Unity3d > VR > again waisting money and resources instead of making a product better :-(

hello all,
well as a long time user since v. 1.2 i'm very very disappointed how Unity evolved...
They put again so much money, time and resources into Unity only to have this fancy VR... :-(
Well if you are in this VR thing you will find out that this is only for special people... a few not the masses...
This is the same with 3D in home TV and Cinema.... dead technology!!!
Just a few compared to the normal Unity users will adapt the technology and play with....
from that group just a few will release something... maybe useful for industry but not for normal consumer!!!
So with VR we are talking just about a group of max 10000 people who will try... than find out that it doesn't work fror them and go on with 2D & 3D.
Belive me i'm working on real VR that works but it will never work without googles... and after 5-10min you have enough from it and you'r going sick from this VR stuff!
Well the problem is that Unity try to adapt every new tech thats out and where you can be sure that it will be dropped in 2-3 Years.... Until then Unity has not the power to fix all bug's that pop out of every release 4.7 & 5.3.x
Same was with Flash, Linux, Blackberry, Windows Phone etc.... the list is longer

UNITY HAS LOST THE GOAL AND PATH THERE WHERE ON WHEN THEY STARTED !!!

Now it's a big company that needs a lot of money and want that you upgrade to 5.x that's still full of nasty bugs... you have to find a version that fit's for you or you have to find a elegant way that these bug's don't affect you...
But performance has dropped on Mobile & Desktop with Unity 5!!!
Also for VR you need a huge PC with Windows as Operating System... That PC cost you a pro license of Unity... but who has this Workstation @ home....
The performance of all this VR stuff is terrible and i have not found anyone who loves it to wear 8h this VR googles lol... nobody will wear it longer than 5-10 min because it makes you sick!
So for normal consumer this technology is dead and will be dead like 3d TV or 3D cinema !!!!

Again you can say what you want.... Unity goes on with VR and waste so much time & resources ...
They totally forget the loyal paying customers like you and me...
We are living from our games and app's and pay our and Unity bill's
But now with these weekly patch updates all is going worse :-(
One bug got fixed but on the other side two or more new pop up...
It was much better @ version 3 of Unity and than it started slowly with v.4
Unity3d 4.7f1 is still not useable with Android... can't update my App nor my Game...
With Unity 4 and before all was much better!!!
Well all what i have said before comes now true... :-(

GOOD BUY UNITY3D
we had 9 nice years while the first 6 where fantastic... the last 3 where horrible because of all the different Versions... and this bag's full of bug's that never get fixed...
Now it's time for something better for the Mobile Market...

@Unity3D you totally lost what is important, you have totally forgotten your loyal paying customers!!!

but well i know now... you don't listen anymore!
M.

 

Would you prefer that Unity simply ignored new up and coming platforms?

One of Unity's big selling points is its unmatched cross platform functionality. You can't have that and ignore up and coming platforms.

 

YES!
Never be the first... in this game... waiting until it becomes real... if it becomes that...
Let a small team work on it... if it becomes something useful than...
but until than care about the loyal customers!
Look @ the market ...

 

Unity is completely useless to me without VR support.

 

While I agree that vr is niche, I don't think that unity is diverting resources to it. They have grown quite a bit and as I understand it many of the teams are specific to areas, like vr. My assumption is that the vr tech is additional to the other dev areas.

Ultimately if vr is beneficial to unity in terms of market and sales, it is beneficial to all unity developers whether tackling vr or not. Additionally devs who are already using unity, it means they can leverage existing knowledge, tools and skills to explore or take advantage of vr.

 

That's actually what they're doing as far as I can tell. Just notice how that employee number has swelled over the years.

What about those loyal customers that have interests in virtual reality?

Yes, look at the market. Virtual reality has never had a bigger opportunity to become established. Previous attempts were failures largely due to a lack of sufficient technology and not enough attention through marketing. These latest attempts are very sophisticated and are backed by multiple, massive companies. Billions of dollars are being invested.

 

Additionally I find this entire line of reasoning to be flawed. Why must you be capable of wearing any of the virtual reality devices for eight hours in order for it to be viable? Virtual reality is not intended as a complete replacement for the existing methods of using a computer any more than a graphics tablet or any of the other less common IO devices are.

By the way you may want to research into this a bit more. My results have been turning up positive progress towards eliminating motion sickness for those who are experiencing it. Which is the other point I need to make... not everyone is actually experiencing motion sickness.

Furthermore it isn't like motion sickness is restricted to virtual reality. Seasickness is often made fun of for a reason.

 

Its actually getting pretty good in some of the latest gear. The guys from Zero Latency were showing it off at the global game jam here in Melbourne.

 

We're going to be at GDC with our game "Sentinels of Liberty - Homebound" with zero motion sickness

 

The PC I built for myself 4 years ago for less than the cost of a pro licence runs VR pretty well, although the graphics card is now just outside the official minimum spec.

Please don't made wild and narrow assumptions about what hardware Unity users have access to.

8 hours of continual VR gameplay is certainly not what most dev etc are looking for with the initial offerings of this gen of VR. But the opposite '5-10 minute' extreme is also silly - well crafted VR apps can be pleasurable for longer than that.

Projecting your personal needs onto a much wider assumed user base is a classic error of thought.

Speak for yourself - I would have cancelled my Unity Pro subscription a long time ago if VR were not on the table.

This has nothing to do with VR really, you've just decided to merge two of your bugbears into a single rant. Without merit.

 

And vr isnt expensive if you know what You're doing. Got a awesome 120 FOV goggles for 93 bucks and a 6 dollar app and I then got VR for pc gaming, granted not as good as new rift quality wise. But the FOV makes up for that. And very affordable.

 

Totally. Here's my expense list for 2016 thus far.

VR compatible & future proof desktop with a titan x in case VR goes 4k : $2600
Oculus Rift : $600 (not buying until later this year)
Sixense Stem controllers : $300
2 Myo bands to practice before with sixense ships : $400

Total VR related expenses for 2016 : $3,900

VR should target apple customers. A small audience willing to pay a high premium.

 

Have you purchased this yet? Current indication is that the next generation of NVIDIA's GPUs will be coming sometime between April and June with the release of a new Titan card.

http://techfrag.com/2016/01/25/nvid...-in-april-gtx-1080-in-june-and-volta-in-2017/

 

The problem with Apple is that most of their hardware is incompatible with the rift. I'm not sure if that is going to change anytime soon. I thought that I remember reading that they hired a VR guy but I'm not sure on that.

I pre-ordered the rift early enough to get a March shipping date. That is going to cost me over $900. I already paid for my stem about a decade ago . My order number is just over 100 so I should be one of the first to get it when it ships in April (supposedly).

I am going to buy the touch when it comes out and I am going to pre-order the Vive as soon as it goes on sale. I hate to think how much that is going to cost me.

I also still need to upgrade my computer. I'm not sure if I should just upgrade my video card to a 970 since that is likely what my potential customers would have or to go with something good so I can enjoy games like iRacing and Elite Dangerous.

Damn you for reminding me about the Myo. I think that I could do some cool things with that.

Wow, I didn't realize how expensive this is going to be. I'm really going to have to put my nose to the grindstone over the next two months to prove to myself that what I am doing is commercially viable.

 

Pretty pricey lol.
I wouldn't even try to target a rift until it's more feasible to do so. The stuff people pay, I'll never understand.
I'd rather reach 10 million potential VR users on lower quality than 50,000 on the rift. (Not correct numbers, idk what they are). But you know what I mean lol.

I'm quite happy and content with a 93 dollar headmount for my Phone with an App to control my PC and Xbox One/PS4 games in VR. It hasn't gotten me the slightest bit of motion sickness neither.

I'm working directly with one of the VR Companies that converts phone into PC Console VR, and it's directly streamlined into Unity. So all that's needed is a Headmount and the App for phone, not external Servers, etc.
It is roughly a 0.05 to 0.1 MS Lag most of the time. (For me at least). And this is sending the signal through Wifi to my Phone. USB Tethering would of course be faster than that.

So I'm quite content with my Setup.

 

Yes. And of course I'd know that, I've replied several things to you talking about the pascal I realize I'm about to miss a jump, but also realize I come from a life of owning macbooks. I usually spend $3,000 every 2 years. Now I'm spending $2,600 for something that should last more than 2 years. It was a no brainer coming from that history.

Is that because the rift needs a dedicated GPU and it has to be somewhat decent?

I went with the STEM. It's $100 a piece. I got a base station and 2 hands. Might get legs / feet too later in the year. Sixense controllers are a little different from the touch. Check them out in case they're more what you're looking for and or cheaper.

I don't think I'll play many first or even second generation VR games. I'm getting this gear for ME. When this stuff is out, I'm picking either unity or unreal based on who has the best support. I've already seen promising unity stuff with the rift and all of the sixense demos have been unity demos so... looking good for unity. Once I have all of this I begin my journey into another world.

Since unity can import assembly binaries to import new code (and asset bundles can import basically everything), maybe I'll make a game that is a world that lets you code, send that code to the machine to compile into the assemblies, and then import and test that code. You build up the universe from the inside.

DREAMS COMING TRUE.

 

Hadn't realized I brought it up that often. I am definitely a hardware geek.

Just think about how great that next jump will be for you when you get it in two years and you'll be happy.

The Oculus Rift requires a minimum of a GTX 970. Anything less is incapable of driving the 2160 by 1200 display at the full 90 Hz required. A GTX 960 can only really handle 1080p @ 60Hz. My understanding is that the higher refresh rate helps alleviate some of the motion sickness previous models had.

You'll have to let us know how you like it.

I've noticed that Lumberyard has placeholders in their docs for VR too.

 

Where is this info from? It was my understanding that the GTX 970 will run all Oculus first party and games from partners at a smooth 90hz, obviously if it's a game that isn't anything to do with Oculus then it's not certain but considering games like Eve Valkyrie and Bullet Train have AAA quality graphics and run at 90hz on a GTX 970 it should be pretty standard.

 

Numerous news sources as well as the official website. Scroll down a bit and click View Recommended Specification.

https://www.oculus.com/en-us/oculus-ready-pcs/

It may very well be possible that you can get by with less but I wouldn't risk it. A GTX 970 is only about half again the price of a GTX 960 but it has double the performance. Additionally it has almost double the ROPs (56 vs 32) and those are the main determining factor for how many pixels the card can emit to a display.

 

Those are recommended specs though, a Titan X would have no benefit for most games as they are designed to run at 90hz on a 970.

 

He was simply asking if it required a powerful GPU and I was responding. I do have to point out though that this is the PC platform and the hardware recommended by Oculus won't necessarily be the hardware recommended by the game.

 

In order to ensure the future of the company they have to make bets on new technologies. They were one of the first to offer reasonable mobile support there was no guarantees it would be successful, back then Steve Jobs and Apple was,if anything, anti-games.

Without mobile Unity would likely be dead by now (probably not all the way dead, but heading that direction).

VR might not have the penetration that mobile did (then again maybe it will in some form), on the other hand its a great way to draw new developers away from other engines, or custom solutions, which don't have as good support.

More to the point, keeping abreast of new technology is required to ensure the continued future of the product.

 

I'm going from an nvidia 860 [mobile] to a titan x [desktop]. I think it will be quite a jump this time. When I update again I imagine I'll get a volt 3 or pascal 2, haha.

At first I wanted to get the msi notebook with the 980 in it. Then I saw a cheaper machine with a 980. Then I saw a $400 upgrade to a titan. Then days later I realized it was a titan x. I hope that's a big step up from a 970 so I don't have to worry about performance with the crazy VR idea I posted somewhere.

Definitely. It looks like it's going to be competitively priced based on how expensive VR tech is.

It's also CryEngine. If they overcome that small flaw at some point, I might check it out. But Unity's ability to load asset bundles makes anything made with unity 5 mod-ready. Multiplatform, moddable, low hardware requirement, VR demos done for sixense and oculus. Unity is the clear winner for this phase

I wasn't seeking a benefit, I'll probably still run games on medium, I just want to be able to continue to run new games on medium for a few more years!

'the game'. Pff, only oculus games I'm playing will be made by me. I'm about to abandon this world, yo!

 

Wow. That's a very good point that completely slipped my mind. Unity does actually predate Android and iOS. It isn't like they waited for the products to become mature either. They announced iOS support within a year of the release of the iPhone.

https://unity3d.com/public-relations/news?year=2008

 

Why don't you get a 980TI? In some benchmarks they win over a Titan X, we use them for development and they never struggle with anything. Not to mention they are far cheaper.

An 860M is nothing on a 980M, never mind a 980TI..

 

@ShadowK: It does have half the video memory though. Something tells me @Tomnnn might actually try to use it all too.

 

Still if my little 980M can develop in Unreal @ 4K resolution whilst being as wasteful as I am with textures, still runs pretty well then I'm kinda not seeing the point. The bandwidth throughput of the Titan X vs. 980Ti isn't significant enought to warrant the price (I mean it's pretty close). Whilst the 980TI still is twice as powerful as the 980M..

It's great having tons of memory, but if the GPU can't spin the throughput quick enough due to bandwidth restrictions then yeah..

 

I got the base station with two controllers and three stem packs. But I still have a distrust of em tracking ingrained in me from the electrical engineer who taught me 3D kinematics. I need accurate and reliable motion tracking and I'm hoping that either the STEM, Touch, or Lighthouse works out for me.

 

I'm betting a lot on the STEM system. Say NO to occlusion messing up your VR experience

But the name is more appropriate for the slew of Attack on Titan VR games that are bound to happen. Also, I've been an apple customer for a long time. Price is no object for marginal improvements and occasionally worse benchmarks, haha. I'm guessing those benchmarks are due to some sort of optimization / overclocking given the stats for both cards or a passmark limitation caused by having so much vram (?) Not sure, not a hardware person. I don't even know what a kraken cooling system is, but I went for it just because... titans... krakens... if only the motherboard was zeus or hades.

@Ryiah thanks for thinking I might know what I'm doing, but I really don't. What does twice the vram mean to me? I honestly have no idea. 16GB RAM, 12GB VRAM... the primal man in my reptile brain feels fear that those numbers are so close. Is there any logic in that? No. Is there any understanding of hardware in that? No. The only thing I know is in the past, for machines I've owned, those numbers have been farther apart.

@ShadowK Reading the above should clarify my position on all of this. I don't know anything about hardware. What I do know is... it'd be pretty sweet if there was a cpu called zeus or hades to go along with the kraken and the titan.

 

Lol, 980TI sounds a little boring must admit.. But there's little in it between the Titan megasaurous X devourer of flames.. Should call it 980 Total Immersion Mega X Stormbringer.. Does that make you wanna buy it now?

The desktop dev machines we use wouldn't struggle in the slightest developing for VR in Unreal, which is known for being heavy as they come.

I7 5820K (Oc'd to 3.8GHZ)
32GB DDR4
1TB SSD
GTX 980TI

With a machine like that, you could do VR in anything without worrying.. Save you a bit of cash too...

 

The Titan X has 12GB of memory and the 980 Ti has 6GB.

The next generation of cards has HBM2 memory for the top tiers. Triple the bandwidth. We need a drool emote.

 

I don't trust any video card with more memory than my desktop.

 

System memory is almost always very low cost. I recently doubled my system to 16GB.

 

I'm still waiting on my game from Muckel but they have lost their focus. Oh well.

 

Haha thanks I realized that. I mean what does more video memory do for me? Will games be faster after loading because there's more room to cache stuff?

I might spend more in 2017 to increase the ram from 16 to 32. Maybe even 64 if the system can handle it. I haven't had issues with that before though. Is that a thing with VR? Large memory consumption?

 

If you actually made a game that needed more than 6GB, it'd be able to keep more of the game's resources in VRAM and wouldn't need to swap them back and forth between system RAM. The PCI-Express bus has relatively limited bandwidth.

 

@Tomnnn: By the way have you seen the initiatives from both Unity and Unreal for creating content in VR?

https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/build-for-vr-in-vr
http://www.tweaktown.com/news/50333/unity-answers-unreals-vr-editor-dev-toolset/index.html

 

Reason we have 32GB of ram is for baking purposes, so I guess not really.. But it'll come in handy.

 

I agree with Shadow. Now that I have 32 gigs of ram (and sometimes but rarely) it's not even enough for Baking for me. I find letting it auto bake everytime I add or move something helps a lot, but I will never again unless forced to temporarily have less than 32 gigs of ram. I'd truly have more if I could, just well, becuase I want more lol. But my Mobo can only handle 32.

 

OP is terribly wrong because its BECAUSE of VR that Unity 5.4 is much faster and smoother than it would have been... for non VR apps.

Why? the optimisations for latency and rendering efficiency became more urgent and do improve things for non VR as well. This isn't guesswork, it's a comment from one of the developers.

There's less CPU and less latency, only a good thing

Is VR going away? probably not, no. Is it niche? yes, until hardware becomes small and cheap enough. Note: the comments for 5.4 are for a later version of 5.4 without regressions etc that are beta stuff.

 

Sounds like 'more room to cache stuff' to me, good.

Looks cool. What I'd really like is an oculus app that mimicked a regular monitor so I could just wear it all the time gaming or working

It's a desktop so I can just shove more ram in there later, right?

 

Only if your hardware allows you to upgrade it. Basically this comes down to how much memory the processor and motherboard support as well as the availability of sufficiently sized memory modules.

Just as an example the Intel Haswell processors (these are primarily the i3/i5/i7 4000 series) have an upper limit of 32GB but some of the motherboards only have two slots making it difficult to reach full capacity until memory modules with sufficient density are released.

It's much easier now than it has been in the past though if you don't feel like dealing with the research necessary to determine it just throw us the model info of the system and we can look it up for you.

 

It seems like VR the occulus rift is too expensive for the average user, its like $600 bucks then you'd need a power PC to run it. So you would targeting a really niche audience

 

@zombiegorilla It might be less for VR since it's built on top of an existing platform but every build option has some maintenance cost when creating/updating the abstraction layers as well as new features. So it's not just having the dedicated team. That said I think that VR will be big enough in two/three years to be worth Unity's effort now.

 

Who is the average user though? Computer hardware will soon be gaining new generations of hardware in the form of graphics cards (AMD Polaris and NVIDIA Pascal) and processors (AMD Zen). Additionally this year is the point where both processor manufacturers will be on DDR4 memory. It's an ideal time for the Rift.

Therefore if we're discussing desktop gamers with dedicated cards I don't think this will matter for long. If desktop users with integrated graphics or laptop users then that's kind of expected. They weren't really gaming much to begin with or they're using consoles or mobile devices for their gaming needs.

Of course for consoles it doesn't really matter. You only need to buy their VR HMDs and have the appropriate console.

 

Don't forget GearVRs. The new Galaxy with Vulkan should help a bunch in getting good performance/longer play times. Which should draw more people to them when talking about gaming.

 

@Ryiah

motherboard: MSI Z170I - 32GB ram capacity
cpu: i7-6700K - ??

Can't seem to find these stats very easily... but I'll guess it's also 32.

I've got that at least I won't be that behind the new stuff and it's still a huge leap for me.

 

Well it depends really, the 6770K isn't that much quicker than our 5820K's (due to OC) as a four core. But much slower in multicore performance. The difference in price between the two is neglible, what you need to decide is what kinds of programs can make use of a hexacore..

Unreal does, it's the recommended spec for the editor.. As for Unity? Not a clue if it would make use of a hexacore or octocore..

 

A coin flip might as well have made the decision for me, I didn't have any reason to choose any of the hardware I did. I didn't look into it at all xD I didn't compare the gpus or cpus or anything. I've never had a water cooling system so I had literally nothing to go on there anyway. I've never even owned a desktop before.

My primary unity machine is a macbook from 2012 so what isn't overkill for that

 

Wasting.