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Unity 5 release date?

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by PROTOFACTOR_Inc, Mar 20, 2014.

  1. Graham-Dunnett

    Graham-Dunnett

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    I think the 5.0 pre-order was clearly spelled out as a pre-order. All pre-order customers are getting 4.x licenses if they are new users, or a discount on the update price.

    I'd be the first to say that getting this major new release out is taking longer than we hoped. We are getting there, though.
     
  2. shkar-noori

    shkar-noori

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    @Graham Dunnett , please tell us more about your plans, so we can be ready, I'm still confused with the way reflections are handled in Unity 5 and I asked alot of time but it seems like most the stuff [about reflections] you're saying is going to be in 5.x not 5.0, can we please get an explanation on what is and what is not planned for 5.0's Reflections?
     
  3. zenGarden

    zenGarden

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    Doing some pre order with no estimated date is not good, for example you pre order a game o software , you have some date , even if you have a delay it's not a year (it seems it's UE4 pressure here)

    What Unity should do :
    - More open communication :
    Not hidding dates or delay and showing what is planned or worked on.
    Epic are the first ones to show the complete roadmap and able to say in what version approximatively what features you could expect. This makes users lot more confident on what is going on with the engine they paid or pay for. And you have open discussions on issues, on new features with developpers from time to time.
    - More clear in video annoucements :
    Like saying in videos that this is a work in progress , there are many problems and things missing. Because watching many videos and some blogs or presentations about UT5 and Enlighten , it just looks like it was done or almost ready ?

    If you seek a dynamic GI UE4 don't have it today, and UE4 have also bugs like small and bigger ones, like UT5 it's also a work in progress today, and the engine and editor are a lot more demanding basically than Unity.
    Using UE4 and blueprints in a team and UT on personnal project , i can say today Unity remains the best for indies and small to medium projects and really the most easy to use or program. Why not proposing some UT5 open beta to public like 4.6 ?
     
    Last edited: Oct 10, 2014
  4. DavidLlewelyn

    DavidLlewelyn

    Unity Technologies

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    Reflections can either be derived from a global scene .hdr cubemap configured in the Scene Render Settings.

    or

    We have the reflection probe system which allows the artist to place probes around their scene. The reflection probe consists of the probe itself, and a bounding box. The probe is essentially a point in space from which we render a 6-sided high dynamic range cubemap looking out into the scene and represents the reflections which can be seen from that point.

    Any object set to use reflection probes,= which comes into the bounding box associated with a probe will then use the generated cubemap instead of the global scene HDRI. Overlapping probe volumes will be selected by proximity to the receiving object.

    Hope that helps.
     
  5. Devil_Inside

    Devil_Inside

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    Is there any reflection blending when you move between bounding boxes of 2 probes?
     
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  6. Fuzzy

    Fuzzy

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    Sounds like a nope, and makes it hardly useful [edit: for any dynamic object] in this state. :(
     
    Last edited: Oct 10, 2014
  7. kurylo3d

    kurylo3d

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    Are we going to be waiting until christmas? how about that? All this waiting is getting stupid. You guys should never have given any sort of estimate if u were going to miss it by leaps and bounds. And some warning that you would miss it would help.

    I mean if were going to be disappointed with unity 5 at its current state.. then fine done give it to us, but give us heads up. I mean do u want people to just jump to another engine instead? Seems like you guys are your own worst enemy. Not the competition.
     
  8. shkar-noori

    shkar-noori

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    @FrakkleRogg ok, I knew that but thanks for the info, What about realtime reflections? blending between probes? the current reflections from the Reflection Probe component is only working for an empty room, anything in the middle will corrupt the reflection..
     
  9. Pix10

    Pix10

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    Angry pointing over broken promises is what originally caused UT to back away from discussing the future, so go easy. I don't think anyone wants to go there again.

    Sometimes things just take more effort than anticipated, this appears to be one of them. It's not like it's make believe, existing testers can attest to that; we just have to be patient.
     
  10. kurylo3d

    kurylo3d

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    Think the most annoying part is the fact that people can go torrent the current beta if they want to lol.. yet i paid for it. But whatever i agree. if they need to do more before a real release.. then so be it. I just hope the probes blend between each other... thats my biggest thing.. otherwise im forced to say forget unity 5 features and use marmoset skyshop :/
     
  11. Ayrik

    Ayrik

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    Unity 5 is not going to change your life. I also purchased Unity 5 and am happily using the (very stable) Unity 4.6 beta and plan on upgrading my project to Unity 5 once it's stable.

    Not having Unity 5 does not in any way prevent you from making your game, and I don't care if you "need" 64-bit, there are PLENTY of other things to work on that can keep you busy for months to come without the needing any feature from Unity 5.

    Some of us are very happy to wait for a stable release and appreciate UT's new found transparency (well at least they're trying).
     
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  12. Toad

    Toad

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    I believe we were told approx. 7 weeks ago that the Unity 5 Beta would be made available to pre-order customers in "4-8 weeks". If so, I don't think the deadline has actually been missed at all yet.

    Having said that, I think communication to customers could be better. I pre-ordered the Unity 5 Pro/iOS Pro/Android Pro upgrades 6-7 months ago, but don't know much about the current status.

    -Is the original estimate still achievable? (i.e. pre-order customers get the Unity 5 Beta next week), or does it need to be revised?
    -Which features are definitely in Unity 5.0, which are definitely being pushed out, and which ones are TBC?
    -How many bugs are still to be fixed? Breakdown of severity, etc?

    Also, what's the latest on the public roadmap? Is that still happening? When?
     
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  13. shkar-noori

    shkar-noori

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    1+. some answers for these questions would be awesome.
     
  14. hippocoder

    hippocoder

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    I can safely say: forget ALL estimations, just wake up one day, log in and it's out.
     
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  15. DavidLlewelyn

    DavidLlewelyn

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    Realtime reflections are an on-going debate. Presently SSRR is something we are working on internally, but I have no official news for you regarding when this will be in the product. It is definitely planned, but I just don't have any dates for you. ScreenSpaceRealtimeReflections are useful in many cases, but also cause issues in many circumstances, as by their nature, they cannot reflect what is outside the camera's view frustum. They're not a fix-all solution.

    Regarding the 'empty room' problem. What you say here isn't strictly true. We have a flag on the probes to cull dynamic objects from the rendered cube-maps. As these tend to move, having these in a static cubemap would generally be undesirable in most cases anyway. To avoid the problem you describe here, you can use culling masks on probes - which, similar to culling masks on cameras, can be used to remove problem objects from your reflections.

    We have had realtime probes in Unity for a while, but the decision has been made to remove them for now. The problem is that of convolution. Presently convolving reflections through from fully gloss to diffuse is a processor intensive operation which poses a large performance hit when you consider doing this in realtime at, 30/60/100fps. Without convolution the gloss response of materials receiving that probe will be incorrect - which is confusing and creates 'pops' and thus the decision has been made to drop these until we have a true asynchronous, realtime solution.

    We are working on probe blending. It's on the roadmap.

    In many cases you don't need true realtime reflections anyway, and like most things game-related, getting a desirable result is going to involve a bit of smoke and mirrors.
     
    Last edited: Oct 10, 2014
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  16. hippocoder

    hippocoder

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    Cubemap/probe fallback?
     
  17. DavidLlewelyn

    DavidLlewelyn

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    Come again?
     
  18. shkar-noori

    shkar-noori

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    no, that's not what I meant, let's say i have a room that's all static, 4 walls, and add a Reflection Probe, everything is ok, but by adding a cube in the middle, the reflection won't be realistic. the cube won't be reflected as expected. after all it's still in beta, but i wanted to make sure that what's happening here is not what we're gonna get when we leave the beta cycle.
     
  19. DavidLlewelyn

    DavidLlewelyn

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    Reflected by what? It would be reflected correctly by the walls if you are using box projection and set the probe volume to match the extents of the room.

    Granted, convex objects using a non-box method will be incorrect, but what you are describing here is an inherent issue with the technology itself, rather than Unity's implementation.

    3D engines of this generation are all going to suffer the same problems. Until we have a robust realtime ray-tracing solution running on consumer hardware at playable frame-rates, we're always going to have to rely on a bit of trickery.

    If you know of any whitepapers discussing other approaches, we're all-ears.
     
  20. kurylo3d

    kurylo3d

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    Thank you! That was very helpful.
     
  21. shkar-noori

    shkar-noori

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    @FrakkleRogg

    1 - Open Unity and create a scene!
    2 - Add 4 walls and a plane [as a floor] and set them to static.
    3 - Add a reflection probe covering all the room and set it to be Box Projected.
    Right now everything should be working fine. but when you do:

    4 - add a sphere in the middle of the room [make it static].
    See the sphere is not reflected correctly, nor by the floor or the walls.

    I'm I missing something here?
     
  22. superpig

    superpig

    Drink more water! Unity Technologies

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    From the probe's point of view, the sphere is entirely backfacing.

    I'm not sure what the cubemap would have to look like for the sphere to be properly reflected by the walls though. The simple solution is to just have a separate probe for each wall.
     
  23. shkar-noori

    shkar-noori

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    Correct Reflections without anything inside the room,
    Correct Reflections.png
    Incorrect reflections with a sphere in the room.
    Incorrect Reflections.png
     
  24. zenGarden

    zenGarden

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    Are your balls static ? Is reflection bitmap calculated before game start ?
    On your picture when you have the balls the reflection unchanged , it is just blurred, is it some depth of field effect ?
     
  25. shkar-noori

    shkar-noori

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    @zenGarden the ball [it's one ball, the bigger on is the reflection] is static, its baked, the reflection did change, the smaller ball is the actual ball and the bigger ball is the reflected ball. the reflection is totally incorrect. Image Effects I used:

    1 - Bloom
    2 - SunShafts
    3 - Tonemapping
    4 - AntiAliasing
    and these have nothing to do with the reflections, the blurriness is because of the smoothness of the material.
     
  26. Devil_Inside

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    The reflection is incorrect because the reflection capture was made from a different location than your camera. Dynamic reflection probes won't help here. You need screen-space real-time reflections.
     
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  27. shkar-noori

    shkar-noori

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    but the wall's reflections were made from the same probe, but there is supposed to be a parallax correction or something like that, right?
     
  28. Zomby138

    Zomby138

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    The parallax correction is what puts the reflection of the walls in the right place. It cannot help with your random objects.

    Having the box projection is very nice. Does anyone know if there are plans to support sphere or cylinder projections as well? For some reason I've always liked designing circular rooms :)
     
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  29. bibbinator

    bibbinator

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    Everybody is hard at work on both Unity 4.6 and Unity 5. Going into Unite we thought we had a clear idea of what the final feature set would look like, but after listening to a lot of feedback we made some adjustments to our plans for both releases. We don't have a specific ship date yet on 5, but we do plan to have a preorder customer beta as planned.

    As for the public roadmaps, we are still going to do that, but it's simply with 4.6 and 5.0 there's a lot happening and we don't want to post unvalidated roadmaps in the midst of rapid development on both of these products. My current thinking is that we will release both 4.6 and 5.0 and then start posting roadmaps.
     
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  30. Devil_Inside

    Devil_Inside

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    It's good to have an update! Thanks!
     
  31. shkar-noori

    shkar-noori

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    Answers like this^ is required to keep everyone happy. thanks @bibbinator
     
  32. ChrisSch

    ChrisSch

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    Just now I had a dream Unity 5 was released. :D
    See what you guys are doing to me with the waiting!?
     
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  33. Dantus

    Dantus

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    As a beta tester, you should be aware of the fact that any functionality that doesn't work is expected has to be discussed in the beta group and nowhere else. As such it is not necessary at all that anyone answers that kind of questions here.
     
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  34. neutralh

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    is blending between reflection probes even possible ? did any one see it any where ?
    i mean how do you blend between cubemap images to create another 6 images for a cubemap ? the only approach would be to use the same technique used for light probes, but that is used for diffuse how to use it for reflections ?
    the only real-time reflection techniques i have seen are :

    - Screen Space Ray Traced Reflections
    - Quad Imposters Reflections (using Quad-Ray intersection)
    - Planar Reflections
     
  35. yoonitee

    yoonitee

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    If you had a lot of pre-orders, can't you take that money and double your staff (including testers) to get it out quicker? Would that help? Surely that would be the correct thing to do if it's taking longer than expected despite a short term loss of profits for Unity. It seems Unity is prepared for a short term loss of reputation on the expectation that Unity 5 will be soooo good that once it out all will be forgiven? Or is Unity in financial difficulty? Perhaps the management needs restructuring.

    I also do think it's strange to take pre-orders for something that might not come out for 2 years and has no deadline for release. It could damage your reputation a good deal. People will think twice before pre-ordering again.

    While there is still a lot of good feeling towards Unity especially since it gives away a free version I can see that changing if it keeps promising things it can't deliver especially if it takes money for it.

    That's my 2 cents worth. :)

    Sometimes I wonder if Unity i like how Wikileaks is portrayed in the Fifth Estate film. He said he had thousands of staff and helpers but really there's just two people. Maybe Unity just has two programmers locked in a room somewhere trying to get out all the new features!
     
    Last edited: Oct 11, 2014
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  36. Archania

    Archania

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    People do it all the time with games. Pre-Order now and you'll get xyz! And it can always be delayed. No guarantees.
     
  37. yoonitee

    yoonitee

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    Doesn't make it right. Also, mostly it's companies in financial difficulty or startups with nothing to lose which doesn't bode well.
     
  38. vivi90

    vivi90

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    Doubling your staff doesn't mean that you can do the same amount of work in half the time.
    "adding manpower to a late software project makes it later" - from the book The Mythical Man-month
    That's Software Engineering 101 ;)
     
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  39. Carpe-Denius

    Carpe-Denius

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    I rembember preordering Watch Dogs, which was delayed half a year *despite* a date. And it's still unplayable..
    I don't want to think that Ubisoft did that to cover up for financial difficulties.

    Two ovens don't make my pizza twice as fast ;)
     
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  40. zenGarden

    zenGarden

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    They gave Unity Free , than Mobile for free , two big steps, i'm pretty sure it will be some other step good for everyone.
     
  41. Andy-Touch

    Andy-Touch

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    You're forgetting about WebGL for free! (Although, it's not out yet)
     
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  42. primaerfunktion

    primaerfunktion

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    And Oculus!
     
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  43. yoonitee

    yoonitee

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    But two ovens could make two pizzas in the time it takes to make one! Ha! Erm... I don't know where I'm going with this. :( It's making me hungry. I think I'll get a pizza.
     
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  44. Max_Bol

    Max_Bol

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    Like others said, doubling the staff is not something viable to allow faster accomplishment. Just think about how much time it would take to train this "new" staff so that they could be up to date with the development.... another 6-12 months before they can even just start helping the current team and I'm not counting those who would have to coach them. (It's not because you can program that you can magically know all about a software like a game engine.) That's without considering if the new staff can actually be included in the workflow or not. (you can't put 2 programmers on the same features thinking they can communicate instantly every change... and you can't put many programmer on a single screen just so that each of them can see what is going on.)
    Want to see what's it would be like? Just try to write story on a Google Doc with 3 friends at the SAME time.

    As for pre-order and release date, I guess many people actually think that pre-order is like "actually buying" a product. It's legally nothing of the sort. When you pre-order, you're only placing an financial deposit for a product to be shipped (in the form specified upon pre-ordering) as soon as available. Even if UT would have given a fixed date of release (which they have not), they could still extend the release date as much as they want. The only right that is given to the "customer" is the right to retrieve their financial deposit at any time prior to the release. (Doing so would also allow UT to remove access to any bonus products or services given with the pre-order). The only thing UT could suffer from extending the release date is the public view of their reliability. Note that I'm not writing all this as some kind of guide or treat, but only to make people notice that when they pre-order, it's an act of will from which they accept the consequences in the future.

    Another thing which seems like it's not clear to some is the difference between "promises" and "engagements". I see many comments about how people want some features in Unity 5.0 yet think it will be only available until later versions like 5.6 and also think it "should" have been available from the start. All that because a representative of UT wrote something like "We're working on it as hard as we can and it should be available as soon as it's ready". From what I see, lots of people see that kind of thing like "We're working on it and it will be available soon" which is really not the same thing and also sound like an heavy case of dyslexia (they literally remove whole word from the sentences).
    UT explained their engagements, yet rarely give any promises. That's why there is nothing wrong whenever they push further the release of a feature or the next version.

    Anyone who don't like this up to the point of feeling cheated or having their money stolen should not work in the video game industry (especially not in the Indie development). They'll have to do the exact same thing many times in the future unless they're ready to sell their lifespan to the customer. (By that I mean you, as a developers, can express your engagement in bringing some features in your project/game to attract customers and interest, but won't promise them as, otherwise, if you do promise features and don't finish them as promised, then it can become a legal matter with false publicity and such. This is what happened with the War Z game (prior to its retitling into "Infestation : Survivor Stories") which ended as being the first and only game to have been legally announced in the whole planet as fully refundable due to global misinformation given by the developers. Even Steam had to bypass their own return policy to fit legally with the situation.)

    Finally, people should take what they read as exactly how it's written and not how they want it to be read.
    (It know it's a pain in the butt, but that's how things are.)
     
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  45. Lypheus

    Lypheus

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    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks's_law
     
  46. jashan

    jashan

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    No, it would not be the "correct" thing to do. Not at all!

    It would be what maybe some economics-school graduates that have zero experience with software-engineering (or any kind of real world-projects) might do. It's called "throwing bodies at a problem" and the good thing is that people that do this either learn their lesson and stop doing it, or they disappear and stop wasting other people's time, energy and money.

    I have pre-ordered Unity Pro 5 for all the licenses I have pretty much the day it was announced and I want UT to take the time they need to get things right. Unexpected things happen both in game development and in software development all the time. It's wise to take the time that handling those unexpected things takes instead of trying to rush something out the door. Right now, everyone has Unity 4.5 ("stable"), 4.6 ("public beta"), and there's a lot of awesome stuff that can be done with those versions ... and Unity 5 is in the works.
     
  47. Carpe-Denius

    Carpe-Denius

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    And "the works" looks promising. The beta gets frequent updates, changes, improvements, new features... It doesn't look like they are sleeping.
     
  48. Cynicat

    Cynicat

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    Dear UT.
    this is my unity wish list.
    in order of pipe-dream.
    1. SendMessage working with inheritance.
    2. BroadcastMessageAll to send a message to every object in your world(useful for game mode related things).
    3. Multiple Tags (makes so much more possible without as much work. status effects and such)
    4. Draggable components (order defines execution order?).
    5. Better soft shadowing (maybe penumbra? maybe?).
    6. Standard shader parallax, parallax occlusion, tessellation.
    7. Area Reflections (area light specular to reflect an image, Remember Me style).
    8. Area Lights (eventually).
    9. Screen Space Reflections.
    10. MoveWorldOrigin (move all objects in scene without breaking lightmaps, statics, Enlighten and such. needed for infinite worlds)
    11. Built in model decimation (with corrected normal maps?).
    12. The purple balloon cat model.

    things i'm exited about in U5
    1. Scene Manager API (Open world-ness!)
    2. Realtime GI (as a CGI artist i love GI).
    3. New Deferred rendering (is it tile based?).
    4. PBR Standard shader (will it be modular? like making a parallax occlusion shader component or something?)
    5. State machine system (will state behaviors work with messaging? if not please do =3)
    6. Audio system (and i'm not even an audio guy, it just looks awesome).
    7. Better Prefabs (by the sound of it they are going to be awesome!)
    8. Dev Road map.

    keep up the awesome guys!

    P.S. this is a feedback reply for the most part. more info to help unity tech make decisions and try to put stuff on there radar.
     
  49. zenGarden

    zenGarden

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    I think Unity tech have already tons of work to finish before looking at what people would want to see implemented ;)

    I'm just curious also :
    Will it be some streaming system for managing games like world of warcraft can do ? If yes Free or Pro feature ?
     
  50. greggtwep16

    greggtwep16

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    I wish that all people/companies learned this lesson but where I used to work (large corporation) this mistake was repeated over and over and I know my former company was not alone (many friends from other companies also have experienced this). Hell, The Mythical Man-Month was written almost 40 years ago now and this still happens all the time. I can understand that human instinct will tend to think the opposite so when you are young you will try this once (or hopefully someone educates you before you do that) but this doesn't seem to sink in at way too many places. I've encountered many project managers that even when you try and explain this seem to be willfully ignorant and will not listen. Employees/contractors are not cheap so I've never understood why it's so hard to persuade them to not overrun the budget when you won't help the timeline.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks's_law