Unity 5 release date?

Ok, I've been hearing alot about the Unity 5 Pro, will there be a free edition to Unity 5?

 

How's that "out during the summer" goal looking at the moment?

 

^ They didn't mention which part's summer.

 

Summer this year runs from June 21 until September 23. Unity 5 has not been released yet, but there are still weeks left of summer.

 

Unity 5 isn't coming out during summer, Unity 4.6 is. It is also still Summer.

 

Graham Dunnett said: "Our dev and QA teams are working under a great deal of pressure to get 5.0 out during the summer."

I suspect they have fallen behind this target, and I'd be interested to hear what a more realistic target is now.

 

Unite is fairly soon, I guess we'll find out more then. Maybe that's when 4.6 will be released?

 

Actually i'm bit curious about this, seeing the amount of request and feedback in some Official "Feature" for Unity5, how many of those request got implemented in the final unity 5 release with their target release date.

 

You said everything I do not wanted to hear, so there will be a Free version and Paid version. Apparently none of our feedback was read, and probable there will be no price change.

Could you say the big differences between free and paid version?

 

Dude, grab a coke, relax and wait until Unite.

He is a volunteer moderator here. Not a representative of UT.
There was nothing official announced from UT.

If you won't be pleased with the stuff they will announce at Unite, you can rip them apart. But until that it's all speculation.

Btw. I thought you were happy with UE4. Why are you're still here?

 

I really hope it happen and they reopen developer build forum, not only this is could be good way to track/gather bug but also nice for user to jump start and learning/Adapting Unity5 since the graphic/rendering in unity5 is (possibly) new.

 

I hope they do something like that, or open Unity 5 beta for pro users.

 

I would love to have a beta version in my hands... for no other reason then to get familiar with the new art pipeline with these new shaders. I wish.

 

That would be nice. They could restrict it to people who've already paid the pre-order fee - it would serve as a reward to them, and also encourage people on the fence to put down the cash.

I need the 64-bit editor ASAP. I'm so sick of using workarounds just to bypass memory issues.

 

+1 this, come on Unity please make it happen.

 

We're working full steam to get from alpha to beta stage. Unfortunately, the Enlighten integration has proven to be a tough nut to crack as there's a lot of technical challenges there. But apart from the usual thing of development always being much tougher in practice than on paper, we definitely want this thing in your hands as soon as possible.

Been a bit of an up and down battle and we've learned some painful lessons in the process, but 5 is shaping up great. Plus there's already some really nice stuff queuing up for the .Xs

 

Great to hear! Seems like a lot of stuff is changing behind the scenes in 5.0 which won't be immediately apparent, but is necessary for Unity (i.e. the modular system and 64 bit editor). I feel like by this time next year, Unity is going to be a much more powerful product than it is now.

 

This great news, and it's really nice that you guys giving some info about it

 

Thanks for the update.

Thanks for the update. Still shooting for a summer release on 5? I'm waiting for unity 5 and my occulus rift dev kit 2... Feels like im going to get both in my hands on the same day if you guys stay on point with summer.

 

Yeah, I think that's one of the basic tenets at the moment. With many areas, we're at a point where we can't just heap stuff on top but rather have to think longer term how to make the platform sustainable. There's a lot of great things we want to do and that we are actually doing but we have to have the platform to support them. So a lot of investment at the moment and in the coming releases is going into giving us that platform. IL2CPP is a big part of that but there's a lot more structural work happening and going to happen.

Also, the cry for stabilization of the platform has been heard loud and clear in the company and especially with our experience working on 5, I think every person in the company is behind that. And while we may sometimes seem idle and maybe even aloof from the outside, it's really quite the opposite. To put it very bluntly, I think Epic's move has been a great thing for Unity. There's a new-found focus and drive and while it's a process that won't unfold in a day, there's so much good stuff happening and it will show -- and yield very tangible results reaching each and every of our users.

Ok, enough musing and rambling from my side...

TBH as a developer, I can't think that far All I'm looking towards is beta and then we're going to march to final as fast as we can get the quality and stability level that it should have. But I'm sure people in other positions have a better picture

 

@Rene Damm

Let me guess bleeding and artifacts from Enlighten integration?

 

That's what I want to read, Please,just keep these little infos coming occasionally.

 

Lurker here. Glad to have the update. Would rather have snippets of information of what is going on than a promised release date. Please... take your time and release a quality product. I think in the end it will be worth it. I get tired of reading forum threads about complaints about this or that when I just want a certain snippet of information.

 

Do you know if the beta will be available at all to people who preordered unity 5?

 

Nope, unfortunately don't, but I definitely assume so.

 

Thanks for the info. We all hate waiting, but i am grateful to at least have some answers as to why.

 

+1 mostly this, i know that not every info can shared. But even if it's only a small info about how is it going back at the factory somehow it's kinda relieving

 

It's reassuring to get a scrap of info here and there.

I hope you guys manage to get Enlighten sorted out! That's pretty much the only reason I preordered 5 :\

 

I am so excited about the threading in Unity 5 (plus everything else).... I am so eager to leverage that for an Asynchronous Socket Server I am building.

I do not particularly like posting, but I cannot contain my excitement!

 

I think Unity opened up the Unity 5 early buy option too soon. They have kinda increased the pressure on themselves because us who have purchased it already will undoubtedly get impatient as the months pass on. I really think unity should give a very substantial bonus offer to these die hardened supporters of their product. Like myself i'm just a single dev shop waiting for this product.

 

They did the same thing with Unity 4, and I don't recall that there were any issues. I don't think anyone would be getting too impatient since you get Unity 4 in the meantime, so it's not as if you spent money on something you can't use yet. Indeed they stopped selling Unity 4 quite a while ago; all Pro licenses have been Unity 5 licenses for months.

(Unless of course you already had Unity 4 Pro and bought an upgrade. But they do have a pre-order discount, so that's something.)

--Eric

 

probably we can blame Unreal Engine 4 and new CryЕngine for their unexpected appear on the market : )
i think i will be very aware of posts which contains "Very Soon"

 

My crystal ball has Unity 5 arriving in late October.

Like most I'd hope to get it sooner, but I also don't want it to be buggy when it comes out.

And I'm very much looking forward to 4.6, maybe out before the end of August!

 

i just need to understand their art pipeline so i can understand how to get the best draw calls and such. (The new stuff i mean.) Even a video tutorial would work for me.. rather then a full blown unity 5 release.

 

Unity people, please do take your time and release it when you feel it is good enough. Don't rush it and release an unfinished, buggy product just for the sake of meeting a deadline.

 

There is a flip side to this. If Unity feels too much pressure to deliver a bug free product that is superior to UE4, then Unity might never ship Unity 5. Personally, I think Unity would be far better off by building a multi-version launcher, and then releasing Unity 5 beta immediately. That way users could install Unity 5.0 along side 4.3, 4.5, and 4.6. Unity users would be able to play with the latest beta without breaking their production Unity work environment. Waiting forever to ship Unity 5 (under the existing paradigm where the new editor will upgrade/replace the existing Unity installation) will destroy Unity. The multi-version launcher is key to why UE4 updates are released so frequently. The multi-version launcher is one simple thing Unity needs to immediately match in order to stay in the fight.

 

You've always been able to do this; you don't need a special launcher. I have versions installed going back to 3.4.

--Eric

 

I currently have 11 different versions of Unity installed on my Macbook Pro, which allow me to open up specific versions for specific things. There is nothing stopping you from currently doing it! Just rename your .app so it doesn't over-write when installing!

 

Correct me if I went wrong in my thinking, but surely the biggest 'losers' from any delay to the launch of Unity 5.0 would be people who currently own a 4 Pro perpetual license, but have already gone for the special pricing on the subscription version of Unity 5? I assume the 12 months of special subscription pricing begins straight away, not when Unity 5.0 is released. And so if I buy a subscription right now, rather than just before 5 comes out and the special pricing no longer exists, I will get less months with Unity 5 in my hands before I have to pay the standard monthly fee?

 

Three cheers to that. I bought a 3 pro license, then eventually a 4 pro licence, and have been mulling over switching to the subscription model for a while. But there were a number of issues that started to really drag down my feelings about Unity over time, and make me look with some interest at what the competition have been doing:

• Concerns about various parts of Unity getting really old, and having no clue what Unity were planning to do to address these.
• A lack of quality, deep and open communication with customers via the forum on a sustained basis.
• A lack of clarity about roadmaps and fixing of various longstanding bugs.
• Quite variable delays in getting latest patched versions to customers in a timely fashion.

So I was absolutely delighted with what has happened in recent months. A great example of what, I assumed, was competition from the likes of Epic causing Unity to recognise the areas where they were weak or at least slowly sinking into a rut, and do something about it.

 

I am aware that there is a way to do that with Unity. What I am saying is that Unity needs to take advantage of that existing multi-version support and create a simple multi-version launcher that takes care of installing various Unity versions side by side. Then Unity needs to push everything out the door immediately in the form of public betas instead of private betas. That way Unity does not allow versions 4.6 and 5.0 to go unreleased forever. The multi-version launcher for UE4 is one of the main reasons UE4 can be released so quickly as public betas. Unity already has the basic functionality in place to support multiple versions, so it is silly/stupid not to release a multi-version launcher that streamlines the process for end users.

 

That's unlikely to happen since public betas have resulted in much worse quality bug reports. There are benefits, but the tradeoff is that you need to invest much more time in it, which isn't necessarily the best usage of limited manpower. Just because UE does something doesn't mean it's always the best thing to do.

--Eric

 

To be clear, "unreleased forever" in this case means "4-6 months after announcement" for a major version and "2 months after first public demo" for 4.6, correct? You make it sound like we've been waiting for both for years. (It seems like that's the case with 4.6, because the GUI was announced ~2 years ago, but beta versions existing would not have helped until about 2 months ago)

 

Neither version has been released yet, and nobody outside of Unity knows when to expect them. If I bought Unity 5 Pro today, when would I be able to use Unity 5 Pro? Maybe in a few more months or possibly sometime next year. Imagine how many more people would buy Unity 5 Pro if we had the option to immediately use the latest beta of Unity 5 Pro right away through a public beta. A multi-version installer and launcher could make it easy for Unity to quickly release public betas.

 

The public beta approach is an excellent way to let end users know what is going on and to build lots of exciting buzz. If we compare the public releases of Unity since March 19 with the public releases of UE4 during that same time, it is easy to see how much more buzz a public beta can generate. And how many more UE4 release will occur before Unity releases Unity 4.6 or Unity 5.0? Unity has been working hard behind the scenes, but only the private beta testers are excited about all of the efforts because they are the only people who have seen the Unity updates. Imagine how much more buzz Unity could have created by releasing all of those updates through a public beta.

If you are worried about the quality of bug reports, there are ways to mitigate that problem. For example, Unity could simply continue to ignore bug reports from people outside of their private beta list. A public beta does not mean that Unity would have to listen to feedback from public beta testers. Unity could simply benefit from the buzz that the public beta would create. I think Unity could benefit from bug reports from the much wider public beta, but nobody would be forcing Unity to listen to everybody's bug reports. The lack of quality in bug reports is not a valid reason for not doing public betas.

 

The UE Launcher makes it POSSIBLE to do what Unity has been able to for many years. It added a feature that Unity already has. For UT to spend time making a tool to do an insanely simple task that already does is a waste of time. UE needed a tool for it because it doesn't do what Unity already can. If a user can't choose which application to launch without aid of an additional tool, making games is going to be way too complex for them.

 

Sure it is, since as I said it takes engineering time away from other things. If, as you suggest, they don't pay any attention to bug reports from public betas, that defeats the purpose. Aside from "buzz" I suppose, but there are plenty of more direct and less deceptive ways of generating that, such as the blog posts they write. Maybe they should just do more blog posts.

As for a launcher tool, it should be quite trivial for some third party to create such a thing if there's any demand for it.

--Eric

 

And QA time. Just having a bug isn't enough. It should be verifiable, repeatable, confirmed unique, and effectively documented before you shoot it at an engineer.

If you've already got more reports coming in than you're able to do all of that with then simply increasing the volume can certainly be counter productive. More reports does not necessarily mean more information, but it does mean more data that you've got to sift through to reach what information is there.