2D Alpha Build Leaked!

I can't believe no-one has replied yet. This is very cool and just as I was going to re-factor my own tile map! I can't wait until others have a play of these features, maybe I shouldn't have gotten pro refunded. These are all features that will hopefully bring the 2D capabilities almost up to that of Game Maker.

 

I am going to try it as soon as this weekend

 

This is really cool, thanks for releasing these new tools. Can't wait for them to be out of alpha so I can start using them in my projects! Hopefully they work really well for mobile

 

Great work, are you going to apply a similar approach to other areas of Unity e.g. Terrain, Prefabs etc???

 

Wow, this looks awesome. Can't wait to see the finished release!

 

This is so awesome, the timing for everything is just :O, really interested in the masking feature and the smart sprite feature, not really sure how the others will fit in an isometric game but I'm sure some 2D developers out there will be so happy right now!

Guess the only thing missing off that list is the 2D bone animation system, but I'm sure that's in the road map . Keep up the good work guys can't wait!

P.S Any chance we can get a sneak peek at future plans for 2D? . Maybe even a adding extra pivot points onto a sprite for spawning effects at the right position .

 

2d Fixed joints, and importing vector graphics...

 

This is an experiment. If it is successful, and we get lot of good feedback and value, then perhaps other teams will follow.

 

I would really enjoy seeing the Shuriken particle system given some 2D quality of life love Maybe its just me, but for some reason I always have trouble working with it in my projects... to the point where I've written my own simplistic particle scripts...

 

Will there be any docs for this? I can't find out how to create tilemap brushes to draw on the tilemap... Anyone did it?

I think I found the assets:
https://bitbucket.org/Unity-Technol...06b232b6b6660f31165/tilemap/demo1/?at=tilemap

Didn't check it yet , tho.

 

Since I don't own a pro license, would like to ask to who does and is trying this build a few things or even if a dev from UT can reply.

First how is structured the TileMap, is it a component containing all the info from an atlas sprite? It would be possible to construct a TileMap at runtime populating it from external data (for example) instead of using the editor?

If all of this is possible how the tile map know where each sprite goes, it reference the sliced sprites by name, index or?

Asking this because I would like to prepare my map construction system out of it instead of generating normal meshes and messing with uvs, it would speed up things.

Last thing, how the TileMap deal with vertex count? I mean if it exceed the amount per tile map of vertices, does it divide it internally on it self or gotta create another game object?

 

If you want to get more feedback, I'd recommend not requiring people to leave it on BitBucket. It requires creating an account. Why don't you just create a separate forum and make it only visible to pro users? It'd be so much simpler.

 

Hmm, Allow the user to lock particles to the x and y axis. 2D emitter shapes like Line and Point.

Personally I would love a replacement for Materials in 2D particle effects. Maybe like a ParticleMaterial2D is added to a 2D particle effect which would let you choose the Sprite, Color, BlendingMode (Additive || Alpha), and SortingLayer in the inspector without having to make a separate material for each type of particle.

Just a few thoughts

 

So Tile Map allow to suppress overhead of dynamic batching ?
I have to render 120x80 tiles for my minimap but because of overhead of dynamic batching that takes 30 ms.

Tile map will have dynamic size ( can we resize it in runtime ) ? Or a size limit ?
it will work for isometric map ?

 

One simple thing - Sprite support! Allow us to use Sprites as our particles!

 

This is really great news!

Not sure exactly where to leave feedback as the blog & repo say leave it on forum but at the top of this thread ... well lets try here:

I build 2d games in Unity as a job, I've been bending Unity to do 2d for years. Here are some of my thoughts & questions from a game dev:

for Sprite Editor:

• If you save a spritesheet in photoshop (some small graphical change) any new sprite boundaries you have drawn will be reset. Prefered functionality is that it just updates the image.
  
  
• dragging the sprite handles on the Mac with Wacom is slow and unresponsive. This applies to Unity product wide. Would be nice if this could be finally fixed! Wacom is a pro tool, I can’t be the only one having this issue.
  
  
• Arrow keys are unassigned in Sprite Editor. These could be put to good use for cycling through sprites for easy naming (naming is probably the largest time sink in this editor window right now).
  
  
• Custom grid view & snap to grid would be welcome in Sprite Editor.

In general concerning 2D:

• Physics calculations for pixel art games would be very much appreciated. Currently physics is strange when using small sprites. Is there any plan to tackle this?
  
  
• 8px by 8px is 0.08 units in Unity. We are using raycasting instead of physics as a current solution.
  
  
• I’m currently using 2DToolKit’s cameras for everything in my game as it has screen resolution features, sadly it’s not compatible with Unity’s new UI canvas.
  
  
• The standard unity camera has no pixel size, are there any plans for pixel perfect 2d cameras?
  
  
• We use 2DToolKit’s tile mapper, which works well, but all tile maps are created in Tiled and exported using the TMX format. Are there any plans to use TMX?

Tilemapper:

• I make heavy use of the fill, custom brush (selection of tiles) and random tile from selection tools that are offered in Tiled and 2dToolKit. Would be nice to see these functions.
  
  
• do you see layers being part of the tilemap like in TMX format or just several tilemaps each as their own layer?
  
  
• We use large Collision2d polygons that are automatically drawn from tiles with collision info in 2dToolKit, this function is very useful.
  
  
• whats the current thinking on how to make animated tiles? Can we replace any tile with a prefab? (this also pertains to destructible terrains, ladders etc. If they can be drawn in tiles as prefabs, like with 2dToolKit this would be very useful)

Animation:

• dragging of multiple sprites onto timeline would be welcomed, or an auto detection by name and number (2dToolKit does this) per Animation on Sprite. Currently need to do this by hand and can be laborious on large anims.
• Animator: Auto no blend when using sprites or special sprite mode. You'll be hard pushed to find someone who actually wants blending here, maybe a 2d mode for animator?
• turn blending off between samples for movement, scale, rotation. Theres often cases where you'd like a hat or weapon to be assigned to the player, the easiest way is to add this to the animation and turn it on when you need it. However, if you animate its position to match the player, you have blending in the samples. Would be far better to have a 2d animation system with frames and frame rate. Samples almost always causes problems for pixelart sprite animation.
• Swap spritesheet at runtime! This is a classic request. Something that can be done easily in other games engines for variations on enemies etc. without giving them their own animators per variation.

Thanks for listening! Would love to see Unity expand the 2d tools and... thanks for masking!

 

(this is possible already, just make a diffuse material, drop your sprite in, then change it to a sprite, then assign that to the emitter and set the size to the sprite size in 100 per 1.0 unit. You can't use sprite sheets, but I'm sure that will arrive one day. You can now assign render layer too, before this had to be done in code. I've been using this process for over a year now)

 

This is exactly what I want to do with sprites in particle systems....

 

PNG support for textures would be really needed since you can have better quality for less size then an uncompressed texture. ETC1 splitting for Android is a great news but sometimes you want more and uncompressed textures are just too heavy for mobile games. Furthermore, devices with 4 GB of RAM are starting to come out. The memory size of PNGs is not that problematic anymore.

 

Hehe: https://bitbucket.org/Unity-Technologies/2ddemos/issue/16/2d-sprite-sheet-avatar-dressing-system
Please Unity, I need this! lol.

Can you please add this your comment there, hawken?

 

I am so incredibly excited about this!

 

Thanks for the response! Did some tests with .assets and it's pretty impressive!

 

Looking good! Personally I'm sure I'll find use for smart sprites and ETC1 color + alpha split. Now add in 16-bit dithering for RGB565 / RGBA4444 and it's golden!

 

I replied as a comment to the unity blog post, but will copy to here so we can keep all feedback in one place.


Features that would really help working with sprites.

– ability to place text in scene that is pixel perfect. Having to create a root object for canvas is cumbersome if we have many objects that are created and destroyed.

– Ability to set half resolution on all sprites automatically, our assets are at retina resolution but quality settings ‘half resolution’ does not affect Sprites.

– We have custom editor scripts to set the order in layer of sprites based on order in hierarchy (so they sort like canvas). Sorting if ‘order in layer’ is same should be same as canvas, currently if order in layer is same the sorting order is random, and different between OSX and iOS which can lead to weird bugs.

– related to previous point, it would be nice if total order relative to top of hierarchy value was exposed as this value could be used to sort sprites, meshes, ect.. And also to sort input layering.

– we have bugs sometimes on our sprite atlases where they stop batching randomly, we have editor scripts which set sprite packing tags automatically, which might be related? The only way to fix is to reimport the folder with textures or rebuild the sprite atlas cache.

Not related to sprites but would be nice.

– ability to cancel physics2D collision events on non-triggers.
– when rescaling a body interpolation is turned off temporarily, there should be an option to keep it on.


– in editor mode the raycast to pick which object is selected is a bit strange sometimes, there should be an option to make objects like background textures not immediately selectable. (2 clicks?) canvas also covers everything, even empty space inside it and is huge so overlaps part of scene and generally gets on the way.
– not related to sprites, but it would be nice to have the ability to set a default camera’s frustum even if there is no camera in scene, as we only spawn camera at runtime.
– not related to sprites, but it would be nice if unity didn’t keep regenerating meta files of empty folders which get continuously committed to git. Unity could perhaps not generate folder meta files for empty folders, and make sure the unique Id generator will always generate the same value for the same path..?

(reply from Paul Tham)

We acknowledge that sorting needs to improve and it will. Look out for it in the near future.

 

This is awesome. I am really looking forward to working with the map editor. Tiled is an amazing tool but being able to keep all my development within Unity is never a bad thing.

 

I'm really pleased to see the 2D side of Unity isn't being left to the wolves. As a small developer 3D games are simply not within my reach and my primary interest is in 2D games, but Unity is hit and miss compared to other platforms.

The masking in particular could be potentially extremely useful. I have been struggling with an efficient method of having a sprite not draw its pixels if what is behind it is s transparent (so it would only layer over existing foreground elements). If masking or another efficient solution it would be extremely useful in layering effects and decals:

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/ca...f-a-cameras-background-is-transparent.321090/

 

The new 2D features look great, so I'm looking forward to giving them a go. Really cool to open up the Alpha to us. I hope this approach is also taken with other areas of Unity.

 

I would also love to see 2D bounding volumes. Similar to collider2D but instead of repelling things it keeps objects inside its shape. So objects could collide like normal against the insides of the bounding shapes instead of being repelled out.

 

The terrain screenshot under the "Smart Sprite" section looks very similar, if not identical to the main features of the Ferr2D pack on the asset store: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/11653

How do the two tools compare?

 

Is there any expected (official) release date for this new bundle of features? I don't think specific dates matter, but it would be nice to have a rough estimate (June... July...?).

Thanks! Everything looks great!

 

There is no release date and even internally nobody really knows yet when they are done. Like said in the bitbucket readme, some features might not ever come out. It is not guaranteed.

Also not all of the features will probably come in a single release, but one-by-one depending on when they hit the release quality.

 

Hello, I have a question about the road painting brush. Can we use it to create animated water? For example, in a top-down 2D RPG, there could be streams, rivers, oceans, etc. Using animated sprites to create these things would be tortuous.

Also, will we be able to paint at run-time?

Beautiful work!

 

One single looping animation per tile is coming. Anything more complex & interactive and you need to do it with separate GameObject. You would be able to paint animated rivers or at least script your own custom brush to do that.

Painting in run-time will work in the sense that you can call the same code for actual Paint() that the editor calls, but you'd have to create the user interface for painting (gizmos, mouse clicks, etc.) yourself.

 

Oh Unity, how I do love you. That smart sprite is sexy.

 

Is there any chance to get a working navigation system built into unity's 2D features? Right now you either have to roll your own or forsake most of them in favour of using 3D with 2D elements.

 

We are also working on bringing the Unity NavMesh to 2D

 

Any plans to add the ability for an object to awake on a specific distance from the character?

 

Will there be any fixes for the Trigger2D -> Trigger 2D collider issues that have constantly plagued simple hit detection? (Where OnTriggerEnter2D doesn't fire consistently)

I have a consistently reproducible scenario where 3 identical, unique, unrelated dynamic objects do not even raise the OnTriggerEnter2D event) about 60% of the time against a separate dynamic Trigger2D box collider, despite all 3 interpenetrating the same box using rigidbody2d's velocity.

 

You can do this from script pretty easily by comparing the Vector2 distance between the object in question and the player position.

 

Yes, please!

 

Thanks @Murgilod. I believe your recommendation is similar/identical to @inthemilkywat, and my answer/follow-up questions can be seen here: http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/ho...-distance-from-character.327911/#post-2126867

Sorry for the duplication. I guess what I'm asking specifically here in this thread is if there are plans to add the ability for a Rigidbody 2D component to use distance-based settings to awaken an object?

I've also added this feature request as a proposal here: https://bitbucket.org/Unity-Technologies/2ddemos/issue/45/set-rigidbody-2d-to-awake-on-distance

 

Has anyone else had trouble getting the palette to see sprites in the project?

When I load up the example project the palette works like it does int he videos/documentation. When I spin up a blank project and import some sprites, I can't get the palette to see anything.

 

Are your individual tile sprites the same size as your TileMap Grid Cell?

 

My individual tile sprites are 32x32 px (sliced up from a sheet if that matters)
Where should I check the "TileMap Grid Cell"? (I attached a shot of the inspector with my current settings)