[RELEASED] Etherea1 - Full Planets for Unity3D

Hi, I've got some questions regarding Etherea1:

1. Is it possible to have a water on the planet? Or should I manually create some sphere with water shaders on it? I mean a real, immersable water with all it's features.
2. Is it possible to create planets in script, not in editor? For example: player enters some seed, clicks "new game" and then I generate few planets with the given seed - not in editor, but in the game itself.
3. Is it possible to edit planet height in specific point during the game (in run-time)?
4. Can there be more than one planet on the scene, each one with their own gravity field?

 

that was insanely cool

 

Ok, I paid my moneys last night and nothing happened. What's next?

 

You should receive 3 contacts through email from me. Have not you received them yet?

If not, please contact me again through email (same used on paypal, please), for me to know who you are.

 

Thanks Imerso, that came through...

I have run into a problem though, it work on my old slow computer at work but here at home on my nice computer I just get a water planet with some sort of back the front error message in the corner of each LOD tile. Anyone know what this is and how to get it working from here?

*edit*

Ok, so :

a) you gotta install the mercurial client and get the latest version
b) you gotta read the readme.txt that explains how to make some small changes if your using Indie
c) once you do that you'll get a bunch of errors
d) then you email Vander asking for help

p.s. maybe a dev forum somewhere else would be a good idea

 

Man this is killing me not being able to use it in Indie

 

Hello kulesz,


1: There is a plan to make a better, separate water mesh, but I can't tell precisely when it'll be implemented;
2: Yes;
3: No, but that is not too difficult to implement having the source-code in hands;
4: Yes, you can have a lot (dozens or even hundreds) of planets together on the same scene, using a normal PC configuration, and they will still be rendered in realtime.


Cheers,

imerso

 

I perfectly understand and I'm working on that. Unity makes a great job hiding some important features from the Indie version, so that is not trivial to make it run with the same generation features as the Pro version, but that wont take too long now.

Thanks for your patience.

 

I will be forced to check out the web player tomorrow morning, as this simply looks incredible. Honestly, let's hope my opinion doesn't change after playing it.

 

It's all good Imerso - it's a big job, do what needs doing

 

Hi Imerso, any updates?

 

By which I mean of course is it working in Indie yet?

 

This is pretty cool, however, up to how many planets can be viewed at once?

 

Hi Vander,

Can you please tell us how the fix for the Indie version is going? At the moment it feels like I've paid you quite a bit of money for something that doesn't work, and when you don't post updates indicating progress for a fix it makes it look like you're not doing anything.

 

I am sorry for the inconvenience, and I understand your affliction. You are right, the fix is too late. An update will be announced as soon as I can get the Indie version working again with a new rewrite with better visual quality.

Until then, only the Pro is working, sorry.

Thanks,

imerso

 

I have some bad news for the Indie people:

At this moment I can't recommend the Indie version as its visual quality is not even close to the Pro version.

Unity3D does a very good job hiding some needed GPU features from the Indie version, and although still technically possible, I don't know when I'll have the required energy to do all the needed work to make it run under Unity3D Indie at realtime speeds.

Making something that will run as a slide-show does not make any sense for game development.

So, the conclusion is: Etherea1 is a Pro (Win/Mac) only extension, I'm sorry.


Cheers,

imerso

 

I feel your pain Imerso, I've had to step away from Unity now too.

I went to Ogre3D because I was tired of driving down dead end streets in Indie and can't afford Pro.

 

Is this project still active and ongoing and is there still a discount for direct buy? Also your site is down...

 

To people that didn't saw yet any demo of this plug-in, Website like the demo are up and running again . You can test everything threw playing the demo, watching videos on youtube or just spending some time on the website that link to is put on the first post.

 

Question: Can one use the terrain as the actual Terrain object the unity provides? I am looking for a way to add wind animation easily to trees and grass(and unity's terrain can do this easily but it's only a hightmap, not a sphere)

 

No, that is not possible.

 

Hello imerso. I bought the imerso planet addon for Unity back in January, when you said it would be available for Unity Indie. I've been waiting for Unity Indie to be fixed for eight months now, but so far I have been unable to use it up until now, and it seems you have revoked your support of Unity Indie. I was wondering if I could request a refund, due to the product not working as originally described.

Thanks!

 

It actually works under Unity Indie. Unity Indie disables some features which effectively make it very difficult -- not to say impossible as almost nothing is impossible -- to reach the same quality as the Pro version in realtime. But it definitely works -- even if I am telling that it is a Pro only extension.

Also, everyone who bought the source-code have accessed both the Indie and Pro versions, as there is no distinction in price/product. You have both them with you. Most people would consider $99 as a bargain for such an effort coming in clear text with no secrets at all. Would not you consider my transparency and keep your support, even knowing all that?

Yet, in the site, above the "Buy now" button, it was always very clear about the "no refunds" purchasing condition, in uppercase.

Please check http://www.etereo.com.br/index.php?pg=prebuy to read the text again. This text is there, in uppercase, from the day one.

There is no way to fairly refund access to the full source-code. You knew that when you clicked that "Buy now" button.

Have you tried the latest update?

Thanks,

imeso

 

On the subject of Unity Indie "sort of" working, to be frank, I didn't pay for sort of. I made my own "sort of" working quadtree planetary rendering engine, and decided to pay you because of the difficulties inherent in making it a working planetary rendering engine. You said you had an engine that worked in Unity Indie. You even showed screenshots that you said were from Unity Indie, but obviously they were not Unity Indie. I attempted to implement your engine after I purchased it, and got nothing more than a mess of polygons and terrible performance, and this is still the case. This was not the product you advertised with movies and screenshots from your engine in other platforms.

On the subject of your website saying that all sales are final, that's fine, but it implies that all sales are final on the product that you have contractually failed to deliver. If the product was delivered as described, then I wouldn't have a problem with a finalized sale.

I have to say that I haven't pushed this very hard, since you've had my money for eight months. I've been very patient, checking this thread occasionally for updates. When I saw that you decided to drop support for Unity Indie, then I decided to pursue a refund, and I will pursue it up to Paypal dispute claim if need be. For me, this $100 isn't chump change, let alone the $1500 I'd need to get Pro working. I still work in a retail position struggling to pay bills, and yet I put a lot of faith in you to deliver on your promises, which have failed to do much at all for me, unfortunately, despite being a frustrating afternoon attempting to configure the thing before discovering that Indie was not supported on my own. Only once confronted did you admit that Indie was not supported, after stating numerous times that it did.

That was very disappointing. So I waited, and here I am.

 

I just made a video with the Indie path enabled. I am uploading the video to Youtube for you and everyone take a look.

I am now guessing that I need to finish the operation manual and create some examples, because not everything is intuitive.

Will get back and edit this post when the video upload finishes.

EDIT: Ok, the video will appear on this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQypuG-fkjo

Please note that this is with the INDIE version.

Cheers,

imerso

 

uh. do the planets have colliders? you can fly right through them in the demo...


and performance is very poor, even in pro. i was expecting a whole lot more for $150. ouch is what i have to say

 

Yes, they have. Colliders are created asynchronously, and the creation frequency is adjustable in the code. For a real-life game, that should be adjusted together with the player speed, to give the system an opportunity to keep up with the player movements.

That works this way because it uses the built-in Physx for full physics support, and Physx does not initialize new mesh colliders very fast, so the only way I found to have full built-in physics without having to implement a new physics engine was to refresh it asynchronously on a secondary thread with lower priority.

For the online demo, the player is allowed to move very fast, and doing so the system will not be able to refresh in time, causing collisions to fail.

imerso

 

Imerso,
This looks fantastic. I just want to clarify something. On your website you have it for 99 then in the asset store 150. Is this the same thing? I did read that it's 30% off from buying directly from you (which would put the price to 99) instead of the asset store. Plus In a previous post, you said that you can't add the terrain trees onto your planets? Can you add any trees/grass/etc on it? I'm just wondering since just having mountains and plains plus water without the ability to add trees and the like is a little disheartening. Other then that, you have a great product here! If there is a way to add trees and the like (plus being able to correct the terrain if you want to flatten out an area for a town/city) I'll seriously consider purchasing this.

 

Hi Archania. It is exactly the same thing. At this moment there is no automated way to put things over the terrain, but this feature is in my todo list.

Regards,

imerso

 

Hi,
To be clear: Once the planet generated with the parameters, we find the same world every time the application launches?. This is for a network project.
For 78euros this a a great package. I'm think about it.

JP

 

If you created from the start a planet with your own parameters, without depending on script that dose it for you.
Than yes. It will stay the same and it will always render the same.

 

Ok. Thx.

I wonder: Would it be possible to disable the sea sphere at a certain distance and switch to a product like this? : http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/146431-Tasharen-Water-%28water-from-Windward%29

or this one : http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/134585-Easy-Water-2.0-Mobile-Compatible-RELEASED?

JP

 

If you find a way to render such water on sphere and not plane than most likely yes.

 

I was thinking something more simple. Deactivate the "spherical sea" and activate a "plane sea". At a certain altitude where the commutation would be... "transparent" : With no horizon probleme. I think this would be possible.
Anyway, I'm there.

By the way, it works with Unity 4? Maybe DirectX 11 is a great opportunity.

JP

 

I decided to make a 50% off promotion for some time.

Etherea1 from my site: $50 --- (originally $99).
Etherea1 from Asset Store: $75 --- (originally $150).

That is 50% off !!!

Both are the same product and include full source-code of Etherea1, the multiple realtime procedural planets generator. As you probably know, in Etherea1 you can have 50, 100 planets at same time, all visitable to the ground in realtime.

Works under Windows, Macintosh and Webplayer. Requires shader model 3.0 and targets UnityPro (but runs under Unity Indie as well, with some limitations).


Thanks,

imerso

 

Hi Imerso,

I really like your full planet system, It's great to see that you have got it to work so well. I have a couple of questions.

1. I noticed while using the demo I was able to fly through the planet surface at some points. I believe it was happening where the land meets the water. Is this a known issue? Does it just happen in the web player?

2. Do have plans to add a planet mapping system of some sort?

I ask because I haven't seen any thing on the asset store that would offer that type of mapping. Any mini mapping solution out there is for terrains and not for planets.

 

Until I replace the (imho) fat&slow internal physx system with something quicker and better implemented, that is what happens when you approach the planet too fast, because the builtin physx needs to pre-process I don't know what for many milliseconds, before it's ready to do its work.

What do you mean? Manual terrain edition? No, not really.

Do you mean manual terrain edition? You providing the height maps yourself?


Cheers,

imerso

 

Thanks you for your quick response. I was referring to a user interface mini map. So the user can see where things are located on the planet like cities, object and land marks while flying around the planet.

 

awesome product but i get a weird bug
followed by a error message

do you have any idea whats going wrong?

 

Does it work with Unity 4?
I'm now ready to buying your product but, 4 weeks without a response to the previous issue. This is worrisome.

 

I got real excited about Etherea1 a while back and bought it, then between poor performance in unity free and seeing posts go unanswered for months on end I chose not to go ahead with using it for my game project. A bit disappointing but I guess Imerso has "better" things to do with his time than support all of us who bought his product...

 

That is why I am interested to Proland. http://www.youtube.com/user/ebruneton
But, I hope Etherea1 will do.

 

I never received a notification from the forum about this message, that is weird.

Looks like you have an unsupported videocard or something. Etherea1 requires at least shader model 3.0 support. Could you tell me the platform (Win/OSX version, videocard model)? Also, do you have your drivers updated?

Also, you can contact me directly if you prefer.

Thanks,

imerso

 

I did not receive the notifications from the forum, so I was not aware of that question.

I will make sure it runs under Unity4 as well --- at this moment, I don't know.

Cheers,

imerso

 

Have you contacted me directly about this? Balancing quality vs performance is completely under control, for example I get easily ~120fps at ground and ~350fps in space with 10 planets around, this under a common Core2Duo with a GTX460 which is obviously not top notch hardware.

If you set everything to the maximum, you'll indeed need a highend hardware.

I will be sending some tips about performance to the mailing list today.

Cheers,

imerso

 

Although I respect Proland and recognize it as a high quality and inquestionable excellent piece of scientific art, there is a fundamental difference between Proland and Etherea1.

A single Proland planet takes about 5gb of storage space. A single Etherea1 planet takes less than 50kb (that is, a Proland planet takes 100.000 times more storage space than Etherea1).

I dare you to put 100 Proland planets visible in realtime like Etherea1 do, and more, under 5mb, still more, on Windows, Mac, and the Web.

Cheers,

imerso

 

Are you saying that they are developing a Unity 4 capability for Proland?

-Tim

 

No. It's a specific engine. Nothing to do with Unity.

In fact, 20GB (downloaded) for the entire Earth. This is perfect for a serious game / simulator I am working (investigate) on ..

Only ONE with a good support will "make my day".

 

Done by PayPal. Without regret, i hope...

 

I just bought this yesterday and it is working just fine in Unity 4. Looks great!