Unity Labs available for download.

Thank you I was waiting this asset for testing the power of Unity 5!

 

First of all I must say this certainly doesn't show Enlighten from it's best side. I've been playing with Enlighten for a couple of weeks now and in all my scenes it has computed the realtime GI in seconds. This scene has been computing for almost an hour now and I think my computer is fairly powerful. I haven't actually been able to check if this is using realtime GI or baked, but still - it's slow.

Also, I'm not sure if this is just me, but when I'm importing these huge projects from the asset store my computer sometimes crashes catastrophically. It suddenly launches a million corrupt applications and then just freezes. I'm on Windows 7. This happened with both the Viking Village and Unity Labs. After doing a hard reboot and importing it again with just Unity running it works.

 

I should probably blame it on my unrealistic expectations, but in all the early videos before the release of Unity 5 I feel like you showcased Enlighten as if it was something you just left on "continous baking" and it would update your lighting in a couple of seconds in the background as you continued working in the editor. But now that I've seen some more real world examples in the form of the Viking demo and the Unity labs demo I realized it's a full blow bake just like with Beast. I honestly didn't think it was until now. Now I understand why so many people complain that it is slow.

I'm not saying it's unreasonably slow. I have no clue what it is doing when it is precomputing, but it was sort of a wake up call for me. And I imagine it will be for other Unity users as well.

I see you have it on "continous baking" in the Unity Labs project, but I can't imagine that being practical when it takes this long to bake. I just moved one box 1 meter and it took over 20 minutes to update the lighting and the whole editor feels sluggish while this is happening. When I can't even see the lightning change until 20 minutes has passed why leave it on "continous baking"? This seems like the kind of thing you would cloud compute when you build your game or similar.

I also thought Enlighten was smarter than this. The box I moved (one of the boxes in the gym) couldn't have affected much, but it still feels like it's recomputing the entire scene.

As for the corrupt applications I have no idea. I've never had my computer crash like this until I tried importing these two projects from the asset store so I was wondering if any other Unity users or Unity Windows users has experienced the same thing. I'm not sure if the import issue is related to the asset store, Unity or my computer. It just seems extremely taxing on my computer to import these big projects from the asset store.

The demo itself works perfectly fine. And it looks really, really good. The performance in the demo is however rather poor. I made a build and it ran in 30-40 fps according to Fraps in 1920x1200 at high. I get 60fps+ in games like Dying Light and Battlefield 4 on this computer. Not sure if this demo is optimized at all or what's causing the real performance hits in the demo as it looks rather simple, but perhaps optimization could be something to consider for future iterations of the demo? To really showcase what Unity can do.

My system specs are:
- Windows 7 64-bit
- Intel i7 970 CPU12 cores @ 3,2Ghz
- 48gb ram
- Nvidia Gefore 680 GTX

I played through the demo and the only real issue I noticed apart from the performance was that the character seems to free fall when riding the elevators down. This doesn't happen all the time. Also when he runs over small bumps he goes into the jump/fall animations which looks very odd. His run animation also looks like he has a bad hip or leg injury. Not sure if that's intended.

 

Ive got AMD Athlon X4 860K Quad-Core 3.7GHz and 4gb ram, Win 7 64b. Its slow loading and could not wait more to finish... So i disabled the continues baking. The demo run with 7-8 -12 fps, its slow. In the end i had to end task the editor.

"Also, I'm not sure if this is just me, but when I'm importing these huge projects from the asset store my computer sometimes crashes catastrophically."
I know what you mean. My cpu and hdd gets so highter when importing the big project especially when its importing images.

 

Ahh, duh. Was trying to debug what ate most of the performance and didn't notice vsync was on. It's on even on the low quality preset. Vsync is the most extreme graphics setting available is it not? Like if your display runs at 60hz and you're not able to maintain 60fps you instantly get bumped down to 30fps?

But I can't build again to test it out because now I'm getting:

I have never seen this error in Unity before. No idea what it means. I just did a build of the project and now suddenly it won't let me build it anymore, even after restarting Unity or rebooting my computer.

Edit: I just deleted the entire project and reimported into a new project and now it builds again. I had to move it to a different partition anyway as I didn't want it eating up all the space in my dropbox. Turning off vsync fixed the worst performance problems. It's still not 60fps, but now it at least isn't 30. I get around 45-55 fps now.

 

I've played around with the demo a bit and here's my feedback:

1. Performance is not great as I've already noted. Even though I don't spend much time doing high quality graphics in Unity I feel like Unity 5 was sort of the "graphics release" for Unity and this being the staple demo it should be better optimized.
2. The demo looks great, but it has sort of the Doom 3 shiny look in places as a lot of the metal surfaces are really shiny.
3. If you're in the listening room and rotate the camera so that it moves through the glass the audio pops.
4. You free fall in the elevators sometimes when riding down and sometimes when riding up you fall through the floor.
5. The character's run animation looks awkward and stiff, as if he's injured.
6. The jump/fall animations trigger when running over bumps and ledges.
7. The jump animations look like they are out of sync or too slow.

The demo overall is great and it gives great insight into how you use the different texture slots to create convincing materials, how to setup light probes, reflection probes etc. etc. I also love the UI all over the place. It's by far the most polished demo you've released in my opinion. And I hope to see more in the future. Like others on the forum have mentioned time and time again in the Unreal Engine vs Unity threads it's when you use your own tools you realize where the limitations and shortcomings are.

 

When running full screen in the editor, the demo gives me anywhere from 23-46fps.
My specs are:
i7 920 @ 2.67GHz
12GB ram
HD5870

I don't think it's horribly optimized but it could be a bit better, mainly due to large fluctuations.

How do I go about just dropping a first-person controller in there? I disabled the cameras and the player character but the FP-controller just shows a grey screen. Are there some other scripts I need to disable?

 

@LeftyTwoGuns The "MenuManager.cs" script takes whatever camera it can find tagged with "MainCamera" and changes its parent among other things. The camera for the first person controller prefab is also tagged with "MainCamera". To quickly test with a first person controller instead just disable the "MainCamera" game object, you'll find it under the "Cameras" game object. Disable the "MainMenu" game object as well. Then you can play with the first person controller.

You can't enter doors or elevators though so you'll have to figure all that for yourself.

 

I was looking more at the performance and by disabling the "CharacterBuddyBot" game object and the "Particles" game object I get nearly a 200% increase in framerate according to the profiler and the editor game view stats panel. It goes from about 60fps to 200fps. Fraps isn't as optimistic though, but it still goes from 45-55 to 60-80 according to Fraps. According to the FPS Counter script in Utility the framerate goes from 50 to 100. The biggest difference is that the game plays silky smooth for me now, it never dips enough for it to be choppy. I could probably even turn on vsync again.

Disabling one of these game objects doesn't seem to affect performance in the slightest, but disabling both at once gives a massive performance boost. They don't seem to play well together. I feel like there's an interaction there worth investigating unless you guys already know why those two things are so expensive.

Edit: The performance hit is caused in its entirety by "ParticleHallwaysElectricalSparksBlue" and "ParticleHallwaysElectricalSparksYellow", more specifically the animations or Animator component on these. You can play through the demo multiple times without ever seeing those particle effects, but they reduce the framerate by at least 50% for me. Like I said you have to disable the "CharacterBuddyBot" as well to see the performance increase (his lights and particles seem to be really expensive as well), but I think it's safe to say there's some really unoptimized bits in there.

 

That's pretty odd, I'll try that later. I spend a good amount of time trying to figure out what's causing performance hits. Disabled all the camera effects, even the lights and reflection probes, performance stayed the same pretty much (I never had Pro before so I have no idea how to interpret the Profiler)

 

What is the GI mode for the light in CharacterBuddyBot or at least all the dynamic light that have dynamic transform?

 

Alright I disabled the CharaccterBuddyBot and the yellow and blue hallway sparks and that did definitely make a difference. Now my FPS range is 30-80. I get the lowest FPS around the control panel area and the room above music room with the chandelier. In the areas downstairs I'm getting steady 60fps all the way up to 80fps.

 

Make it use 4 cores!

 

Came in to say that this happened to be too, on Windows 7.
It launched everything in my taskbar icons, launched multiple Thunderbirds and iTunes, then some other weird programs that are part of Windows or something.
I could click to launch more programs, but clicking on anything inside a program (like closing) would do nothing. Could use Ctrl + Alt + Delete to launch Task Manager but wasn't able to do anything with it.
Had to hard reboot.

I'll try importing the project again and see what happens.

 

First off, big thank you to everyone that helped put this project together. It's really neat. Unfortunately, I'm having quite a few strange problems with it at the moment.

Upon import I'm getting several "inconsistent line endings", "Bone length is different in avatar and animation" and "nodes with Scale Compensation" warnings. All of which seem minor and easily fixed, but this one seems strange:

After opening the scene and allowing the lighting system to finish all jobs, I run the scene and get a random amount of error messages for either "state.minMaxAABB.IsValid ()" or "aabb.IsValid()" and there are many lighting issues throughout the scene for me.


Reflections and bounce lighting doesn't seem to work for certain areas/objects. Look at the buddy bot!


This area seems too dark.




These areas seem almost too bright.


I also cant get anti-aliasing to work In the editor and this degrades the quality of the entire demo greatly. Ow my eyes!


I also got the professor stuck in a falling state on this corner once and was forced to restart the entire demo to "fix it".

I was also getting another weird ambiguous error message before when running the scene sometimes, but I can't seem to reproduce that one anymore.


Currently running Unity 5.0.1f1 on Windows 8.1 64-bit, Intel i5 3570K 3.40GHz, 16GB DDR3, GeForce GTX 960.

Yes, the impression I got from all the demonstrations was that the system would intelligently work in the background with little user intervention. However, my experience so far has been quite the opposite. I thought the purpose of continuous baking was to allow users to work in real-time so they can see changes instantly., while changes are automatically baked in the background. But unfortunately it seems I need to re-bake my entire scene to see any changes. Am I just missing some fundamental procedures to get this to work as desired?


@willgoldstone, @drcharlesunity Why u no have spaces or capitalization in your user name?

 

I don't think I've ever had a hard crash, but sometimes when I switch from one Unity 5 project to another I get an error message telling me Unity has stopped responding / unexpectedly terminated / crashed, etc. But when I click okay, Unity just presents the project I was trying to switch to in the first place??

 

@TwiiK @Xinoph : If you can consistently reproduce this issue (which I've not seen nor heard of before!), can you submit a bug report with as much detail as possible? Any hard evidence will help the asset store dev's track down a solution.

 

I have an antialiasing effect on the camera, but the edges (for example the "Control Room 05" font) and other edges appear very pixelish. Is that something I can change or where I did something wrong?

 

@Adam Buckner I'll see what I can do.

@TobiUll The antialiasing image effect isn't very good. I never use it. It just blurs details I want to keep and doesn't really do much in terms of removing aliasing on edges. I think you have to use forward rendering or something to get proper antialiasing. It's probably described in the documentation.

 

@TwiiK
But Unity's new preferred way of rendering is "Deferred Linear", right? Is there no other way to accomplish proper antialiasing?

 

they said they were working on some sort of Temporal AntiAliasing.. and 5.1 might bring that to us.

 

Thanks for the reply Will.

1.
Yeah, didn't think the warnings were anything to worry about but figured I'd mention everything just to be thorough. Is the "could not create custom UI from the custom editor" a known issue as well?

Also, do you know of any easy way to automatically fix inconsistent line endings? It's really annoying to have these warnings cluttering up your console, and this project has a ton of them! The best solution I've found so far has been a community created script that can automatically fix all your scripts for you.

4.
"too dark" was probably a really bad way of describing it. I know some areas are made intentionally dark, but that particular section seemed unrealistically so. Something just felt off to me. Like there were no reflections or bounce light on the walls or something. I've since revisited it and there are indeed reflections. So maybe baking just hadn't finished when I first looked at it.

5.
The bright areas definitely do seem intentional now that I look at them again. They just seemed unrealistically extreme the first time I looked at them.

6.
Yeah, anti-aliasing has been the biggest visual issue I've noticed in Unity 5. I actually have the option off in most of the games I play, but something in Unity 5 seems to be almost enhancing the problem! Good to know this is a known problem. Since I think fixing this will improve the visual quality substantially, and my eyes will think you too.

7.
Oops! My apologies to Doctor Charles. This typo has actually awoken a strange nerdy desire in me to see Bill Nye "The Science Guy" join Unity Labs. It would probably only be a big nostalgia kick for us Americans, but what I wouldn't give to see Bill Nye walking around the Unity Labs, showing of all the science!

8.
Thanks for letting me know about this. Good to know it's not just me being a lighting newbie.


Thanks Unity team for all your hard. I'm Looking forward to your future releases that will make Unity 5 even better.

 

@TobiUll Look at Will's reply just above yours. He said this:

And yes. I use deferred linear for everything I do. But luckily AA isn't a big deal for me.

 

Same problem here. Will has said they're working on the issue:

 

Found a bug as well.

The room with cubes and slopes:
When you walk up a steeper slope, the drcharles character suddenly does a jump animation. I think this is a bug, because why jump on a slope when running up to it?

General
When walking around in the audio room, there are some places on the ground when you walk over it, the character suddenly does a jump animation.

Further, overall nice demo and very usefull for checking out the use of certain features. I'm really happy with these kind of demos. Keep them comming =)

 

The doctor appears to be suffering from Catapedophilia (unnatural desire to jump), because he also jumps when going down steep slopes or falling off ledges! But no need to worry Dr Charles because I think I've identified the root cause.

The doctor's animator controller appears to always trigger the jump behavior when entering the midair sub-state. This means he will automatically jump whenever he loses his footing, regardless of the reason. You can stop this from happening by simply disabling the "JumpingSMB" script on the "LeftFootMidair" and "RightFootMidair" states within the "Midair" sub-state, but that also makes him unable to jump all together.

The culprit here is probably a bug in the "JumpingSMB" and/or "JumpingActivationSMB" script. Since something is not correctly identifying when the jump behavior should actually be performed.

 

May I please ask something that may sound rude at first, but which is absolutely not meant that way?
I have heard the sentence "It is UE, so it looks great right out of the box" a lot.
And everytime I do something in Unity, I think "It is Unity, so it looks crappy unless you tweak it to the max.". It just takes so much tweaking / time to make it look just right.
In fact, I am glad to see that you are also fighting with this on the demo scene and that it is not just me.
May I ask if you expect this to change in the future, or should we all dive deep into custom shader making if we aim for realism? I have noticed that you created a custom skin and hair shader, for example.

 

I'd like to add that this has happened to me twice now, both times I've tried importing the scene. It will unpack all of it and right before the dialog box pops-up to import all the files, Unity will freeze and a bunch of programs will open on my task bar. I have to S***+click them all in my task manager and end process. I can't say anything really makes it happen, except simply importing it from the asset store. The scene will work fine once I go back into Unity, but importing twice now has caused this problem

 

@willgoldstone
I am not sure what exactely is exactely is making it so difficult for me. When I try to make it look real, I follow these steps:

but it takes much time.
Maybe I am asking for more presets, I don't know.

 

I haven't actually used Unreal Engine 4 much, but what I think TobiUll is asking for is that you have the ability to open a new Unity project with more things already set up for you.

The default directional light and skybox in Unity 5 is a big step up from Unity 4, but it will still look pretty S*** if you just add assets to that and hit play. In Unreal Engine 4 you seem to have a dynamic sky, bloom, etc. already setup in the default scene you get with a new project. Perhaps add a preset to the new project dialog with "must have" image effects like bloom, tonemapping, color grading etc. already configured because these can be quite tough to setup right and without them you will have that "Unity" look. Just add a "next-gen!!11" preset for new projects in other words.

I feel like the current 3D scene has enough things already setup to annoy people who just want a clean scene they can create their project in, but too little for those who actually want to use it to create nice things without much setup. Splitting it into a "3D realistic" and "3D clean" or something would be preferable in my opinion. The realistic scene could even come with example scripts for a day/night cycle, color grading presets etc. etc.

I also feel like it would be a good investment to hire a few people full time just to produce projects with Unity so that these people can directly give feedback to you about the things that just don't look. Then you can improve them and in term make it easier to market Unity to the hobbyists who currently choose Unreal Engine 4 for it's superior "out of the box" look.

But at the same time I'm very skeptical about the asset store and your view on it. Take screen space ambient occlusion for instance. You can use one of the two image effect included with Unity and pull your hair out trying to configure them properly just to give up at their lackluster quality or pay 20 bucks and use something like SSAO Pro from the asset store which just works (which was supposed to be Unity's slogan once upon a time) and gives perfect results. But I fear it may not be in your interest or the asset creator's interest to actually have SSAO Pro be a part of Unity so it will remain on the asset store forever as a superior alternative to the built in effects. If this is overly paranoid just let me know, but it irritates me that we have like 4 different bloom effects and none of them work all that well, or that we have 2 SSAO effects which are much worse than what you get on the asset store.

 

Can you please report this problem with the in-editor bug reporter and give as much detail as possible. Any information that can help with reproducing the issue would be great.

 

First off, let me say that I find most a of your comments to have good merit (tho' perhaps a bit acerbic! ^_^!), so keep them up.

I do feel, however, that all this "out of the box" thing is a bit of a sad wild goose chase thru a smoke screen. It's great for marketing, I suppose to have all that carp (as in fish) in the scene, but the chance it will actually work for anyone is microscopic. For all of the games I have ever made in Unity, I can't think of one that would need an active day-night cycle, and when setting up a scene, I wouldn't want my camera covered with more carp.

This could be a marketing thing, yes, so our newest users can put a cube or their favourite model into a new Unity scene and have a good looking default setup so they can think "Yay! Look, ma! No hands! I'm a hotshot game developer!" But practically, I can't see the value. With even my limited experience, I'd rip all that carp out and start from scratch. I like(ed) the fact that Unity was a blank canvas.

I agree with you about the settings, but I'd suggest "default" and " clean", as certainly none of these settings, whether in unreal or Unity are realistic in any case. When I worked on a major TV show for several years, we would indeed add a 1/4 black promist filter to the scene to soften the look of our interiors (mostly to hide the sets, IMHO), but if it was ever obviously visible to the average viewer, it would be reshot without it. Moreover, we have many people working 2d projects - unarguably, far more than 3D - and a large group making 3d titles that don't fall into this FPS, MMO "cinematic" style. A lot of this current look is simply a fashion trend, and varies depending upon the agents developing the product, and any defaults are bound to fail and be replaced. This brings us back to marketing and perception.

I'd rather spend the time teachings people what these effects are and how to use them, than try to put in presets that will never satisfy anyone and will be thrown out anyway.

 

This has been a problem with Unity for years now; I've reported it several times. There are a few posts with people reporting it:
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/importing-a-package-causes-windows-to-open-all-my-programs.183993/
http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/585494/unity-causes-a-whole-bunch-of-random-windows-to-op.html
http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/419564/unity-opens-20-windows-when-importing-asset.html

It tends to happen if Unity is importing a bunch of assets and you open a different window like a web browser while you're waiting. I think what's happening is that Unity tries to pop up the modal "Choose what to import" window, but there must be some bad code where if Unity doesn't have focus it instead opens a window for every running process, even the ones that are set to be always hidden.

 

Seems likely seeing as I always multitask while waiting for these big projects to import and after rebooting I just let it run by itself because I don't want to agitate it.

And Adam, I do agree with you. People who actually make games won't start new projects often at all, and what's in the default project is of no real interest to them. But the hobbyists who flooded in after Unity became free, and especially with the full feature free release of Unity 5, seem to be some the most vocal on the forums. So making some, in my head, simple changes to please this crowd would go a long way. And the new default 3d scene in Unity 5 has to be some attempt at pleasing these people. Otherwise it could have just been a blank canvas. If I have to CTRL + A and DELETE when I start a new project it doesn't really matter how much stuff was in there to begin with. At least the way I see it. After all I do have to "subtract" quite a bit from the default scene if I want complete control over it. Ambient lighting is enabled by default, GI is enabled by default, the procedural skybox is enabled by default. It's not a blank canvas by any means.

But this could obviously be solved by example projects etc. I did just now try to install Unity 5 on my work computer as a brand new user. I wouldn't say the experience was great. The "Get started" video is good, but apart from that there isn't much. No information or tooltips about what the choosing 3D or 2D means for my project. No information about what choosing "Asset packages" before creating my project actually does. I have to leave the launcher and go to the website to find any information at all.

The example project I specifically chose to install as part of the installation process is nowhere to be seen. This has to be a bug? My only option is "New project". I browsed through my entire machine without finding the example project.

Some of your official projects on the asset store could be presented in the launcher as game templates or similar with links to "How it was made" if it came from a tutorial. I feel like there's definite room for improvement here in the way of helping newcomers and reducing the amount of repeat questions on the forums.

 

That could be a factor. I'll browse the web if I'm waiting for a large project to import. I'll try to re-important the labs scene again with my browser open and again with nothing open and see what happens

 

That is exactly what the Unity Labs demo and Standard Assets are for! The Labs demo definitely has a few issues right now, and I would go so far as to say I think it should really be labeled as a "beta". But the Unity team is definitely working very hard to address many of the issues you're talking about.

The project window could definitely use some additional information and tabs to help absolute beginners. The introduction video is good, but only briefly goes over the most broad points. There really needs to be a list of how-to videos presented here. Starting with one that actually goes over how to use the project window itself!

"Installing" the Standard Assets just means they are now preloaded into Unity. To use them you need to actually create a new project and check "Standard Assets" from the list of assets found under "Asset Packages..". The getting started video mentions the Standard Assets, but does not actually explain how to use them! This should be addressed ASAP.

 

I just successfully imported the labs scene while having multiple tabs in Chrome open and didn't encounter any problems. I can't remember if I had any other programs open aside from a web browser the two times I did experience the problem.

I'll try to file a bug report and note exactly what I was doing if it happens again, though. At this point, I can't really say what caused it before.

 

Yes. That is not a bad thing, I also use that sentence on my wife. Anything that makes potential users feel comfortable right away will help Unity.

 

I have a question, somewhat unrelated: Can't you get the developers of Neoaxis into your boat? I only know the main producer, but he is really motivated and crazy as the Unity guys are.I switched from Neoaxis to Unity because of the pure manpower, but the Neoaxis guy is definitively on the right track. I would love to see his manpower on Unity.

The reason why I am proposing this is that he designed absolutely great example projects.

 

Hello Dr. and the Unity team.

First of all, thanks for putting this project for all of us to inspect. There are lots of things to learn in this project and I'm sure you'll preparing some learning material using its features.

One thing I've found out is, the reason why the Dr.C grows a mustache. The moment I've seen him without a mustache, I immediately started supporting him on this.
Also he looks a bit like the famous Spanish actor "Gael García Bernal"



Second, I wanted to ask about hair mesh and shader for Dr. himself: I couldn't import the "CharacterScientist.fbx" file to Blender to check out but I take a look using "Autodesk Review" and it seems to me that the hair mesh has custom face normals, thus I think hair shader uses those but it also has a NormalMap applied.Shader must be blending those normals I guess. Is possible to learn more about how hair and skin shader works? what they need in order to work properly.

Third, I've put Dr. to a new scene which revealed some sort of hair mesh shadow problem.
Is this hair mesh bug? or a shader bug? or not a bug at all and it is just "Custom hair shader" that is made "custom" for indoor and no shadow environments?
Left is the Dr. in a default scene, right one is Dr. in his usual environment.


Thanks again!

 

I'll see if I can get any traction on these.

 

I don't know anything about neoaxis. I'll have a google. Anything more you can tell me?

 

coolio....

 

yep i had the same crash where like million of windows popped on my screen while i was importing unity labs. at first i thought its some virus, or someone is hacking into my computer... until i luckily read it here... there were even some programs opened in fcking Chinese lol, i live in EU and have never seen Chinese programs on my computer

well import came up with error anyways.

Failed to import package with error: Couldn't decompress package
UnityEditor.AssetStoreContext:OpenPackage(String)

this one, your team should really look into it. there is quite a few people having problems.
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/ca...llage-demo-on-the-asset-store-updated.307022/

so tomorrow i'll start again