Unity 5 release date?

Sorry I've explained it wrong probably. I don't mean specular map. I mean what do you use for reflection cubemap? In Unity 5.0 it can be a reflection probe (baked as you said), cubemap generated from the skybox or few other inputs. Do you just use some skybox cubemap for it?

 

I wouldn't have thought it, but with a reflection probe of type custom and a cubemap render camera, you can get realtime cubemaps. I just put the probe as a child of my moving sphere.

For your cloud problem: you could try and render your clouds in your skybox.

 

So if it's possible to render it that way in real time, it would be also possible to just render one frame per XX minutes/seconds instead of doing it in real time, right? I would just cull everything that is not skybox, clouds etc. and use one global cubemap for everything. Or as said before, attach this camera to the player, catch whole surroundings to the cubemap every X/XX seconds and use it for the one big probe that is moving with player.

You mean to just use the skybox image to include clouds in it?

 

Yes, you can render your cubemap when you want. It is just a cubemap like in Unity4 with the benefits of automatic switching from the reflection probe system.

Yes, put your cloud computation in your sky shader.

 

Just wondering, how were people selected to be in the closed beta? Did you have to apply somewhere or were people just randomly chosen? Just a liiiiiittle jealous.

 

Not yet, sorry.

As for getting into the beta, I got in way back at the beginning of version 4, it wasn't something that just happened recently. They had opened it some time ago, but it got out of hand and there were some leaks, so they closed it to newcomers, at least for now, though you never know...

 

Does all of the Enlighten stuff for GI have to be baked from the Editor (manually created scenes), or is it possible to use it with objects that are dynamically added to the scene (and never move)? Can you trigger a rebake from code during game runtime?

 

Ah, that renders my bug report useless It's still very easy for things like mirrors, even if they are not moving.

I can't do that, sorry. I'm so bad at graphics programming, I couldn't even blend normal maps without strange results...

 

I'd love it if you could call it from code even if it took significant time. That would open up the option of allowing users to bake lighting on user created maps. Of course that's right along with hoping that Enlighten doesn't glue the results to a scene. Some games don't cooperate very well with a scene based workflow and I hate when Unity ties features tightly to scenes.

 

Lightmapping is an editor class, but aras surely has more information.

 

So for rough surfaces, wee need a cubemap with preprocessed minimap levels.

What about ambient lighting from the skybox input that you've announced for Unity 5. From the videos it looks like it uses skybox material input to generate the ambient lighting. Does this input need a preprocessed minimap levels too to look good?

Im just wondering about catching the whole skybox+clouds layer+maybe something else (instead of only using a skybox image) in runtime and just using it as an input for the new ambient lighting feature. I't doesn't need to be true real time. But it need to be updated from time to time in the runtime.

If you have your whole sky on your skybox material, that probably woold work great just out of the box, but I'm wondeing about cases when you have only 'clear' sky included in the skybox material and all other things like clouds are separate objects.

Would that work?

 

I would add the question, how dynamic objects near other objects could be handled. Cars won't appear in prebaked reflection probes, since they are not static. How could we treat them?

 

BUMP.

 

I have 1 question about the PBR shader in Unity. I've seen in the videos that when there's no specular map assigned, there's a slider for the glossiness. Once a specular map is assigned, the slider goes away. As far as I understand, the glossiness values are stored in the Alpha channel of the specular map? Why isn't there a separate glossiness map slot? Quixel for example exports a separate map. Also, as far as I know, glossiness map shouldn't be sRGB corrected, while specular map should. How does that work when there's only 1 map?

 

Ok, that makes sense then. Thanks for the fast reply!

 

I'm a bit disappointed, cause I was made sure that all, I mean all the features were for 5.0 and not for 5.x,
see:
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/unity-5-is-coming-and-more.234931/page-20#post-1621306
and a couple of posts below it.

I just want to know what will be the initial 5.0 features.

 

I'd rather have a useable product out sooner, then have every feature at the same time. Let them add them in with a 5.1 release. Shouldn't be held back by a couple of features for very specific situations.

 

It has been mentioned many many times: Don't rely on features that aren't available yet!

 

+1 this mostly this.

 

I'm not relying on anything that I dont currently have. I have made some kind of realtime-reflection via cubemaps at 64x64, But I'm just disappointed that they were so sure about the release features of 5.0, and now they dont deliver it for the the version it was supposed to be in, whatever 5.1 is fine by me.

 

Is there anyway i can get access to the beta today? Rather then 4-8 weeks. I already purchased it, but i have a client that i want to show something i did in webgl for potential business. I won't risk turning them off by forcing the unity3d web player down their throat. People who arent tech people are quick to dismiss things they have to download.

 

At the end of the day, were talking about some hefty changes with the 64-bit editor and enlighten integration which is a lot of work and remember it's still in beta right this moment. I'd much rather them get it right as opposed to just shipping out some half baked buggy rubbish.

So the engineers shouldn't be disappointed either, do it right or don't bother. As long as they keep at it for a timely release then all is good.

 

It's essentially never going to make developers happy shipping too soon and never going to make customers happy shipping too late!

Therefore if people consider Unity to be an ongoing product it's probably better for everyone. By this I mean more frequent, smaller updates.

 

@ShadowK

Since you are involved in the closed beta of 5.0, i was wondering if you could answer me one question about it. If you are allowed to do so of-course

I was just wondering if i have two sets of static geometry and i disable one and enable the other one at run-time, will these changes affect how the dynamic GI is done? (use the new enabled static geometry and not use the disabled one)
I asked this a while ago and a dev replied saying it would be possible, but they needed to find a simple way of exposing that functionality.

This would be done for destructible parts of buildings and other structures.

I will hopefully be able to try it out when the beta is open for those who pre-ordered it, but it would be nice to know beforehand

@Aras
Could you tell me if users who pre-ordered Unity 5 though Studica(student commercial) will get access to the Beta?

 

Thats why you need a a roadmap on Trello.
Roadmap on Trello = this is what we are working on(this is what you may get).
Shiny video with cool music = this is what you will get.

 

I've not tested how Enlighten reacts at run time, I suppose the basic premise is how does GI get affected at run time at all when instantiating meshes etc.? I've got one of Micheal O's demo scenes. I'll give it a shot and let you know..

 

It's supposed to be "real-time" right? Does this mean we will be able to instantiate a fully dynamic scene (ingame level editor for example?) and achieve the same result as if we built it in unity editor and then activated realtime GI there?

 

As I understand it, Enlighten is "real-time" in that you can move the lights around at run time and the GI will update, but you can't move the actual geometry.

I've not got the beta yet, that's just what I've read.

 

Well that would suck. If it has to bake stuff... could that be done at run time too? Like you'd instantiate the level, it would do it's stuff, and then you could play.

 

I'd love it if it had some kinda options for something like that.

Maybe just swapping between two or more pre-baked static geometry set ups or something.

 

Thanks for checking it out.
For what i'm doing, i don't instantiate new objects at run-time that would be needed for this. All objects are already in the scene. some are enabled and others are disabled and i switch between them when destruction happens.
If you are able to test it, could you tell me what happens to the GI when you destroy/disable a static geometry?

Sorry if i'm asking you to do too many things after this i'll go back to waiting for the pre-order beta

Edit:
I would be very happy if by disabling a geometry at run-time, then that geometry would no longer be used to compute the GI. I could make things work with that

 

Do you have any plans to support it in 5.0 or a later release? Would be awesome.

 

Interesting, will that work on mobile? I've worked on a "real time" GPU solution for this problem within the last weeks for my mobile project - it takes 0.5 seconds to blur on the iPad Air while keeping 60 fps, but the older iOS GPUs who does not like dependent texture reads need a minimum of 5 seconds with kind of brute force otherwise the app will crash, so I can update the cube map by (sharing the work load over many frames) maybe every minute or two which is still fast enough for my needs. (I only need sky, clouds and water surface on my cube maps because it is a sub sim)

 

It's exactly what Zomby138 is saying, I tried it and got there eventually. The short answer is no it doesn't update the GI at runtime if you change the geometry.

It was the same when I used it years back.

 

Thanks for taking the time to check this out for me
I'm hoping they let us remove geometry from the GI at run-time in the future, it's really important when dealing with destructible environment and other scenarios. ( I believe Battlefield games do this and they also use Enlighten, but in a different way i guess )

Imagine you have a big building and it's really dark inside it. By destroying one wall, the GI would affect the inside of the building a lot more.
This is how the destruction in my game looks like (this is a very simple destruction model i made. it will be more complex):


From what i remember, i also don't think it's possible to remove data from removed/disabled geometry from the occlusion culling system. That's one of the reasons i don't use it.

 

Does this mean we will be able to have realtime GI for a fully dynamic scene (all objects spawned by script, at runtime) at some point in the future?

 

Yes it is. The dev also told me that. He also said it was something they could look at in the future but definitely not for 5.0.

Having that feature would drastically change how an indoor level would look like. (with doors/windows that can be opened or with destructible environment)

One other option to save performance and not have a dynamic door affect the GI calculations, the door could simply be removed from the GI calculations once opened. It wouldn't have that nice effect of lighting the room while opening it, but would still work very well. But there would have to be a functionality to add the door back to the GI calculations, in case we want to close the door.

Edit:
My apologies if i sidetracked too much from the original topic :/