What single feature from Unity Pro would you want to see in Unity Free?

This is a simple question, What single feature from Unity Pro would you want to see in Unity Free?

There are so many features that define Unity Pro and justifies its purchase to help you push your game to the next level that it's actually difficult to choose only one.

Explain why you would want that single feature over the other ones.

This can be usefull to the Unity Team, so if they ever want to make a basic version of a Pro feature, then they will know what features the developers want the most.

My anwser:
For me, i would be undecided between Real Time Shadows, Occlusion Culling, Deferred Rendering and the Profiler.
Ultimately i would choose the Profiler, the second one would probably be Occlusion Culling.
With Unity Free you can create a game with nice graphics and detail, but as you advance the development, you will eventually be worrying about performance and that's where the Profiler can be very usefull, so you can see what parts of the code take the most CPU time, so you can optimize the code and improve performance.
Then again, Occlusion Culling can also be the most usefull feature to improve performance of a detailed scene.

How about you? ( don't be limited by the options in the poll )

 

I also chose the profiler for the same reason. There are workarounds for a few of the other features like DOF, pathfinding, occlusion culling, and even realtime shadows. The profiler seems to be the most important as it truly helps optimization and isn't just a luxury/eye candy feature like the other ones.

 

These threads are never gonna stop, are they? Everything seems to be repeatedly discussed, asked etc! over and over again. It's getting very boring coming in to the Gossip section only to find the same old stuff talked about but with a different thread title.

 

Really? I never saw a thread like this in this forum, and this thread is not meant to bash Unity Free or anything.
This thread is basically meant to see what feature the developers want/need the most, something that justifies the Unity Pro purchase.
I know it doesn't bring anything new to the table but it's good to know what the majority of developers are looking for.

 

I think Amon is mistaking this for the typical "Pro costs too much", "Free vs Pro is the wrong business model", etc posts.

As to the question, its a toss up between real time shadows and render to texture. However, things like shadows have free alternatives, which is a great tool for encouraging a Pro purchase. Things like render to texture don't really have an alternative, so its difficult to really see what you're missing.

 

I probably am! Apologies if that is the case but I'm certain if I do a forum search that even this has been discussed to death, many times. Anyway, like I said, apologies if I've got it wrong.

To add something to the thread: personally the profiler would be the best thing to add to Unity free. It really does do a good job helping you find where the bottlenecks are in your code.

 

I'd pick profiler but I wrote my own, not as powerful but its meeting my needs for now Instead I'm going for real time shadows.

 

Of those, I've already made my own simple room based occlusion culling system (took me an hour, almost doubled the frame-rate) and a LOD system which looks better than the unity one (for my needs at least - it has pretty much no visible pop in). There are external solutions for RT shadows, decent lightmapping, static batching and path-finding (not that I need it) so pretty much the only thing that I'd need to finish my game is RenderToTexture for the post-effects, which will be important for the aesthetic of the game. So that

 

I thought Static Batching was included with basic. At least - if it's what I think it is.

Congrats to everyone coming up with there own home brew solutions! Necessity is the mother of all invention.

Maybe we should start a Unity lottery where everyone throws $20 into a hat and one starving artist walks away with a shiny new copy of Unty Pro.

 

Dynamic batching is included in free.

 

Render to texture. Even if the texture size was limited in size to prevent it from being used for every possible thing it'd be a godsend.

 

Oh yeah, render texture!

 

I think, if I were forced back to free, the one that would irritate me the most would be losing BuildPipeline...

 

I second that.

 

Real Time Shadows..

 

That is awesome that you were able to do those features. I did a LOD system that works very well, but i believe Unity's LOD is much more optimized and less heavy on the cpu.
I also tried to make real time shadows, reflections and occlusion culling. The only one that worked was the reflections, but it was too heavy since it was using vertex color and raycasts for each vertex, it worked but i would never use it in a game.

Static Batching is only available in Unity Pro, the one you are thinking of is Dynamic Batching.

 

These threads are never gonna stop

 

the button that makes you an MMO.

 

This topic isn't a request like the others; it's a discussion about peoples' opinions on integral Unity Pro features that would be nice in Indie.

 

+1

 

As far as I'm concerned, profiler is the ONLY rational answer here.
I consider this one omitted feature a weakness of the product and the company, quite frankly.

To keep it really simple, making a game without shadows or culling or the best animation features, is not ideal, but perfectly acceptable and can still yield success and thus lead to a likely purchase of Pro.
However, making an unoptimized poorly performing game, is always unacceptable, and not having the profiler is a very likely way for this to happen.
This reflects poorly on us as developers, and Unity as an engine.
It also makes this one feature a "held hostage by a $1500 investment" decision, which I refuse to be a party to.
While this may sound as if it is wonderful incentive to the businessmen and marketeers, I specifically will NOT buy the Pro product and started using other options, despite my investment, because of this.
This is also because, those of us who are serious enough to purchase the basic licenses to iOS and/or Android, plus pay the Apple developer fee, are lumped in with those that just download the free version of the software and not given access to this "essential for anyone serious" feature.
That's not "democratizing game development", IMHO.

 

Profiler.

Without a doubt.

I miss it so much now my student license expired

The rest of the stuff is graphical shinies or things that can be worked around.

 

I voted for the Profiler, but what I really want that's not on your list is Render Textures. For 2D work they can be extremely useful and provide tremendous performance boosts over the alternatives. They would also open up much easier implementations of a number of 2D game techniques.

 

Ok, so according to the poll results so far, if we want to sell more copies of Pro we should never introduce the Profiler or Real Time Shadows in the free version... I'll pass this information along to our sales team

Kidding of course, this information is always interesting for many reasons.

 

Profiler, hands down.

 

You kidding, but it was exactly what I was thinking from the start! "Thread alt title: what feature to hype to sell more copies of pro!"

 

Does that mean we can have audio filters and deferred rendering in their stead?

 

Was between real time shadows and differed rendering for me. With Differed rendering you can have displacement maps on terrain and the baked shadows... I think.

 

How about Dark Skin instead? ;-)

Well, with Differed rendering you could do whatever you want as you just invented it

 

I'm trying the Pro demo and I don't even use the dark skin on that!

Dark skin, RenderTexture limited to 1024x1024 and you can have low-level renderer access back.

 

I am for either Real Time Shadows or Profiler.

 

What about those of us who actually own Pro, and thus don't want to see all the best features moved into free?

 

Why would it matter to you? There would still be features in Pro that won't be in Free, plus it would help a lot with development.

 

Don't tease me.

I really want post processing. You can keep your real time shadows and occlusion culling. I'm a 2D guy.

Not that I'm worried, I'm going to be pro in 2 months. iOS and PC/Mac

 

Hmm, I voted for the shadows, but after reading the thread entirety, I can definitely see the profiler may be a better choice - especially dangerous for those that know how to use it :3

 

This is a missing vote option. Render Textures would open a can of new possibilities like post process image effects and faster realtime shadows, so graphically wise the Free version would be on the same level as the Pro version.
I guess most people crying about missing shadows are actually referring to Render Textures (even if not aware).

 

I would take Render Textures as well. The Profiler, I think, actually makes sense as a Pro feature because it becomes more useful as your game gets more complicated.

Render Textures, on the other hand, more than adding eye candy, actually enable new types of gamplay. Think about Portal - that's exactly the kind of crazy indie game that Unity should be good for, yet you can't do it without Render Textures.

In addition, I think that Render Textures in Free would be good for Unity's reputation. You know the constant "UDK vs Unity" threads that pop up around here? Unity is clearly the better option for small teams (and the people that typically post these threads are small teams), yet they're drawn to UDK because it makes it very easy to make a good-looking game.

 

What exactly does the profiler do? Sorry, kinda slow.

 

dark skin

 

You can read about it here. It is immensely useful to pro users for optimization.

 

Yeah, profiler.

This made sense to me(just something to think about, I'm not demanding anything):

 

It shows you a profile of the resource useage of the components. It tells you where your resource hogs are. That`s something that you can more or less easily find out by yourself. By going through your components manually, and turn them off and on, and having a look at the FPS. It`s just much more time consuming that way by classes. Which qualifies the Profiler as a Pro feature. Hobbyists have this time. Pros not. Well, yeah when you take the Unity strategy into account that you start with Free and finish with Pro, then the Profiler may be best placed in the Free version too.

My favourite was and is Realtime Shadow though. Realtime Shadow is a must have for an up to date game nowadays. The substitutes sucks in the one or another way. Blobshadows are a pain to work with, and are resource hogs. Volumeshadows are resource hogs too. Realtime Shadow is nothing that you can leave away really. And this is unfortunately what Unity does. Realtime shadow on the other hand means Deferred Rendering unfortunately. And this will much likely not happen. Unity will not give Deferred Rendering into the hands of the free users.

The point is it is meant to start a game with Unity Free, and finish it with Pro then. Which fails with this strategy. It would mean a very big redo of the game to me when i would have to implement Realtimeshadows with deferred Rendering now afterwards. Deferred Rendering changes the whole lighting.

When it comes to shadow then Unity free is a demo with missing features. Nothing that you allows to start your project with Free and finish with Pro. You can at least work around the Profiler issue. But not around the Shadow and Lighting issue.

 

I don't think Unity intends for anyone to start a project with Unity Free and finish that same project with Unity Pro.

Unity Free is to give you an idea of Unity's functionality and power, that's all. You can make full games with it, but not of the same quality as games made with Pro. It would also be incredibly poor planning to attempt to switch to Pro mid-project.

When you begin production, you make decisions on the software you'll be using. You should never change that part way through without a very good reason.

 

I'm in that position exactly because of the RenderTexture issue. I figured there would be ways to get around it, especially with the changes to Screen.SetResolution in 4.0 but since there isn't I'm looking at having to drop some serious change to increase the size of some pixels.

 

I was in the same situation a while ago... sucks.

 

You need a "Unity Free is a great deal as it is" selection.

 

No they don't because that's not a valid response to this unless you're just trying to troll the thread.

 

Of those listed (and understood by me ) I would choose pathfinding.