Unity LiveTune?

From the blog about the latest keynote: https://blogs.unity3d.com/2018/03/20/unity-unveils-2018-roadmap-at-gdc/

Cool! Any more information? Is it built on top of Unity stuff exclusively? Can I somehow train it to use my own things? (for example, I have my own post stack, which is scalable, can I somehow hook it into LiveTune?)

 

from the name it feel like that will be a paid service. i hope i'm wrong

 

When I watched it yesterday, I couldn't help but be skeptical of LiveTune. What is the performance overhead of constantly monitoring your game's performance? I have a hard time believing that you'd get better game performance than just letting the user specify their quality settings in a classic options menu, which then wouldn't require constant performance monitoring. Changing various performance settings while the game is playing also can't be without cost.

Perhaps the secret sauce though is they have worked all that out better than a cynic like me would think possible

 

Well, in a basic sense a game already does "performance monitoring" by calculating the delta time value between frames. If that value is acceptable then you don't have to do any other checks and thus have a pretty negligible cost. You only have to do anything more expensive when either a) things are already unacceptably slow or b) you've got loads of resources to spare.

So I don't see it causing a performance hit in any way that makes anything worse. The base overhead of this is going to be something like one bounds check on an existing float value.

For users like us who are experienced with this stuff, maybe. But... First, I'm pretty experienced, and I still find that this can take me quite some time with some games to get things just right. Second, sometimes "just right" for some sections of a game aren't quite right for others, so I have to compromise, whereas an automated system could just tweak it on the fly. Third, believe it or not there are gamers who just don't mess with the settings.

 

I speculate that some of this can be preconfigured, as well. If LiveTune is a service, then it may be able to apply ideal settings from users of the same device playing games with similar performance profiles.

 

So it sounds like your system automatically (based on thresholds we set) adjusts everything in the Quality settings.

Are there ways to hook up custom stuff into the system? For example, in our game, since we always use some form of post processing, we don't use the AA setting from quality settings and we have our own, that we set to the rendertexture we render to.

 

If LiveTune connects to Unity Servers, I assume it will not work on Xbox and PlayStation?

 

Why would you need it for an application deployed to a fixed hardware platform? Wouldn't you want to hand tune the game yourself?

 

Xbox and PS isn't really fixed anymore, think of Xbox One Pro for example.

Even if hardware is the same always, game content normally is not and you want to present that content looking as good as possible, while maintaining a certain frame-rate.

The simple approach is to find the lowest quality denominator that looks and performs acceptable in all places in the game. For instance, things like "We need to display 50 characters here and there" (or ), while most of the time the game would have 10 characters only. Now you either accept that your game runs bad while more than 10 characters are active, or you adjust the quality to make sure the game runs acceptable with more than 10 characters always, or you adjust the quality/content in every location where this might happen. The latter might not be trivial or possible at all, depending on the game, think of open world where the player has a lot of freedom and you as a developer can foresee every scenario that would come up.

The problem with the above approaches is because of "one thing" you make the whole game look worse at all times. Wouldn't it be a lot nicer, if quality/content adjusts automatically, during times where needed only?

This is where such feature becomes useful. The game controls at run-time what should be scaled up or down to maintain the best quality while also maintaining 60fps for example.

Dynamic resolution comes to mind as something Unity supports as a built-in feature that is related. But it doesn't have to stop here, you can apply this to many different things, it's really up to your creativity but normally applies to visuals only that don't affect the game-play (shadow distance, vegetation distance, decals, environment particle effects, etc).

This concept isn't new though and there are probably articles in the internet that explain why this is useful a lot better than I just did

PS: It seems there is even a Unite talk about it.

Spoiler: Unite Austin 2017 - How To Scale CPU Systems Dynamically

 

Hey everyone, I'm one of the engineers on the LiveTune team

@angrypenguin we are currently still in Beta so we're limiting the product to only iOS and Android but we have discussed the possibility of expanding to more platforms in the future.

@Peter77 thank you for the feedback. I agree, we want to get to a point where we can tune only specific parts of the game so that the experience is not altered for the entire play session. This is achievable through a lot of manual work as of right now but we are looking into how we can automate this reduce the amount of work needed from developers.

We will be giving a talk about LiveTune at Unite Berlin on June 20th - Breakout 4. I'll be there in person so if anyone has more questions, feel free to DM me or schedule a time to chat during Unite

If you're not attending Unite Berlin and are interested in LiveTune, you can sign up for the Beta here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScKvPzvQQgfq-fxWVcG1TmpSkS0FBBpBCnb3lmZlAfnDjf90Q/viewform

 

It's for games made with Unity exclusively because we rely on the Unity Analytics API to track performance data for our tuning. Hopefully we will be able to open this up to non-Unity things in the future!

 

The product is currently free and in Beta and we haven't discussed a payment plan for LiveTune yet. We have a limited number of spots for the Beta so if you're interested, sign up ASAP! https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScKvPzvQQgfq-fxWVcG1TmpSkS0FBBpBCnb3lmZlAfnDjf90Q/viewform

 

That's not what I meant

A lot of the descriptions of it sound like it tweaks stuff from the quality settings until the performance is desirable. Since the way we have set up our (Unity) game, the quality settings are not that important, I was wondering if we could hook up our custom stuff to LiveTune. (so for example, we have a custom post processing stack that is pretty scalable, also on higher end devices we add more cosmetic objects on certain scenes etc).

From trucn's reply it seems that is doable.

 

@AcidArrow ah yes, sorry for the misunderstanding. You can definitely hook up your custom stuff to LiveTune

 

So has LiveTune disappeared now?

 

Pretty sure it turned into this.

https://blogs.unity3d.com/2019/04/0...oother-frame-rates-with-adaptive-performance/

 

Is LiveTune available already? Can't find much about it, but it would come in quite handy for me now...