Is this Unity 3 soldier absolutely necessary ?

News & General Discussion
1

If the idea is to promote Unity widely outside the world of war game addicts, I wonder if putting a warrior with a big gun on the Unity 3 “What’s new” page is the best idea. The related demo game is of course truly amazing in terms of quality… but IMHO this kind of communication insists too much on a certain type of Unity applications.

Besides, I would have appreciated if this demo had included some “non military” customization options for the character : I would never allow my kid to use this game as is, for example.

I know people at Stonetrip have done much worse with their Shiva demo full of zombies and blood… but I’d be pretty deceived to see Unity follow that route, even at a highest level and keeping an undeniable touch of class when compared to many others.

2

What about a game where you raise, stuff, beat up, and roast a fat round chicken (all with love !) ?

No ? :frowning:

3

I can see where you are coming from. I stopped playing intense shooters about two years ago because I realized how bad they are for your mind… There are simply too many of them in the industry at the moment. My friends don’t take it too kindly! :slight_smile:

However I can also see where UT are coming from by putting that kind of demo into Unity 3. Shooters are by far one of the most graphical types of games out there, and what better way to showcase the abilities of Unity 3?

While it may have a military theme, I don’t see so much wrong in playing the demo - while your kids may not be prime targets, they are trying to impress the game designers of today and tomorrow. I chuckled at the thought of how many kids are going to try make a shooter now! It certainly impresses.

4

I think that most people associate high quality 3D game graphics with shoot-em-ups like Crysis, etc. and my guess is that’s why they chose this. To be honest, although I choose not to play those types of games and I agree with you that there’s much too much violence in the world, I personally am not offended by the splash screen nor the demo scene.

5

Yes, going with a military theme this time was definitely a departure for us , but for a lot of people Unity is looked at as the casual game engine for cartoony, simple games and we felt the need to contradict that perception a little bit. We could’ve made another peaceful walkthrough that was simply better looking than the 3 year old Island Demo, but we also wanted to make this demo have some gameplay so that people would spend more than 2-3 minutes with it. I understand your concern to some degree, especially letting your kid play it, but it’s one demo in a string of demos and this one just happens to be a shooter. We also did “Dark Unity” this cycle, but again, that’s just another good looking walkthrough and we wanted more gameplay this time for the default demo.

6

Uhm, ‘customization’? Don’t you have the best tool in the market for that right in front of you? :wink:
Take out the gun, and replace the military character model with something kid-friendly and you are good to go! :smile:

Oh… and don’t forget the take out the mission complete voice when you reach the house… that voice is just going to scare your son. :-0

7

Good points, everyone :slight_smile:

8

Thats a very silly thing to be upset about…

9

:smile::smile: I was talking of the demo webplayer of course, not the project… customizing the project is certainly the way to go !

A girl, actually :wink:

10

“Upset” is excessive : I just wonder if this is the right choice. And “very silly” is a bit… silly.

11

history
I made quite some odd experiences when introducing Unity to certain companies, which primary are doing serious stuff whilst those weird splash screens were showing up. I’m glad that they are gone now.

military fps
Personally i dislike these military training games, the more realistic they are, the less i enjoy them. I would have preferd a science fiction scenario just because it keeps things more abstract, still you can show off all you want. Beside of this i understand the need to get out of the cuty corner and making some waves on the more serious gaming front but another scenario would have worked as well. On the other side many, at least gamers, sadly are familiar with this type of killing games.

the new webplayer demo
I think it’s easily the best of its kind in the web. The intro is kind of lame and i would have expected that i can steer through the clouds and land on the landscape on my own. I didn’t like the game concept, the voices (i primary wanted to kill my instructor) or the colors but apart from this, it’s an immersive experience.

The demo has its issues like it’s stuttering a lot on my MacBookPro GT330 (at the end it’s almost unsteerable, i for sure killed for framerates there), the menu felt clumsy (i also wasn’t able to get into fullscreenmode easily), camera was too aggressive and slided through objects and walls, texture resolution is too low (but that certainly will be adressed with the new middleware), everything looked too square edged, cross-hair wasn’t good to see, reduced quality resulted into glitches, too much blahblah in the beginning and terrain objects were plopping in and out.

On the bright side the clouds looked cool, some plants were really nice, good steering of the character and nice animations, nice physics intergation (blowing up some stuff was fun), as i already said an overall immersive experience if you’re after this type of games, nice ambient atmosphere, good modelling of the weapon and well fitting sound effects.

Definately an improvement as an example, needs some fine tuning and i would have prefered a different scenario.

12

so you mean that more demos are coming? like Dark Unity ? :slight_smile:

s

13

Congratulations to the release first of all!

I played the webdemo and as Taumel said there are good and bad things with it. I think overall it shows great skills from the guys who has made this. Some scenes are very nice, for instance when the helicopter lands. Great lighting and effects. Clouds looks great aswell.

What I am most concerned with is the performance compared to quality. The resolution is very low. So low that maybe you shouldn’t even be able to to go into fullscreen mode (cause it just looks awful at that size). It looks okay when you are not in fullscreen even though the texture res is on the low range even for that size. The aliasing is very noticable. Are there any edgeblur effects on for this? If so is this what one should expect in aliasing when using deferred rendering?

The framerate also feels abit low especially as I said compared to the quailty we see. Maybe its just a matter of loads of effects eating up framerate that arn’t so noticeable since you first and foremost look at texture resolution and aliasing to make a judgement of the quality.

14

Do we really care about this? Unity is a development tool. They give you a skinned character that’s completely set-up for you to learn - that doesn’t mean that you should go out and create your own military game and I don’t think that it sends any kind of message.

Rock on Unity team, investing a little more into showing people what can be done with Unity is definitely a good thing. Unreal Engine wouldn’t be that popular if it wouldn’t be for Epic always showing how to use the engine. And that old Island demo… good riddance.

15

@stefano.cecere - yes, Dark Unity will be released as a standalone in the near future.

@Filto - try adjusting the quality in the menu. One of the reasons for the lower texture sizes is the download size itself. So it’s a compromise and we were able to fit this entire demo in ~75MB which I think is pretty good.

16

Yeah, I’ve had a couple of issues with it.
In Webplayer:
*With ambient occlusion on, when I’m flying in the helicopter, looks like there’s a weird code bar overlay on top of the forest.
*If I turn on ambient occlusion in the intro with clouds + heli, the clouds show up on front of the heli.

Inside unity:
*If I turn on the ambient occlusion, and then toggle other graphics features, I get a weird flickering. If “double toggle” the ambient occlusion it fixes.

Anyone else getting those bugs?

17

Yes, precisely : it’s a development tool… which means much more than what the image of a soldier tends to suggest to potential developers (and clients of these developers) coming from outside the game industry.

18

Great news ! This “realtime cinema” scene will surely be convincing for some of our professional clients, who are still sticking with Flash and hesitating on jumping into realtime 3D for their communication.

19

Yes - I also got these bugs with SSAO.
The textures really seemed larger in the video - can’t say anything negative about framerate, though, as I’m testing on my 3D workstation… so … yeah … 6core, 8GBRAM and 1GB ATI are not likely to decrease framearte.

The textures really do look a little smudgy compared to the overall graphic quality the rest of the demo achieved. I agree on that one.
Also I really REALLY missed AntiAlias … there’s about every effect in the monu but nothing for AA edges. Especially since the game is on the slower paced end of the spectrum of action games and if you’re playing in a small window I find the edges to be very distracting.

Otherwise very cool, as the video preview already showed us :slight_smile:

And for the record: I am not offended by a military demo despite the fact that I don’t like war shooters at all. It’s a tech demo and shows what else unity can do. There’s no need to get upset about anything. Sheesh.

20

Neither offended, nor upset. Just wondering if the choice is right, regarding the objective of enlarging the user base beyond game development - and presenting Unity as an alternative to some leading (though less powerful) multimedia development platforms, not just as a concurrent to other game engines. I keep thinking that it is necessary to express such an opinion, which I believe reflects the thoughts of more than one person… and if nobody said it, who would say it ? :wink: