What's Unity schedule after 4.3?

Unity 4.4? 4.5? 5.0?

A 4.3 license would be valid until when (more or less)? Is 5.0 close, far?

Which is the schedule?

 

They are very unlikely to comment on this until there are 'headline features' ready to be announced, and even then there may well be plenty of vagueness in terms of the exact timing.

So for now all we can really do is make guesstimates. They have said that we will get the new GUI in a 4.x release, and it seems reasonable to expect this in either 4.4 or perhaps 4.5. Anything else is pure speculation.

Take for example an eventual 5.0 release. This is when people who buy licences will need to spend more money. They will need to add some major new stuff to justify the upgrade cost, and who knows what that will be. I suppose it is likely to involve at least one massive new feature, or major reworking of technology (e.g. new 3D physics or new mono). Aside from progress in developing whatever the new features are, Unity also have to balance the need to make money with not upsetting pro customers by charging them for upgrades too often. And since there are now subscriptions, they will probably also be keen to make that subscription good value by giving subscribers a major new version before too many years pass since the first subscriptions were made.

I would not like to guess at timescales, but if I had to then I certainly would not be surprised if we at least heard something about Unity 5 in the 2nd half of 2014. But I expect quite a bit more from 4.x in the meantime.

 

Another way to look at it is to ask whether Unity 4 now contains enough new features to justify its existence/the cost of pro users upgrading from 3.x to 4.x. With the 2D stuff and forthcoming GUI, I believe the answer to that is now a big yes. I would be delighted if they give 4.x users even more, but I don't demand it. From a feature partity/completeness point of view it would venice if they could update OpenGL to a newer version for the desktop platforms that now support modern OpenGL, but I don't know if this will happen or not. Aside from that and the new GUI, what I'm mostly anticipating from the remaining version 4 point releases are various bug fixes and tweaks/polish to recently added features.

 

4.3.1

 

Unity 5? Not gonna happen any time soon. Unity 4 it's still brand new

 

Welcome back Tiles, where have you been hiding? I miss our arguments.

Unity went up to 2.6, and 3 went up to 3.5 or 3.6 if I'm correct, so I think yeah 4.4, 4.5 and 4.6 will be the finals before 5 is released.
4.5 will most likely be a major release with new functionality, and 4.6 will probably be mainly bug fixes.

That's just based on my previous knowledge of the Unity releases.

 

It's a year old. In software years, that's about 40-50.

--Eric

 

It is middle aged, and will soon need to be spoonfed and cleaned after its retirement.

 

I have a few extra diapers left. They might be too small since I was using them for Unity 3. Also, a new engine in about 2 years from the last engine is a bit..... ehhh. IDK just make me happy

 

Considering that they are just now doing a hackathon camp to brainstorm their ideas, they likely haven't fully planned the 4.4 and 4.5 milestones. I'm thinking 4.4 will be bug fixes and some features, and the GUI will be in 4.5, as well as nested prefabs.

Wouldn't surprise me either if they do some graphical updates the engine. I'd bet on PhysX and a new version of Mono won't come until Unity 5.0 because both of those are likely going to break all current solutions/bugs/workarounds that are in place for every platform using a version of Unity that is less than 5.0 And if you're going to break the way physics works... may as well do it on a major release. Piss people off and make them happy at the same time.

Given that they are still tooling around with FogBugz and learning how to do software processes to speed up releases, it wouldn't surprise me if the milestones and bugfixes start to get closer together. I've seen what FogBugz can help do, and it wouldn't surprise me if 5.0 arrives sooner than 4.0 did.

 

Do you know which would be the new features in the new physics system?

 

Normally, I'd say we're 50% through. However, since the GUI is still forthcoming, I expect the 4.x cycle will be longer that normal. It's one of the main features for 4.x, is at least 2-3 months out, and will need another 7-9 months of hardening and follow-up releases. So, 5.0 is probably a year away.

Gigi.

 

CEO David Helgason called this the most ridiculously awesome release ever --> don't hold your breath ... imho we can expect optimisation and a very good, stable 4.4.x ... then 5.0 with new GUI buyout / mega-partnership announce at Unite 2014 in Sep

 

UGH I really don't like the buyout rumors I've heard > <

 

Buyout? Damn, hope not. New company, new policies, and when something works OK this is usually bad news. There's always somebody that needs to fix what already works to show he has some value. What did you hear about????

 

The buyout was turned down. It was from Microsoft.

 

Would have had upgraded mono

 

David has said that the GUI will be in 4.X.

 

Thanks.

Though Unity as a part of Visual Studio... wow, could have been interesting...

 

It goes well enough with Visual Studio as it is, really

 

I saw that coming from a mile away many months ago. Glad they turned it down still though. Would have been a great buy for MS.

 

A tool which has multi-platform support as one of its big selling points should not be owned by one of the platform makers.

 

Unity uses nVidia's PhysX library. I doubt they'd move away from it. They'd probably just update it. As for new features, I would assume a similar feature set to whatever version they update to. I know from reading other threads that some people are looking forward to some water simulations and squishy deformables. But this is all speculation.

One thing that will definitely be possible is very simple world creation. An oft overlooked feature in most programming languages is the ability to "Hello World". With this simple, yet powerful invocation, many other programmers in other languages have been exploring vast universes and populating galaxies. I think it has been underutilized in Unity and hope that Unity 5.0 contains this amazing technology. ;-)

 

Deformables... I don't know. Don't see that much market for it. Water simulation is a plus, no doubt. And perhaps destructible environment, that it's becoming a must-have right now for a game engine.

 

Glad they turned that offer down! That may have led to some funky things for Unity and OS X users

 

Hack Weeks at Unity are to work on cool and interesting stuff that might never end up in Unity. And if they do end up in Unity they are usually at least a year out. The major features/fixes/changes for the rest of the 4.x cycle have most likely already been set in place over a year ago.

Unity has been using Fogbugz since 2.x (or earlier, my memory is a little fuzzy on this), so for quite a long time. The faster release cycles are simply coming from an internal desire to do so.

 

Hopefully, PS4 Xbox One ports soon.