Fully Dynamic Diffuse Global Illumination

Maybe we should wait for the first beta to be released before we ask for improvements?

 

It was more about having a plugin usable in a game on a PC with good 3D card , not a plugin with uncertain future improvments. Anyway i'll wait until as necessary it will get fast enought.

 

Awesome. Let me know if you need a tester!

 

So looking forward to this....

 

@sonicether

thank you so much for the feedback.
I'll be waiting patiently

 

Hi sonicether when are you planning to release the first beta ? To be honest the last demo you released looked good enough as far as I was concerned and looked certainly good enough to release in beta. What are the bugs you are still trying to resolve ? As long as you made it clear what its limitations were upfront and it was cheaper during the beta period it looks ready to go on the store to me.

The performance looks fine to me too and I have a 5 year old graphics chip. Even if its performance was lower it would still be of use to some people prototyping levels in unity without having to wait for gi baking.

Alternatively you could release a free trial version with a watermark embedded like scrutiny render to avoid any risk of people not being happy with a purchase because they had misunderstood any limitations it had.

Because it is an effect that can be turned on or off easily its performance isn't so critical because if someone doesn't have a machine that can cope with it they can turn it off in a similar way to ssr.

With the arrival of VR and 14nm graphics chips the average graphics performance in a pc is going to increase soon anyway. I have an old graphics chip and as a result I don't run my games at ultra high settings but that doesn't mean I don't like the fact that the games I buy will look better if I buy a better graphics card.

We need high end effects like this added to unity to make the most of that impending increase in graphics performance. Obviously try and make it as efficient as possible and I imagine when unity gets round to implementing the hardware voxelisation features enable in directx 12.1 hardware there will be ways to make it more efficient on the latest hardware. But in the mean time it looks easily ready for its first release.

 

Thanks for answer, sonicether.

I do not want to press, but could you say if at least come out in a few months, at the end of the year or next year?

 

As Unity GI is sucks I've stopped my project and waitting for your GI solution, please be faster thanks.

 

You are not his boss.

 

Please read my entire post again! I said I've stopped my project and then ask him to be faster please!
It was more like a beg request. I'm not his boss infact he is my hero

 

Honestly, if you stop your production because of the lack of good GI, you definitely have the wrong priorities.

GI isn't more than a nice icing on top of the cake. It doesn't make your gameplay better, nor is it necessary for a good looking game.

Furthermore, you shouldn't rely too much on the work of one person. There is always the chance this never sees the light or get's abandoned for several personal reasons by the developer.

 

I never switched to 5.x due to the screwed lighting. If they had kept beast I would have done the move. So you can switch back or bake lighting in your 3d package.

 

Because you're in a position to criticize other developers priorities and tell them what features are both important and unimportant, without citing any evidence you've created and launched anything of your own.

If you don't agree that a third-party developer successfully completing a dynamic realtime GI system for Unity is the single most important thing going on with Unity right now, then you are wrong.

 

LOL.

 

And it happened for DivergenceOnline. This thread is not the place to start rants. Keep it real everyone.

 

Sorry but is this project still in progress?

 

So... anything new?

 

Just sending good vibes to Sonic Ether

 

Sonic, please don't give up... We need you

 

From the latest Unity 5.4 beta notes:

If i remember right, i think @sonicether said that having this in Unity would be great for performance purposes in this GI?

Pretty awesome news from Unity by adding a motion vector buffer.

 

Pls Sonic release as is, i dont care about performance, i want to do Cutscenes/Animations !

 

Hey guys, here's a little update on how things are going.

The asset itself is ready at this point! The front end is finished and I've fixed the issues that I considered important enough to fix before the first release. I'm just finishing up one last demo scene which is just a simple randomly generated 3D maze looking thing that you can re-generate with a different seed at run-time, so it shows off the "dynamicness" of the whole system.






Speaking on the future of the GI itself, I've put a lot of thought into what I want to work on after this first release, and that'll all be clearly communicated with a development roadmap.

I think it'll be a good to give people an idea of what it's like to work with, so, despite my shyness, I'm going to make a a video that simply goes over the various parameters, shows what it's like to setup in a scene, and gives tips on best usage practices. I'm also going to put together a video of the GI in-action to supplement screenshots for the Asset Store page.

So, everything is really coming together now! I'm sorry it's taken longer than I thought it would. If I'm being honest with you guys, it was a bit of a struggle for me to truly be okay with the state this project is in for the first release--for each thing I'd check off my to-do list, I'd add another... My intuition has been telling me to go ahead with this release, and I've decided to trust that feeling and move forward. I've been so afraid to make a wrong move or say the wrong thing that it's resulted in me seeming like I don't care or that I'm not working as hard as I can on this project. I'm learning to trust my instincts and embracing that I'm going to make mistakes. That's an unavoidable fact about development that I'm sure all of you are aware of, and a lesson that I'm finally getting through my head.

So, thanks for sticking with me. I'll of course keep you guys updated with further developments.

 

#happyclappydancewoot

--IronDuke

 

@sonicether
thanks so much for the update info!

Please let me ask you a question:
Are you doing something to prevent piracy?

For example, EasyRoads3D Pro has a validation method that prevent easily be pirated.
I known that there is no software/system unbreakable if the cracker(s) has the time and the motivation.

Best regards.

 

Those screens look like what I would have spected the system to be when U5 was released. This being realtime looks like magic. As for ideas for the roadmap I think most of it should focus in optimization. Stuff like baking to lightmaps, calculating light every n seconds etc... Imagis loop sssuperb.

 

This being quite a unique piece of software It would be really easy to spot in a comercial game, pretty much a suicide if you're distributing via Steam.

I believe there are little people out there using pirated stuff in comercial games, and I would not bother much on those using in hobby part time unless is not much complicated integrating such protection. The best anti piracy is to update the package often. Same for games, update a game 3-4 times a week on release with mandatory updates to be able to play online and you'll reduce piracy a lot.

 

What is the white box in the first image?

Surely you wanted to show us the system as pure as possible but some antialiasing would not hurt

 

https://twitter.com/sonic_ether/status/727206185342918656

 

This is very promising... I am using Enlighten on my projects but it is cumbersome to set up and it is a pain to bake things because it looks inconsistent... keep at this man.

 

This is great news! Can't wait to try the new demo @sonicether

 

This is great news, i hope you'll show some best practices about settings for lower hardware.

 

Great to hear, really looking forward this

This GI solution looks really promising. Is it at all possible to do a performance and visual comparison between this GI and Unity's Enlighten? Would be interesting to see the results

 

Does it uses keywords? cause I'm really out of keywords and already hit that 128 keywords limitation.

 

@sonicether,

I'm looking forward to supporting your project once you release it on the asset store... on a side-note; your volumetric clouds and godrays in Minecraft are stunning! Are you thinking about porting those over to Unity any time soon?

 

I gotta be totally honest, if you find Enlighten to be cumbersome to set up, you might find the same in this solution, at least in its current state. Sure, you can just drop it on the main camera and get it actually running as easy as that, but you may find situations in your scene where you have to add occlusion geometry, and I highly recommend setting up low-poly proxy models for voxelization if your scene uses lots of high-poly objects. 100% dynamic real-time solutions will always be less robust and more touchy to situations because of the corners that must be cut to achieve acceptable performance. I hope I've struck a nice balance.

I'll certainly try to compare my solution and Enlighten visually, though comparing them performance-wise would be almost pointless, since Enlighten is so blazingly fast.

It doesn't use keywords currently. Though, when I have the time to do a really thorough optimization pass, I might decide to use keywords. I just hate working with a resource that I know is limited and for which there's no way to predict how much will be available for any given user.

Yeah, I'd love to! Honestly, I have a ton of ideas, but I have to pace myself

 

I just can't wait to see what you have. And after playing with Enlighten, I've gotten the hang of it.

 

Woah!!! :O
Nice work man!

 

Incredible ... We are in the same situation ... 128 keywords are not enough for next-gen games using a lot of custom shaders and fx ....

 

That's correct, I've seen lots of people saying this that 128 keywords is not enough at all ! maybe 256 keywords be good for few years!

 

Just worked my way through this thread... FANTASTIC work and thank you for spending your time developing this. Your effort and obsession for perfection is appreciated and I'll cast my vote with my money once this baby hits the AS.

 

Any news?

 

Been awhile since I checked in here...those last screenies look great!

Let's get this bad boy on the store Cody!

 

Any news?

 

It seems there is none.

 

relax
its all gonna be fine =)

 

release before Christmas pls !

 

Hey everyone, I just finished the demo I've been working on. You can download it and check it out here:

SEGI Beta v0.8 Labyrinth Demo

This demo does show some of the current problems with the algorithm, so you'll be able to see its strengths and weaknesses in it.

I'll keep you guys updated as I continue preparations for release. We're almost there now!!

 

Lets check !

 

Runs ok in my GTX 750 TI 2GB, at 24 fps "Fantastic Setting"

CPU: Intel i7 with 24 Gb of RAM

 

Average of a stable 63 FPS, highest 65 and lowest 57 with the default settings at 1080p.
CPU i3 3570k, GeForce GTX 780, 16 Gb DDR3.

Low Settings is pretty fast, clocking at 145-160 FPS.