"UniStorm" or "Time of Day" ?

News & General Discussion
1

Hi there

I’m looking for a sky weather system. So far I have found two that I’m interested in:

UniStorm
Time of Day

I have read through the asset descriptions and the reviews, but I can’t decide which one fits better to my needs. Therefore, I’d be very grateful if you were able to share your experiences. Have you used either or both of them? What are the Pros and Cons? Which one would you choose if you only could pick one?

Here are my basic requirements:

  • Day/night cycles can easily be defined (durations, blend between day and night, skyboxes, etc.)
  • Supports different seasons
  • Nice range of different weather types including clouds, which can easily be triggered/tweaked
  • Has to work on Win, Lin and Mac. Strong mobile support is nice to have, but not mandatory.
  • Easy to set up and to tweak
  • Well maintained, regular updates, no heaps of warnings or errors with every new Unity release
  • Relatively lightweight, isn’t a huge burden to framerates
  • Written in C# would be a Pro (I’m trying to stick to only one language in my projects)
  • Comes with solid documentation. Tutorials would be a Pro, but isn’t mandatory.
  • Well organised asset structure (I prefer to integrate asset store assets into my own project structures, rather than leaving the structures as they come out of the box)
  • High probability that the developer will migrate it to Unity 5

I’d highly appreciate to hear about your views and experiences. Especially with these two assets, but maybe there are even more I have overlooked (-:

2

The last UniStorm version I used was not working so well with Unity 4, but it seems they’ve released a new version recently which may have corrected the problems- Time of Day works very well with an easy 5 minute set up. A friend recently asked me to evaluate all the packages available and one alot of people seem to miss is Environment Gator which has a great set of features and it’s virtually a drag/drop process - Unity Asset Store - The Best Assets for Game Making

If I had to choose one it would be Environment Gator- great UI and very easy to set up, though Time of Day is great if you just want something very simple.

3

Thank you so much for sharing your experiences. I wasn’t aware of Environment Gator yet, but will definitely have a closer look. Sounds promising.

4

People miss the “Gator” because it hasn’t been around as long as the other two. It looks awesome in the description - and it may be awesome - but on the webplayer it looked to me like the moon was traveling perpendicular to the sun and the clouds on the horizon never went dark. But overall the clouds looked great.

I picked Time of Day months ago because it was designed to have a light processing load (suitable for mobile) and the author is diligent about updating and is very responsive. Another feature update is due soon, and there will be an improvement to the clouds.

5

The great thing about Gator is that you can customize every last detail in the inspector, so you can customize the moon or any orbiting object you want to add (so you can have 3 planets a moon in the sky if you wish). Time of day was still too basic for what I was looking for- but I think for mobile it would be the better option as Gator is probably more high-end on the specs.

Gator is regularly updated also, just ask the author what you want in there and it gets added- can’t complain with that! I use it for prototyping scenes and projects, it’s very immersive with all the different weather effects, sounds realistic clouds. I don’t think the webplayer does it justice when there’s so much more potential to it, I had a dream where a giant lion was projected in the night sky and decided to immortalize it in a scene- took me 5 mins ha :stuck_out_tongue: