Hey there everyone, been quite some time since I’ve posted.
Is there any info on what’s going on with the Speedtree buyout from Unity yet?
I’ve been waiting all these months and admittedly I haven’t really researched much during the time, but when I do research all I can find it links back to the original posting they were bought by Unity.
It would be really nice to know what’s going on, like what does this even mean for the Unity community?
Whilst I understand it is in their rights to not talk about it, but what’s the point of telling us if there’s no transparency on what’s going on? (If there is, please link me any urls to data to read)… But anyways, certainly they didn’t spend all that money buying them just to make Speedtree work in HDRP and that’s all it was about. Certainly there has to be more to it.
Same thing for furioos.com and probably a lot of other tools and services…
I really would like to get frequent information updates about the progress of intergration/improvements of stuff they aquire.
I wouldn’t expect much from this, as @AcidArrow said… if this was Unreal engine (and Epic bought them), we would probably now get access to Speedtree for free, but since Unity acquired them, I doubt anything will really change for us. It’s all the same as when Unity acquired Pixyz or Vivox back then.
Which kinda makes me wonder if it was a counter buy to stop epic from buying speedtree or something.
It tracks with how they seemingly bought them without a plan, but that’s also how they have treated their other (presumably planned) buyouts, so who knows.
They bought bolt and are giving us a free VS solution (needs a ton of work but its a start for beginners who want to use it). I don’t see why holding on to small hope they could possibly integrate some iteration of speedtree natively inside unity for free is outside the realm of possibility.
Because this leaves little room for the things people are hoping?
They could change their minds of course, but I would say their track record points towards things staying as they are.
Also, they gave away Bolt for free—only after the community shamed them.
And finally, wasn’t Bolt kind of a knee-jerk reaction after they failed to create a VS solution of their own and they just bought something to serve as a starting point? (or is their own solution that they have been working on for ages still being worked on? I don’t really follow visual scripting news)
EDIT: They’re still working on their own VS solution, they just pivoted it to being DOTS only and bought Bolt to fill in the monobehaviour gap, I guess?
EDIT 2: Actually I’m not sure if they are still working on their own VS. If someone has a link please share.
As far as Ive understood, Bolt essentially is their VS? I thought they are just heavily modifying it and binding it into the current Unity ecosystem, might be wrong.
I agree with you btw, it 99% most likely won’t happen with SpeedTree. I definitely wont be disappointed if it doesn’t. I just have this feeling that hopefully some higher ups in Unity see some major competition heading their way with other engines and things really start to turn around for the engine making it better for everyone, the company and users included.
This. When I read “for now, nothing will change” I think “oh, so it’ll keep being a useless implementation”.
If I remember correctly Unity decided they wanted their own solution to be centric to DOTS, but because everyone wanted a traditional approach they bought Bolt.
Since they are writing their own backend for (ex)bolt too, it will be their own solution. They are also working on putting the two together, so eventually there will be only one Visual Scripting package which can be used in both scenarios (which ties into the “hybrid first” approach of ECS too). According to the plans they were talking about of course. (Source: various posts in the Visual Scripting topic in this forum)
Q4 2018. Bolt 2 is announced. The original dev said that Unity had approached him in relation to acquisition, but their visions didn’t match for what visual scripting should be, so he opted to remain independent then.
Q2 2019. A few months later, Unity’s Monobehaviour based VS solution gets cancelled in favor of the DOTS/ECS VS solution. The reason being that there are multiple competent Mono solutions in the store, but nothing for DOTS. First experimental drop was on May 13th 2019.
Fast-forward to Q1 of 2020. Bolt 1 has received no meaningful updates since the end of 2018 and had accrued a bunch of long standing, some pretty fundamental show-stopping bugs. And Bolt 2 development had stagnated, perpetually stuck in pre-alpha/alpha stage with long pauses between new alpha releases. It looked like the original developer burned out and approached Unity to sell them Bolt asset like Unity wanted back in 2018. But this is just my personal guess, nothing confirmed. This is also when they shifted focus from Bolt to their new asset Peek.
August 14th 2020 - After one or two beta releases under Unity ownership, Unity cancels Bolt 2 and props up Bolt 1 as the new VS solution going forward, which causes another community outrage for many reasons. Long story short, they couldn’t finish Bolt 2 and integrate it in core 2021 in time, but they could do that with Bolt 1. Then outdated Bolt 1 was also a lot less opinionated and simpler architecture wise.
September 28th 2020 - Unity announce a new action plan for Visual Scripting - a new high performance runtime that can support both Mono and DOTS and unification of UI/UX across all Unity’s graph based tools via Graph Tools Foundation framework.
Also September 28th 2020 - Visual Scripting [Project Manager confirms that DOTS VS won’t receive new public releases]( https://discussions.unity.com/t/803038 page-2#post-6358221). Around that time, DOTS VS lead dev joins Bolt/Unity VS team as the lead developer to work on the new runtime and help port the asset to a native engine package.
Q4 of 2020 - Unity deal with most long standing Bolt 1 bugs, of which there is a fair amount and port the asset to a native Unity package. A first of its kind, according to the dev team. This required to create new internal workflows for testing, validation, etc.
Q1 2021 - Bolt 1 is rebranded to Unity Visual Scripting and ships with the engine. It gets some editor performance optimizations, minor workflow improvements, further bug fixing and a new visual theme using Bolt 2 icons. Bolt 1 custom node API gets documented for the first time (original developer never publicly released docs for Bolt 1 API as it was considered unstable and the tool was marketed primarily towards Unity/coding beginners).
Q4 2021. Unity VS lead dev (former DOTS VS lead dev) has finished their work on the new high performance runtime and leaves for another internal Unity team. The runtime is in pre-alpha for Unity 2022.1. Graph Tools Foundation package hasn’t received public updates since summer 2021 and is undergoing integration as a core package for Unity 2022. Bolt 1, now Unity Visual Scripting, hasn’t received any new features since the end of 2018 besides a rudimentary support for the new Input System. Current Visual Scripting is still very much Bolt 1 from 3 years ago, just a lot more stable.
TL;DR: DOTS VS development is paused, they’re focusing on the mono Visual Scripting for now. But the new tech will support DOTS specific nodes in the future so Mono and DOTS visual scripting systems will be under the same tool according to the current roadmap. They also have 2-3 years of mono improvements in the pipeline so I wouldn’t bet on seeing anything DOTS VS related anytime soon.
And Bolt being free is not a good example for new acquisitions. We had to fight for it becoming free and Unity had no idea at all what to do with it and I’d argue that they still lack vision for it as they are adamant at honoring backwards compatibility above all else, including good architecture and design.
Y3p, Unity need finish first DOTS core architecture, for any DOTS visual scriptipting to make even sense. Otherwise will be quite waste of time, with such major and continuous changes. So that probable not earlier than DOTS 1.0.
but it’s not
