That the current UnityGUI would get an additional push (in the range of 2-10 times as fast) has been mentioned some time ago to perform better.
This does not impact the new system basing on the informations back then as for 64bit editor: since 3.5 umbra and beast are 64bit removing the need for a 64bit editor seriously as those were the two common reasons for it to fail outside the build pipeline problems (which I hope will be addressed in one or the other form and don’t doubt that this will be the case with the push for tripple A which simply needs to be able to handle 10-30gb projects)
Texture streaming
We’ve been working on a texture streaming solution. Unity will load the textures at the necessary resolution just before it needs it. You have a texture memory budget which Unity will fill with the most important textures necessary. Unity automatically analyzes your scene but you can also manually specify the needed textures resolutions at specific locations in your game.
This means you can have more textures at a higher resolution, especially on mobile devices and consoles. Unity automatically analyzes your scene to allow for prefetching of textures. Even on iOS we’re able to stream textures in the background at 60FPS.
Considering the Gamasutra article says “A release date for Unity 4 has not been set, though interested developers can pre-order it here.” and links to the store page, I’d say there’s a chance that the press release/info they received said preordering would be available there and it’s just not setup yet. If so then we’ll probably see pricing soon enough when the Unity site is updated.
In the past, they have pretty good pricing for upgrades. I’m a little grumpy at not getting a GUI in 3 and would like a better deal this time around. Probably won’t happen so I’d better get over it and get back to work.
Sooo… features that we awaited in 3.5 are now in 4.0… this means that I have to lay down some more more to get improvements to realize my project… since I also purchase the Unity Pro version of Unity for my graphic artist, this means twice the money…
Well… let’s see… I’m surely think twice before spending another $1500 for licenses to Unity…
I haven’t used Unity’s GUI system for years in anything beyond prototypes so it’s not something that bothers me, but it does suck that it was originally slated for 3.X. These things happen though.
I’m pretty excited about a bunch of these features. All the rendering stuff is great. DirectX 11, 3D texture support, etc will allow me to do some really cool stuff in Advanced Surface Shaders.
I’m also glad they’re adding dynamic obstacles to the pathfinding because I think it’s pretty useless in it’s current state.
Guys, while we don’t want to not give you answers to your questions, this article was published earlier then it was supposed to be. For this reason I have had to remove details about the release from this thread and close it for now. The press release will go live in a couple of hours and we’ll be able to respond to any and all concerns you guys have then.
Ah, didn’t need to make that second thread then :). Didn’t realise this one would be brought back. Sorry about the early post, didn’t know the Gamasutra news was early ;).
