This is weird, according to the shipped docs, real shadows are Pro-only, yet in plain old Unity I can see these options in the Mesh Renderer pane when highlighting an asset and check them. Surely if they’re Pro-only options then they should be greyed out in normal Unity, right? I want actual shadows because what’s a light without the realistic-looking shadows created by it? I don’t need video streaming or image effects, as there is a way to achieve them with shaders and Movie Textures.
the settings in the editor are there so that the settings are already correct if you upgrade to unity pro so your project works fine then with dynamic shadows
I say $1500 because I’m Canadian and everything costs more here. No joke. The americans complain about high gas prices. Move to Canada, we pay double, and we supply the damn oil that makes the gas.
That and I’d have to buy two licenses, one for me and one for my friend, so it’s unlikely. I really don’t have $3000 to blow.
I’m from switzerland, europe. american gas prices in general are a joke by our measures (we pay about $1.60 per liter here in switzerland, other countries like germany are even more expensive)
But yeah if you need to buy two licenses it can be quite a bit of cash though your friend could pay his himself
I don’t understand the part on the $1500 though as you don’t pay more. its sold from the european side so none of the US taxes and alike you normally would pay. (unlucky for EU customers again as they have to pay 16%-20% VAT due to that benefit for you)
I’m hoping dynamic shadows will appear in the free version of 3.0. With so many other normally expensive and powerful additions to the engine that people would typically want if they could afford it. Plus the new Deferred renderer I don’t see why shadows wouldn’t be included in the free version too.
I personally assume that they will.
The deferred renderer without shadows wouldn’t make much sense.
Also I agree that there are other pro oriented additions that give enough reasons to upgrade, the “base level visuality delta” is really not required. Beast, Umbra, potentially part of the new audio capabilities and who knows what we all don’t know at all at the time.
That all assumes naturally, that the deferred renderer will happen at all for the free version.
Deferred rendering has nothing to do with shadows. While shadow-casting lights won’t add draw calls for lighting calculations in a deferred renderer, they will each add the draw calls for their shadow pass.
That said, I have no idea whether shadows are still deemed fancy enough to be Pro-only. For reference, Torque’s deferred renderer is Pro-only.
i personally think shadows will still be pro only feature, i don’t even think deferred renderer will be available in the free version, i think the free version will still use the current renderer.
because currently unity pro in my opinion its over priced for the current features in comparison with unity free, how come most of the features are there for free, and just for a couple ones, mostly eye candy its $1500 usd.
i think unity 3.0 will have all those features to justify the cost difference and make more sense to charge that for pro
No, it’s just that Unity Free is absurdly underpriced. Actually Unity Pro by now has quite a few features that Free doesn’t, mostly not eye candy (asset bundles, profiler, async level loading, etc.). Unity iPhone Pro on the other hand is barely different from iPhone Basic but has a $1100 difference.
I’d imagine that the deferred renderer would be in the free version, there would still be plenty of features that make the pro version worthwhile. It’s quite common for applications to give 90% of their functionality away for free, yet charge what may seem like alot for the other 10% in comparison, in the end people willing and able to pay for the software will pay for that extra 10%, because it’s still worthwhile. If it were me, I’d put shadows in the free version too (at least for web player), but it’s barely over the line IMO.
The free version is pretty much a demo of the full product minus a few key features when the 30 day trial of pro expired.
I guess we will find out in time, but think that omitting shadows would be a shame since almost every other engine out there today has some kind of dynamic shadows. Unless it predates DX9.
hopefully we will hear more in the run up to launch. Keep hearing all kinds of rumours about node based shader editors, 2D and other things that weren’t mentioned in the press release.
I’m 99% sure I saw Aras mention that there wasn’t going to be a node based shader editor. Of course I won’t be able to find that now since I want to find it. :?
(we pay about $1.60 per liter here in switzerland, other countries like germany are even more expensive)