Unity 5 is coming and more!

Some minor questions?

• What exactly would this "Inspector Plugin Settings"?
• I know that Mono is not updated, but the MonoDeveloper will be upgraded to version 4.2 or 4.3?
• At the launch of version 5, it already comes with all the features of version 4.5/4.6 integrated? Or have features that will reappear only in version 5.x?
• The workflow for working with scales, has changed? For working with scale in Unity is a bit painful, we have to get going into modeling programs to check scales.
• We can work with Multithreaded (not the Editor, but the game) natively in Unity, or do we have to use plugins for this?

 

Hey guys, i'm one of the people that bought PRO a little before 1st of March (i bought it in February).

Could you move the grace period to beginning of the year 2014?
Its only the 3rd month and there are lots more people in that situation!

Thank you in advance!

 

A while ago at a previous GDC i remember Unity working with NVidia on APEX Destruction and Cloth. Will Unity 5.0 be best placed to start providing APEX support like Unreal and Crytek technologies support out of the box? Secondly, will this likely be a pro feature if these workflows are put into Unity 5.0?

 

You can always run out of memory ^_^. Perhaps it'll be filled with a bunch of cubemaps.

 

Is there any possibility of batching near distance trees on the terrain system, now that SpeedTree is integrated? Have you guys looked at that? Unity terrain handles billboards and far trees extremely well, but draw calls goes through the roof when you get close to even small amount of trees.

 

Hi,
Congrats for the announcement of Unity 5.
Do you plan to release Unity 6 at 18 months-24 months after Unity 5 release ? Or you have a new scheduling schema on the works ?
This info can really help me decide between a perpetual license - subscription.

On a side note :
- Web GL will not be free after some point - extract from an email sent by Unity : "Deploy to WebGL with our upcoming paid-for add-on - a further one-click build option for web apps." Ouch.

 

"Chariots"--"Posted: 01:05 PM 12 Minutes Ago

Is there any possibility of batching near distance trees on the terrain system, now that SpeedTree is integrated? Have you guys looked at that? Unity terrain handles billboards and far trees extremely well, but draw calls goes through the roof when you get close to even small amount of trees.​

"


To be friendly only to activate the option shadows the draw Calls dramatically increases even though for example an object with 10 draw Call. the shadows greatly increases the draw Call even in small quantities of objects.
Conclusion is heavy.
I hope to have improvements in these aspects.

 

Well done Unity Technologies!

 

Please, please could you finish that last sentence? Is it perhaps "which Unity will then run through asm.js"? And if so, does that mean that native Unity plugins will be able to work via WebGL? Just asking...

 

Surface shaders are still supported and so are plain Cg shaders.
It has nothing to do with DX11-level features on OpenGL, but refers to the new physically based Standard shader. It's a one shader to rule them all (except special FX, skin, etc. cases).

Yes.

 

Beast will indeed not be a part of Unity 5.
All the GI features are not really tied to a specific rendering API, so they work just fine on DX9, DX11, OpenGL and OpenGL ES. On the mobile side they require a fairly recent device (say from within last year or two).

 

than i would find the unity5-page misleading. it states if i purchase unity5, i get the following techniques and webgl is on the list.

i ask again will clustered rendering as shown on unite 2013 be implemented in 5?

 

Great! What sort of security concerns are there for plugin developers that are now using pre-compiled dll's and similar for different platforms? Do they have to provide the full source in C++ format to the end-users (Unity users) for this to work? I'm thinking about plugins such as Coherent, NOESIS and others.

 

I hope there are more underlying features exposed in the APIs. Mecanim, animation events and custom fonts come to mind, off the top of my head. More than once have I had to use SerialisedProperties and peeking into the editor code and YAML files to manually edit or copy properties that are not exposed in the API and are affected by scripting.

For example, writing to AnimationClips to batch changes to many clips or changing the mask source destroys events and since the events property is not exposed at the importer level they need to be copied manually.

In the case of custom fonts I've even had to write to the fontsettings YAML file manually to get kerning pairs to work, as the property is of a type that doesn't seem to be exposed to the C# side of the engine, surely that is something that should be exposed?

 

@jonas: Sounds good, thank's for taking your time explaining the situation!

 

i hope its not too expensive. been waiting for this feature quite a long time and upgraded to unity 5 the moment it was available. this is a bummer right now..

 

Will there be a cross upgrade option to WebGL for those having the Flash add-on?

 

Some thoughts for unity staff:


1. I hope that you will overhaul the mesh interface. There is no point to having meshfilter.mesh. There should be just an encapsulating Renderer.

2. I hope you will make a lot of breaking changes. Anyone who's anyone doesn't constantly keep upgrading during development. They stick with something and ship it. If they HAVE to upgrade, they wouldn't be a developer if they couldn't fix things that break. Now is the time to really take risks since you've dropped beast you may as well go with it for sanity's sake and change a lot of things.

Please ignore the vocal minority as they'll end up using it anyway. Enlighten etc is just too strong, so we could have a very sleek Unity

3. Please make more things pro, to encourage pro uptake. I need Unity to earn a lot more money this time round. More money for Unity is more development on the core of my business.

Thanks guys, and I really am impressed by your hard work so far. This is something special. It must have been frustrating releasing Unity 4, knowing that it was a stop gap you had no choice but to leave as it was, knowing that the only way to catch up to the big boys was to hunker down and focus on 5.

ps... GC

 

Is there some kind of fallback so that an app case use the GI features on a newer device but scale back if running on something older?

 

You could just bake with Enlighten, there's no need to fall back as such. I've only tested enlighten on a latest gen Samsung Galaxy Note and a new(Ish) Ipad and everything ran fine in regards to speed. I'd gather older devices could suffer, so I'd just bake away.. Just like a nice delicious TurkeyPotPie.

Man his name makes me so hungry.

 

Purchase WebGL ? Are you Referring to WebGL PRO ? As this would really suck major @#! if WebGL is not available for Unity Free Version.

 

Ugh! That is indeed something the landing page should be much clearer about, indeed!
The way the video and the page make it sound it's a developer preview until it's out of the Testing phase. It did not sound like an Add-On purchase at all. Which is ... a little disappointing.

Also: Does this mean that people who want to export to web will not be able to do so after plugin Support has been dropped by the browsers?

 

Static lightmaps will now be provided by Enlighten and they mix seamlessly with in-game GI.
The default workflow will be much more streamlined and automatic, but we still plan to support a workflow where you will just get the EXR files.

 

David Helgason said in his blog: "...SpeedTree is integrated..."

What does it mean?

#1: An importer for Speed Tree Models (we have to buy a separate licence of Speed Tree)

or

#2: Speed Tree is part of Unity 5 like the current Tree Editor in Unity 4 (we dont have to buy Speed Tree)

 

We have upgraded to 4.x last January, are we eligible to upgrade to 5.x for free?

 

Its #1 but with bending support and stuff like that, but the actual speed tree engine will not be integrated.
I think this is also poorly worded,

 

Thanks for the reply, that's great to know!

Can you go into a bit of detail in regards to how an environment is prepared for real-time GI? I'm not familiar with how Enlighten fully works, unfortunately. Do you have to manually set up environment probes, for example, or nothing like that is necessary for the real-time elements of the system, and the system works fine in arbitrary environments? I'm asking mostly to know whether I can use the real-time elements of Enlighten within a procedural environment.

 

That makes sense. Thanks!

 

Can someone from Unity give me any information what is likely to be available in the clothing physics for the upcoming Unity 5.0. Will apex or something similar be supported giving the movement to the new physics 3.3 version.

Is this still happening
http://physxinfo.com/news/8065/post...-is-going-to-be-integrated-into-unity-engine/

 

If we do have to pay for WebGL, why do we have to pay for the early access? doesn't it make more sense to release it for Free as Development Preview just like Flash, then if you really need to put a price tag on it, let those who want the Full Features of WebGL or Completed Version as Paid for Add-on Not the Preview Version...

 

Apex is a completely different SDK, if they were including Apex they would of announced. Physx 3.3. should include everything in Physx 3.3.

http://physxfiles.com/PhysX_3-3_release_notes.html

 

You owe me tea and biscuits..

 

And.....

-Free ALL indie mobile licence.

 

So how long does the $600 dollar upgrade last for? Because I won't be able to upgrade for at least a month.

 

http://unity3d.com/unity/faq

What do I get if I pre-order Unity 5.0?
Owners of a Unity Pro 4.x perpetual license can pre-order Unity 5.0 for $600. If they also have Unity 4.x deployment add-ons, they can upgrade the add-ons to Unity 5.0, at $600 / add-on. This offer cannot be combined with any other current offers from Unity and expires when Unity 5.0 is officially released.

 

Yeah that doesn't actually answer my question "Officially released".

 

Sometime after spring (which is when 4.6 will be released), your not going to get a date at this point in time.

 

yes?

 

So, do we have better lightmap integration to AssetBundles this time?

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/61580-AssetBundles-with-lightmaps

 

I'm curious about the upgrade to PhysX: Will we be able to manually advance the simulation? I'm asking because it makes client side prediction for fast paced shooters much simpler when you can reset and resimulate a few simulation steps to account for errors between the client and server. I'm currently using bullet to do this but having an "in Unity" solution would be much easier to deal with.

 

Ah, thanks for that, plenty of time, I just in a middle of computer upgrades, so that's why I asked.

 

Since lightmaps are stored on a scene level, the easiest way to work with them in a streaming scenario is with additively loaded scenes.
I agree that they should most likely be added as dependencies for when building asset bundles with specific objects. A bug report on that would be nice.

 

Any information on what the Level Streaming feature is?

 

Enlighten needs to do a precompute on the static geometry to calculate data that can efficiently be used at runtime for in-game GI.
That precomputation process is available only in the Editor.

Dynamic objects can be lit with light probes and cubemaps. At least in the initial release dynamic objects will not influence the environment. That might be possible further down the road, but the majority of your scene should ideally be static.

 

Will the WebGL add-on have support for asset bundles?