Yay, another Madness Sale!

This one is looking like a real grab bag.

So what's worth getting?

What are you going to get?

This is what I'm looking at:
-Stylized Nature Pack $25
-A* Pathfinding Project $40 (but the price still seems a little steep)
-Universal Game Sounds $44.55
-Universal Fighting Engine $149 (but I would never get around to using it)
-Uframe MVVM $45 (but I just-just bought playmaker)

 

Hm.

Not sure.

 

FastPool
Anti Cheat Kit

 

Anti Cheat Kit for sure.
Probably the Universal Game Sounds.

Still thinking about:
Gamestrap UI, looks cool.
Intelligent Traffic System for a large future future project.

If I didn't already have A* Pathfinding Project, I would've gotten that one too.

 

I am thinking of getting Final IK, but I don't think I'll ever have a use for the other assets.

I have been using Gamestrap for a while and I think it's a really good product.

 

Final ik is the best of the bunch for me.

There is a tendency with the specials (at least my perception) to reduce assets that will soon be included in unity natively. It happened with the ui toolkits. Now we see the ssrr assets (planned with 5.3) and director assets (planned with 5.4) on the sales. I will probably not invest in these. Luckily i already own cinema director which is really great but i think its fate will be the same as ngui.

 

Hence the name "Madness Sale".

 

FinalIK, finally in sale lol. It is sure worth of full price, but being Asset store junkie, my credit card is always crying

 

I just use madness sales for extra licenses I might or might not need. What? It's legit

 

Curious - what's the fate of NGUI? To *still* be the top-selling plugin (or possibly #2 behind Playmaker) on the whole store, even after uGUI has been released a very long time? We can all only hope for that fate.

 

There is a blog entry by the ngui dev stating the number of licenses went down dramatically with the appearance of ugui. And as a former ngui super-enthusiast myself i fully understand that. Never used it again.

 

Ok. That may be so, but they're still the #2 asset by popularity. He's still making tons of money off of it. We use uGUI on our new game, and TextMeshPro. No more NGUI for us either

 

Are the rankings reset after a period of time? Or is it taking into account sales from the beginning? It may simply have so many past sales that it isn't disappearing regardless of the current sales.

 

No, that's not how it works. They reset every month, max. The exact algorithm isn't "known" but I pretty much know based on looking at the page a whole lot and comparing our sales numbers under various circumstances of zero sales vs hundreds.

 

Hmmm, you say it's good. But to asset sellers who aren't on sale it's going to be a slow month. But on the other hand I could look for some bargains.

 

Thinking about Cinema Suite but all I really want to use is Cinema Director, which is the same price as the whole suite right now. The rest of the suite will most likely go unused.

As far as uGUI and NGUI, I've got NGUI totally running through my whole game and haven't even had a chance to play with uGUI yet.

Final IK and Dynamic Bone are both awesome for anyone considering picking them up. Very useful.

 

Same here. It's about the only thing I could really use that I can also afford.

 

I'm an NGUI user as well, and I've recently tried out some of the uGUI tutorials/videos and said to myself, "This looks and feels very familiar..."*

* I'm aware that Mike Lyashenko consulted for UT for a few months for uGUI and I'm pretty sure he knew he was selling his soul.

 

Yes, but think of the resume entry he got in exchange for it...

 

For people who've used both... How does A* Pathfinding Project Pro compare to Apex Path?

I've owned Apex Path for over a year now but still haven't used it yet. Coming up on a project where that may change. With A* Pathfinding Project Pro on sale should I pick that up to use instead? Are they both pretty much comparable? Any reason to use one over the other?

 

I'm also wondering how worth while A* is.

 

Im looking at Universal Game Sounds! 2700 sounds for 44 bucks is a steal! But Stylized Nature Pack Looks cool too! what to choose?!

 

Screw you guys. I missed the last sale because the time ran out so I didn't want to miss it this time. Then the kids got up early so I was in a rush this morning trying to get ready. The Canadian dollar sucks. So $160 later, I end up with FinalIK, the traffic sim and the pathfinder. FinalIK will be really useful for me. I have a potential project for the traffic sim and Edy's physics which I picked up on level 11. I only have one specific use for the pathfinder but it will save me $40. I don't know if it will make me $40.

 

I've only used each a little, and both seem really good. My preference leans towards A* Pathfinding Project Pro, largely because it offers multiple pathfinding solutions (grid, navmesh, navmesh with recasting, and point graphs) where Apex (from memory, this may have changed) is grid only. The different solutions each have their own pros and cons, so it's worth checking out what's likely to work best for your project.

Quite honestly, at the prices they're available for, if you can afford to I'd say get both and try them out in your project.

 

It beats being broke. At least this time around the sale wasn't packed full of things I wanted.

 

Ok cool, thanks. Not sure if I'll pick it up or not since I don't know exactly yet what the project needs. I have so many unused assets I've purchased over the years "just in case" and I'm hesitant to add more to the list, haha. Good to have your assessment though, that will help.

 

Heh, tell me about it. My SO is always rolling her eyes at me whenever I buy something new.

 

I haven't told my wife yet. I also just bought a graphics tablet and a Kinect 2 with the windows adaptor. She doesn't quite know how much that all cost. On the plus side she is in a good mood since I made her an incredible ribeye steak dinner for our anniversary.

 

Posting this only cuz I had it all drafted up, and don't want it to go to waste if it actually helps anyone decide, but I wasn't sure if it would, since it's just a story, really.

The TL;DR first:
I haven't used either pathfinding solution yet, but I plan on using A* Pathfinding Project. (Lots of help. Thanks, aer0ace)

The long response:
Before I jumped on board to Unity, I was using a C++ engine, and in the middle of integrating a library called Recast Navigation/Detour. When I switched to Unity, I was interested in finding solutions that also use Recast (Unity uses it natively, but I don't know to what extent) and AStarPP implements it. What I was most interested in though, was the Detour implementation that does crowd simulation. However, at one point, the usage of the algorithm violated the license, so for a time, the asset didn't have crowd simulation, and plenty of people were bummed about it, including me. But several months later, the author came up with his own solution and all was good again.

Not sure what's under the hood with Apex. It looks like it also has some crowd simulation, but it doesn't look exactly the same as what AStarPP does.

 

I wonder why there are A* projects on the store. It's such an easy thing to implement!

 

They offer plenty more than just an A* algorithm. As @angrypenguin mentioned, AStarPP integrates Recast's navmesh generation* (build your world, set some parameters, and the navmesh gets autogenerated from the obstacles, height differences, terrain properties, etc.) or point graphs, or a straight up grid which is what you may be thinking. And it also integrates Detour's crowd simulation (e.g. local avoidance) as I mentioned above.

Again, I think Unity includes some form of this, but I don't know how comprehensive it is.

 

Yes.

Well, that's more than A*.

 

From what I hear, this A* plugin is ridiculously better than what's native in Unity, so much so that it makes Unity pathfinding stuff look borderline unusable. But I've never tried the Unity stuff. I use A* and the performance was ridonkulously fast!

As far as people wondering how great A* is, there are a very large number of reviews there. Trust me, it's worth it.

 

I've used that too, and for projects where the available features are a fit it works really well. But yeah, there's a huge amount of stuff it doesn't do that both A* and Apex cover

Yeah, using available navigation data to find a path using A* (or any other well documented algorithm) is easy enough. The huge value of both packages is really in how that navigation data is generated and managed, because that's often the bigger and harder part of the job in the grand scheme of things.

 

Is uFrame worth getting?
I don't understand what it does. From the look of it, its very similar to uScript, it let you visual script and generate code.


I will most likely get:
Final IK
Dynamic Bone
A* Path Finding
UFE Bundle
The Cinema Suite


I am unsure about these one since Unity has SSR on their roadmap which is coming at the end of this year (4 months time)... plus Candela's support is very wonky from the look of it, a lot of angry users in the forum so I am not very keen on getting it. Another thing is most of the Unity developed effect can be used on all platforms, while both of the SSR solutions below are limited to either Windows or Desktop only.

Screen Space Reflections
Candela SSRR V2


I was going to get these but turns out they aren't very good:

Exploder
iTS - Intelligent Traffic System


So, anyone with uFrame? What do you think? Is it worth it? Is it just like uScript?

 

Yes, yes it is. People should focus on that instead of using A* like a buzzword I wrote A* in java for an ai class in college. I copied and pasted it into C#, made a few syntax changes, changed the points to vector3s... it worked. But generating points is always an interesting task. I've worked with mostly small projects so usually I have navigation nodes all over the place.

Are those really so much better than playmaker that it doesn't even get a mention? Even BlizzardEntertainment made use of it for Hearthstone.

 

I mentioned uScript because uScript generate C# code. From what I read on the uFrame Asset Store page, this seems to be the case too.

 

Oh, I see. PlayMaker doesn't generate code, I get it Still, you can view the code in each node or make your own for better performance.

Do the majority of visual scripting solutions (other engines included) generate code? Blueprint, PlayMaker and the like seem to remain as nodes from development through production.

 

I think only uFrame and uScript generate C# code from what I can see.

 

Where did you hear that iTS wasn't very good? I bought it and took a quick look at it (well just run the sample scene) and it appears to run ok.

 

I'd also like to get some insight on this since I'm planning to purchase iTS. What's good and what's bad about the asset?

 

I bought it to test it out, but I haven't gotten into it yet. From what I understand though, it's not a visual scripting system like uScript, it's a MVVM framework that lets you create the scaffolding and relations with some node graphs. The generated code just becomes boilerplate, and you still have to write code yourself to interact with this.

 

I've been using Exploder for a couple of years and really, I can't fault it. No issues at all, easy to implement and it looks great.

I noticed in the reviews that someone has said it doesn't work under Unity 5, but it works perfectly. For Exploder there were no changes required to my Unity 4 project when updating to Unity 5, it just worked.

I don't know the developer at all - I'm posting here in fairness because it's a great product if you want destructible objects.

 

Thanks, I am looking at buying that and was just about to ask if anyone has hands on experience with it.

I have purchased Fast Pool already since it was so cheap and I wanted to have a look at the code to learn from it. And I might get Final IK as I have heard nothing but good things about it.

I didn't really consider A* pathfinding project but now that I have seen a video of it... this actually seems incredibly useful for what I want to do.

 

Just noticed playmaker was on sale, pretty crazy discount. I'd buy it again if I didn't already own it I trust they'll exist the longest until unity makes their own visual scripting given the portfolio for PM.

 

There's a really good video for UFrame:

From what I can tell it maps out an entire project and lays the ground work (building scripts and content I'm them for what it will be passing around).

Also, in the video he mentions playmaker with a bit of a scoff, but since then he has made plug ins for it.

 

Maybe one of them will buy / hostile takeover the other one. Any notable portfolio pieces for uFrame? If it's going to dominate the Unity-visual-scripting market soon I'd like to pick it up now while it's on sale.

I managed to find this on a forum regarding the difference between them, "uFrame is not a visual programming system, it's a visual way to define your structure, classes, and code in general following a very specific pattern, which then creates code for you to edit in places to inject your specific logic."

It's surprisingly hard to find a semi-recent comparison of them.

--edit

Is uFrame going to lose support once uFrame ECS is available?

--edit 2

I have no idea what ECS is but I see it won't simply replace uFrame MVVM (I also don't know what MVVM is). On a question board full of recent questions about it, I see ecs will eventually be useable with uframe... so there's more speculation for uframe continuing to exist and be updated after ecs is available... whatever all of these words mean.

Sold!

 

Seems like a good business, selling goods with words that are meaningless to customers.

 

I already finished the basic tutorial I can see this being like blueprint-design and then the kind of implementation that I want. Not crazy about the scene loading requirements though. It doesn't simply generate code, it binds everything to the 'scene kernel'... and it does not work without that.

Not sure how easy it will be to handle networking like this, but these things are always amusing to use.

 

I tried out the web demo. The AI is pretty stupid and unrealistic. It is basically running like ON-RAIL. The AI doesn't react realistically like normal people would - if you smash into the AI car and try to drive it off the road, it doesn't reverse, it just react robotically and drive back to the road in shortest path possible. If you ever play GTA:SA or GTA 4, watch and test out the traffic, it is quite realistic and hilarious at the same time.