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What improvement will be in Unity 4?

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by nikko, Apr 11, 2011.

  1. nikko

    nikko

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    - SpeedTree integration (and maybe bundled?)
    - A GUI builder?
    - native Openfeint or Gamecenter support?
    - GPS support?
    - 2D specific framework for sprites, scrolling, platform games?
    what else? What do you think? Any info out there?
     
  2. ant001

    ant001

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    Dec 15, 2010
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    - convert to mmo button
    - vst audio plugins
    - web textures
    - all features on all platforms
    - build "webgl"
    - physics importing
    - cg shader to unity shaders
    - text (not scaleform)
    - more video codec support
    - interactive textures
    - dark purple theme for pro users
    - stereo3d 120fps
    - kitchen sink
    - apply 'playmode' changes to attribute
    - live visual code edit
    - more pumpkin
     
  3. dogzerx2

    dogzerx2

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    -more awesome graphics
    -directx12
    -ninjas
    -strumpy shaders integrated
    -steal some of good UDK ideas
     
  4. chaos1986

    chaos1986

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    erm there's a few improvements that need to be made,

    - Building to Windows or Mac compiles the exe into machine code (currently it's not hard for people to pull the code out of the built exe)
    - Better out-of-the-box networking support (yes, for mmo's!)
    - A 64 Bit version of Unity
    - Fix the constant CG errors random crashes on many systems
    - Support for substances (Google it if you don't know what they are)
    - Plugins for many popular 3d modelling packages so we can seamlessly design our materials in our 3D apps
    - Support for DX11, tessellation and all the other modern bells and whistles
    - Better transforms (like the ones used in most 3d apps)
    - A WYSIWYG GUI editor integrated shader editor to be more artist friendly
    - Ability to greater customize the "choose resolution and settings" window
    - Real time shadows for Unity free (only hard shadows!)
    - A pay monthly (or yearly) subscription model for Unity Pro (makes Unity Pro more money AND more accessible to more people), this would include free upgrades to newer major versions
    - Trial version of Unity Pro is unlimited in time BUT it cannot make builds (on any platform) and has a watermark when you 'play' in the editor

    - Separate showcase subcategories (iOS, PC Mac, Android etc) on the forums, I'm pissed off with seeing *great game released, awesome idea* for YOUR F***ING iPhone, 90% of people don't have iPhone's or iPads.
     
    Last edited: Apr 11, 2011
  5. hizral

    hizral

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    I like this one :)
     
  6. NomadKing

    NomadKing

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    - A one click MMO making wizard
     
  7. Dreamora

    Dreamora

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    Just do it yourself if you don't like it.
    Mono has a tool to make the JIT compile step offline on your machine so its end compiled for distribution, including the consequence of performance lose of the cpus that aren't like yours (this "optimize to the end machine" part is one of the major benefits of .NET and JAVA over C / C++)
     
  8. hippocoder

    hippocoder

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    I'm actually looking for workflow improvements in the editor, not new features since lets face it, nobody in the world has fully even tapped the potential of the existing features yet. You ask for DX11? thats fine and dandy but you haven't made the most of dx9 yet.
     
  9. hippocoder

    hippocoder

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    what benefit exactly? since you will be compiling with the target device in mind. It should be slightly slower due to overhead if anything.

    In any case the development speed far more important than the execution speed. In unity there appears to be a function for everything I will ever need so no complaints here.
     
  10. Dreamora

    Dreamora

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    No its faster, cause the CIL is platform independent, its the framework on the end system that compiles it with parameter suited for the platform (especially math support and cpu pipeline depth which makes a major difference between p4, amd, core 2 duo and core i).
    Its only the first startup that takes longer to perform that step.

    As unity uses .NET only for the scripting, not the engine, the impact isn't as large as on a pure .NET application, but with heavy maths you still see a fair difference if its opted wrong (if you cut p4 and then look for an average on pipeline depth + SSE2 targeting it should run reasonable).

    On the editor its totally unimportant as the editor is near complete unmanaged, so it couldn't be of any less use to care about it there.
     
  11. stimarco

    stimarco

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    I can assure you of this much: UT know very well what Substances are. And you won't have to wait until 4.0 to see them. :)

    (This much has already been announced officially. You'll see threads on the topic in these forums if you hunt around.)
     
  12. wingedfox123

    wingedfox123

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    when is unity 4 coming out??:)
     
  13. wingedfox123

    wingedfox123

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    convert to mmo button :D:):cool:
     
  14. pmvstrm

    pmvstrm

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    - 64-Bit Support for the Game Runtime on the Enduser System!-
    - Utilization/Parallelcomputing of Multicores on Windows and Mac-

    People today having AMD64/EM64T 64-Bit Multicore CPU and 4-8 Gbyte RAM.
    Such a System cost no 900 $ and absolute Standard this Days.

    But i think we can wait a longtime... A Look in the Unity Folder tells me thadt
    a bunch of 32-Bit 3rd Party Stuff works in Unity (FMOD, Pace, Beat e.c.t)

    Any 3rd Party Stuff must be avaiable first in 64-Bit on Windows x64 Platform
    before it can seamless used (without crapy 64 to 32 Marshalling slowdown everything).
     
  15. KyleStaves

    KyleStaves

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    Who led you to believe that to get any major benefit out of DX11 you need to be "capped" by DX9 already?

    We already know DX11 is coming to Unity; it has always been their plan to stay with DX9 - skip DX 10 entirely - and eventually adopt DX 11, we just have no idea what their timeline for this is. I'd venture to say that Unity 4 is a fairly good bet here.

    Your entire argument is incredibly strange to me actually. Why would I need to "fully tap" the potential out of the lightmapping system if what I really need for my project is a better GUI system? Why would I need to "fully tap" the existing image effects potential when what I really need is GPU skinned meshes?

    Personally, I'm really just waiting for a new and improved GUI system. EZ GUI/SM2 is great, and I already have a license for them - but it'll definitely be interesting to see what UT comes up with, whatever it is I'm sure it'll be integrated much better into Unity - hopefully it'll perform as well as Brady's products.

    Other than that, I'm happy with the feature set. The only thing I really, really want to see is support for Visual Studios 2010 so I can use it without having to convert my project every time there's a file change in it.
     
  16. tatoforever

    tatoforever

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    Workflow improvement? I don't see how can Unity improve something that is already over improved(awesome mind you). Unity is about ultra fast/easy workflow not about high end features. Thats why people are asking for other stuff, like GUI, AI, DX11, AA, GPU skinning, better shadows, HDR, eye candy stuff, etc.
    Personally, I'm looking forward to see 64bits support and more rendering power, specially on the real-time side (like in CE3) as we already have very good stuff on the pre-baked side of things.
     
  17. hippocoder

    hippocoder

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    There is always room for more features. Robust tools for positioning objects in relation to other objects as standard. Alignment tools as standard. For example select one object and align to another based on 3dsmax style alignment tools. Fantastic. I should be able to do this and it is not available.

    I would also look into having a unity javascript editor that is actually nested inside the actual editor. For many of us who rely on javascript, it is a pain having an external editor which requires me to shrink the unity window. An internal editor would also allow me to just click play, and the script would autosave. Over the length of the project development I would save a few hours right there.

    @people confused at my "fully tap the potential" - you seem to be confused about exactly what DX11 would give you. It can't actually give you better graphics. Because right now the bottleneck for 9 out of 10 things made in unity is the art. For DX11 you would need yet more shader know-how and yet more art in the form of tesselation textures and so forth. If you aren't already pushing DX9 you will see no visual gain from DX10 or 11. You might have an all-in-one HDR lighting solution, but it isn't something that will make your game look better unless you have already got great art, and frankly, nobody using unity right now is at that point from what I have seen in the showcase.

    This isn't me saying you're S*** - far from it - I am just saying I do not believe DX11 offers a very measurable visual improvement over 9. For example crysis 2 is using DX9 rather happily and you would be incredibly hard pressed to figure out how to improve it visually. DX isn't everything either - for the mac you would need equivelent OGL graphics, and for the other platforms, nothing would change. The reasons for going DX11 must surely be "under the hood" to deal with far grander projects and graphics techniques such as Tesselated worlds. To me, this says DX11 isn't a milestone that we will reach for many months yet bearing in mind windows isn't the whole of what unity supports.
     
    Last edited: Apr 11, 2011
  18. QFS

    QFS

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    4? S***, didnt 3.0 just come out only 7 months ago, and I hope to hell they dont do a jump to 4.0 soon.

    Lets focus on stuff that needs to come in the 3.x cycle not 4.x.
     
  19. jonbonazza

    jonbonazza

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    This isn't "entirely" true.

    Though you are right that a virtual machine will preform faster on hardware that the the C/C++ code was not optimized for, if C/C++ code is written specifically for a certain platform, no VM will be anywhere near as fast since C/C++ is native code and compiles directly into machine code rather than Byte code.
     
  20. KyleStaves

    KyleStaves

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    I'm all for improvements to the scene tools. Vertex-snapping was a huge step forward, I could certainly see other areas for improvement here as well.

    This certainly wouldn't be in my list of desired features, and I doubt it would be on the list of many paying customers to be honest. Not that I'd mind having it as an option, I just don't see it happening - not with them working on their own MonoDevelop so slowly already.

    See, this is where you are misunderstanding the desire to have DX11 implemented. Is it going to be valuable for even most of the projects created using Unity? No, absolutely not. It's not a feature for today, today most commercial products created with Unity are almost certainly mobile/web projects - where DX11 isn't going to happen anyway. Do I see myself working on a DX11 project anytime soon? Definitely not. Do I see it as important technology for the platform? Absolutely.

    UT is clearly trying to position their engine as more competitive for larger budget products. Today DX11 support isn't integral for that, but Tessellation is going to be the super big-ticket feature for the next generation of games - Unity has to offer it to be competitive with the engines that already do. They've already said they intend to support DX11 though, so the entire conversation of why they should support it is a little moot.

    If you really judge the entire Unity using community based on what you see on these forums, you are looking at one very, very small sub-set of the user base.

    Neither do I. I also don't expect Unity 4 to launch for many months.

    If this were a thread about 3.X feature requests I would agree with you, there's no room for DX11 in that conversation (I'd honestly be shocked if we saw DX11 before Unity 4).

    But again, supporting a future where Unity includes support for DX11 and tessellation does not mean I'm working on a project today that requires it - or even that I expect to be working on one in the short term at all.
     
  21. tatoforever

    tatoforever

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    Indeed, you got a point.

    Thats fine if you have only one display, but for people like me using more than one display, is better having visual studio in one screen and Unity on a secondary screen (more room for Unity windows). Sorry, can't those tiny script editors bundled in the engine, i need Visual Studio in full screen. ^^
    I'm aware that DX11 won't make your game look better, in fact any graphic API will automatically make your asset look better, but it gives you more flexibilities and posibilities, like for example, nice MSAA using defferred rendering, better hardware shadows filtering, tesselation, geometry shaders, etc.
    I'm partly with you on that one, the problem isn't DX9/DX11, is Unity not been pushed to the limits like CE3 does.
    Thats provably why, no one is taking Unity serious for AAA titles. Any AAA engines offerts right out of the box lots of eye candy features.
    Again, i do believe that DX11 wont make your current game looks better, but will gives you more posibilities as a shader programmer or 3D engine programmer to create some extra set of visual features to improve it, features not being posible on DX9, the rest is an art work job. And yes, CryEngine3 does some nasty stuff with their full defferred stuff, they have defferred projectors/decals, defferred lighting, deffered reflection and lots of deffered stuff thats avoid extra drawcalls. At its basis it is highly optimized, that even UnrealEngine can't compete with. But i don't believe Unity will follow CryEngine route (super optimized for real-time) and DX11 in Unity will bring new posibilities to improve the rendering power of Unity, that are almost imposible on DX9.
    Cheers,
     
  22. DallonF

    DallonF

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    Ah, but .NET isn't Bytecode. It's JIT compiled; stands for Just In Time. That means that as soon as a method is called for the first time, it's compiled into native code. So while a .NET application might take longer to start up and might be a little bit slow as it starts, overall it's just about as fast as the same algorithms in C++*.

    *C++ isn't the "increase FPS" button that many people seem to think it is, but since it's lower level, you can make more optimized (and more headache-inducing) algorithms than are possible with Java or .NET.
     
  23. hippocoder

    hippocoder

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    Interesting replies to what I had posted. Indeed I can see your point. It's important to push forward early in order to keep up with the neighbours.

    Will the big budget games happen? lets look at a case study for engines:

    id software. They had to make a game for every major engine they released.
    Unreal. They had to make a game for every major engine they released.
    Crytek. They had to make a game for every major engine they released.

    Unity. They haven't made any games for every major engine they released. And until they do, competing on a feature level is moot as no big guns will touch unity until it happens. Indeed, none of the big players in the business would have touched the above companies unless there was a published successful game to show it off. Demos are everywhere, nobody takes notice of demos.

    Unity gave it a good shot with boot camp demo, but it's still a demo. I'd love to see an AAA unity game in the stores, and whats more its totally possible. MW2 could have been done with unity 3, and whats more - it would probably perform the same since AAA games use scripting and bytecode up to the wazoos and you're not actually seeing better performance from them except perhaps just how much middleware and optimised graphics they use.
     
  24. Lab013

    Lab013

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    I haven't found your final statement to be true for most x86-32 and x86-64 systems (and currently, pretty much all other systems are irrelivent) past a very basic OS level. The only really big increase I can think of is 16 bit code runs slow on x86-32 and x86-64, but legacy mode and registers are generally irrelevant. Also, you can do a JIT system (like LLVMs *cough cough*) that doesn't give away your source code.
     
    Last edited: Apr 12, 2011
  25. duke

    duke

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    1. A more threading-conscious architecture.
    2. Scaleform integration/inclusion*

    * I haven't ever touched flash, but Scaleform is quickly becoming an industry standard, so i'll suck it up. The current GUI situation is woeful.
     
  26. aninjamonk

    aninjamonk

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    something for making 2D games...
     
  27. c-Row

    c-Row

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    The possibility to run two instances of Unity at the same time.
     
  28. saymoo

    saymoo

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    Well for 4.0 or earlier (the sooner the better!!!)

    - faster engine (renders etc) so the famous unity LAG will dissapear.
    - Speedtree, Bink support.
    - Matinee like (Unreal engine 3) cinematic editor.
    - Kismet like (unreal engine3) type of visual scripting build in
    - Material editor
    - Particle editor (like Unreal Engine3)
    - Physics editor (like unreal Engine 3)
    - Animation editor (like Unreal engine3)

    as you can see, most of the Unreal Engine 3 toolsets/editors are needed (the reason why AAA companies use UE3 so often)
    for easy game making. (more control per thing).

    Epic games, knows how to do things professionally (and did years of research on what licensees needed/wanted in the workflow)
    use that to improve Unity.
    (e.g. Trinigy Vision etc. also use this approach, and that engine is also very popular in the industry)
     
  29. janpec

    janpec

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    I dont think you are looking from right perspective.
    Unreal, Crytek and Id are all much bigger and more experianced team with long time engine development (at least twice as much as Unity devs). Unity team just probably doesnt have time to put team in game production too.
    Also why did you put it they "had" to make game? I am sure that Epic games didnt had to make game becouse of finacial problems. They sold probably arround 100 licenses for UE2 and 3.
     
  30. saymoo

    saymoo

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    to whom are your reacting?
     
  31. HeadClot

    HeadClot

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    What I think Unity 4.x Needs

    1. Visual Scripting - Similar to kismet
    2. DX11 Support - Unity already said that they would be supporting this according to a previous poster
    3. Better/More flexible network support - This way we do not have to License out third party network library's but we still can if we need to.
    4. 64 Bit Support - I run Unity on a 64 bit machine and this is a big one especially for me.
    5. Cinematic Editor - Perhaps Unity can create an editor similar to the Cry engine Track view Editor. Link
    6. Particle System Editor - I know unity has this to some extent BUT it is limited compared to other engines (Unreal and Cry engine)
    7. Scale form Integration - This is quickly becoming industry standard; if not already.

    I would personally love to see unity keep its ability to be versatile and at the same time Be improved in so many ways. :)
     
    Last edited: May 27, 2011
  32. janpec

    janpec

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    hippocoder.
     
  33. jmpp

    jmpp

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    Just for the record, you can already do this. If you're on Mac (I guess it's similar in Windows, but I personally wouldn't know), drill down to the Terminal and perform the following:

    Code (csharp):
    1.  
    2. cd /Applications/Unity/Unity.app/Contents/MacOS
    3. ./Unity -projectPath <pathToYourOtherProjectHere>
    4.  
    An example of -projectPath would be:

    Code (csharp):
    1.  
    2. ./Unity -projectPath "/Volumes/Your Awesome External Drive/Unity Games/That Other Unity Project"
    3.  
    (the path to the project needs to be enclosed in quotes if there are spaces or any other sort of special characters in it.)

    That will open up a new Unity editor instance focused on the other project that you passed as argument to the -projectPath flag. An alternate way that doesn't require the -projectPath flag is to turn on the "Show Project Wizard at Startup" option in the Unity preferences and that will force Unity to always ask you what project you want to go to when you open up (any instance of) the editor.

    Admittedly, there's still a lot of room for your request because this whole thing could be made easier, more visible and more accessible for everybody, even for those like me who love and already spend a lot of time at the Terminal!

    Regards,


    - jmpp
     
    Last edited: May 27, 2011
  34. Eric5h5

    Eric5h5

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    You can also just duplicate the Unity app. Takes up more disk space, of course, but simpler.

    --Eric
     
  35. HolBol

    HolBol

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    You can do this already on windows. Just run the application twice.
     
  36. flim

    flim

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    3.x is just less than a year, I hope UT will deploy all the mentioned features in 3.x.

    Maybe off-topic, I hope 3.x has multi-thread rendering, 64-bit editor+engine, integrated cinematic editor, AI.

    Those are reasonable features for a 2011-2012 road map, right? We are not using Pentium 3 or single core Pentium 4 today.
     
    Last edited: May 28, 2011
  37. Dreamora

    Dreamora

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    and you can do it on osx too, just be aware that the 2 instances at the same time from doc etc is no unity thing, that an osx thing.
    if you want to start two of them with different projects (the same ones is a no go and not allowed happily in U3 as it breaks the whole project) you can do so from the command line. There is somewhere instruction on it.
     
  38. stimarco

    stimarco

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    I can offer a cast-iron guarantee that the following features WILL DEFINITELY be included in Unity 4.0:

    • An even number just to the left of the first decimal point in the version number!
    • An awesome new About... box!
    • Some new stuff and changes in the Editor!
    • Some new stuff and changes in the engine!
    • More stuff in the Asset Store than there is today!
    • Some stuff people will love!
    • Some other stuff people (like Taumel) won't like—but the precise bits will vary from poster to poster!
    • A "Make MMORPG" button!*
    • A thread appearing in the forums shortly after its release demanding to know which features will appear in Unity 5.0!

    Seriously, people: What in the name of Harold Camping is this thread even doing here?


    * Terms and conditions apply. User must purchase unadvertised "Unity MMORPG" license. Staggeringly expensive hardware, hosting, and bandwidth required. License fee will be greater than $NaN. Must have own development team consisting entirely of innocent teenaged wannabes with absolutely no interest in making their own MMORPGs: only yours**. Pricing is per server. Documentation extra. No sample code is supplied. Must add own graphics, audio, quests, clichés and other content, including scripts and code. "Make MMORPG" button is for illustrative use only.

    ** Good luck with that.
     
    Last edited: May 28, 2011
  39. HeadClot

    HeadClot

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    *Thick London Accent*

    By George you are right!


    It should be under the Make a Wish forum section!

    :p
     
  40. flim

    flim

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    I really want the soldier disappear in Unity 3, 4 splash screen.
     
  41. Don-Gray

    Don-Gray

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    I think it's time Unity allows users to use their own images for the splash screen like Max does.
    (maybe you already can, I don't know)
     
    Last edited: May 28, 2011
  42. oxl

    oxl

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    +1 .

    In Unity 3.4 please. Seriously.

    --
    oxl
     
    Last edited: May 28, 2011
  43. saymoo

    saymoo

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    I can hardly name that an inprovement (removal of the soldier in the splash) request.
     
  44. JRavey

    JRavey

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    That people complain so much about the trivial splash makes me think it should stay. Unity Pro could have a user-defined splash screen, that might be OK.
     
  45. Don-Gray

    Don-Gray

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    It is trivial, but (implementing) being able to edit it is trivial too.
     
  46. JRavey

    JRavey

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    Good, if it's trivial, then don't worry about it.
     
  47. Don-Gray

    Don-Gray

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    No worry, just a simple request.
    As far as I know I am free to make such a request.
     
  48. Moonjump

    Moonjump

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    You can with Unity Pro. I understand UT having the Unity splash screen in the non-Pro versions. The only problem is now that there are so many Unity games out there that it could maybe bore some users. Plus I have so many Unity games on my iPhone that I often wonder if I have launched the right game.

    I would rather it changed to a developer splash screen with a large Powered by Unity watermark, or at least a developer image window within a standard splash screen.
     
  49. Don-Gray

    Don-Gray

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    Oh, maybe I am being misunderstood (I have Pro) I am talking about when you launch the editor!

    :)
     
  50. Eric5h5

    Eric5h5

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    This is about the splash screen in the editor, not builds. In any case, you can solve the issue by getting a Mac, since the OS X version doesn't have any kind of splash screen at all. (Might be a bit of a drastic step just to get rid of a splash screen. ;) )

    --Eric