Unity 5

Been working with Unity since version 3, and was really surprised to see them go free non-commercially at this year's GDC .., but with that you can tell that the engine isn't visually that far off from Unreal Engine 4 at all ...

Here is some progress that i've managed to work to over the years since 2012 or so using Autodesk Maya, Motionbuilder, Softimage/Face Robot, 3DS Max, Character Generator, GIMP, OC3 FaceFX, Audacity / Creative X-Fi MB2/3 amongst others :


https://youtu.be/aNGzm4895UQ

Cities: Skylines uses this I believe. It does indeed look great.

LeviathanZERO said:

Cities: Skylines uses this I believe. It does indeed look great.

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i didn't know that, will take a closer look at that game

Unity has indeed come a long way, what was done with Cities is great and relatively light on resources considering what you are getting.

Keep it up Unity, the cross-platform aspect is quite an attractive choice too.

The big thing with Unity 5 is they made all the rendering engine capabilities available in the free version.
That brings it more in line with what you get in free (or minimal monthly subscription) versions of Unreal and Cry Engine.

Up through 4.6, a lot of necessary features like render targets and full screen post processing effects were only in the paid commercial version.

Between that and the UI system they added in 4.5 or 4.6, Unity is much closer to a complete package that you can use to play around with and not need to spend any money unless you want to really make money with your projects.

The one big thing I think is still missing (at least I haven't read about any major changes to it in 5) is the engine API calls are not thread safe, so you have to marshall all your direct interaction with the engine to the main thread. That means you can still get into problems like KSP has had with huge ships where all those expensive physics calculations can bog down and not make efficient use of all the available cores.

Wouldn't offloading processor intense functions to a c/c++ dll help in that situation though? They support that...

http://unity3d.com/learn/tutorials/modules/beginner/live-training-archive/writing-plugins

erek said:

i didn't know that, will take a closer look at that game

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We have some lovely pictures in the Cities thread.
There's a 4K downscale shot on this page. Looks wonderful.
http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1830317&page=9

Wasteland 2 is apparently getting reworked with unity 5 for the ps4 version that is supposed to be out near the end of the year iirc, and will available for as free upgrade to existing pc users also. Should be interesting for another play through.

horse said:

Wasteland 2 is apparently getting reworked with unity 5 for the ps4 version that is supposed to be out near the end of the year iirc, and will available for as free upgrade to existing pc users also. Should be interesting for another play through.

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That's awesome! Isn't Wasteland 2 like the precursor to the Fallout series??

erek said:

That's awesome! Isn't Wasteland 2 like the precursor to the Fallout series??

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Wasteland was more or less.

So basically Wasteland was made by Interplay back in the early, early days by the guys that founded it, and published by EA. A few years later Interplay wanted to make a sequel, but EA wouldn't sell the rights or fund the game. So instead they made Fallout which is similar in theme (post apocalyptic RPG) but in a different universe. They also made Fallout 2, and planed to make a third one but did not.

Many years later Interplay folded, sold the Fallout IP to Bethesda, and one of the founders, Brian Fargo, had moved on and made a new company inXile Entertainment. EA didn't do anything with Wasteland, so the trademark on it lapsed. Trademark is not like copyright, it is use it or lose it. Fargo trademarked Wateland and set about trying to get someone to fund a sequel. Nobody would.

Then Kickstarted happened and he turned to that, got funding, and now 2 ish years later Wasteland 2 is a reality.

So it is a sequel to Wasteland 1, but a spiritual partner to Fallout. It would remind you of Fallout 1 and 2 (3 and New Vegas are Bethesda's properties and done very different) in a number of ways relating to gameplay and style, but is a distinct universe and has some fairly significant differences. they are similar parallel universes, not prequels/sequels.

I'm about to dive into Unity right now actually. A friend of mine is pretty far along in Unity and he loves it. I learned the Unreal engine back in 2007 and it looks different now from Unreal 4. Kismet is now blueprints and it looks more robust. I don't know, I think I'd rather stick with Unreal for standard sake, but whats everyone's opinion on this?

Stick with what you are most comfortable with. Learning the UI is always the easy part compared to actually making assets and gameplay programming which is basically the same no matter what app you use.

If you want to help your friend then learn Unity. I got into Unreal years ago and the differences are mostly surrounding map-making, Unreal still using BSP brushes.

redmasc said:

I'm about to dive into Unity right now actually. A friend of mine is pretty far along in Unity and he loves it. I learned the Unreal engine back in 2007 and it looks different now from Unreal 4. Kismet is now blueprints and it looks more robust. I don't know, I think I'd rather stick with Unreal for standard sake, but whats everyone's opinion on this?

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Haven't done anything with Unity but UE4 has been awesome, been using it for close to a year now and love it. Tons of tutorials, looks great, easy to use. Only issue is Unity has a better asset store, but hopefully UE4's will catch up.

Ghost of a Tale recently announced conversion from Unity 4 to Unity 5. and JUST announced conversion of shaders to physically based versions.

http://www.ghostofatale.com/

Ugh, I HATE that fake DOF effect... at least tone it down so it's not like looking at N64... otherwise, cool to see some higher quality graphics on Unity. It'd be interesting to see someone try and port over the recently released Unreal Tournament map to see how it compares there. Someone do it, please?

WHY!? Why are developers obsessed with stupid Chromatic Aberration!?! It's a shit effect that NEVER makes the game look BETTER. STOP USING THAT SHIT! Those screenshots look HORRID. People spend hundreds of dollars on lenses so that distortion does NOT appear in photos. It is NOT ever a desired effect in real life, why the hell are game devs smearing that shit like vasoline on everything?

Cool they went free. But its a far cry from Unreal 4 engine. Unless you are blind.

DOF blur is created in our eyes naturally. There's no need to add it into games.

bigdogchris said:

DOF blur is created in our eyes naturally. There's no need to add it into games.

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I agree with DOF being overdone in games, but your comment on our eyes creating naturally is inaccurate when it comes to images on screen. There is no DOF unless it is artificially created. Unfortunately, devs over do it.

bigdogchris said:

DOF blur is created in our eyes naturally. There's no need to add it into games.

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In reality (this goes for film as well) you can't have everything in focus 100% like you can with rendered images. Seeing how you're viewing a 2d rendered image your eyes do not create a depth of field effect naturally when viewing a game.

Depth of field is useful in game when used in certain circumstances where you can predict where mostly likely focal point is or create a cinematic point of interest and it's annoying when it's simply enabled all the time for no reason like above.

CA can go die in a fire, the only game that used that effect well was the original crysis and it's effects on your suit hud from damage and water effects.

you guys are focusing too technically on the "depth" portion of "depth of field".

Of course, a 2d image has no depth.

However, your eye is not focusing on the entire image/screen, at once. Therefore, things around your focal point, in your peripheral, are naturally not in focus (your color perception drops off, as well). which is half the argument for depth of field in games. to force the peripheral to be out of focus. Because that's what a real eye does.

adding additional blurring on top of what your eye already does, detracts from your ability to track objects in the game. Because, our eyes are independent form the game camera. Percieved blurring is actually tied in our brains to feelings of disorientation, confusion, sickness, that something is wrong.

Anyone wanting to be semi-competitive in an FPS will turn off motion blurring and depth of field effects, for this reason.

the other bit is about depth, yes. The idea that using depth of field should in theory, make the 2D screen image seem more 3 dimensional.

However, we don't actually realize that depth of field is happening in real life, with our eyes, unless we are very close to a mostly flat object which we can use to site down and guage our own field of vision. (stand next to a textured wall and slowly look further down it. Noting how the focus from your eyes changes. You'll probably become conscious of the muscles controlling your eyes and lenses, as well.)

Most of the time, when a game has a strong depth of field effect, it just makes eveything look like a blurred mess. Because the depth of field effect is based on the focal point of the game/character camera. Not our eyeballs. The game camera may be focused on one part of the screen, but we aren't necessarily looking there, with our own eyes.

Depth of field is really only useful as an effect for forced perspective and visual flair. or to impress upon us a feeling or emotion, to connect with the game events. So maybe your character just got punched in the face. Some depth of field to give a sense of disorientation, can pull you in for a second. Or maybe you just rounded a corner and are facing down some beast and your character has a moment of great fear. A bit of that tunnel vision can get us in the moment.

It doesn't actually enhance our ability to see into the game or an area captured in an image. It takes away from it. Advanced lighting and shadowing effects are much more useful at giving our brains an impression of depth and dimension.

Looking at Skyrim screenshots with heavy DoF can look cool. But playing it that way, in my experience, is pretty terrible.

I agree but If we are talking about recreating a realistic image then motion blur and depth of field need to be present in a rendered environment. Depth of field is much harder to emulate in games because it's impossible to tell where a person is looking at all times, maybe in the future vr and eye tracking it may actually compensate for this.

Motion blur is also needed to make moving objects look realistic on a screen as rendered images but blurring the whole screen as you turn doesn't do a good job of recreating what we get in real life because we track objects with our eyes.

I think motion blur works well in games when it's used on fast moving objects in a scene that our eyes wouldn't have been able to track well in real life. Or in racing games at high speeds objects are blurred as you pass them, because normally you are not trying to track things you pass on the side of the road with your eyes anyways.