I was looking at Simul Weather and was excited how amazing it is. But searching around it appears there’s no possible way to get it into Unity. Same goes for a similar product Silver Lining.
There seems to be 2 ways, either get direct access to the render pipeline and let the SDK’s draw their own stuff. I understand this might be tricky with the OpenGL/DX abstraction.
The other way is to reimplement some of the features, but it seems Unity can’t use tex3D?? Loads of advanced techniques use 3d textures so this seems very strange.
Here’s the posts/feedback posts dealing with it. Can someone at Unity look into this? For pro work middleware like this is pretty much vital.
Well… yes…
But I would expect Unity to go through each major middleware and at least investigate the issues with integrating it. I mean, no tex3d is pretty major. Now that they are pushing consoles and big publishers they’re going to have to do this more often. At least talk to the middleware people about the integration process and what Unity lacks
Unity can’t offer middleware addon bridging for the simple reason that they wouldn’t work with the webplayer.
Its true, that for console its different. But console targeting costs tens to hundreds of thousands per title, they will work with the source and will have the possibility to integrate what they want.
Not all of us use the webplayer or console
One of the main reasons for buying Pro is to get external library access. External libraries are why people use Unity really, because they don’t want or need to do this stuff themselves. Naturally Unity can’t do everything so I expect Unity to checkout different middlewares and see what might be lacking to allow this. eg Speedtree is huge, I’ve no idea if it’s possible (I assumed these things were when we bought pro)
A wiki page of middleware and some Unity integration notes might be in order
Not all are, right.
But there are targets of crossplatform development, one is that you can use the build on more than 1 platform and as such all platforms comply to some standards.
And yeah unity can’t do it all, but this “cant do all” includes not paying fat fees to get middleware for freeriders or buying middleware only 20 teams need where 17 of the 20 teams are meant to get the source license and their own middleware anyway
Also as for the links you posted:
Direct access would be useless. Already the exposed texture handles are useless cause you have no control reliably over the render state. Trying to access the actual full context would be a guarantee for an instant crash. Also due to the “don’t touch Multithreading” half the stuff people would like to do wouldn’t work out anyway
VTF is working since 3.0
Matrix to shader always worked as you can see on the material class
I strongy disagree with the idea that if it doesn’t work on all platforms, don’t put it in. Why should apples OpenGL stop me on windows using tex3d? Does windows not having accelerometers stop me from using them on the iphone? Of course not. Unity should treat mac and pc as differently as they do for iphone and pc. If it works on both then great! If not, simply give the user a warning when using features that aren’t fully cross platform (maybe add something to the build settings to allow you to choose all the target platforms at once, thereby enabling relevant warnings about non-cross features)
I presume this is why there’s no forcefeedback on windows, because of apple/immersion (spit) having licencing issues. If you want crossplatform, be aware of the warnings or read a manual page with a table of specific features.
iPhone can have distinct stuff as it is truely distinct.
same for android and consoles.
But the visuals on all PC targets must be equal, otherwise the whole point of crossplatform is fucked up.
whats the point of a visual feature that fails and works depending on its “mood today”
also at the time its no topic, the most important topic right now is that deferred renderpath works at all at a reasonable performance and with support for AA. we don’t need additional features that don’t work too, enough lose ends on U3 already out of my view.
But you are forgetting that PC’s have a massive array of graphics cards, which is why Unity has fallbacks all the way to DX6. Having tex3d is just the same as this. If your computer doesn’t have it, whether it’s a crappy intel gfx card or you have a mac, you need to have a fallback. You simply don’t get the nice fluffy clouds or whatever just like you have to support various DX levels now even when targetting just windows.
“iPhone can have distinct stuff as it is truely distinct”
iPhone vs android are exactly the same scope as PC vs Mac, yet they are happy to support specific features of the platform. All I want is the same consideration for PC vs Mac (In my case tex3d and forcefeedback, but I’m sure there are a few others. Also when mac DOES support tex3d and ff it can be seamlessly supported)
