What happened to splines?

I have seen the spline feature forum post that was planned for the 2021.x releases. But I can't find much of an information about it's current state, plus it doesn't even exist in 2022 alpha. What is the current state of splines?

 

It's been pushed until the new Tool Ecosystem is done: https://forum.unity.com/threads/uni...ne-tool-enough-is-enough.988851/#post-6599305

 

Yeah but it's been 9 months over it and there is nearly no word on anything about neither the tool ecosystem nor the splines.
I need splines and I don't wanna make up my own way or use

 

Yeah, Unity has been very quiet about a lot of their ongoing projects over the past year. They are in the middle of a massive and much-needed re-write (ECS, new physics, new animation system, kinematica, tools ecosystem, and so much more) that is going to set the tone of gamedev within Unity for the next 10 years. And the biggest challenge they are facing with all this is building a cohesive and intuitive tooling system where all these new features can play nicely together. And I imagine that the tool ecosystem will have a big part to play in all of that.

A lot of these new features (such kinematica) are pretty cutting edge with not many industry standards so they will need to go through several iterations before they get it all right (and they really want to get it right cause they will be stuck with it for at least the next decade). And I imagine that it is why they have been so quiet over the past year. Preview packages are great for individually scoped projects, but they are horrible when you have multiple projects that depend on each other and you want to go through rapid iterations.

So given all that, and that they communicated not to expect the Spline tool into the tools ecosystem is done, I would not expect the Spline tool to come out any time soon. But there are some great Spline solutions out there that you can use. Here is my favorite one:

 

First things first, Kinematica is stopped on development by last year. Some of the researchers on the project even switched to different companies. So it is pretty much dead, which would make sense since there are more prior matters like having an animation graph to blend stuff is a missing feature for example.
I understand there is a major rewrite but those things will take years to mature to be anywhere near to be used for production by the comunity.
We are working on a game project, we need an AI BT solution, Unity provides none. Pathfinding is old as heck too.
So let's buy a BT asset, let's buy a pathfinding asset.
We need splines and stuff for cutscenes, let's buy a spline solution or use one.

I mean, a darn game engine is a thing that provides this stuff. These are some core things that are missing. Sure we can buy, use or write systems but this is a major focus point for indie teams. I am not happy with all this, to be honest.
Plus, most of the assets are like swissknifes, we need 2 core things to use but they include 30 features that increase the code complexity, reduces maintainability, and hurts the development.

I wish they would focus on providing what a game engine needs to provide first before doing futuristic stuff like kinematica or dots or what the heckever that they do with 5k+ people.

I understand they do stuff for the next 10 years or so but if people keep switching to different engines since Unity can't provide the bare minimum, who is gonna use it after 10 years?

 

Where did you hear that some of the researchers switched to different companies? And which one of them has left?

 

Michael Buttner, was Principal Architect and Engineer on "Kinematica".

He works at NVIDIA since last year.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelbuttner/?originalSubdomain=ca

It was more or less his feature / software / idea.

Kinematica "pausing" development is announced by Unity here:

https://forum.unity.com/threads/animation-status-update-q4-2020.1023445/

If I'm reading this correctly, no updates to it at least until 2023. Seems dead to me.

And even with the most charitable and optimistic interpretation of everything above, a production ready version of kinematica (like a fully working, fully featured version of it, available in an LTS version I can use), is like at least ~4 years away from now?

 

To be honest, there is a very fine Motion Matching plugin in the asset store for quite some time. So I am not really worried about the development of Kinematica. There is more pressing stuff that needs to be fulfilled from the game engine standpoint.

 

Yeah, and that's why they put Kinematica on hold, so that they can put their efforts to getting DOTS animation done and get DOTS to 1.0. DOTS is important here because they can't keep adding features (like Splines) to the existing architecture, it just doesn't scale.

 

It seems quite silly to make a roadmap if the majority of items are so late. But sadly I guess this is more of a marketing decision rather than a technical one. It's pretty standard for developers to know that a feature will go late, but the higher ups to ignore them :/ sigh

 

https://forum.unity.com/threads/at-which-point-in-time-will-unity-add-splines.1067309/ take a look at this

 

Thank you so much for an update. It is very helpful to hear an official answer, even if it's merely "it's coming later"!

 

Considering i am necroing a old thread, the splines 2.1.0 in unity 2021.3.1f1 LTS, i can get from unity is missing the functionality we used to love for following a gameobject along a spline,,.

missing splinewalker, missing getposition, missing getpositiononspline..
Waiting for something done right seems like a way of just saying, go buy a spline asset instead..

even tried .. using UnityEngine.Experimental.U2D;