Unity 5 release date?

I'm talking about inside the editor - everything's fine in the build at runtime, I just can't bake the light maps themselves on large scenes.

 

imo it's more about easing the pain of development. Sure you could write your own GUI, your own audio tool etc.
But if someone else has done that for you, then development time and cost go down.

 

Honestly? Unity needs to come out sometime January. This would impress everyone with it's robust feature set, lack of bugs and so on.

But Unity customers want everything yesterday. So when Unity does come out, one must be patient if there is a bug or two or it doesn't have ALL THE TOYS possible. So it is OK asking for it to come out sooner, or asking for various moons on sticks, just be prepared to get what you ask for when you ask for it

After all, a game engine is never done...

 

But please include a example project which enables us to reproduce the error without using our brainz... A simple "click here, do that" is not sufficient... even if the bug is reproducible without any project...

 

Oh... Unity has a proven track record of promising stuff and then pulling back saying "Instead being in X.0 it'll be in X.Y..." or actually delivering a half baked (pun intended) implementation of the feature which is actually unusable in RLD© (Real Life Development)...

 

Such as...?

--Eric

 

Really... you ask that?

 

Yes. Since I don't know of any examples where that actually happened.

--Eric

 

GUI

(and since you should have quoted the entire phrase: ) half baked implementations:
Beast integration
Occlusion culling
Navmeshes
...

 

Define Half-Baked, please. Thousands and thousands of games (I dont have a list) have been shipped that use the built-in Lightmapping, Occlusion Culling and Nav Mesh system. Its hardly half-baked if you can ship a product with it.

 

But surely the purpose of a roadmap is to show the road ahead? Why keep up things that have already been shipped?

 

Given the 64bit editor should have been here LONG ago. You can't even purchase a new system that even has a 32bit OS anymore. And it isn't like this is a new thing either.
I think the biggest issue is that Unity wants to support the people using lower versions and not upgrading. This alone is an issue since in order to move forward, you have to cut support and focus that manpower to the new things.

 

Half-baked: Ignoring a lot of common use-cases. Upon release the Nav Meshes would not support additiv mesh loading (does it support it now?), the occlusion culling created sub-optimal and even unusable results, Baking lightmaps crashed on big scenes, ...

You you look at the new features in the releases of Unity 3 and 4 in regards to what could be used without a hazzle, there were so many problems.

That said, with the .x releases, you did your best to make it usable. Thus, your reference to "Thousands and thousands of games" (I suppose this references mostly mobile games), then yes... but I doubt it's "Thousands and thousands of games" with the .0 releases...

If you feel offended by this, then I'm sorry... (in the same time, you could go through the forum history around those .0 releases and check yourself for the posts people did in regards to the new feature sets). I'm a pro user since long ago, so I have seen the progression and the features coming and the requests people made.

I prepaid for 5.0 and I really hope that things will be going smooth with all those big changes that are coming on. Even if this takes longer than you expect, I'd rather see a release beginning next year with multiple companies having had the change to produce a games with the 5.0 beta, so they can catch most of the common bugs.

 

Beast has always been 64-bit.

 

At least they have one!.

Also if you're honestly telling me that all the systems function as they should, then tell me why I spent nearly a year replacing them all (or at least trying)? The editor crashed when exporting to beast (terrain mainly), Occlusion culling often caused flickering meshes and with that bit I tried and even reached out to Unity on a few occasions. Lack of 64-bit editor made Unity crash a lot, terrain system crashed a fair amount in general.. Before anyone asks YES I did upload the project and I did submit bug reports!.

I know a lot of other devs who ran into these problems, I've submitted more than one project to Unity.

I'm not fussed about it anymore, but for some use cases Unity was troublesome on areas. I like Unity it's a good engine, it's just not geared towards big heavy games like CE and UE are. BUT! (Big but here) Unity 5.0 seems to be changing all of this.

 

You need to be able to export it to Beast first!!.

 

I just wish i knew what the people at unity were thinking. Right now this thing could be rleeased 2016 for all i know.

Its almost funny that the same thing is going on in the oculus rift forums. Only there is people want to know why it hasn't shipped to them yet and want the info on when its going to ship to them. But at least with rift i cna confidently say august or september the latest.

Right now with unity.. its up in the air.

 

Can we at least get a date for when the release date will be released?

 

how much u want to make a bet they are purposely keeping quiet on it for a big reveal at unite. lol

 

maybe 4.6, but I'm guessing that Unity 5 will arrive late October or early November.

 

Take this as a temporary public roadmap for the time being, until we have a full public one:

 

Please re-read the post.

 

Show where they actually promised that for a X.0 release, please. I know people keep repeating that they "promised" it, but as far as I can tell that can be traced back to an interview during the 3.x era where someone off-handedly mentioned working on it. There wasn't any promise and certainly not for a X.0 release. Repeating something that's not true doesn't somehow make it true.

Why? You said 'Unity has a proven track record of promising stuff and then pulling back saying "Instead being in X.0 it'll be in X.Y..."', but have completely failed to show any examples. That's a pretty serious accusation so I would think you'd have actual proof of that. I'm not quoting the "half baked" part because that's not relevant here and I agree that some of the features are not what they could have been.

--Eric

 

I'm betting Unity 4.6 is announced at Unite, but Unity 5.0 does not ship until spring or summer of 2015.

 

If it takes that long, then im switching engines.

 

Out of interest, why?

 

Other engines have the capabilities that I need graphically. They are now pricing themselves competitively. I stick with unity out of loyalty and experience gained with it, but that can only carry me so far.

 

simply... 64-Bit and Enlighten for us, but the thing is we're not changing engines

 

I 'myself' never had any Beast-related out-of-memory crash, but we had this issue when importing 8K textures sometimes, And yes we're developing for PC and have 2K terrains baked with alot of meshes alongside, but frankly it takes alot, i mean ALOT of time to bake a single scene on 4 Bounces and 50 Res.
if the crash is happening, it has to happen when unity is building the data for Beast not during Beast's baking. after all, Beast is a memory-hungry-old-tool that requires replacement, and Enlighten comes for the rescue.

 

well, but they kinda said within 2014 for Unity 5, am I missing something?

 

WRONG!

It was promised in the 3.5 release. It was in the Announcement section of the forum made by a UT staff member. It was mentioned in a post just prior to release. Then, the day of 3.5's release, no new GUI. People complained. UT's forum posts then mentioned it was was coming in 3.6. The 3.6 release date came, no GUI as promised. Then boom the initial posts were edited and any official mention of GUI and promises were removed. Fast forward through several major forum updates and upgrades, and BOOM all those initial controversial threads are gone.

With UT playing stupid and acting like fools saying they never promised S***, but we know, and we remember.

I'd consider Mecanim in the list of half baked too.

 

Um, no. I was there, and pretty heavily involved in the forums, not to mention involved with the betas, which had no hint of any GUI system. I'm quite sure they would not announce any features that were not even in the betas. Also, there was never any 3.6 release, nor was any such version ever announced in any way, so I think it's far more likely that you're just remembering what you want to remember.

Well that's certainly mighty convenient for you.

--Eric

 

It's kind of silly that Unity treats its releases like it's announcing a new WoW expansion or something. People here are ostensibly developers so just give it to them straight. Unless project managers at Unity are completely useless they have dates and milestones and they know what the current progress is. Software development always has unexpected problems but it's not magic.

I don't think the whole uGUI angst is from not delivering the GUI but because it was a big mystery. If Unity had been more open about the development going sideways and getting restarted multiple times then no one would have expected it to suddenly be included in each release.

Hell I don't see any reason why the upcoming release bug tracker and scheduling boards shouldn't just be public. What harm could it be to anyone to be transparent? It's not like your competitors are going to use that information against you. They are too busy cranking out their own features.

 

Here is a talk, from 2013, from the creator of NGUI, that covers a some of the history of Unity GUI development:
http://unity3d.com/learn/resources/talks/state-new-gui-unity-4x

In terms of transparency; a lot of people on this board have been using that word repeatedly. Other than not announcing exact dates for releases of a feature (we have already discussed this) and not having a public roadmap for a few years (we did used to have one, and our VP of Engineering has stated that we will have one again) what could we do to be more transparent? We are all ears! We already give insight blog posts on upcoming features, deliver hands-on talks on upcoming features at conferences/events all over the world, and talk with our users in a great deal of methods of communication. Heck, I even gave a guy a hands-on new GUI demo in a pub and bought him a pint, because he recognised my Unity tshirt!

 

So... is that an official Unity policy? Cause if it is, I am only about 40mins on the train from the city. If I stalk the bars near the SF HQ and spot a shirted staff member, can I get free beers too?

 

I just gave examples of what could be made public that would be more transparent. Most of what you are doing internally to track new releases could be available publicly. Basically instead of saying "what should we make public" you should be thinking "what do we need to hide" as by default everything should be public. That's definitely the standard Epic is setting.

We don't need "the release is definitely 19th of August" because that is asking for trouble but you should be able to indicate how on schedule you are for the dates you are targeting and what those are.

I've seen that video, but it doesn't have anything to do with Unity communicating those problems as they occurred. I've never been waiting on uGUI and my experience with it doesn't look like it'll replace NGUI for me, but I never thought Unity being obtuse on the issue was ever very sensible and it definitely increased the grumbling on here rather than help keep a lid on it.

 

This is a bit too much denial about the new GUI for 3.x. I was there too and recall the turmoil. Helgason himself wrote one post stating he was sorry the GUI didn't make it. People even said they bought the 3.x Pro version only, because they were sure the new GUI came out for it. And they were quite angry when Unity 4 was announced but no GUI for 3.x had appeared. At that point UT excused themselves and that it wouldn't happen again.

It might be true that people overhyped themselves much, but obviously some communications have gone wrong horribly. But when reading your posts, @Eric5h5, it looks like nothing ever happened and people just imagine B.S. And that's not the case.

 

I've never implied that there wasn't an issue with the GUI; obviously there was. But the notion that it was ever "promised" for a specific version and then yanked (complete with mysterious cover-up conspiracy) is just wrong. The notion that Unity has a history of promising features for a specific version and then not delivering is even more wrong; I honestly don't even know where that idea comes from, hence me asking for details (and not getting any). Certainly they've had failures from time to time; let's just keep discussion to things that actually happened please.

--Eric

 

There's the major issue in your first sentence, time. We were talking about a GUI two years back, I know a GUI isn't the most needed feature there are really good alternatives like (DF, NGUI, Scaleform etc.) but it flags questions in development speed (as a whole). Mecanim was prioritised over core features (like a 64-bit editor), was it a better selling point? I'm unsure as Unity are selling on the back of AAA visuals (which I know could mean anything like Doom2), but lacks the core engine components to support A / AA / AAA PC / Console large / open world games from five years ago. (Read the rest before taking that statement contextually).

Bugs kept falling into black holes, never really knowing when they'd be fixed. Someone I know logged a PhysX bug three years back and it'll most likely be fixed in Unity 5.0. You can't release games with core component bugs, it just looks sloppy although I know a lot of games that have because they had no choice. Implemented features are always works in progress but core components seemed unfinished or buggy and eventually became complete over a release cycle.

The issue is time, if it takes Unity three years to develop a feature then that's the end of a development cycle even in AAA. You can't wait for Unity to play catch up with it's buddies whilst you have a game to develop, UDK had a 64-bit editor way back in March 2010 and it was in Unreal engine 3 a fair while before that.

I'm first to stick my hands up and say UE4 is rough around the edges, it's no where near competition in the mobile sector yet and has it's quirks. No such thing as a "perfect" engine, but you can trust in two things A) they have their priorities straight and the basis well and truly covered especially in 3D B) we know "Roughly" when they're going to release features. They may delay a couple of months, sure whatever I'm not bothered I can live with it..

As I type this, I've not a clue what Unity wants to be? Is Enlighten and 64-bit editor a necessity due to future mobile games? Is the ability to support large current generation PC / Console games in Unity 5.0 a by-product of that need? It's great to see Unity branching out in this area, but by past history I'm still scratching my head as to what's the end goal and if it's a smart idea to invest.

 

Unity never promised the GUI in any version. It was on the roadmap for 3.5, but never explicitly said it would make it into the release. People like you are the reason they don't share their roadmaps online anymore.

 

I personally think this whole debate is ridiculous and pointless now, and I was hesitant to post this, but I feel like you should be aware that you're wrong about it not being promised so that you can stop arguing otherwise. In fact, Andy Touch just posted a link to a video in which ArenMook describes Retained Mode GUI (which was basically the earliest attempt at what was pretty much scrapped and iterated into what is now called uGUI) as "the system that was supposed to ship in Unity 3".

That said - I'm glad they didn't ship that system, it was cool but broken. The new one is looking much, much better and I'm sure it's because they had/have the time to really get a good design nailed down. The only people who will be disappointed are the ones who foolishly expect it to be a content-creation tool when it's really intended to help you lay out your UI content (from other programs) and make it interactive.

 

I agree that this is silly, so post a link to where it was promised and I'll stop arguing otherwise. I keep asking for that, but all I get is people shouting "WRONG!", and "they went back and edited it out". (Seriously?) I do hope you understand that an item in a roadmap with a disclaimer specifically stating that the roadmap is not a commitment isn't a promise.

Obviously there has been a general intention to do a new GUI system for kind of a ridiculously long time, which kept getting mishandled for whatever reasons. But as far as I ever saw there haven't been any actual promises until the 4.6 announcement. Yep, that one is certainly a promise. So if they don't deliver in 4.6, then everyone can legitimately complain about not keeping promises. If you're complaining that they didn't implement everything in a roadmap even though they specifically said that it was subject to change, well, I don't know what to say to that.

--Eric

 

No, but he did ask about the new UI system and I did have a Beta build on my laptop. And we had a good long chat about the sorts of things he doing with Unity, and it was my choice to buy him a beer. Is their a Unity Usergroup in SF?

 

Andy that's great you answer to customer question. But from my experience, you can ship a game with a half backed feature. You can ship a game with memory leak and crash... If they don't happen to much that's ok.
Most AAA production do.
I've worked with terrible engine and when we wish to change the engine, the argument, our managers use against was "we have ship a product, so it's ok". No if you have to use hundred of workaround (not documentated..), and the you can't fix a bug that happen one out of ten times every time a player start, that's a problem.

But hte biggest problem Unity face right now, is the communication. I think Unity listen to a selected number of people that are evangelist and of course don't point the big flaw Unity have for the majority of customer...
But of course that's nicer to listen to people that only tell you nice things

Right now there is a communication problem. If the demand of customer go in the same direction that has been decide internally, that's ok. But if it's not, you wouldn't change it, isn't it ? And you start a fight with them...

You are on the defensive side. Instead you should only listen and take notes.
There is a big frustration for the customer point of view. They run business, and their business depend on your capability of delivering a new version. You keep them blind. And yes, if your management do their job properly, they can give a estimate date of Unity 5. You have (I hope) a deadly internally. What company do is usually say "2nd semester of 2014" when they are not sure.

I have been to a unity presentation, and it was really a one way communcation. A team explain their grief about big project/merging scene and everything related. But it was like the unity guy was only defending unity instead of saying "I will talk about this problem in a future meeting", and really doing it. And their grief was totally legitimate (it was not a troll)

You really need to think like you are a programmer talking to another programmer, that ask for you help because he has a problem when he use your lib. Really like he was your colleague. Be helpfull and transparent and people will be nice and understandable!! We are the same people on the same boat, not two side fighting.

For example when someone say "this feature is crippled", answer: we can open an official thread on your problems, our specialist will look into it, and we will see if we can give you a fix in a futur update with an approximate date, or a workauround.But Unity 5 take all our work force, so we can't promise you anything.

PS: Unity promise the GUI for the 3.x version. There was an offical roadmap, and you can probably found an old post discussing this issue with every link to the official communication if you didn't archive it.
(I'm 100% sure, but I don't want to spend the afternoon searching fo it, I have better things to do)
Continuing arguing against it just show that you really need to work on your communication! In the end, we don't care who is right or wrong!

 

We can at least all agree, that UNITY NEVER officially deny that the GUI was not for the 3.x ?
(and maybe intentionnally to keep some customers)
We can at least all agree that UNTY talk about it for the 3.X ?
(even if there is legal small disclaimer at the end of the roadmap that cover all features)

 

Why would they deny that? They wanted to release it in the 3.x cycle, but couldn't get it ready in time. They definitely talked about putting the GUI 3.x when they were saying they wanted to try and fit it in. Talking about something != promising.

 

Anyone else think this thread got derailed and stopped being about unity 5 along time ago because some people are butt hurt over a feature that has plenty of alternatives already?