[RELEASED] UniStorm 5.2 - AAA Volumetric Clouds, URP Support, Weather, Sky, Atmospheric Fog, & More!

It's a bit weird with the way Unity does their Asset Store updates. Unity 5 is categorized into individual 0.0 versions on the Asset Store.

So, you will need to have Unity 5.0.2 in order to receive the 2.0.6 update. Unity 5.0.0 still uses UniStorm 1.8.3.

 

We're very close to finishing our new Climate Generation system for UniStorm. This will be available via the Editor, which can be used for generating one single climate that UniStorm will use, or using a Climate Zone, which you can have as many in your scene as you want. Climate Zones change the weather to for that specific zone.

The Climate Zone will generate zones for you using real world data. This allows you to have snow mountains, rainy grasslands, and dry deserts. Climate Zones can be triggered by both player height and by an OnTrigger collision.

Climate Zones will not change the weather. All weather will still be dynamically generated. This affects all climate related options.

We have made a video demonstrating a climate change by height. We have generated 2 climates, a Grassland climate (380 or lower) and a Mountain climate (380 or above) UniStorm will then take the settings from the Climate Zone (Seen Below) and apply them to UniStorm.

Gaia was used to make the terrain and place all the rocks and trees.

Climate Zone Editor (nearly finished)

 

Honestly, this looks badass awesome. Going to use this in my future games when Climate Zones are finished.

Great work tho!

Just a question beside: Is the degree system just based on Fahrenheit?

 

Thank you.

It has the option to use both Fahrenheit and Celsius. UniStorm will then handle the rest.

 

Here's the updated Climate Zone Editor. It will now generate climates using both Celsius and Fahrenheit. The screenshot of the Editor is using Celsius.

 

Is this a feature of version 2.1? I don't know the whole history of this project but read that version 2.1 is planned.

So it's currently under development? Any release plans?

 

Yes, this is a 2.1 feature. We plan on submitting UniStorm 2.1 sometime this week.

 

I like it, though one thing bugs me: the magic temperature drop. Are there any plans to make that more gradual somehow?

One way I see things working is to have smaller, more discrete "climates" that might jump from, say, 50 degrees to 40, then to 30, then to 20, etc. Can something like that can be set up?

 

That's a great idea. It's something that we can certainly add.

To explain further, it's not a magic temperature drop. It is the player switching Climate Zones and UniStorm adapting the new settings. This happens by collision or height. What we can do is make this transition gradual instead of being instant.

 

Good job. It seems like you've doubled if not tripled your efforts. I hope your sales continue to rise. I think this is becoming the defacto weather solution for Unity. Keep impressing us o and do speed trees ;-) thats next gen next gen.

 

Thank you.

Yes, we are looking into support for snow with SpeedTree.

 

Another (non priority) request would be...true volumetric clouds and weather, with sky shading...like lightning that lights clouds etc.

 

Clouds are already lit by lightning.

Volumetric clouds are something that we are considering for a feature version.

Thanks for the suggestions.

 

We were aiming to submit UniStorm 2.1 sometime this week, but things took a little longer than expected. So, expect UniStorm 2.1 to be submitted, for sure, sometime early next week.

We have also decided to give everyone a new demo scene to get the most out of UniStorm. Our last demo is a bit dated. So, it's time for a new one. We are also including the UniStorm UI you see above, with the icons.

As you can see from the screenshots, storm shading has been greatly improved as well as lighting.

Here's the new demo that will be included with UniStorm 2.1. Big thanks to Gaia for generating this terrain.

 

Many of you have requested the ability to alter the night sky color. So, we've done just that. With UniStorm 2.1, you will be able to adjust the night sky color. We have also improved the moon and star shaders.

Here's UniStorm's new night skies (this is using the UniStorm Demo scene that's included):

 

I have been away from UniStorm for a while. Today I decided to give it a go again.
Made a small scene, little valley 500x500. Nothing else..
Without Unistorm added, I was running at 160 - 180 fps.

I added the prefab UniStormPrefab_C_Survival with this, I got MAX 29 fps... Is this normal?
Infact before that I ha a browser and Word open, then I had 2 fps...

Unistorm seems a tad hungrier than before?

Mark

 

UniStorm's performance has been increased greatly, some our older updates. UniStorm Desktop can even run better than that, on a mobile device.

It sounds like you may be receiving some type of null reference, this can cause huge losses of frame rate.

What I think is going on is that you are missing the UI system from the survival demo. Try testing out the survival scene demo that we included and seeing if you still have 29 fps, I'm certain you won't.

Make sure you aren't receiving any errors in the console. If you are, you are missing a reference somewhere. If you need to, copy the survival demo scene, or just use it and delete the unneeded items, for your starting point.

If you need further help just ask.

 

I never bought this tool, because I was not buying 2 tools... for the same thing for mobile and PC... Now that you finally added it, you have a new customer . Thanks.

 

Great to hear. We felt like it was a good move to combine the systems.

 

is now on the newest update also the example scenes ?

 

Nice screenshots.
Looking forward to checking out the new update when it's available.

 

I apologize, but I'm not sure I understand what you're asking.

Thanks.

We are aiming at submitting UniStorm 2.1 this week.

 

Another screenshot update showing off UniStorm's night sky improvements.

UniStorm's star shader has been improved allowing for non-visibly tiling stars. We have also redone the moon shader and retextured all moon phases. Stars also fade out along the horizon (which can be adjusted)

 

I mean the demo from youtube will this also come like a integration, or 3rd party support ??

 

Okay - major feature request.

The mechanism that UniStorm integrates with other stuff is a bit messy right now. The first hours of playing with UniStorm become:

1) UniStorm took over my camera and broke my input system
2) Ah, I need to move all my stuff from its player object over to my camera.... why does UniStorm have a Player object and Camera and MotionController in my game by default when I'm likely to have all of that stuff myself
---- Why doesn't UniStorm just set the camera as a variable in a script so I can drag my camera or gameObject into Unistorm and it can parent whatever it needs itself without me dragging stuff all over the place... the reason why this is REALLY messy shows up later
3) Okay I need to copy all of these effects off the UniStorm camera or the whole thing breaks. That's not good. I'm doing all of this and I don't know that its going to work.
4) Okay... Attach my camera to the UniStorm Editor... wait, if I'm doing this why doesn't UniStorm just add everything in itself when it activates the Editor
5) Ah crap there is another version coming out soon. Will I have to do all of this again?


Too many steps, some of which seem unnecessary, and too much removing stuff that I'm not sure why its adding to begin with to get it to work properly on day one.

TLDR; Feature Request
-------------------------------------
Would really like a much simpler version of just the weather system that can simple accept a camera/parent game object since UniStorm expects/depends on a lot of other things already existing or being in a particular place.

 

UniStorm doesn't change or alter any input of a camera. If this is happening, it is most likely some conflation within your project or something with your camera system. No where in UniStorm's script does it alter the users camera.

You are right, the process for applying a custom player is a bit dated. We will develop a system that attaches everything for the user. We will try to have this done for UniStorm 2.1 update.

Thank you for your suggestion.

 

Not necessarily true in two instances:

When there are multiple cameras in a scene Unity picks the one with the highest depth property as the one its going to use. In the event of a tie, its really whichever comes last.

In this case, when Unity creates a new scene - the depth of the camera is -1 (no idea why that's the case). The depth of the camera being created by UniStorm is 0, so Unity is going to use that one as the main/visible camera. Since it uses that one, the scripts attached to that camera also have priority. UniStorm attaches a MouseLook Mobile script (not sure what the Mobile part is) to its camera so that's where its taking over everything and unless you take a step back to try and figure out what's breaking - you're pulling your hair out.

This is with Unity 5.2.2f1 on OSX targeting PC, Mac & Linux Standalone.

 

You don't need to use the UniStorm camera. You can simply use the one your player is using. You need to make sure it is attached to UniStorm in the camera object slot. The depth plays no role with UniStorm. It can whatever you need it to be. If something is breaking, show us a screenshot so we can try to help. It's not the cause of UniStorm. It sounds like the script names of the standard Unity assets are conflicting with your camera system. You can delete the mouse and character system that came with UniStorm. They are the default ones with the Unity standard assets.

You also need to make sure you are importing both the UniStorm Desktop and UniStorm Mobile folders.

 

Hi,
Will 2.1 include the planting demo that's previously been shown via youtube?
i have some of the assets that you use in the demo, so including the demo would be very helpful and useful.

shwa

 

We will look into how we can package up a scene file containing references and positions to see if we can get it ready for 2.1.

 

I wonder if that could be a 2.1.5 release since it doesn't necessarily improve functionality. I'm pretty excited for all the new features/fixes presented with 2.1.

 

It's cool but there is a big problem! we can't see changes we made in editor and should hit play to see what changes! so that's awful and I can't work like that. please make this more pro

 

We agree, we want to submit 2.1, then we can work on this.

This has been fixed several version ago, what version are you using?

Try this solution to see if it works:
http://unistorm-weather-system.wiki..._UniStorm_editor_will_not_keep_values_I_enter

 

A very heavily requested feature and the last part of our UniStorm 2.1 update is the Auto Player Setup system demonstrated in the video below.

This video demonstrates UniStorm 2.1's new Auto Player Setup. This works by auto spawning, assigning, placing, and positioning all needed UniStorm components for custom players. It then gets the player's camera and assigns it to UniStorm with the necessary settings. Lastly, it will automatically assign all these components to UniStorm. This process takes just 1 second and saves users time from having to do it manually.

 

I'm using Unity 5.3.0f and UniStorm v2.0.6.0 but I have to click play to see the changes

 

If I could like this more than one time I would

 

I don't believe Unity 5.3 is out yet and is still in beta. This is most likely why it's not working. It works perfectly fine in all other versions of Unity up to 5.2.3 (the newest version). Until we see the release notes, and can test it ourselves, there's not much we can do.

Edit: We saw there's an open beta for Unity 5.3. We will check it out to see what's causing issues. It says in the changes that editors and runtime has been changed. I'm sure we just need to add some type of update changes within the editor code. We won't know for sure until we look into it. However, we won't have time to look into this until after we submit UniStorm 2.1.

You can email or PM us so we can figure out what's happening. Sending us a video of what's happening would really help.

Glad you like it and thanks again for the suggestion. It's something we've been meaning to do. We're glad it's finally fully implemented.

 

Another quick update.

We know that some people have said that before night time it was too dark. So, we've fixed this by adding in an adjustable twilight color option that greatly improves the lighting between day and night. This affects the transition from evening to night and from night to morning. As you can from the screenshot the result is much better. This can be any color the user wants so if some users want it dark during these transitions, you can still do so.

UniStorm with the twilight color option


UniStorm without the twilight color option



We have also improved our procedural skybox shader for more realistic sunrises and sunsets.

 

You continue to amaze us!

 

So when do you think 2.1 will be done, I want to see all your awesome work!

 

twilight, sunrise and sunset shots look good!

 

We're planning on submitting it tomorrow. However, we may need till Monday or Tuesday. This update has so many tools, fixes, and additions. We need to make sure everything is flawless.

I can assure you it will be well worth the wait.

Thanks!

 

The terrain at night is still bright. This seems to be due to the fact that Unistorm does not change the ambient intensity of environment lighting tab. For day to look good it needs to to have a value around "1" but then the night terrain is to bright, if I manually change it at night down to 0.2 the night terrain now looks good.

I see the same results in the standard demo scene.

I've already set the proceduralSky for the skybox and the Sun_Mon object for the sun and changed ambient color source to color. Will 2.1 have time settings for ambient intensity?

Cheers

 

Brilliant BHS, I have been away for a couple of months since I got frustrated by terrain generation with TC. I have now moved my project over to Gaia which compliments Unistorm perfectly.

The addition of Climatic zones is great and dare I say improves the functionality of Unistom to no end. The screenshots with the twilight option are great and also are a welcome addition.

Good job team.

 

Cool man take your time

 

As you can see from the screenshots above, the darkness around night time has been fixed. We have added a custom color option for transitioning into night and transitioning into morning.

Thank you. We have been working hard to add as much functionality and improvement to UniStorm as possible. Expect continued support and improvements to come with future updates.

We use Gaia too and it is an awesome system.

 

Can't wait! please release it faster
And please test it on Unity 5.3.0f1 too

I've mentioned max and low light intensity is 1 and 1.5! please increase it to 4

 

I really need to increase Directional Light intensity, but seems It can only raise up to 1.5! is there anyway I can increase that parameter?

 

Hello guys. Glad to see you have released a new version. Alas the bug with moon/stars still persists. Now it can be even seen in a demo scene: a stars appear BEFORE moon as black dots. Just open demo scene, set time to midnight and look at the moon (the bug only appears if HDR is on)

Second question: is there a way to adjust scene ambient light independely to clouds? The clouds only looks good with ambient = 1. My scene doesn't use so much ambient, so clouds are totally black even in a daytime

 

i am interested in unistorm

does this work flawlessly with rtp?