I’m sure this is more Renaldas Zioma territory, but how about a unity-sanctioned competition for the best demoscene style demo (all about the effects, guys!) in similar fashion to other scene demos?
This would be a feather in unity’s cap to see so many really exciting DX11 demos that push unity hard, similar to your flash demo competition. I think Unity 4 would benefit from this hype and excitement.
Ermmm… You do realize Hippo, the whole point of demo scene is to showcase YOUR OWN ENGINE right?? Using Unity in demo parties you would be the laughing stock! Also, what’s the point of it? Besides to showcase some pretty visual? Unity is a game engine, not a demo engine. Unity’s strength lies in its versatility as game engine.
IMHO, I think Unity should concentrate on making PLAYABLE GAME DEMOS. Make one for each major style/genre/category so beginners can easily get into Unity and learn from it. So far Unity has made couple of playable demos that showcase TPS (Third Person Shooter) genre (“Bootcamp”, “Penelope”), A racing game (“Car Tutorial”), a top-down shooter (“Angry Bot”)… and I would like to see Unity branch out and tackle other genres/categories such as RTS, 2D/3D Platformer, RPG, Beat 'em up, Fighting games, Flight Sim, City Building Sim… etc etc. There are lots of them and each category deserves a simple demo to showcase how Unity can be best utilized.
EDIT: Okay, I was quick to post while skim reading your post
I am not against the idea to be honest, if its a Unity community wide competition. And I think it is beneficial to Unity platform if demos submitted can achieve or even surpass CryEngine or Unreal Engine’s visual. It will be a huge win for UT and the community.
I can see some value it doing demos with Unity like that. Especially if they focused on performance. Often there are tons of ways to “fake” nice looking effects that don’t require processor power. Could be a nice way to share tricks and solutions.
That sounds like a great idea. At least I would like to see more demo-scene style work using Unity. Maybe it could even end-up as a separate category in Unity Awards
For once DirectX11 / Compute shaders allow quite a lot of cool effects without need to modify the engine itself.
I think there a more than single point in demo-scene - of course to some it is important to showcase their own code from the ground up - but for others it just a media of self expression no matter the underlying code. There are number of demo engines that were released to public and used by other demo-groups successfully.
AFAIK there are several demo-scene productions made with Unity already.
That’s a wonderful idea Hippo.
And about “their own engine”, nothing prevents anyone to code his own routines in GL. I think in 2012 we’ve seen enough floppy disk 30ko .exe with a rotating cube and LSD-like visual effects to understand that it’s no use to reinvent the wheel once again
Many people with the right expertise for this kind of thing I guess will be limited to unity free which would be a problem if the purpose is to showcase Unity
Well, while I am totally supportive of a Unity demoscene, Unity games will be disqualified from many competitions just due to the sheer file size of the engine. I mean, people out there have made great 4k demos. Even using the latest technology, a few substances alone would take that up, not to mention code size. The Unity standard application alone is quite a few MBs.
Farbrasch is a great resource for demo scenes, however, at least on Windows. They recently released the source code to many of their demos on Github. There are few good demos for OS X however that actually run on the 10.8 platform.
Still, file size notwithstanding, we should do a Unity demoscene contest. I think it’ll be fun. I’d do it.
Thanks for the interest guys! sounds like it is gaining some support and traction. You mentioned filesize, but I addressed that in the OP, and so did Rej, with the self expression category. There are many “demoscenes”.
There is nothing better than getting the community out there experimenting with compute shaders, DX11 and so on on behalf of unity.
What more could encourage people than the prize dangling for a delicious copy of unity pro and a 2 month expiring “educational version” like before or such. Get people using, pushing, competing and sharing all that is unity 4.
GL owners are not left out. You don’t HAVE to use DX11 But a common criticism of unity is that it “doesn’t look as good as ”. I disagree, anyone join me on that?
This is amazingly important. We need mass of developers to get those potential talents that will be able to get their hands dirty on DX11 and with Pro version being at its price this is already great sword that strikes chances down. In that case Cryengine or UDK scenario with full acces to engine at no cost is best, but hey then you already invite guy called royalties on party and he is a real downer.
As user of Cryengine, UDK and Unity i dissagree with your dissagreement:smile:. It becomes obvious after using engines for short time what tricks are making this opinion happening . But this is really generally speaking, going into more detailed explanation would be that some games could still look better in Unity due to no realtime light restriction and due to its rendering.
Yes and Yes, Count me in to contribute to this sort of endeavour. Great idea Hippo!
Personal opinion here only , but why not split the unity demo scene in to two groups. A no limits PC type demo and a Mobile demo. Each one aimed at the latest respective hardware. Build in a FPS and profiling counter and you will also have a handy tool for gauging what’s possible.
Perhaps each scene for the final demo could be contributed by various teams, making it to the final cut would be a little reward in its self.
I think using unity to make tech demos like this. … artistic demos, show-off demos, how the hell did they do that demos … is a great idea for promoting the cutting edge technical excellence that’s possible.
One thing about the demo scene is that it’s pretty much always been very competitive and that means showing that you can come up with cool new stuff, new effects, new techniques, that push into what seemed previously to be impossible. A major point is to do things that have never been done before and show off new experiments, to get people to go wow how can that be running so fast on my computer hardware or i've never seen anything like that, i don't see how they did it kind of thing. personally I’m a bit bored of the 3d models flying around doing nothing - cudos for the artistic design quality but give me more procedurally generated goodness any day.
I think you also have to realize that it’s not about wether people have Unity Free or Pro … the whole point of making these demos is to use whatever limitations you have to do something that looks like it goes beyond the limits - that’s being an artist. If you are in Unity Free with no directx 11 or rendertextures or shadows or whatever… show an effect that looks like it uses those things, yet doesn’t, and that’ll be impressive. It’s not about what tools you have or what those tools themselves can do already, it’s about how you can be creative and use those tools in a way that shocks and surprises and pushes the envelope of what everyone thought possible. But then when you do that it’s almost as if the tool itself does not matter so much and it’s more to do with what you can use it for. So that might not necessarily make Unity the center of attention if most of the merit in your production is your own creativity and Unity is just there as a tool. BUT, that said, Unity does facilitate and allow a lot of stuff which provides a platform to leverage.
I don’t think many hard-core coders (which is what makes up the demo scene) - they hack stuff and write low-level code and all kinds of really clever programming genius to squeeze speed out of everything - they probably wouldn’t give it as much merit if it’s based on a third party engine like Unity… from a demoscene perspective, because that’s sort of cheating and breaking the rules… but even if they don’t like it it doesn’t mean the public at large wouldn’t be impressed by watching these cool productions. Especially if the production does things that most people ordinarily would not be able to get Unity to do, and then you deliberately market it as being made with Unity, it would add clout to Unity’s image.
I think this is an awesome idea. I mean: REALLY awesome. This could be its own scene, with people who might not have the perseverance to complete a game on their own but have talent for creating awesome stuff could really shine - and get jobs in longer-term projects
This looks like quite a way to get some creativity flowing. And having separate “Unity” and “Unity Pro” categories could certainly show that there’s also quite a lot of awesome stuff that can be done with “Unity” (without the Pro).
And eventually, we might even see stuff like this:
Svet is created as a “training project” by a really nice Russian guy, who is not fluent in English, so I am writing on his behalf.
The game is available for free as a torrent or from the file hosting service. And here is the steam link.
Also, what’s the point of it? Besides to showcase some pretty visual? Unity is a game engine, not a demo engine. Unity’s strength lies in its versatility as game engine.
But a common criticism of unity is that it “doesn’t look as good as ”. I disagree, anyone join me on that?