Based on Unity’s general direction in designing the internal tools of the engine, what do YOU see them incorporating or designing that already exists on the asset store for Unity?
They have already added TextMershPro and the nGUI guy offered insights in how he approached his solution which may or may not have influenced their design decision in how they gave us the new Canvas based GUI system.
So do you think or feel that Unity will, in time, implement their own solution for something that already exists on the asset store?
For example, Unity 2018.1 has some new shader tools. I was wondering if they are going to add features which are already existing in some asset store products like ShaderForge in the near or distant future, which would thereby nullify its need or existence?
In terms of “major features” and not technical back-end improvements (ECS / C# Jobs, SRP, etc) I would say that Input, Terrain and Visual Scripting are their next major targets.
Minor targets would likely be IK (generic chains and full body), 2d skeleton tools (Anima2D integrated version), and play mode save.
There’s so much noise in the featureset and scope now it’s hard to keep track and/or put faith in releases, though. Getting new features is rather bittersweet.
Well… do you remember what was before ShaderForge years ago? Strumpy shader editor, and the author was hired by Unity around 6-7 years ago to do the latest shader editor. RageSpline author was hired by Unity for 2d stuff and AFAIK same thing has already happened to multiple parts of the engine.
I also believe that the same trend will continue happening with different things but we just wont know about them all. In the case of NGUI guy I understood that things didn’t go too well so they might have changed the general stance to mostly avoid talking about hiring/integration things publically.
As LaneFox mentioned, I think terrain is an obvious target. I would like to see automatic generation of LOD meshes, which was discussed as an experiment in a recent blog but not as something being incorporated into Unity proper. That makes me think they are considering it though.
Some things I would love, but don’t think they will do is native integration with Steam, and reviving development on the UNET HLAPI.
Apparently the existing Unity terrain isn’t supported in the HD render pipeline which makes me hopeful something going is coming down the line on the terrain front.
Honestly, I don’t really understand the problem people have with terrain.
There are some really good tools in asset store if you need fancy shaders, and the basic structure of terrain is nice since it’s so easy to code against.
I would be very afraid of rewrites to terrain engine that end up being overly complex and make it more difficult to write tools. It’s better to have less functionality but be easier to extend, then more functionality but be harder to extend.
The biggest problem I have with terrain is a lack of documentation on what the hell it does to trees. Because… what the hell does it do to trees? I’ve had bugs with trees for years that I still can’t figure out.
Terrain need a lot of prior, I see them working on the prior, I assume they are laying the foundation for the big terrain update, and it will be glorious
I agree you can do good stuff with the terrain, and the speed with which you can have something up and running with it is great. At the same time however there are parts of the terrain system that are archaically clunky in both workflow and performance, which is backed up by the fact that when Unity makes their most impressive demos (The Blacksmith, Viking Village, Adam) they tend to use custom one-off solutions.
Yeah, I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s some voxel based terrain system a la CryEngine in the works, but when we’re going to see it is a whole other story.
