck to the rest of you.
p.s. this might change when unity 4 gives away free versions to those that cant be bothered to support software companies.

 

@parasme -

You say "Don't use xcode 4.x"... I don't understand that. Those versions work great with Unity. I'm not sure if the older versions work at all. I know that when they released the new Ipad and the Xcode to support it, that it broke Unity IOS (non pro) until they could patch it a week later. But that won't affect you, because you have IOS Pro, right? I guess I'm not sure which version you have, because you couldn't have broken if you had pro, and your only other message says you bought basic.

But if you change your mind, and upgrade your IOS basic to IOS pro, you will get shadows in v4. Anyway, you will apparantly have happy days rewriting a game engine in Objective C. I admit it could be fun, but I think it's more fun to work on actual games.

 

Which is completely unnecessary because pretty graphics have not much to do with the price of a software. There are a lot cheap and free 3d apps that working just fine with Unity.

 

It's called Blender

 

You could check it before buying or use the trial to see it doesn't support shadows. You bought that and 3d software and ... to implement an idea alone and were expecting a good result! It's not the professional way of doing things.

 

@parasme -

I've read your post twice... not sure why... maybe I was looking for something that make sense and found nothing. The most funny thing you wrote is that you programming in Objective C can do without Unity ... well, if you are that good to be able to get the same result of an excellent game engine writing raw code then you should write your engine and I guess tons of people will be giving it a try: the work of a genius it's worth trying

 

More unity stuff via Gamasutra:

Unity adds Online Services store, promises Windows 8 support

David Helgason details most ambitious Unity engine yet

 

Unity homepage: "Pre-order Unity Pro 4 to get immediate access to the Unity Pro 4.0 pre-order beta"
I've already preordered last month. How do I access this?

 

Also here http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/148356-Unity-4-available-to-pre-order-customers-today!

I guess contrary to the interview and the announcement, it's just not ready yet (no eMail, no forum link, no store download option beside of 3.5.5. Wouldn't be the first time that Unity shot too quick and things are a bit out of sync.

 

Wow, great news.

 

when can we expect unite12 keynote video?

 

really!
What does it mean?
later today? later this week/month?

 

Is there release notes/new features list anywhere?

 

You can already download it from the store if you have pre-ordered.

 

http://unity3d.com/unity/beta/notes

 

i cannot see flash platform build. release notes says fixes about flash?

 

Do you have Flash addon bought for your account? maybe they just don't allow Flash releasing at the moment.

 

no i did not buy but i can see it on 3.5 as beta.

 

3.5 had it for everyone as preview but it's paid addon for 4.x

 

Unity 4 should at least silence all those who say Unity can't do nice graphics. The demo they showed on stage looked pretty spectacular:

Edit: Thought I linked to the correct spot in the video, but it's around 33 minutes at least.

 

Great

 

I am watching the Keynote now... very nice stuff so far... definitely love Mecanim and Shuriken (need to learn Shuriken)... and the features are KICK ASS... I was curious about this particular feature SkinnedMeshRenderer.bakemesh... I am going to guess, I can use Beast with my character models... if that is true... that is F'n A!!!!

 

Where did you find the keynote?

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24AY4fJ66xA right here...

 

I downloaded Unity 4 ( it said it was a trial ) and I uninstalled the other unity. I upgraded my project... And apparently I can't use unity 4. So now I can't open my project in a later unity and I can't use Unity 4. It wasn't made clear that the beta was only available to license holders.

 

Sorry for my ignorance, it actually was made clear that it was only for Unity 4 pre order people. I was just so excited and now I am just so dissapointed.

When can the general public expect a unity 4 beta just like we did for 3.5?

 

According to the 4.0 Beta page the Beta shouldn't even be available to non pre-purchase people because it says...

"Do not distribute any of the downloads or download links you receive as part of the beta"

 

Hi,
Unity 4 beta looks awesome Seeing so many animated characters on my early 2009 mini mac with no frame drops is great !

I have two issues.
1. I have repeatedly sent emails towards sales regarding getting money back for preordering unity 4 before the discount and I got no response, after nearly a month. I wish some answer really, regarding the amount of money and the timeframe to get them.
2. I am very interested in some info regarding MeshTopology class which is of great interest to me and is totally undocumented. I wish to invest time and effort on this but there is no starting point (an example) atm.

I would really appreciate some responses,
Kind regards,
-Ippokratis

 

"emails towards sales regarding getting money back for preordering unity 4 before the discount"

If it's the same as in my case, you will receive the refund before an email
(not received a response to my email, but did receive the refund on my last credit card statement).

 

Well executed. What exactly as far as graphics is concerned did you find spectacular, anything you can point at?

 

MeshTopology is an enum rather than a class, and it's used with Mesh.SetIndices. Instead of:

Code (csharp):

1. mesh.triangles = triangleIndices;

do:

Code (csharp):

1. mesh.SetIndices (triangleIndices, MeshTopology.Quads, 0);

--Eric