Aren’t we supposed to get free shadows with 4.1.3f3 or do we have to wait till Unity 5?
Unity 4.2 will have hard shadows for one directional light in the free version. 4.2 was shown at Unite Nordic and will be released later this year.
Oh ok. Thanks for telling me. I wasn’t completely clear on all the information.
There won’t be free shadows in the free version I don’t think? It would be nice though 
there will be in 4.2
That’s great news, I have a Pro license but it’s nice that Unity is getting some basic dynamic shadows
Would you happen to know if the navigation system is improved ? The Agent obtacles are horrible, we end up with agents slidding an invisible sphere in the scene.
That sounds great!
I’m also curious about this.
Having never had the privilege of using shadows, a directional light is like the one-directional sun which is environment-wide, no spot lights or point lights I presume. And the shadows will be hard-edged not soft. Ie it’s the cheapest/fastest/simplest of the shadow types.
So what are the benefits of this… I presume you can use this to do e.g. basic shadows like shadows from trees, shadows from meshes, shadows from dynamic objects like a running character?, but it just won’t interact with any other lights, right?
Could you use these dynamic sunlight shadows in combination with some precalculated shadows like lightmaps or precalculated global illumination or screen-space ambient occlusion etc?
I’m a newbie when it comes to this stuff.
Well Unity free can’t do SSAO anyway, but you can use the shadows and lightmaps at the same time, for sure.
It will react with other lights → you could use dynamic lights to color / lighten the shadow for example.
However those other lights won’t have dynamic shadows.
In a lot of cases you would use only one directional light with shadows anyway, so it’s a pretty big feature for Unity Free.
Hopefully this will also be enabled in the free mobile licences.
This is great news.
So if I use four directional lights as street lights all shining down and separate from each other by distance, only one of them will show shadows; or will they all show shadows as the objects pass beneath them? Thank you again.
You wouldnt use directional lights like that. Those would be spot lights or point lights. Directional lights are basically positionless, affecting the whole scene.
From what I heard you only get ONE directional light, like one sun shining a long distance away, and that’s all.
OK, got it. Have not used spotlights…YET, but if I do I guess they will not have shadows.
Still having shadows from a sun for scenes outside will be most joyous. Having said that, than does Pro give shadows with spotlights or point of lights?
Yes.
I’m not sure if you know or are aloud to say, but will the new GUI be available for free users?
offtopic but…I don’t see why it wouldn’t, they might just keep some features away from you.