Unity 5 Free Features?

I am just wondering if there will be a free version of unity five?

 

Yes there will be. What they haven't decided yet is what new features will be included in the free version.

 

Thanks

 

Which means... there's plenty of room for speculation!

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that realtime GI will not be in the free version.

 

Probably not, I guess.

 

They can keep GI in Pro and a whole bunch of the other stuff. Just give us render textures in free and maybe profiler access. Realtime GI seems like it could be a real license seller which could make up for the people who are upgrading for RT and the profiler.

 

Still hoping for just basic render textures in Unity Free... lots of interesting uses, yet there are so many other advanced features now - isn't it time to make render textures available? Of course, I have no right to request any such thing since Unity Free is awesomely generous.

 

what do render textures do?.

 

http://docs.unity3d.com/Documentation/Components/class-RenderTexture.html

 

Renders textures don't do anything, they are just temporary textures in the memory. It's the graphic pipeline that renders camera contents into RTs for future usage. For example if you want to create Depth/normal effects (SSAO, shadowmaps, etc). G buffers are also a good example of RTs usage which are heavily used in Deferred techniques (such as Deferred Lighting and Deferred Rendering).

 

RenderTextures and Async Level loading would be nice.
I think that dont having Async loding scares a lot of people away, especially if they dont want to develop for mobile.
How ever I'm really excited about Unity 5

 

I think "making profiler" free, beats them all. You will realize it when you start chasing ghosts.

For mobile, GI is not a big deal,really. Nor the rendertextures either, they can be faked or simulated in free. Even rendertextures is not so important for a casual mobile game. Most likely you want to do some fancy graphical effect with camera memory.

 

Getting Render Textures in Unity Free would be sweet, but I agree with kayum about the profiler. Getting the profiler in Unity Free would be amazing!

 

Even a "light profiler version" would be incredible to have in Unity Free...

 

Most likely the physics based shader rendering, audio mixer, new profiler would be available for pro users only.

 

Yep. Just something to track memory allocations and time-consuming functions would be very, very handy.

 

Some basic Profiler in the free version would be fine, now, Unity 5 is targeting AAA so let us work better mobiles

Anyone looking at "Benchy profiler" in the Asset Store? Seems fine, a bit rough still.

 

I assume their objective is: unity5 pro for AAA.

Then you can see, mobile game development needs a heavy use of profiler. In something complex, you will never know what is wrong with your code, unless you use profiler. For example I was a fan of LINQ. According to 0__60_fps_in_14_days_What_we_learned_trying_to_optimize_our_game_using_Unity3D, you should avoid using LINQ. Because LINQ creates an immediate buffer. There are may be many such things. For a desktop PC, it might not be necessary. But for mobile we have to do carefully.

 

if they still wont let us use the dark theme, i hope they at least give us a medium theme

 

Render textures would be great, even as a beginner they can still make your game look better, And profiler, even a stripped down, would help a lot optimizing your game. Every thing else a lot smaller developers don't need. Also does any know if the old web player is still going to be around?

 

Profiler would be nice, but I have my own set of tools which work quite nicely. Render textures would be great though!

 

I would love render textures, that's a great idea!

 

I believe it would be a smart move ultimately, on Unity's part to add render textures to free. I think with enlighten, new fmod etc there's now enough value in pro to forego the need to hold back render textures from free. They could also keep other high end features in pro as well.

That should keep most free users using Free as opposed to UE4 I'd guess, since you can do pretty much any visuals in free then... just perhaps not quite as cool, and open up asset store's pro offerings a little more.

I do believe PROfiler is a professional tool though, and worth it's weight in gold. I can't see that budging from pro.

But that's my personal opinion, for whatever it's worth.

 

With no enlighten in free what would free users use to light map? Beast is gone in Unity 5 so the only option left to free users would be light mapping in their DCC app.

About the profiler, if I were still using free I would want the profiler over render textures. It doesn't serve the interests of developers, gamers or Unity technologies to put out games with poor performance.

 

Would be great.

 

I think the profiler is a very important tool and should be on the free version, it's very hard to figure it out what's causing your game to be slow or stuttering and these issues keeps your game from being optimized/playable on more devices, thus, having it helps you get money, and with money you can buy the unity pro to make stuff fancier.

 

As a hobbyist, I'd take this deal. I can write my own behavior trees and the like, and the profiler is a professional tool. For free use, I can eyeball memory issues well enough. Render Textures would let me get in those last little bits of visual polish. Not necessary, but nice, fancy and can really set off certain elements ts when done right. And while digital distribution has changed the game, people still generally see your graphics first, and having that extra bit of polish can help.

 

That's exactly what I was thinking. Also, if you look at the free/pro split now, very few of the gated features require a re-working of the workflow to implement, presumably to allow customers to "upgrade" their project to Pro with minimal changes to the content they've already made. However, in U5, the physically-based shading looks to be an integrated component right at the start of the work-flow, so I can't see how they could keep it a pro-only feature and still have the "project upgrading" ability they have now. So maybe PBR will be in free also? If that is the case, I think it is very unlikely for render-textures to be in free as well.

 

PBR is definetly in free. RenderTextures are nice, but is it a must-have for hobbydeveloper or small Indies? I won't think that they will appear in free..

 

I would guess they'd just disable the gi part and let you have lightmaps baked only. This is what free users have in Unity 4, so I can't imagine anyone is going backward.

 

A request on the easier side (I think), would be to support Oculus in the free version.

A bigger request would be an option to allow all pro features to be used in free, but you wouldn't be allowed to publish using them without buying pro version.

 

New GUI and PBS. That's my wishlist. The rest is a nice bonus.

 

RenderTextures = Oculus Rendering Support
Oculus needs a screen-space barrel distortion to deal with the pincushion distortion of the lenses. Head tracking, well, that needs native plugin support as things stand (or inclusion into the engine...but that's more work and potentially risky business-wise)

 

I'd like render textures and post processing effects to be free for indie.

 

The profiler isn't the only way to profile your code. System.Diagnostics.StopWatch, for one.

The profiler is great, but it's just one tool in an arsenal.

 

It would be cool if Unity considered more ways of giving us cool Unity 5 features. What about letting us choose like three or four PRO features per project out of let's say twenty PRO features (render to texture, soft shadows, etc.) chosen by Unity staff? Would that be possible?

 

Unity is a business. They would gain nothing from letting you cherry-pick the few features you want from Pro. Now, letting you buy said features individually might make a bit more sense.

 

Officials, do you plan to make the dark skin available for free? That may sound a little bit weird to opposite of some ppl here requesting some pro things and etc.. but that dark skin has some kind of mental power)) lol.. It's easy to develop when it's dark, it's very difficult to work with light skin..

Could you please give some comments about this?

Thanks

 

Speaking from when Render Textures was available for about a weak last autumn I can tell you how pleasant it was to have Unity Free render 16 UMA characters so fast.

Isn't it a problem in that it allows all those expensive Pro Post Effects to be done for free then? I did buy an asset called Painterly that needed post effects of Unity Pro. Can't use it but didn't bother asking for a refund. Duh!

Of course having a profiler available would be nice too as then for example it'd be much easier for me to figure out why the vanilla UMA asset is only running as 5 FPS on os X Lion with Unity 4.5 when the same project ran at 27 FPS with Unity 4.3.4???

 

Shhh, they'll hear you >.>
But yes, render textures are used for post fx (is how it works elsewhere at least).

 

i really really really hope that unity 5 free has multi threading!!!!
i have 8 logical cores but unity uses only 1, the rest does nothing. now my game lags on my high end laptop(i7 4810mq,gtx 870m), but uses only 20% cpu. and because of that the gpu cant do much to. UNITY: please support multi threading !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

Any chances GUI will be Pro only? I really hope not.

EDIT: Nevermind, it'll be out with 4.6

 

The new 4.6 uGUI will be in free. It's not Pro only

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/of...oming-in-unity-4-6.248524/page-5#post-1662586

 

I had a chance to finally see Unity Pro in action and I really like it, in fact LOVE it. The things that I would require in the next Free version to stop me from moving to UE4 in the future would be the LOD system, Batching, Asset Bundles, Occlusion Culling, and a few, not all of the post processing affects. Everyone says Render Textures and Profiler...I am only a designer and my job is to do level design at the moment and my brief time with Unity Pro was not enough to see those in action but I believe you.

Might seem like a tall order from me, but with all the other pretty stuff coming in Unity 5, there is more than enough to keep from me that I think we could be given some of these other older features. In fact, other than Speed Tree and the GUI, I would be happy with Unity Pro right now! Of course, some built it shaders would be nice but I am happy with the ones from the community.

I do know I can get LOD, Occlusion Culling, and probably other stuff from the asset store, and I do have several of these assets. I find it often takes a couple of products to find one that works for me, some of them are cumbersome and clumsy, and they don't always work well together. I have had wonderful luck with shaders, not so much with other tools. I am not a programmer so when I am told that I can write a script to fix this and that, it just doesn't make me happy, or my programmers who are busy with actually...like..making the game?

So..I love Unity Pro, I want Unity Pro. But I hold out for hope that either Free will expand a bit or that the price will drop so our team can afford to buy it before we make all that money on a non-existent game. In the meantime, we develop a test version and then if UE4 comes out with a viable networking solution for us, we move over there. I have one programmer who is working with UE4 right now and loves Blueprint. It is a bit too high powered for our audience level though but hopefully we can turn stuff off.

Again, I would be happy with a little more in Free, the old stuff, the stuff that has been out in games for many years. That is what our players need in our game. And if we ever want to actually show the public a nice game with a few acceptable features, then we need more than the current version of free. The difference between the visuals in Free and Pro at this very moment is stunning. I had no idea until I saw it.

Hippo, I value your posts, but I sometimes think you forgot what it was like to be starting out. I get this "let them eat cake" vibe at times. No disrespect intended, honestly. Just my opinion.

 

If the new additions could all stay Pro, it might be enough to justify moving Render Textures to Unity 5 Free, allowing for widespread indie development of VR content for the Rift (and to a lesser extent, the DIY headsets like Google Cardboard and Durovis Dive).

Unfortunately I feel like the only way Render Textures will make it into Unity Free is if everyone stops wanting them. Which isn't about to happen.

 

Anything but the Free Dark skin... Lol.

 

THIS. I'm diving into UE4 for a DK2 hobby project that I would have otherwise developed in Unity free and potentially upgraded to pro once it was out of the prototype phase. As it stands, I either drop $1500 on unity pro, or switch to unreal and spend the dough on a beefier desktop (which I probably need anyways)

 

I'm a huge Unity fan, and use Unity Free for a 2D game I'm making. But for 3D, I've switched to UE4 for one simple reason: Unity Free doesn't support the Oculus Rift. It's a darn shame too, from the time I've spent with UE4, I can tell you I would happily switch back.

It's not been quite enough (yet) to push me over to buying Pro when I expect to make no profit on my games, as a hobbiest. I have, however, bought several asset store extensions and would continue to do so.

On the other hand, a more Epic-like licensing change would easily convince me to go Pro. (Drop the 12 month minimum and either "Keep what you have if you cancel" or lower the monthly price significantly.) Given that they're still selling $1500 licenses and 12-month $75 subs today, even as a Unity 5 pre-order, I don't expect this to happen.

 

Yeah render textures in free would still not enable the rift though, I think you'd need dll support. But what unity could (and should imo) do is add native vr support. There would be support for morpheus on ps4 and rift on desktop. That would be a really cool thing.

I guess they'd be worried about bloating the api a little though, I guess. Perhaps a kickback from facebook can oil the wheels.

 

Didn't stop them from adding a whole boatload of classes to support various mobile platforms. I think one class derived from Camera to support VR is not too much to ask.

What WOULD stop them from implementing it this way is that none of the VR headsets are really finalized, so if they added native VR support it would be constantly changing to keep up with the development of those kits. When Oculus Rift is released for real, I'd say odds of native VR (and thus, odds of Oculus Rift support in Free) will skyrocket.