Unity 5 is coming and more!

I agree that the mobile platforms should not dictate the maximum supported hardware, but so far that hasn't been the case (DX11 support with Unity 4, and now PBR with Unity 5) so I think there might be a misunderstanding here.

My guess is that Enlighten's precompute step is a lot more expensive than you're assuming, as in: minutes of computations, not milliseconds.

 

Thanks man.

 

+1 This is what matters most to me. Terrain, trees, and vegetation requires more than a little love.

 

I'd still want it. I remember playing Dwarf Fortress and walking away to get coffee for 15 minutes while it generated a new world. Or spending untold hours reading wikis and fiddling with ini files just to get slightly better graphics in lots of games. I think there is a fairly large audience of graphics nerds who would be willing to sit through a one-time 10 minute loading screen if it made their game look amazing.

 

I would say it's based on your level complexity. For a really large level it could take a long time to evaluate the data, making it infeasible on even desktop. Once this step is done though you do have somewhat beautiful lighting

 

Well there is speed tree integration in Unity 5, so that makes for nice tree and vegetation (for a price), but its no help for the terrain.

 

Hello Jonas and graham

Since you are talking about the web player. i like to know why you don't have the web player right clip being able to be deactivate during build instead of in the html.. i working on something for Facebook and i like to use the right mouse button in my project. That all i really want any other thing that unity might not include i know will be address at the asset store. that right mouse click is my only complain.

 

Another question on unnoticed topic, How about built in decal system, any news about it??

 

Very great news

As so often I already upgraded all my licenses and addon licenses to Unity 5 and am looking forward to finally use umbra with our terrains that currently kill the editor due to their massive amount of data that make triangulation absolutely impossible It does not help that umbra is a 64bit process if Unity can't compile the meshes to even send to it hehe


I've to agree with the points on WebGL though but have a different stance on it: I will just wait until Chrome (where Unity is whitelisted for the very moment - would doubt that continues to be the case after webgl became available) and Firefox pull the NAPI plug, then webgl will become free as the license states webdeployment, leaving WebGL the only remaining option for Unity to deploy there after Unity pulled the Chrone NaCl plug themself. We all know Unity will go there anyway, either voluntarily or because Firefox and Chrome will remove Unity from the web.
That is unless a customer wants and at least partially funds the WebGL targeting

 

Unity needs something like BluePrint (maybe buy or hire the uScript peeps)

Love how Blueprint works with shaders and material

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FcxA_xYnHZ8

 

Actually looking at it more, I think Unity is in a strong position.

They have the big share of the market (that of course they would be crazy to not protect) and they do have a team of 400 people and they say they are a stable Company in profit. They have been adding 2D support, add-on useful things like everplay, the Asset Store ads value and offers interim solutions while one waits for Unity to come up with built-in solutions, (although there should be more control on quality on these assets) etc....

So they have in a way FORCED Epic and Crytek to answer. But considering where Unity stands now supplying tech to hobbyists, small indie, medium indie, big teams, education, AAA studios for part of their projects... Unity is in a position where they can look at it all and decide what to do, Ecip is reacting to Unity, Crytek is trying to get it. But Unity at the moment is on top of the mass market. So they should have the resources to assess and move forward.

Yes when you think 400 people and for how long some features have been on the waiting list does make you think that maybe they are working on 400 things therefore is it only really 1 head per task so that's why take so long (I am exaggerating of course). But if they manage to focus more resources on those fixes/features that are more urgent to us they will increase user retention, of course it is not easy to see where their priorities are because some of us may say we need a better terrain engine system but maybe the majority of the AAA studios using Unity may be asking/needing something else... so we do not know how they assign their priorities.

Also to be honest I don't care if they cut 4.x cycle short and move to 5.0 earlier (If stable) with new GUI and new features and they may try to please the recent 4.x pro buyers in other ways (added value/discounts, whatever)... It would actually help retain and lock users in the next Version 5.0 which makes it harder for us to switch tech after moving to Unity 5.. but yes it would need to be a fairly stable build.

Go on Unity, the ball is still in your court, I am sure they will find the right way to keep their market share, be that with new pricing policy or delivery time and features... but right now they do have a few minutes to assess and implement changes where needed.

Keep it up

 

asset/prefab export? would make a whole lot a difference in project organizing.

 

When I think of Unity when they were just 30 people and Unity today then I must say that for me the difference is by far not worth the additional 370 people - seems the 80/20 rule even works when it comes to number of employees.

It clearly was a better experience when they were smaller - and more expensive in the entry level, I hate the whole free thing - how many active customers do they have? 400,000? There are "just" about 1 million Apps on the App Store.
So the question raises when looking on it from another perspective, the perspective of the whole mankind: what is this large customer base (and democratization of game development) good for except for selling more assets on the Asset Store? A lot of assets are blown up with useless n00b ballast that just blocks the flexibility of the core usability, and somehow it seems Unity itself also goes this route (except that this stuff does not block anything).

They started with a game, made a game engine of it and on the long run this became another kind of entertainment software for the masses.

 

well but those 400 heads I am sure are not 400 developers.
I would think most of the 400 are international baed marketing/support teams, people for specific channels like union stuff, different platforms... etc...
400 people engine developer? no way

 

? Who said that? When they were just 30 I doubt they all were developers too.
But this does not change the fact that for me the overall experience is worse compared to these days.

 

Real-Time GI + 64-bit + Asset Store + Publishing to nearly every device in the market + Editor for Mac = Bye bye Unreal and CryEngine.

The only thing left for me is an editor for Linux... I hope you make it soon.

 

Only thing UE4 doesn't have, YET, is Real-Time Gl and they said they will implement it soonish.. so ya? Plus, I don't think unity5 will give access to sourcecode.

 

Yep , running a company with a 100%engineer quote wouldn't go well.
I quote Gamasutras Blog Director Christian Nutt:

 

Please don't. uScript spent far too long in beta and development.

It's important that if a feature is going to come, it comes in a measured and very thought out way. The power of visual scripting in general is:

1. it is trivial for a programmer to add new nodes (playmaker can do this for instance)
2. allows game artists to build the game, and C++ programmers to focus on the hard stuff
3. it's not just logic, but hooks into every single part of the engine, from animation to particles to controlling rendering.
4. it is actually better for AAA than it is for indie. Indie may well still get stuff done quicker with code. The reason for this is the thinking behind it - Artists work every day in the game world, and they need to be able to deal with doors, wiring up AI, effects, life in the world etc - even bosses. What this means is that it suits a larger team where throwing more programmers at the project is not only risky, but difficult.

Blueprint's power isn't really realised with a small team or individual. It's the wrong way to look at this form of visual programming. If such a thing should be used, it should take the same amount of time as it would to code - just by not a programmer. The moment it takes longer to use visual scripting than coding it, is the moment it's worth is begins to reduce as the real cost of development is how long the game is in development for.

This is from the perspective of larger team development.

So if Unity wants to give this a go, it should be well planned out, well thought out and done with the same considered approach to UI. It shouldn't be integrating a 3rd party that's not anywhere near as good as blueprint. In the meantime let me share an anecdote about The Other Brothers:

In TOB, you can practically build a small game without any code. Everything is offloaded to anim events and clever components, allowing the artists to build the game - and they pretty much did! It's quite possible with the right game engine setup, to empower artists right now in Unity without resorting heavily to visual scripting.

 

I love visual scripting, but yeah, that's the kind of thing best left to an asset.

 

I actually disagree - I think its best done natively. An asset simply can't hook into the engine well enough

 

That depends on if it's mirrored or if it generates code. Admittedly, both of these things are full of various caveats that make them far less than ideal than a native solution, yeah.

 

Isn't that "hitch" usually caused by awake/start functions and content size of the loaded level? I notice no stutter whatsoever with my game, but I keep the content in each additive scene pretty limited. Maybe you need to break things up better.

 

Just read quickly through this thread and here are my 2c.

I've been using Unity since its first iPhone version and I'm changing to Unreal 4.

My main reason is price, mostly because I have Unity Pro with Android, iOS and Blackberry and Unity is asking me to pay $1800 to upgrade (without taking account the Blackberry plugin). More, I loved the fact that Unity is going to have WebGL output and then I read paid WebGL output.

The subscription model is just bonkers. $75/month for Unity Pro, +$75/month for iOS, +$75/month for Android, +$75/month (or more) for WebGL. This just isn't sustainable for the end user. Unity's investment in new platforms isn't the same as if redoing everything from scratch, and yet I'm seeing similar prices.

I'm also fed up with the 2 year update cycle, where we get some new features but where old problems aren't addressed at all (e.g. Mono is still stuck at 2.6). I'll miss the community and the asset store, but from what I'm seeing in U4 I'm pretty sure in the medium term its community will become as vibrant as Unity's.

 

You think that's bad. To upgrade my studio it's going to cost north of $12,000. Not a typo.

Unity is in a strong position over all, but not on all fronts. It is hampered in the AAA side due to its shackle to a older and slower implementation of Mono (and lack of native C++ alternative). On the 2D front, it's aces and competes more with GameMaker and their ilk. Personally I want Unity in a reasonably strong position because of the investment I've made in it in my studio.

David

 

Game Whiz, keep in mind that Unreal will still cost you 5% of any gross revenue. They do give the example of iOS apps where if your game makes $10 you pay 5% ($0.50) to Epic, that is out of the $10 from which Apple of course takes 30% ($3) so to you goes $6.50

So if your iOS game makes $7000 as in $10,000 revenue minus $3,000 (Apple 30%) you still own Epic $500.

In other words if you (with one game or with a bunch of games or with one game released on iOS, Andorid, Steam, humble bundle, whatever, in a week or in a year) make $37,000 gross sales at 5% amounts to $1850 which would pay for your Unity Pro Upgrades... (and give you roughly $24,000 from where you will of course take your costs out and whatever is left pay taxes, etc..)

So if you make $37,000 there is no difference in costs between the two solutions for a one man band developer with one license (well a part the extra $19 per month for Unreal which is $228 per year)

if you make less than $37,000 Unreal 4 will work out cheeper for the year.
If you make more than $37,000 Unreal will start to work out more and more expensive with that 5% on any additional game/revenue.

So for a single man developer that is doing this not just for fun but with the hope to generate profits (or already generating profits) if you make more than $40,000 you should probably choose which engine to use purely on your development and publishing requirements, which engine allows you to get the job done quicker/efficiently. Which engine has all/most of the tools your need, which engine has the best customer support and quickest bug fixing performance, which engine is more polished and ads more relevant features as things move on, etc..

On $250,000 GROSS revenue 5% is $12.500 which is 7 times the cost of the One Man Band Unity Guy upgrading to Pro. Or more or less what nsxdavid will have to pay to upgrade his studio.

For now I am using Unity 4.x Pro for my immediate projects which are small projects that can be done just fine in Unity... A bigger project I will be starting later which requires a AAA look and possibly the Unreal 'name' behind it (but not a AAA budget) may be better off using Unreal 4 (I have not yet tried Unreal 4). But Unity 5 may come out on time for me to compare them and it may offer what I need so it will be interesting to see which way I go.

For the hobby developer/s wanting top tier features then with the new Unreal 4 Pricing they will be more keen (i think) to go with Unreal 4 (or Crytek if they offer a user friendly solution). And this is where Unity may have to pay attention because the vast user base includes small indie/hobby developers that will maybe never make decent money out of their games and for them 'currently' Unreal offers a cheaper solution if the engine is right for their games. So, interesting to see what Unity next move will be

(I just typed this up on the fly, so I hope I didn't get all the numbers wrong in my examples, which again are quick and rough, not a proper analysis)

 

Not entirely correct. Realtime GI is in the engine:

https://forums.unrealengine.com/sho...ble-Light-Propagation-Volumes-GI-WIP-AND-BETA

It is just "off" officially.

 

Thanks for your post. Yes, all you said is definitely correct, but having to pay first with no guarantee that my game will generate any kind of revenue sounds way less appealing than sharing my success with Epic.

I just downloaded Unreal Engine 4 and my first opinion is that it seems less polished than Unity. I tested the Mac build with the demo projects and I'm still not impressed. I'll give Unreal 4 a month of my time and then I'll decide. Hopefully that'll be in time to still get Unity upgrade rates if needed.

 

Yes I fully understand what you mean

About Unreal 4 on MAC, from what I can tell it is their first MAC compatible version and they already have some hot fix and new version coming out next week, they are keen on saying that MAC improved versions is a priority for them, check their forum stuff.

 

Our decision isn't a hobbyist or small mobile decision - its based on a team but for what it's worth:

1. all engines up front pricing is never the price of development
2. if I can do something in less time in unity, i've saved more money than what I saved going with UE4.

So if that applies to you, beware of hidden costs such as taking longer to do things, C++ coding and different/less user friendly workflows.

 

Wow, so absolutely no announcement or response to the most critical piece of functionality that has been missing next to the new GUI, Nested Prefabs?

Nested Prefabs have been asked about around six times in this thread alone. Is there some sort of huge problem preventing this from being fixed? It's extremely disheartening that references to base 3D model prefabs are still, still destroyed upon adding them to a prefab. As has been mentioned many times in countless threads about this topic, this extremely basic missing function seems like an oversight or even a glitch, leaving users flabbergasted when they find out that it doesn't work.

 

Yes, absolutely. Like I said, my first impression of UE4 is not positive (when compared to Unity), but I'll give it a spin. I suspect that you're right, and that dev time is less in Unity than in UE4, particularly for small projects like the ones I do.

I took one look at BluePrint and immediately said no. One the other hand C++ does look appealing, particularly after years of pre-allocating stuff to avoid GC. One month will go by quickly, and if I decide to stay with Unity I'll do it with the conviction that it really is the better engine for my needs.

 

First I don't know how it works in other countries but here we have a depreciation of 3 years for software. Subscription is a smarter way when you are low on cash flow because it will reduce your taxes - same for the 5% that you have to pay to epic for income based on UE4.

When you are not low of cash flow, like in your $250,000 revenue example then you just don't care about $4500 for Pro + iOS + Android at all because you made these 250k based on your work and the 4.5k investment in unity - 5% or $4.5k is peanuts when you have $250,000.

When you start with either Unity Pro (iOS + Android) or UE4 then the price for both is equal (for a SINGLE SEAT) at a gross revenue of of $90,000 over the first 2 years (or $108,000 when subscribing to Unity during that time)

^ multiply that per seat…

The truth is that the moment when Unity actually comes cheaper is the moment when I as a single developer would have so much money left that I would not care about the 5% or the cost of Unity at all.

If the 5% are a problem for you then this is what I would call a "luxury-problem" - I pay UT currently almost 20% of my monthly income each month (yes, I am really that poor) - this is what I would call expensive, but it also shows you what some crazy people are willing to pay because they need it - money is an absolutely completely relative thing.

My Apps are usually somewhere in the Top 1000 (of all apps) in Germany and many other countries but I am broke - it also means almost all other paid apps make less than mine and just a few 1000s make more… where the hell shall all those professionals come from who can to pay enough to feed 400 Unity Employees each month? (I would guess they need at least about 10,000 - 20,000 active pro users) They are not really existent, it is a mix of hobbyists, beginners, schools and professionals and for most of them Epic currently has a better offer unless they are really used to Unity.

I won't switch to UE4 or CryEngine anyway, but I fear a lot of people will do. If I would start with development as a beginner today I clearly would not take a deeper look at Unity when looking at their prices because I would think as soon as I want the Pro stuff I have to pay a lot more and this smells like a trap.

That's true - but if you don't have money you can't save money.

 

That cuts both ways. UE4 has built in AI,Cinematics, visual scripting etc, in unity you have to do all that yourself or find 3rd party solutions, so UE4 would probably save a lot of people time vs Unity depending on your needs.

 

Just to bump something for a 3rd time before it get's lost in this thread:

Will Unity 5 finally support PVRTC2? (not 2 bit PVRTC - I mean version 2 of the PVRTC compression, PVRTC3 is the newest one, we are still stuck on V1)

Mac, short for Macintosh - MAC is "Media Access Control"

 

Yeah I think people miss the idea to achieve alot of the stuff you usually end up looking for, you spend money on 3rd party assets that all add up.

 

if you buy unity 4 pro in us$1.500 and now few weeks after if unity 5 pro cost the same us$1500 and the upgrade from v4 to v5 cost us$600 then you lost us$600 in a few weeks, sorry.

P.D. unreal engine cost us$19 mo.

 

Just ran it in Windows and it's night and day. UE4 has very very impressive demos and the video tutorials seem good.

 

My concern is the 2 year cycle. This is too short as some of the features that came with Unity 4 was really beta level.

For example, Mecanim is great but it took 1 1/2 years to be called useable. It's still lacking many of the functionality of the old animation system. By the time Mecanim is mature enough, we will be at the end of Unity 6.

If Unity offered new features that is mature and has been fully tested at the beginning of a new version, then 2 years seems fair. But with the current practice of releasing beta ware that takes almost the entire 2 years to mature at the expense and headache of paying customers is not very nice.

Honestly, having been bitten by the mecanim story, I am very very cautious of new features that are advertised for Unity 5. The marketing promotion seems very nice but the problems will surely surface once implementation begins.

 

Any chance for apex particles and/or apex turbulance? And apex destruction.
I am making off-road simulation and would be so nice to have physically based dust http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHUdErdlKk8

 

Ooops, I've misread it on the Imagination site http://blog.imgtec.com/powervr-developers/powervr-gr6500-ray-tracing

PVR3C™ triple compression technologies (PVRTC and ASTC for texture compression, PVRIC for frame buffer compression, PVRGC for geometry compression)

 

"Mac, short for Macintosh - MAC is "Media Access Control"

lol, leave it to an apple guy to make the distinction

/kidding

 

Honestly, When I first heard about new features in Unity 5, I was not impressed. Yeah, some new features, but not to much, really. And then Unreal 4 came out and I must admit it is the engine I was waiting for. I am not going to bash unity, or praise UE 4 - I am just telling my opinion about what unity lacks and what attracts me to Unreal 4.
First of all, the great advantage, Unreal has - source code. If you are going to develop some casual game you may not need it, but it is always good news to have source, especially when you are working on large projects. But for medium small games source may be not such an advantage. So it all depends.
The one thing that surprised me about Unreal 4 is they have rewritten everything - tools, big portion of engine, they added new very useful features like blueprints (for artists) and ability to use C++ instead of some lame scripting language (unrealscript). It seems they simply made a whole new engine. New features in Unity 5 comparing to this seem pale. And what is most important for me UE has one universal IDE, which combines everything - in previous version you had to use different third party software, manually edit ini files etc. - new IDE makes everything much easier and in this way UE came most close to the ideal engine - for me, of course.
But Unity already had a single IDE, easy to use etc. whats the difference? Honestly the main problem I see with unity is it's plug-in-based nature. On one hand almost any feature could be added to the engine by plug-ins and this is great, but on the other hand it means Unity does not have many necessary features and game developers are forced either create necessary plug-ins by themselves or buy from asset store. It also means, that in some cases engine developers do not bother themselves by adding necessary features to the engine. For example Unity still has very basic and slow built-in GUI system, no built-in support for multi-part models etc. etc. Even if you have bunch of necessary plug-ins, you still have make them work together, which may prove even harder, than creating everything yourself. Of course, the same may to UE too (you may add to your project some third party plug-ins, like Speedtree or FaceFX), but in most cases those plug-ins are much better documented and fewer, than Unity plug-ins. And also, they are much less buggy, in most cases. Additionally in UE you have to integrate third party software into engine - not integrate with each-other, that may be much harder and buggy.
May be I am wrong, but at this point UE seems much better choice for me, than Unity. Of course I wish all the best to Unity team and I will watch with interest it's development. I hope future versions would be more solid and containing all necessary features for modern game development.
With Best wishes...

 

Unity bit by bit replaces so many of all these missing features you mentioned. Sure it takes time. Compare how far unity has come in the last few years and then just look how much time and budget the Unreal Engine had since it's beginning.
Sure - it may seem to be a nice thing to have source access and I can really understand that some people want or even need it. Maybe ... maybe at some point in the future Unity will make it accessible. Probably depends on how much the concept of source access chatches on in the future. Until then there (probably?) you can still ask sales for a siurce license. It used to be sold for a high price under NDA. So if that hasn't changed - the option is still there, if you absolutely need to. I think that the majority of the users don't really and actually need it or would even know what to do with it.

Regarding the IDE - when the first demo video of UE4 was shown to the public I was really surprised how much the few screens of the editor matched and mimiced Unity's UI. So why is it that for Unity it is nothing new and unexciting while for UE4 it's awesome that the UI became accessible?

I can absolutely understand if you need one feature or another that you have to decide for a certain engine and that this decission should never be made purely on the image and name of that engine. The things you listed, though are rather a problem snapshot of the current situation that may very well change in one to a few years again. Some of the problems (GUI) are even pretty much in reach, already. For a large project you make a commitmend that is probably longer than some of these features might last, I could imagine. Don't you think?

 

¨

I think you read that wrong, he just said a unified IDE was important to him and that UE didn't have it before the UE4, and that Unity already had this.

 

Don't forget that in order to give source code you can't have any 3rd party software that is licensed against it. Autodesk beast isn't going to allow people access to their source code. So as long as Unity has that in it, you'll need to probably jump through hopes to get it.
I understand that there are many people that can do wonders if they had access. Just different companies have issues why they can/can't.
Unity 5 looks like it is going in the right direction giving much needed improvement. Looking forward to it.

 

They could separate parts into precompiled binary dependencies, I'd have no problem with that.

 

As long as they can do that. We have no idea what deals where made and papers signed. I get what you are saying but again, we aren't part of what decisions they have made.
But it comes down to what you want to do and what tool will make it happen. Doesn't matter who it is.
I wouldn't use Sketchup to build a house over AutoCAD or Revit simply because Sketchup isn't the tool for the job. But to each their own and comes down to the bottom line of getting the product complete and out the door.

 

Point is that Unreal is giving their best to outdo Unity just in the same way that Unity has been trying to catch up with Unreal.
Competition is a very good thing because now the Indie community is presented with much better options than before.
Complacency is no longer acceptable in this very heated Indie space. All engine makers need to give their very Best Shot at both features and pricing.