The new audio tools looks really promising. It looks like it removes all the limitations I've personally hit in Unity's audio toolset.
I'm curious what the performance on the realtime Global Illumination is going to be like. I'd much rather have destructible environments with great lighting than static environments and great lighting (and from what I gather, destructible 3D environments with great lighting might now be in the realm of possibility... SQUEEEE! ).
And the new UI that's coming in 4.6 might finally smooth over what's been Unity's dirtiest secret for ages.
OMG, so many mythical things that have been coming for such a looooooong time. Firstly - the new GUI. ABOUT BLOODY TIME. FMOD plus new audio - hell freaking yes! Global illumination, 64 bit editor - and perhaps the most game changing feature: Web GL export - that's huge for anyone doing online stuff. I'm zero percent surprised but still very happy to see that announced!
I'm trying not to be excited about this, because of how previous updates have advertised game-changing stuff that ended up introducing bugs, broken workflows, or "developer previews", and you only discover how broken the stuff is when you start having to use it on a real, shipping product... <_<
In particular, I wonder what the workflow is like working with realtime global illumination. It sounds a lot easier than having to bake lightmaps (and deal with crap texture compression, seams, using up a texcoord that you could've used for something else, etc.), but I wonder what kind of gotchas it brings.
But hot damn, I sure hope this stuff works as advertised.
Makes me glad we switched to the subscription model for Unity for sure. Will tinker with it for a while. But as @Elyaradine suggested. We rushed into 4 and spent much time dealing with broken bits and pieces. We needed to for Windows Phone and 8. Every patch would fix one thing and break something else for a while.
@tbulford: same here the subscription model is king! I just wish mono on the devices will also advance a bit quicker - the "lowest common denominator" across the platforms is still too low for write-once-deploy-anywhere.
@farsicon I am not having any real issues with mono. My only recent run in was some of the stuff that's different between Mono and the Microsoft CLR on the Windows 8 and phone environments. Particularly IO and reflection. Also notably the way windows interprets double's from strings been dependent on local while Mono just assumes a decimal point.
@tbulford: yes! Those damn doubles - I hate that. My biggest issue is security - not all the platforms supports encryption, so that sucks a little when doing web comms etc.
@tbulford: yes! Those damn doubles - I hate that. My biggest issue is security - not all the platforms supports encryption, so that sucks a little when doing web comms etc.
You would expect any mobile platform to have security off the cuff.
But.. native WebGL exports. If it doesn't go the way of flash exports, ZOMG that's huge. In my experience the web plugin is as buggy as hell, so moving away from that will be amazing.
the new GUI. ABOUT BLOODY TIME
IBIWISI. They've been promising this since like v3.5. Granted, the do finally have a working 2D framework, so it has at least an outside chance of actually making it into the final release.
The fact that it's a "developer preview" 2D framework that puts together atlases that sometimes have an entire column of pixels offset, and doesn't allow you any access to the resulting texture to fix it because it's all automagic means I have reservations about calling it "working". Of course, we'd only discover it the day before having to ship something, because it's something you don't expect to see stuffed up until someone says one entire column of pixels is off and you could only see it on an retina device...
Been doing UI for the last couple of weeks. Even with NGUI getting things pixel perfect is a steaming pile of horse bollocks. I sincerely hope the fact they've rewritten the UI three times and got the NGUI guy in means it's actually up to snuff. The fact that it has a rect transform replacing the regular transform gives me hope!
I find NGUI to be invasive rubbish. Much more headache than the headache it solves... this does not bode well.
I think you been overly generous. I got NGUI for our mobile Port of Toxic Bunny. For the effort to make it do the things I needed and stop leaving little artifacts all over the screen I could rather have rolled my own. Not to mention the still prevalent lag spikes I had to work around.
The fact that it's a "developer preview" 2D framework that puts together atlases that sometimes have an entire column of pixels offset, and doesn't allow you any access to the resulting texture to fix it because it's all automagic means I have reservations about calling it "working". Of course, we'd only discover it the day before having to ship something, because it's something you don't expect to see stuffed up until someone says one entire column of pixels is off and you could only see it on an retina device...
Any performance issues we should worry about? My issue with our home build 2D engine is the fact it uploads new geometry if we resize or flip sprites. Clearly that's just a bottle neck to avoid. Does the Unity implementation use a shader to flip sprites or is it remapping UV's in the mesh? Assuming you might know this offhand.
Been doing UI for the last couple of weeks. Even with NGUI getting things pixel perfect is a steaming pile of horse bollocks. I sincerely hope the fact they've ... got the NGUI guy in means it's actually up to snuff.
We're using Daikon Forge in our Unity implementation, anyone else used it? It's not bad, it's just very clunky, but does things pretty well as far as I can tell.
Any performance issues we should worry about? My issue with our home build 2D engine is the fact it uploads new geometry if we resize or flip sprites. Clearly that's just a bottle neck to avoid. Does the Unity implementation use a shader to flip sprites or is it remapping UV's in the mesh? Assuming you might know this offhand.
Sorry, I don't really have any information on that. :/ As far as I know, the only "special" thing that the shader does is to check the size of your screen and snap the vertex positions and avoid subpixel stuff going on, so I guess everything else must be happening on the mesh itself. I've only used the 2D stuff on static UI elements, not on anything that had to have animated frames.
We're using Daikon Forge in our Unity implementation, anyone else used it? It's not bad, it's just very clunky, but does things pretty well as far as I can tell.
I bought it to make some Grids examples. It is very powerful, and I quite like it.
What is sad is, I know Unity will not be able to match it in flexibility and power (certainly not at the rate they have been implementing GUI up to now). Will we ever use Unity native GUI :---/ ;_;
Ah I didn't know that he wasn't working with them anymore. The latest feedback I've heard is that it's NGUI ish, but is substantially different. The reason I viewed the NGUI guy working with Unity as good thing is that (unlike Unity) he's actually made a fully featured UI. And as we all know from games making and releasing stuff is the best way to learn things, so he'd have good insight into what doesn't work.
Anyway, I'm excited for the new UI, because taking 2D pixels and projecting them into 3D space in such a way you hopefully get the same 2D pixels back is just the WRONG way to do it. And right now that's what every solution uses.
Anyway, I'm excited for the new UI, because taking 2D pixels and projecting them into 3D space in such a way you hopefully get the same 2D pixels back is just the WRONG way to do it. And right now that's what every solution uses.
Actually this has the one advantage of scaling really nicely.
Um. Do you guys want me to ask anything of Unity specifically? I can try to go past their stand at GDC tomorrow again.
Would it be too much to ask them about the PSM Unity version and if that's planned as part of version 5's release cycle. We didn't manage to get into the Beta from our UK company and am really keep to know more about this specific version costs etc.
Are they planning any updates to their particle system? Shuriken is starting to show its age, and the last time I checked (GDC last year) they had assigned 0 developers to it.
@dislekcia: don't have questions yet about U5, but it would be interesting to maybe ask them if they were interested in increasing their presence in SA - they are pretty wide spread, why not here as well :)
@tbulford: PSM wasn't really spoken about much, I assume their Vita and PS4 support is more interesting/useful. I doubt that PSM is going to be any sort of massive sales vehicle anytime soon anyway.
@Elyaradine: Particles were on a lot of peoples' minds. There was talk of updates maybe being a thing and when we asked about exposing more of the system to code too there were some wry smiles.
@farsicon: Don't see what that would even mean... We can buy Unity just fine, it's not complicated ;) If you were thinking about stuff like being at meetups and talks/sponsorship, I think we'd need to motivate pretty hard for that based on a much larger potential market for them - especially as they have their Unity conference already.
@dislekcia: they also have branches of developers all over the world - which they have been growing consistently and are quite proud of - I'm sure there are local devs that would love to work on Unity.
@tbulford: PSM wasn't really spoken about much, I assume their Vita and PS4 support is more interesting/useful. I doubt that PSM is going to be any sort of massive sales vehicle anytime soon anyway.
As quoted from Unity's own web site about there Unity for Playstation specifically PSM.
Games developed using Unity for PlayStation® will be available on PlayStation®Store (PS Store) where millions of fans across the world gather each day to enjoy the industry’s most fun and immersive gaming experiences. SCE will also offer Unity developers opportunities to integrate popular PlayStation®Network features such as trophy functionality into their games.
Tried all the GUI systems and they are terrible. Has anybody rolled their own? I've started a simple one using the new 2D features of Unity and it isn't that hard to get working.
Along with the Unity 5 announcement, we also discussed the future of the 4.x cycle, which includes two more big releases: 4.5 and 4.6. Unity 4.6 is especially noteworthy as it marks the release of our much anticipated new GUI system. We can’t wait to get it in your hands!
I'm so excited! I'm not going to touch my GUI before this is released (unless it takes waayyy too long to release). It looks pretty polished though, so I have a feeling the wait won't be too long this time!
Comments
The new audio tools looks really promising. It looks like it removes all the limitations I've personally hit in Unity's audio toolset.
I'm curious what the performance on the realtime Global Illumination is going to be like. I'd much rather have destructible environments with great lighting than static environments and great lighting (and from what I gather, destructible 3D environments with great lighting might now be in the realm of possibility... SQUEEEE! ).
And the new UI that's coming in 4.6 might finally smooth over what's been Unity's dirtiest secret for ages.
Really liking the sound tools and the updated editor, 64-bits... Yay!, and improvements to the 2D integration.
In particular, I wonder what the workflow is like working with realtime global illumination. It sounds a lot easier than having to bake lightmaps (and deal with crap texture compression, seams, using up a texcoord that you could've used for something else, etc.), but I wonder what kind of gotchas it brings.
But hot damn, I sure hope this stuff works as advertised.
*Paul rushes to the bathroom to change pants.
But.. native WebGL exports. If it doesn't go the way of flash exports, ZOMG that's huge. In my experience the web plugin is as buggy as hell, so moving away from that will be amazing. IBIWISI. They've been promising this since like v3.5. Granted, the do finally have a working 2D framework, so it has at least an outside chance of actually making it into the final release.
What is sad is, I know Unity will not be able to match it in flexibility and power (certainly not at the rate they have been implementing GUI up to now). Will we ever use Unity native GUI :---/ ;_;
Anyway, I'm excited for the new UI, because taking 2D pixels and projecting them into 3D space in such a way you hopefully get the same 2D pixels back is just the WRONG way to do it. And right now that's what every solution uses.
Thanks
Thanks, @dislekcia!
@Elyaradine: Particles were on a lot of peoples' minds. There was talk of updates maybe being a thing and when we asked about exposing more of the system to code too there were some wry smiles.
@farsicon: Don't see what that would even mean... We can buy Unity just fine, it's not complicated ;) If you were thinking about stuff like being at meetups and talks/sponsorship, I think we'd need to motivate pretty hard for that based on a much larger potential market for them - especially as they have their Unity conference already.
The call for Beta testers was in December last year, Not available from South Africa we did apply from the UK but were too late.
http://thevitalounge.net/sony-inviting-beta-testers-for-unity-on-ps-mobile/
The indication at the time was February this year for release.
I am not convinced this wont be worth pursuing and since we only need a PSM license the barrier to entry is far less then full VITA.
Anyway I will watch the Unity forums for the announcements thanks.
I'm so excited! I'm not going to touch my GUI before this is released (unless it takes waayyy too long to release). It looks pretty polished though, so I have a feeling the wait won't be too long this time!
This video is more than 2 months old though :/