What a difference 8 years make.

Spoiler

 

Kinda disappointing actually.

 

Just curious, how come?

 

It is a massive improvement, but not a surprising improvement.

 

Unity 3 was really behind for it's time

 

Considering that the Island demo always looked kinda bad (Unity could look better back then) and that the book of the dead looks better than anything has come out of Unity, AND considering 8 frigging years have gone by, I'd say this isn't such a massive difference.

 

I don’t know everyone seems so negative about why the differences are what they are.

It’s a HUGE difference and shows that Unity’s rendering capabilities have grown by leaps and bounds.

 

It was really ahead of it’s time. Maybe not in rendering, but certainly in terms of accessibility and usability. Other “engines” at the time weren’t really available to the general public, or were largely collections of libraries and tools.

 

Yeah, I puerly ment in rendering.

Edit: never worked with version 3 myself, started with 4 but just in a entry level, went pro first with 5

 

I started messing with it around 2ish. And even then it was light years beyond other solutions in terms of jumping in and making stuff. Other solutions required a lot knowledge and setup just to get going. At that point I was only using it for playing around and rapid prototyping. 4 was the first time we actually started using over internal engines.

 

Because like @AcidArrow pointed out, Unity was capable of more back then. What the screenshots are truly revealing to us is that (a) the department responsible for creating the demos has greatly improved, and (b) that the production values for the demos have gone through the roof.

 

Actually at this time, Torque was the only engine that took a similar approach. Unity was kind of an underdog, that people from the Torque forums laughed at.

Personally, I liked the Island demo.
Avert Fate was cool too, if somebody here still remembers that.

 

This is a good point. And applies to gamedev in general.
Back then there were just around three people creating the Tropical Island demo and Avert Fate.
The core team behind „The book of dead“ on the other hand, were 12 people and you need a fairly capable computer to run it at merely 30 FPS. The tropical island ran in a webbrowser on low-end Computers.

Yeah gamedev became more accessible and you get all the tools on your fingertips for free. But it‘s definitely more complex and timeconsuming these days. Especially with 3D games.

 

I was working at Garage Games at the time.

 

ah so thats the name.. Avert Fate is the fps demo for unity 2.5 (or 3?) with one full level up to a giant boss at the end of level, right?
It is actually ahead for its time for me... with all those particles, refraction, hdr (was it fake?)

 

Oh really?! Haha that‘s interesting.

 

Yes, that was the game. It was definitely graphically on par with the games from that time. The assets were all made by one German artist, when I remember right.

 

Oh, I remember how they used screenshots from that demo for networking documentation! I was dreaming about using networking back in the day, when it was exclusive to Unity Pro.