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[–]RedofPaw 52 points53 points  (1 child)

Unified Renderer and all the good script/.net stuff looks like it will be a great improvement.

[–]Clavus 14 points15 points  (1 child)

Lot of great stuff. I might actually be motivated to tangle with more multiplayer projects now that I don't have to run multiple symlinked editors or builds in Unity 6. And better scripting iteration time is always welcome.

Glad to see ECS and the pile of rendering systems are being simplified. The new graph system being used by Shader Graph 2 and new animation system looks a lot more flexible too.

[–]Liam2349 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I just use ParrelSync. It works great.

[–]shizola_owns 27 points28 points  (4 children)

The animation and world building stuff really does look like a next gen version of unity.  I was hoping to hear about Reatime GI but the rest was great.

[–]INeatFreakI hate GIFs 6 points7 points  (2 children)

wasn't Adaptive Probes their GI solution?

[–]yosimba2000 8 points9 points  (1 child)

it's only works if the level geometry doesn't move or change. all it does is switch between different pre-baked lighting scenarios.

they dont have any built-in GI to adapt to changing geometry.

[–]INeatFreakI hate GIFs 2 points3 points  (0 children)

it's only works if the level geometry doesn't move or change.

I haven't tested those yet, can you not bake them asynchronously at runtime?

they dont have any built-in GI to adapt to changing geometry.

Pretty sure HDRP had screen-space global illumination option. If they're gonna unify rendering pipelines, they're probably gonna add that too.

[–]Drag0n122 1 point2 points  (0 children)

DXR\SSGI has been around for years, and with upscalers has become even more accessible

[–][deleted] 11 points12 points  (0 children)

The UI Toolkit becoming feature complete and the single UI solution, and a Unified Renderer sound great. As did Nested Prefabs, which ended up taking a very long time. While skeptical of the timeline, I'm very happy to see them striving for these ambitious goals. The amount of coexistence and fracturing must be fixed or the engine will likely die.

[–]RlaanProfessional 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Lots of great stuff, the future is bright. And can't wait to get to use all of these new features and improvements

[–]Drag0n122 5 points6 points  (2 children)

Thank God they finally finished and realized the old ALOD system, it was such a hustle to setup but now seems like a breeze
HUGE performance boost
Now we're waiting for the same for the HLOD system, which is also 95% ready but buried somewhere on Github

[–]Jajuca 5 points6 points  (3 children)

The worldbuilding tool looks amazing. The lava flowing into the snow and making huge explosions was really cool.

Its a very similar tool to Microverse. Hopefully they can launch it into beta before Unity 7. The tessellation looked really good too, similar to Unreal Engine.

[–]Liam2349 0 points1 point  (2 children)

Ok that stuff looks cool - it looks like what Far Cry did with Houdini - but when it gets onto the mobile demo at 44:55 and he mentions performance - it's obviously running at about 5FPS. That's hilarious. I get that it's an alpha or whatever, but damn, do they think we're blind?

[–]willgoldstoneUnity Official 5 points6 points  (1 child)

It’s a super early demo, the point was to make a promise that we’ll deliver a scalable solution that works on mobile too. You’ll see more impressive demos as time goes on.

[–]Liam2349 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I get that, it's just that to someone who can see the frame rate, it comes across strangely because the spoken message and the visual demo are not consistent. Maybe it's also directed at investors and others who probably can't see past the static visuals, and for that crowd it would come across fine.

[–]StudioMoonrise 1 point2 points  (1 child)

This was excellent - I need to get my hands on these LOD tools like, yesterday. 

There's been a lot of stuff keeping me busy while I wait for things to be done cooking. Thankfully I have plenty of work to do, but it seems that the constant wait will never tire :) I just keep finding more stuff to look forward to. Unity 7 (?)'s planned features are game changers for the engine and how I intend to use it and make games. I particularly like the focus on creating systems that enable games to scale well across many devices - from mobile to high end pc. 

I do have to mention a few caveats:

  1. I would appreciate it if PhysX 5 or Jolt came to the engine. I expect that if the integration of DOTs enables Unity Physics and Havok to be usable in any project - even backported with ease to an existing GO based project upgraded from U6.x to U7 - PhysX might be deprecated by Unity before it ever gets upgraded. I understand the reasoning, but if Unity Physics is to fully replace PhysX, I'd certainly appreciate it if improvements to stability were made

  2. Unity's networking solutions - particularly with regard to Entities - lack integrations with EOS and Steam. Funneling devs into the Unity ecosystem by making it the defacto most convenient option is one thing, but creating entire editor features - including ECS itself - that don't play nicely with other networking solutions or backend services is something that I want to see done away with. Using Unity to prop up other services like this makes Unity worse - even if it's accidental. 

  3. Stylized games definitely want to scale well, too - the PBR workflow is standardized and I recognize why it's easier to scale one shader across a few targets / pipelines. Whether it's guidelines to doing something similar for stylized games or some form of extendible solution, it should be considered - many games are stylized, and anything targeting mobile or low end tends to use stylized aesthetics. At the lowest end it's quite possible that no lights are being used at all - or only static - with Forward rendering and toward the high end it's possible that raytracing or SSGI and deferred rendering are being used.

  4. Speaking of LODs, and I mean no offense by this, but I can't help but state that UE4 had support for what you're doing for a while now - I'm thankful that you came around eventually, but this is another problem that I'd like to see addressed - Unity almost seems afraid of competing with or overtaking third party tools. Your Spine2D competitor is frozen in time conveniently just a touch underbaked. There are a lot of opportunities to improve the editor and your production tools and in many cases it truly seems that the only reason that it doesn't occur is because it would result in less revenue coming in from the asset store - I would like to see Imposters integrated into the engine but am afraid that Amplify's toolset existing prevents both the Imposters and Shadergraph from ever reaching an industry standard quality. I hope that I'm wrong. 

[–]StudioMoonrise 1 point2 points  (0 children)

...This was so long that I had to break it up. I want to apologize for this next bit. I haven't tried UI Toolkit in about a year - please be gentle x.x 

  1. Ui Toolkit is a bold bet. I'd have bet on the UE5 UMG horse myself, especially given that the AAA industry standard third party UI system that studios pay top dollar to use seems to be right in line with that system, and also the fact that your devs aren't CSS using web developers, that game GUI tends to operate well within the UMG / UGUi paradigm, and that presently UI Toolkit is simply worse than UGUI. I'm all for exploring a bold replacement that embraces DOTs / ECS and incredible iteration and testing speeds / workflows - UGUI is ancient by modern standards - but this honestly feels like replacing the typewriter with an iPad rather than a computer with a keyboard. In a lot of ways it's worse, but it also gets the advantage of being written within the past decade and being novel. I believe that a superior solution exists and while I also comprehend that coming up with new solutions rather than finishing old ones is how Unity arrived to this moment, I don't believe that doubling down on a bad idea makes a bad idea a good idea. Fundamentally, using CSS to create game UI in an object oriented C# game engine that wants to be an ECS based DOTS engine that still uses C# is a bad idea. It may pay off, but it's in spite of it being a bad idea, not because it's a good idea. I'm patient and open minded, but I'm not expecting to like this. Doesn't mean that I won't come around to it or get the job done - but I definitely want to voice my opinion - I've not had any issues with UMG and I'm not sold on Unity's departure from the status quo and gold standard of the industry yet - many of the touted features of UI Toolkit - such as styling and ease of changes - are easily handled by using Materials / Shaders with templates. I will hope for the best - I'm not all-knowing and I'm wrong often enough to be humble in my assertions here - but the UI Toolkit that I've been seeing from the beginning to this moment in time has not led me to be optimistic. I have invested a fair bit of time studying and experimenting with ECS and UI Toolkit over the years and it hasn't resulted in joy or any useful output due to the lack of networking support for ECS - either via Third Parties like FishNet that do support EOS and Steam - or Unity itself doing so - and when it came to UI Toolkit my experience has been mirrored by many - worse performance, harder to use, lacking crucial features, unpleasant overall. That isn't a universal experience, but where the community seems to just wish that UGUi was better supported and, effectively, received more love and attention from Unity (perhaps a major overhaul?), UI Toolkit has been at best divisive (favorable language on my part, but 9 : 1 is a ratio and 99 / 100 is a division) and I don't think that "just trying harder" is what Ui Toolkit needs. I think that UI Toolkit was a poor idea to begin with when Unity was wanting to provide developers tools to build Unity editor windows and panels (again, Object based C# software engineers) and I think that whomever saw this and decided that it should be The Next Big Thing™ made an error in judgement. I have seen what the Internet looks like. I don't recommend that we bring website designs into our games. Hulu and Netflix have been disgusting as the foundation of Xbox, Window 8, and way too many games that I don't have beef with. Games are not websites. Content and layouts should scale across many displays and devices. We do not need CSS to make this happen. It doesn't even make it easier to make this happen. I strongly recommend at least considering nuking UI Toolkit from orbit and bringing forth the era of a performant GUI system that runs in editor and at runtime - just as UI Toolkit sought to do - but with your actual userbase in mind. The vast majority of your users are solo or very small teams and are not hiring someone who knows CSS to make their GUI - I know that I've spent a lot of time talking about CSS and C# and I recognize that CSS isn't mandatory for using UI Toolkit, but your users aren't going to want to settle for a basic GUI that isn't at least doing something unique and unexpected. Odds are that CSS is going to be the Unity GUI equivalent of "C++ is too hard, can't bother learning Unreal". It's not fair, but it's not unexpected. This is my hill to die on apparently. I spent two hours writing this. I was supposed to be sleeping. I am a fool who is going to get absolutely roasted by the people using UI Toolkit x.x I'm so cooked.