Weekly Topic What's your favorite new 5.6 feature so far?

As I’m sure many of you have already heard, we just released Unity 5.6! You can check out our extensive blog post or the release notes for the full run down if you haven’t. (And as always, don’t forget to backup your project first before updating!)

Has anyone given 5.6 a spin yet? What are some of your favorite new features so far and why? What’s got you most excited to try?

Let’s keep this to a discussion about what you like (or not) about 5.6 additions so far. If you have some specific feedback on the release regarding bugs or have questions, please direct those posts to the official release thread here so that Sara can make sure it’s all tracked and get you answers. Thank you!


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(To see past discussions, go to this index thread)

 

The progressive lightmapper looks great. It'll really help with the workflow with light maps. Before, using light maps was a pain because it took so long before you could see the result of changing things. I'm interested to see if there's been any changes in performance, though - just having automatic baking on can sometimes slow my computer to a crawl.

The GPU instancing stuff is very exciting. We'll want to do experiments with moving a lot of characters around the scene, and instancing might help us get that count up.

The physics debugger will be nice to have around. Artists and level designers have a tendency to just... leave the mesh collider on stuff. Finding those at a glance will be a big help.

"Editor: Improved the performance of the Hierarchy view in the Profiler Window."
That performance has always been attrocious (10+ seconds for Unity to react to every input when I'm deep profiling and have expanded a couple of times), so this will be nice.


The navmesh stuff is neat, for sure, but it's too little, too late. The system was never ready for production, and even with all of these (pretty great) improvements it's half-baked. It's still not possible to make the agents do anything else than hug every wall ever, and it's still very cumbersome to get any information about what the agent's going to do. agent-agent avoidance is still not good - there's no way to make agents walk past each other without having them bump into each other and lose significant speed, which looks horrible.
Not to disparage the work being done by the people working on the navmesh, they're doing the right thing. It's just so many miles away from what it needs to be to get good results and not be a pain to work with.

 

Physics.ComputePenetration is super useful! I waited for that quite a while to make a character controller that works just how I want it to.

The TreeView IMGUI Control is cool as well. At the moment I only use button lists which is pretty bad and with the new TreeView thing will finally look how they're supposed to.

TextMesh Pro... well the old text renderer can't even compare. The two features that makes it especially awesome are the support for custom "links" (metadata) and emoji.


I know those things are all considered minor (or moderate in the TMP case) where as most people are all over the progressive lightmapper and video stuff, but honestly it's not really of any use to me.


The only thing I'm sad about is the absolute garbage performance of the noise module.
Just make a particle system with ~500 active particles at a time and change settings in the noise module, it will hang Unity for like a second for every change, even when typing numbers.
I can't imagine that this isn't some kind of bug. Is it generating some kind of huge lookup table for noise curves? Even if that's the case it shouldn't take so long. Use simplex noise instead of the expensive perlin! nobody will notice the difference and its a lot faster.

 

The progressive lightmapper is great but I ran into an interesting scenario. Maybe it's a bug but I think it's intended behavior. I'm working with a terrain and spawned a bunch of game objects. The lightmapper uses a geometry cache for performance but was sucking up 24 Gigs of ram after building the geometry cache.

 

The progressive lightmapper by far. This is the one feature I was waiting on since betas for 5.0. The new post-processing stack is also very impressive.

 

The new VideoPlayer! Very flexible and powerful to be able to render video a to Camera Near Plane, Camera Far Plane, a RenderTexture or into a Material's Texture Shader Property!

Gifs from when I was testing it out (File-size is too big to upload to Forums):
https://twitter.com/andytouch/status/832560011071078400
https://twitter.com/andytouch/status/832295788646658050
https://twitter.com/andytouch/status/832562361185816576
https://twitter.com/andytouch/status/832586099277053955

 

Yeah the new progressive lightmapper is probably the best one in 5.6 for me too as it will save a ton of time thanks to the prioritize view feature. Too bad it's still missing some important features but maybe we (hopefully) get them in the patch releases.

 

I don't have much use on my current project, but will in the future. That drag and drop ordering of scripts though!

 

For me, mixed mode lighting working well with the Enlighten lightmapper is enough to keep me happy for now

 

My favourite feature must be the web-gl being broken on the server when it used to work correctly a version before.
https://i.imgur.com/fWCIQjw.png
https://i.imgur.com/DDMjnuE.png

 

There are new features?

 

I already raved about it on the forum during the beta but I love the support for compute shaders on metal in 5.6

 

Progressive light mapper, but new video player would have save a ton of my time in the past.

Wasted so much of my time trying to get EasyMovieTexture to play nice with iOS Android and Google VR in the past.

 

Particle system multi management .__. I've wanted it for so long!

 

Ceirtainly NavMesh components and abilitity to use surfaces and links. Just wishing you will improve it further and make AICharacterController compatible with it.

 

- New Video Player
- GPU Instancing.

Now, post a package with these demo. Don't think. Just do it.

 

I totally forgot about the script reordering, thanks for the reminder! I went through the entire change log; I wonder if it simply wasn't mentioned, or if I overlooked/misunderstood its entry.

 

Yeah I definitely didn't see it anywhere on the change log either. Huge time saver. I only tried because I remembered it being mentioned recently. Glad to update just for that.

 

Does the script reordering break prefab connections, or has that been fixed as well?

 

Yeah it does still break prefabs.

 

I realy want those Navigation components and i have been waiting for them so long.

 

Don't really have a favorite feature of 5.6 because I'm not really using any of the big features of 5.6.. one of those releases where I just moved onto for the sake of keeping project upto date with the latest... lighting nope won't touch it, my project still sticking with realtime only for lights.. improved navmesh pathing.. this is what I plan on trying out sometime in the future have yet to see how well it plays with hybrid of terrain and voxels or if its still better to use another asset ie A star pathing probably the later.

Improved video support, one of those things I think most wanted updating so we didn't have to have eegh quicktime, while doing re-encodes for videos, buying third party assets, dealing with the hassle of multi platform support etc..and now that we have it, I still haven't put it to full use but it does work well with testing webm. I was hoping it came with a built in encoder actually, as have far more use cases for that, but fell short of that.. in anycase keijiro got it covered and there is another unity jp project that has webm support for encoding now so in a round abouts way I gots what I needed.

Treeview IMGUI looked useful until I tried it out and realized the design of it was awkard to just go use, and documentation left off details and setup after the beginner implementation. For my editor asset would have been perfect, if the api was easier to actually use and move editor scriptableobject structure over into using it, instead it would require rebuilding my own asset around using that or writing some bridge .. Not really user friendly implementation (is explained was built for in house use but still if you're gonna release it yknow) Maybe they start improving more in editor areas then aswel.. like those useless drop down menus that fill up my entire screen and force me to mousewheel scroll down a fking huge list.. you know the ones.. script execution [+] has them.. changing the keycode for input.. all the crap areas that could be improve with a proper ui like i dunno..a tree view list and working search filter instead of using that drop menu and stuffing it with 100's of items because that's really intuitive.

Postprocessing stack also not really included in 5.6.. so far only using it for Anti-aliasing..yeh thats it for me.. the AO and its options are a little behind most the assets doing the same, and behind UEs own built in AO, the rest of the effects are good but don't have much use for them currently.

Anyway the best thing for me in 5.6 release wasn't even in and working in 5.6 until late last month and that's TMP pro... better clearer text with effects and MORE of it on a canvas without being screwed by the 64k canvas vert limit or making workarounds.. localization isn't handled as easily as original text component with a dynamic font.. so I'm tied to using old text components for some areas until I get around to finding localized fonts and doing the make your own font library thing for tmp with it ..or perhaps the attitude should be screw localization.. just wait for the localized version clone.. that can happen right?

Vulkan api works nice and fast, I have even less reason to touch Win10 crap now

"Editor: Improved the performance of the Hierarchy view in the Profiler Window."
That performance has always been attrocious (10+ seconds for Unity to react to every input when I'm deep profiling and have expanded a couple of times), so this will be nice."

Yeah using deep profiling is still a slouch, my disappointment for 5.6 thinking they do something about it...really not much improvement with the profiler or its features ..left in the dark with profiling background threads as the profiler really only gives you insight with whats going on the main unity thread..I dunno what happened to all the feedback collecting they did last year but it seems to have not shown up in actual releases yet.