Unity 5 is coming and more!

OK, I was just letting you know Windows Store Windows Phone publishing will require you to upgrade Windows.

 

@goat:

Your estimate is a little off... I actually have ADSL2+! And yea, 4mins is a bit exaggerated, maybe 10mins? still not that big a deal though! and for those whose downloads take 2 hours, I feel your pain! Once Upon A Time, I had a 3G Modem...
@PeterD: Ok... what was that supposed to mean? I can't see the joke... Anyway, isn't 4.5 the one with the new GUI tools?

 

Nope.

--Eric

 

@Eric5h5: which one was it then? 4.6? And i forgot what 4.5 was supposed to have, other than a new shader building process

 

A million fixes and sparkles. 4.6 is GUI as far as I know.

 

and when are we getting these "million fixes and sparkles" ?? days?? weeks?? months??

 

Not long now

 

oh come on........ its great even if Unity 5 comes out this winter... but I'm afraid that the new features will be in 5.2 or 5.4 .. 5.x... can we please get a little info on the initial features of Unity 5.?

 

In the next release, what's new besides the new GUI?

 

the next release is 4.5... i think its fixes and improvements..besides the improved shader compiler... and then its 4.6 which 'i think' is 4.5 + uGUI.

 

This topic is about 5.0. Look in the first post in this thread for the features.

--Eric

 

so you're saying everything is in 5.0 not the cycle of 5? right?

 

Seems really clear to me....

--Eric

 

thanks alot.. i really hope that the 'bundle of joy' comes out soon!

 

So what in Unity 5 has been removed that was in Unity 4?

Also what in Unity 5 has had any feature, use, or aspect of a feature diminished or downgraded or made limited when compared to Unity 4?

(Ex: like how Unity completely screwed people using forward rendering lights and shadows)



You keep telling us about all the positives, but what about the negatives .... or do you plan to keep tight lipped until release day and then have developers mad again?

 

You can use shadows in forward rendering. For point lights and spotlights it requires a minor shader modification, so I'd say "slightly inconvenienced" would be more accurate than "completely screwed", but hey, why not take an opportunity to be overly dramatic!

--Eric

 

/ begin rant

I don't get why you are worked up.
What about forward rendering and shadows? That you can't have point lights casting shadows?
Why do you want point lights casting shadows in forward rendering?
Think about it - forward rendering is not the way to go for high-quality games. If you're using forward rendering, you're likely targeting a platform that isn't very powerful. And if you're targeting a platform that isn't very powerful, why are you then complaining about lack of shadows for point lights? They're computationally expensive to do in forward rendering - you shouldn't be using them anyway, even if they were supported, on whatever platform you're building to.
And if you're targeting high end PCs, then why use forward rendering at all? Deferred is the way to go.

/ end rant

 

But you can.

--Eric

 

we know that Illuminate Lab's Beast will be replaced with Geomeric's Enlighten... and about the forward and deferred lit.... u need more shadows? use Deferred.

 

You can. Now.

Not when it first happened though.

You are missing the point completely.

Its about UT boasting about the positive changes, and making sure to keep quiet about the negative changes. They kept hush hush when they removed forward point light shadows and it wasnt even a major version upgrade either. And frankly it was a stupid move. Some projects simply looked better and ran better on the old system.

So I want them to clearly and openly state all the changes (positive and negative) before I spend a single penny on upgrading. I want to know how my projects will be impacted, I want to know what changes in workflow I will need to make.

 

I'm still waiting for shadow and light support for transparency and particles...

 

Which isn't even possible with conventional shadow mapping, so... you're going to be waiting a while. At least until fixed-function raytracing makes it into consumer hardware (which isn't that far fetched... Imagination already has it, it's just a matter of NVidia and AMD picking up the tech for consumer GPUs)

 

Sorry should've made my post clearer, i mean semi transparency. Other game engine has it already :/, especially particle shading. Well maybe except UE4 for their transparent object.
in Unity grabpass can't receive any shadow is a bit annoying

 

@Hippocoder: what kinda sparkles? The reason why it took so long for me to reply is because my "new post" notification for some reason isn't popping up anymore...

@Eric: So how is this shader modding done? I dare hope they can bake point lights soon...

 

Hm, I've got a question.
Enlighten is a cool tech for making static-ish geometry receive realtime GI.
Light Probes are a great tech for making dynamic geometry receive static GI.
Is there any chance we'll see the two combined?
There's a BF4 rendering tech paper which I believe mentions injecting the GI data from Enlighten into a volume texture which is then used as a light probe volume (each voxel is a light probe). So it would be great if we could have Enlighten GI data injected into our light probe set, allowing our dynamic characters and such to receive realtime GI.

 

Can't really talk about upcoming patches other than it's probably better

 

I want a new splash screen, I find the actual one ugly. I would prefer white text against dark gray background or the opposite, or even full black, I think it would be so much better

 

Simply buy pro, and you have you custom splash screen.

 

But most of us don't want a big fancy custom splash screen, just one that doesn't look like a 1999 Atari intern made it. I'm definatly not going to pay $1500 to fix something that basic.

 

Guess I better be glad Unreal announced UE4 , or U5 will not have as near as many features as its projected to have.

 

@Hippocoder: Ok... :/ Guess it's a game of wait-and-see...

@PhobicGunner: That sounds interesting! the extremes First-person shooters go to to get realistic visuals...

 

Do you plan to, at some future time, procedural animation for humanoid characters, and, may be, non-humanoids? Something, that can create animation of characters inside editor, based on skeleton and muscles?

 

Doubt it. I really don't think that's the purview of Unity. It's a game development tool, not an animation studio.

 

I created a full procedural animation controller for combat and navigation with Mecanim IK and splines. Can create thousand of variants using less than a hundred base animations. If I had full control over the joints I could create a full procedural animator based on the same principles. What I really need is the IK to work in the Editor and I would release it on the Asset Store.

HTH
-R

 

I don't know if there is any information out there, but what about the terrain engine and terrain shaders? Will there be an improvement in that area because lets face facts it is pretty bad compare to other engine i mean really bad. I see a lot of improvement in other area except the terrain engine, so i hope that you will surprise us with a new video showcasing the new Unity Standard TERRAIN. One can hope right?

 

See it that way : if you see a game is made with your software , that you put out for free, you probably would like a big credit for that right?
If you are professional into game designing ,a software that cost $1500 is not that big of a deal.
And if you can not get $1500 at one time , you can use the subscription method.

I think that's a fair deal.

 

The issue is that the Unity splash screen looks terrible.

 

@Murgilod: Well, I don't see it as Terrible, but I wouldn't mind a new splash screen, perhaps a spinning Unity logo made of metal in a white room! This would use 3D graphic, since Movie textures aren't supported in free version, unless UT have some magic left in their pockets...

 

I really hope UT is watching this thread.
What I really want to see is first person view models FINALLY supporting shadows.
Seriously, it's mind boggling that UT hasn't solved this yet.
Garry Newman encountered this when developing Rust, and he's got a write-up/rant about it on his blog which sums things up pretty much perfectly.

My understanding is that cameras generate a "shadow texture" that basically gets sampled in screen space and multiplied by light color. It would be nice if I could specify that, instead of a camera calculating its own shadow texture, it simply reuses the shadow texture of another camera (so my first person view camera would simply reuse the shadow texture of the main camera)

 

Technically, the only thing that keeps every feature from being active in Unity Free is the license file. UT could, theoretically, preface the entire launch with soft shadows, deferred rendering, render textures, a movie texture, and dynamic navmesh support.

 

Ah, for anyone interested UT did confirm that light probes will be automatically updated with Enlighten GI data.
Awesomesauce

 

thank GOD. what about those HDR Reflection Probes, any info? and where did they confirm the GI Data for probes?

 

They did say that Reflection Probes will update dynamically as well as light probes:

This was in response to a question I asked in the comment section of the Teleporter demo blog post.
http://blogs.unity3d.com/2014/05/19/teleporter-demo/

Really quite excited

 

@PhobicGunner: Now THAT is awesomesauce! (quoting from your last post... )

Now to see if it's in free version... And yes, the feature set you have in whatever version is because of the license file. (I know because, even though they are SUPER GLITCHY, it is possible to use RenderTextures in the free version of the editor.)

 

Something that just came into my mind is. Unity 5 will feature pbr.
But afaik there are 2 different pbr shader variations: metallic/roughness and specular/gloss
Which one of these will U5 be using? If it hasn't been answered before.

 

specular reflectivity (rgb) smoothness (a)

 

Ah, okay good to know, thank you!

 

Is there any specific reason U5 won't use metallic/roughness?

 

Luck of the draw? Or maybe reflectivity style was cheaper?

 

Backward compatibility with specular maps?