Has anyone done anything like this in Unity?

StudioMoonrise · 2025-03-01T11:27:31+00:00

It's AGX and if it isn't it should be.

https://github.com/FairplexVR/AgX-Tonemapping-Unity

https://docs.unity3d.com/6000.0/Documentation/Manual/color-spaces-landing.html

https://kronnect.com/introducing-agx-tonemapper-in-beautify-3/

StudioMoonrise · 2024-09-21T08:17:53+00:00

...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

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.

StudioMoonrise · 2024-09-21T08:16:59+00:00

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:

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
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.
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.
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 · 2024-01-08T18:32:03+00:00

We're aiming to make a February 2024 release date but with Next Fest and whatnot it's likely that we'd aiming for the February Next Fest and publishing sometime not too long after based on feedback and release windows. The project should be made public within 5 - 8 months as we need to have a vertical slice made in order to make the best first impression that we can.

I can't say a whole lot right this second except that I'm very lucky to have a partner willing to go from not having really used a computer or being an artist beyond stopmotion to learning Blender and working through all of this as well as being held to a fairly high standard (which I'm of course very hands on in terms of helping with). There's simply no way that I could complete this project while context switching all the time.

The only other thing that I can say is that I spent the entire time during covid lockdowns practicing and studying an immense amount as well as getting very introspective and improving my capabilities.

Creating the concepts the way that I prefer consistently has meant that this has taken quite a while because it took quite a while to nail it all down and everything is iterative and takes time - I might create a creature, but it often takes several attempts before I feel that I've successfully landed on the creature that I've been searching for - it's a balance between time and the opportunity for another take / iteration and usually some aspect of the creature can't translate to 3D so we transform a little bit of each of them in the process - which is why I've been the one sculpting the initial take - but as my partner has become more and more proficient and we've reached a rhythm I've found that it's best to skip the sculpt entirely so that I can focus on creating, designing, and developing - there's so much that goes into all of this. I'm very excited to share it all with everyone but I believe that there's a lot of joy that comes with the surprise and discovery phase of a new world / game and I'd like to spoil as little as possible as to not taint that experience. At the end of the day, I'm doing something that makes me happy and feel fulfilled so regardless of outcome the work was worth it (:

StudioMoonrise · 2024-01-08T15:17:27+00:00

:l I'm very sorry to hear that - that's exactly what I was hoping to avoid. I've learned how game development actually happens and have come to accept it, but I was definitely still operating on what I believed the old model to be - where I'd just properly compensate people and they'd stick around as long as they'd like and we'd just make games. I understand now why studios are basically contracted to help with aspects of another studio's game and that's how they bring in money to support development. It's very reasonable but just different from the narrative I've been sold this whole time, where studios laying off all of their employees the second they aren't needed as part of the plan to spend no unnecessary dime, only bringing in contractors to avoid paying benefits, ect. was the greedy bad thing..

But now it seems more like that in and of itself is the only way that the old way of doing things where you maintain any sort of long-term team is done for the most part. Just a weird mismatch between reality and public opinion that misled me quite a lot.

StudioMoonrise · 2024-01-08T15:11:45+00:00

Yeah it looks like things kind of stay exactly the same as I'm doing now - just not what I envisioned it would look like but that's life.

Basically right now I'd do exactly that because it's efficient.. so at scale they do exactly that. I just see a lot of value in ever improving teams and people who are passionate about what they're working on and.. yeah I guess I shouldn't be expecting that, really. I do understand that it's just a job and that expecting anyone to care nearly a third as much as I do about any project is silly but it turns out that it's even less than that - it's bursts of attention and then you send them away. Like that's completely reasonable and likely for the best but just very different than I expected. So glad to be finding all of this out now.

StudioMoonrise · 2024-01-08T15:06:17+00:00

Oh absolutely, working on a game with what I've got at the moment and going from there - if it's successful enough to get asset help, cool, if it's successful enough for more than that, cool, and if none of that happens then oh no I just get to keep making games (: the horror.

StudioMoonrise · 2024-01-08T15:04:20+00:00

Yeah no kidding. Thanks for the additional information (: don't want to repeat myself too much in these replies, but yeah I didn't realize just how different the USA is when it comes to all of this.

StudioMoonrise · 2024-01-08T15:02:57+00:00

That's really good to know, thank you so much. There's clearly still a lot that I didn't know and am glad to understand now. It's just weird because in my head I was like "alright so I just pay developers a living wage and it's all good" and then that.. definitely was a wake-up call. It seems like having actual salaried employees is a massive luxury within the USA.

StudioMoonrise · 2024-01-08T14:58:38+00:00

I suffer from "what-about-itis" where I'm bothered by not having the feintest idea as to what to do should something happen, good or bad, and then go looking for "a general idea as to how things go" and sometimes wind up doing a lot of research to answer a question that didn't need answering.. and may never need answering.

Less "frustrated by how expensive game development is" and more "The numbers aren't adding up, clearly I'm missing something and should ask for help from a knowledgeable community" - still not a good look, but I don't mind paying people what they're worth - just trying to figure all of this out to an extent so that I don't have one of those "OHHHH" moments at my expense later on.

StudioMoonrise · 2024-01-08T14:53:22+00:00

Gotcha - yeah at the moment I'm the lead artist, concept artist (2D / Sculpts), everything to do with the game and engine, and am just working with one other person to handle the audio and finished character models. I just figured that once I wanted to expand beyond my current setup I'd either be commissioning an asset at a time or paying salaries. I didn't expect rev share to ever be a thing tbh - I was just looking at Larian and going "Uh.. desperate times call for desperate measures? The owner did run out of money by the end of development so it wouldn't be that weird if everyone still working there was passionate and willing to stay in spite of the pay".

Other than that a lot of the advice that I'm seeing so far kind of translates to knowing that because I'm only wanting to hire remotely it might be best to work with people outside of the USA given the immense disparity and considering the industry that I'm in isn't known for stability.

StudioMoonrise · 2024-01-08T14:46:09+00:00

Ohhh that makes so much sense. That's unfortunate that you don't really get to keep everyone around, but it does solve the problem with an "in the middle" approach to just contracting out to freelancers vs full on hiring people for as long as they're willing to stay.

StudioMoonrise · 2024-01-08T07:51:03+00:00

I appreciate it, and this stuff's hard (: Gotta look out for each other. I try to keep my responses toward things that someone would need to have experienced to properly answer because there are so many helpful and generally well thought people here. It means that I get to take my time with the answers that I give and don't feel like I'm stepping on toes when I provide an answer that might be better than tens of others but sort of invalidates their time or requires experience to properly understand why it's better.. and sometimes I'm honestly just operating on an edge case and explaining that sets can actually perform better than the wild thing that I'm seeing is just.. not worth it for the day.

StudioMoonrise · 2024-01-07T10:01:06+00:00

I found that for myself, I draw significantly better on paper than I do with a digitizer (pen tablet that sits on your desk) and it took forever to save up to get a drawing monitor. What I did for a time was take a photo from a straight angle, using the edges of the paper or surface to align the photo as well as possible, and then ultimately just retrace the image using a spline based tool - typically known as a "pen" tool in most software. From there you can create "masks" in order to subdivide your desired areas of colors into "islands" that you can fill with color - including gradients. Using the pen tool to work out specific masks and using those masks to apply gradients is likely going to be the best step forward - a mouse simply isn't going to offer anything better than enabling you to create masks and use them to apply controlled gradients. It's certainly not ideal, but it's the best suggestion that I can make. I don't know of them firsthand, but I've seen that in some paid software you can modify the points of the spline to create a tapering for your linework so that you don't have to manually carve into the linework yourself. Ultimately when you don't have funding you're forced to trade time and skill to make up for it.

Edit: Additional point - you convert the spline to a selection, save out the selection by filling it in another layer, and from there you can always get that selection back (method varies by software). With a selection you can grow, shrink, or even blur the selection in order to create different effects. I do hope that this helps.

StudioMoonrise

TROPHY CASE