I always find you have to take a deep breath on any upgrade. After learning the hard way I dragged out my existing games and did the upgrade. Just to test it I opened the stock island game and everything seems fine other than maybe the camera functions a bit differently it spun so easily I had trouble making my way around, I don’t remember that from before.
The problem came when I dragged my old games in and tried to open them. The exposure on all the stock Unity elements, trees ground even the sky and sun, seemed several stops overly bright. The odd thing is all the game elements that I imported looked normal. Not sure if this is a lighting or shader issue since it seems to affect only the unity created elements? I’ve seen shader problems before between upgrades I’m just not sure why it’s only affecting Unity content and I’m not sure the best fix? If I drop the lighting down then I have to rework the shaders on all my imported objects. Definitely an annoying problem.
Since the first post I’ve tried everything and nothing really fixes the problem. The weird thing is I’ve had zero luck adjusting the shaders for the plants and I can’t find one for the terrain itself, still learning Unity. I tried dropping the light and ambient settings but it just made things dark and the plants still glowed so I’m guessing it’s a shader issue. I’m hoping there’s an obvious fix I’m missing since no one else is commenting on the problem but I haven’t found it yet. Just odd that my content is fine but Unity’s is messed up. I could understand if it was the other way around. I’m guessing the resources got tweaked in the update so the next trick is to swap those off but I don’t see how that will fix the terrain? We really shouldn’t have to rework the shaders just because there’s an upgrade. Seems like a nice update but I didn’t need any of the features yet and it’s already cost me hours.
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Well I solved most of the problems by reloading content from the new Demo file and downloading the Terrain pack again but I found another bizarre problem and I haven’t a clue what’s causing this one. There are dark and light patches of the same terrain texture. I tried painting across with various textures but it had no affect on the brightness. Really hating 2.1 so far. I haven’t even got close to looking for new features I’m spending all my time fixing issues. I just hope this one is fixable.
I didn’t use anything custom, I can’t even write a shader, it just seemed to be a shader problem. Ironically I started this as a mod of the original Island Demo. I just deleted the plants and flattened the island and started over. The only thing I did to the textures is add new ones. My models used a stock diffusion shader and all the plants and terrain used the same ones that were set up for the original island demo. Reloading the plants helped so obviously they changed between versions but I haven’t a clue why the ground is now patchy. It’s the same texture painted across so it’s acting like there’s more than one shader but it’s not tied to the texture.
I’ve got back ups of the level but that doesn’t help when the engine itself is the thing that changed. Reloading a back up will do nothing. Frustrating because until I solve the problem the game is dead in the water and if it can’t be fixed I’ll loose a lot of hours of work. Upgrades shouldn’t be this scary. I’d say please don’t mess with existing shaders especially without warning. I generally avoid upgrades until projects are finished but it’s mostly because of compatibility problems this seems to be a change in the shaders themselves. It’s just odd that it’s only affecting Unity content and not my own. I wish we could keep more than one version of Unity installed on one machine. I definitely plan to keep two machines on hand and two installed copies so I can test out existing games before I commit to the upgrade from here on out. If I have to start over with the land mass I’m pretty much scrapping the existing game level. It may make it impractical to finish the game period. It was being done as a promotional game for a company I work with so a problem like this can definitely affect if I continue on with Unity. I’ve been tinkering with this off and on since 2.0 came out. The only thing I know to try is to see if I can downgrade to 2.0 if I can’t get the terrain fixed and stay away from 2.1 until the game is done.
I’ve had really good luck with Unity up until now. I’m not having much luck with independent game engines over all. I had to drop a game that was nearly finished with Torque because the engine was too buggy and now I’m having major problems with Unity. Can’t seem to win. I’m shocked no one else seems to be having problems because they were pretty dramatic on my end.
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Well I think I just made a massive error. I tried reloading the old game to check on how a few things were set up. I made the mistake of dragging it into the folder rather than just copying it. When I started Unity I saw the “updating project” warning. I’m guessing there’s no going back now. I have other saved games but they are from months ago so it’d be hard to get them back to the point this one is at. I guess I either fix the terrain issue or I bag it. Not loving Unity right now.
A word for the future give people the option to abort the “update game” and is there any hope of doing an update where we don’t loose all our games? I learned that one the hard way the first time I updated Unity.
You can…simply keep a copy of the folder containing the old version of Unity (rename it, of course) and install the new version.
It already does that…if you try to load a pre-Unity 2.1 project into 2.1, it brings up a dialog saying that upgraded projects can’t be loaded into old versions of Unity, and do you want to quit or continue.
2.1 was tested quite thoroughly before being released, and none of the dozen or so projects I upgraded had any issues with the final version of 2.1, including a couple with terrains. That’s not to say your problems aren’t real, or to make light of your frustration, but 2.1 is a solid release where the problems are few and far between. I don’t recall having any particular issues with 2.0 for that matter, nor 1.6 either.
However, I have to say that complete, current backups are essential regardless of upgrades–hard drives can fail at any time. This applies to everything you care about at all, not just Unity projects.
From the screenshots of the terrain it seems like Unity is using realtime shadows. Have you tried just hitting the Generate lightmap button in the options when selecting the terrain and switching to Lightmapped instead of vertex lit or realtime in the drop down?
In any case, it would probably help to just relax a bit.
If you focus on posting specific information on what exactly is going wrong, including screenshots of it and specifying what exactly you expect to behave different. And some information on the lighting setup you use? That would make it a lot easier to actually help you solve the problem.
Well regenerating the light map got rid of the blockiness. The problem now it’s all that overblown look. I never could trace the problem with the other items it was reloading them from the updated file that corrected the issue so that’s not an option with a terrain. I just spent an hour digging around trying to find a way to adjust settings for the terrain and came up with zip. I can find the lightmap itself but no form of terrain shader or surface just the original texture maps. Even finding that might not help because as I say that didn’t help with the trees and plants. There obviously were changes made and the plants were updated. Probably if I started from scratch the terrain would be okay because this seems to be a legacy issue.
It’s not really a matter of chilling I’ve blown a lot of hours already on this and I still don’t know the source of the problem. Fortunately this is the only game I was working on with Unity, I was getting ready to start others, so the problem is limited to this one game. If I can find the terrain settings for adjusting the shader it might help but once again that wasn’t a solution with the plants and the problem is obviously from the same source.
Just frustrating having an upgrade that looked very exciting screw up a game I was in the middle of building. Point, it worked perfectly before the upgrade and has been a mess since the upgrade. I really do avoid upgrades because there’s usually some kind of problems and most software upgrades involve a reworking of the interface which wastes days or weeks. I’m still using Photoshop 6.0 for this reason. It does what I need it to do and I found every time I updated it I lost days trying to figure out what they did to it. Like on 6.0 they thought it’d be cool to set the line tool to vector by default. I wasted an hour on that little improvement trying to figure out how to turn it off. I just wish upgrades weren’t so risky.
I can’t be the only one to have this problem so it must be a known issue. I’ve done nothing unusual with the lighting and the sun key is exactly the same one from the Island Demo. There are a few small lights placed around the island for localized lighting but none near the area of the capture. This is definitely a global issue involving legacy content. As I say I’m sure new games started with the updated plants and textures are fine but it’s definitely a legacy problem for existing games.
PS I reread the post. For specifics on what I’d expect it to look like it looked like the darker areas of the blocky capture normally before the upgrade. The lighting looks overblown on it now but the other items after I did the update look correct and like I said my original content was never affected. Lighting adjustments I found didn’t help and will just make everything else look wrong. I keep going back to the same issue but I think if some one asks the programmers you’ll find a change was made in the shaders and they adjusted the content to compensate but any legacy content wouldn’t be affected. I’ve seen this happen before with Unity so it was my first suspicion. Some of the older content doesn’t react the same. The point being how would you go about changing the shader for the terrain? That may fix the problem since it’d be using an updated shader. Still not sure why my original content was never affected? It’s a bizarre problem and as I say even thought it’s half fixed I still haven’t a clue as to the source.
It looks like that the material is using a relfective shader to me. That looks more like an angle from the light. Switch around the shanders a bit, see what other results you get.
Man it’s a mess. I finally started checking out other areas and I noticed the texture problem. Also the shaded areas look okay but the lit areas are overblown. Another hard lesson on not upgrading mid project. Remember at this point it’s just the terrain affected. The objects are okay. It seems in part because of how it’s interacting with the light but the texture blocky blur is another problem. I guess I’ll try reimporting the textures and see if that sorts itself out.
A word of warning to anyone with an unfinished legacy game I’d consider waiting on this update.
I am no artist, but I have seen this before in my projects with the ground, it is a reflection shader issue. Create a point light and rotate it around the terrain, watch the terrain you will see the terrain light/darken and reflect bright/soft. I swore I reported this at some point, but probably not, I get so consumed in code that I forget sometimes what I submit and what I don’t.
Hope you get it straightened out soon, let me know how you fix it!
Thanks
Increase the basemap distance in the terrain settings.
It seems like you still haven’t switched to lightmap mode? How about posting the project folder so folks can take a look and tell you what exactly is causing the problem?
As Eric said, this Unity 2.1 has gone through a very long beta process and all projects including terrains upgraded just fine. If you post the project folder, I am sure we can get down to what is actually going on pretty quickly.
Interesting…
New project, new scene, create terrain, add a light texture as the backdrop, add a point light facing the terrain at 45 degree angle, move camera around and see reflection. Basic project with a terrain.
Thanks zumwalt. Nice to see some one else finding similar problems.
I have a dozen or more back ups in various stages of completion including on an external drive. The last one hadn’t been backed up to the external and it had some issues sorted out that took many days to fix so reverting to an old version isn’t an option right now. I had a back up I did when I did the update and normally I do a copy and paste but I was running on three hours of sleep and just dragged it into the Unity folder and fired up Unity only to see it saying it was updating the project file at which point I’m guessing it’s no longer compatible with the old version of Unity. The joke was I only loaded it to check a couple of settings from the saved project file.
I seem to make a career of finding problems no one else has had before but they happen for me consistently and no one else can replicate them. Like I say I’m glad Zumwalt had a similar issue crop up.
The file size is very large because I dragged in a lot of material, models and images, that aren’t being currently used so the finished game size isn’t that big but the file would be difficult to post and contains some plants and such I purchased so I’d probably be breaking agreements posting it publicly. I barely used them so they could be removed but it would take a while to sort out and get the file down to a reasonable size. Unfortunately this project has gotten to be an Albatross. It represents maybe 5% of what I’m doing but often over shadows everything else. I already spent a lot of time this weekend trying to sort out the mess and I’m facing a deadline on another project so I can’t keep wasting time right now. I’m between a rock and a hard place with it because I committed to providing the level but it’s a freebie game that is sucking down a lot of resources. There seems to be a legacy compatiblity issue that may make it tough to finish in it’s current form. Also since zumwalt had problems starting over may not fix it.
The problems were definitely caused by the update because it was working perfectly before the update and I even have a version of the level posted on line. I got excited about some of the new features I wanted to try and foolishly went for the update. A massive mistake that has already cost me.
I’m having a nasty Torque flashback because I got a game 90% finished, all the art finished, but the game couldn’t be finished because of engine bugs. Now I’m running into the same issues with Unity. I love the engine but it went from a great looking game to godawful and I’m not sure it can be fixed. I can post it on a private link if some one at the company is interested in sorting out the bug but it’ll be a month before I can spend much more time on it and weed out licensed content to post publicly. Just not enough hours in the day. There are multiple things that changed because I’m also having a lot of problems with the character constantly being buried up to his waist in landscape. I might be able to adjust the collision to get rid of the problem I haven’t had a chance to try but that was something else that changed after I installed the update. It really did make a mess of the game.
Sorry to sound so negative but I’ve been a huge fan of Unity up until now it was just depressing to see the affect the update had on the game. We’d planned to move more into gaming in the Fall and I had big plans for Unity but until the issues get resolved I’ve had to slam on the brakes and consider other options. The terrain engine went from my favorite part to something I don’t trust. The first release worked beautifully but there’s some real problems with this release.
I don’t think it has anything to do with your project, I did further testing and I reproduced it in my tiny RPG. As I was walking my character around, I had shiney ground under the grass, now depending on which way I was facing would determine if it was noticable or not, and the lighter the texture also made it more apparent. This problem is easily reproducable, all anyone has to do is the steps I mentioned above and they see the issue.
Step 1) create a new project in Unity
Step 2) add a terrain object
Step 3) apply a light colored texture to the ground (or sand if you want)
Step 4) paint the hills gold or white or something along those lines
Step 5) add a first person prefab to be able to move around
Step 6) Add a point light, angle 45/45/0, place it anywhere you like above the terrain
Step 7) walk around the mountain / hill or what ever and see the shiney result
I would suggest IMO instead of giving them your current project, try that above step list, see if the problem persists, just use your textures that you used in your personal project for the terrain textures in the test project. If the problem still persists, send them that project instead.
These are also steps Unity can do in there Dev environment to reproduce the issue. These steps were consistent in my testing to reproduce the results of the shiney terrain. It was constant on its results.
Well I think it’s time to cry uncle. I tried importing the original Island Demo and it opened fine but it’s still got the same erratic camera issue, if you move the mouse slightly the camera will spin in a circle. I can I’m sure fix that but I’m not sure since it’s essentially the same project file why the textures wouldn’t be messed up.
Here’s where it gets really weird. I started a new project and just did a rough terrain with textures. I set up the camera and moved around and everything seemed to be fine so I loaded some plants. At first I didn’t think they were working at all until I noticed little spots. All the trees are no bigger than blades of grass even at 200%. Apparently now there’s a scaling issue with legacy content. I’m completely stunned. I was supposed to post an updated island for next week but I’m going to have to tell them it’s shelved.
I’ll try to sort out posting a bug report but Unity appears to be a mess right now and I simply don’t have time to work out all the problems because there seem to be multiple issues. I really don’t care if every tester gave it a 100%. The thing to realize is if the end user has major problems it has major problems. To repeat the level was working perfectly before the upgrade and it’s a complete mess now and I’m having trouble with legacy assets even in a new game.
A final headache, when I started the new project it hid it some place and I haven’t a clue where. I’d started new projects before and they always got saved to the Unity folder. This one it put some where else. I’m not normally a Mac person I mostly use it for editing and Unity but it is the most hated things to me Mac filing and search. I can find the file in Search but it refuses to tell me where it is. I can open it from there but I don’t know where Unity hid it. So far this upgrade has been the second worst in history for me. There was an old Animation Master upgrade that nearly drove them out of business and they lost 90% of their customers including me. The company never recovered. I realize not everyone is having the same experience but to put it into perspective that’s the level of trouble I’m having with it. For me it went from the most stable independent game engine I have used to the worst. Not a good upgrade.
It probably put it in your user folder. Unity has always put my projects there. One thing you could have done is looked to see where is put it since the path is right there when you create a new project. Another thing you could do is Ctrl + Click on a file in the project with it open in Unity and “Reveal in finder” to see where it is.
I didn’t know we could use custom shaders for the terrain – I thought terrain shaders couldn’t be changed. Is this really something we can do? If so, how?
So you’re saying the Island Demo in its default state still looks as expected in 2.1 for you (besides the odd camera controls) and that you’re using the same assets from the Island Demo in your own project?
I’ve been able to reproduce some of the lighting issues belseth and zumwait have pointed out, submitted an official bug report myself into our system, and hopefully Aras will have time to look at it this week.
But regarding the other issues such as the Terrain Assets no longer working correctly I would really appreciate you sending in your project folder so I can have a look at it and help you out as best I can. I’m sorry you’re having so much trouble with the 2.1 upgrade, but we can’t help you resolve your issues if we don’t have all the necessary information.
belseth: so, if I understand correctly, in Unity 2.0 your terrain was all ok, and Unity 2.1 changed it’s lighting?
What hardware do you see this on?
The only idea that comes to my mind is: if you used non-directional (spot or point) lights with terrain in Unity 2.0, they would produce nonsensical results. In other words, they were not working correctly with terrain. In Unity 2.1 those lights should work properly, so that’s one area where the lighting could have changed. We assumed that no one was using point/spot lights with terrain in 2.0 (because for all practical purposes, they were not working). Is that the case?
zumwalt: I can’t reproduce your issue with your given steps. Again, what hardware, what OS X version? And filing a bug with the scene that shows the issue would help.
Good afternoon Aras, Ant has been able to reproduce the issue and created an internal support ticket, did you get that ticket and look at his results? I would assuming coming from Ant instead of me, it would carry more weight that it is a problem.
I will create a very simple project tonight again, only use probably 3 textures, and then when I am done, I will submit a bug report.In the mean time, please get with Ant and find out his ticket number.
