Unity 4 Revealed

[Red]

http://www.indiegamemag.com/unity-4-reveal-indie-game-developers-are-ecstatic-but/

Well worth taking this in!

not sure how this will affect Playmaker (and i'm sure it's going to present a bit of a challenge to update PM to be able to use these new features.)

I think when i decided to go with Unity 3D (and Playmaker for the controls/scripting) i made the right decision.

So, who else is as excited as i am to be able to get Unity 4 and see what it can do to the game-dev process?

[kiriri]

http://www.gamedevuniverse.com/blog/2012/06/unity-4-upgrade-pricing.html

with Pro upgrades hitting in at $850.

Somehow I can't say I'm all that happy :S
cool features, but 850$ for 2 years is somewhat extreme for a supposedly indie-friendly company, don't you think ...
Well either way, cool features Like real IK!!!!!!

[Vermz]

http://www.gamedevuniverse.com/blog/2012/06/unity-4-upgrade-pricing.html

with Pro upgrades hitting in at $850.

Somehow I can't say I'm all that happy :S
cool features, but 850$ for 2 years is somewhat extreme for a supposedly indie-friendly company, don't you think ...
Well either way, cool features Like real IK!!!!!!

What do you mean for 2 years?

[kiriri]

well, isn't 2 years roughly the time it'll take them to produce the next major unity update (unity 5) ?

[jeanfabre]

Hi,

 Mixed feelings really, They are still getting more and more into AAA, which is for the mere mortals developers a mirage.

 Careful with ik , it will be only limb ik, so only two bones.  it's really great and seems to be extremely powerful, but still, limb ik, is not full ik.

 I am sure the indie version of Unity will remain very attractive and the best solution to do indie games.

And I love there website presentation with the scrolling, I want to do that in unity now somehow!


Bye,

 Jean

[Red]

good point and good catch on the IK issue.

though, it looks like the animation system would work perfectly well with most auto-rigging solutions like Biped in 3ds max.

the AAA crowd i think is a natural fit though... i mean, it's mainly graphics and the scope that makes something on par with AAA games nowadays and since the tech is evolving, getting AAA results is not outside of the realm of possibilities for us indies. granted, that's a LOT of work to go into it but it's still achievable.

my only concern is how they're going to handle the free licenses. i'm still on it (i'm definitely going to upgrade when i have that much money to do so) and the free version was one of the deciding factors for me choosing Unity3D in the first place.

[artician]

This is a tough price to swallow for me.  I've slowly gotten over the learning curve of using PlayMaker for development, and my pipeline workflow for getting assets into Unity has never been more streamlined, but I continue to hit so many bugs with the Editor itself that I'll have to wait and see on this.  I would like to be a full-time profitable independent developer, or at least contractable for small side projects, but I haven't been able to produce a finished product in over a year of development.  All sorts of ridiculous things have cropped up, primarily major features in Unity, just break or don't work.  When support is contacted, more than 3 times now I've had a reply such as: "Wow, yeah that's a bug alright.  File a bug report!  We have no idea when, if ever, your lightmapping, landscape foliage rendering, or tree geometry will work.  Sorry!"

I didn't need those things anyway~! 

But I can't fork over another near-1k of my own money before seeing their support and focus on fixing existing features become their priority.  Hell, you still can't even import a 4096^2(+1)  resolution heightmap, even though it's an option within the editor itself!

[shinodan]

Yeah i need to make money from the free version first, Im already skint. the economy sucks.

[kiriri]

2 bones only is a serious downfall for me, since my legs consist of 4 bones (blender rigify Rig)... fail!
But there are a  bunch of things I really like nontheless... like the copy paste components even while the game is running (although come to think, that's nothing more than a copy of the 5$ plugin in the asset store xD).
And then there's the new text rendering backend, external forces for shuriken, tesselation (finally!), dynamic navmeshes, well, and of course Linux support
All in all it might not be worth the money for everyone, but I think I for one cannot finish my project without these features, now that I know of them.

[jeanfabre]

hi,

Yes, also, I think after the announcement, they quickly realized that it might not have been a good way to advertize it, now they are trying to calm down the initial deception:

http://blogs.unity3d.com/2012/06/24/unity-3-x-and-4-x-going-forward/

saying in short: don't upgrade to 4.x which is really against the logic... why releasing 4.x then...

 I am not really sure this is the best approach, it will get very messy.

bye,

 Jean

[artician]

I guess this is still positive as a lesser-of-two-evils kind of thing.  I'm mostly afraid their support will get even less efficient, as now they're supporting two branches of code when before they could hardly support one. 

I think their support team does a relatively good job of responding to issues, but I haven't had them actually fix an issue for me.  I've had to make drastic changes in multiple projects of mine because of this.  At first it wasn't such an issue, but after the second and third times it substantially diminishes my faith in their business plan.

Here's hoping for the best! 

[kiriri]

it should be noted that, contradictory to the "wait and see" post, my unity support just offered me 25% off if I upgrade now from 3.x to 4.x :S All in all, this is getting quite weird.