That’s a strange way of thinking about it. If the Humble Bundle or similar precludes entry to Unity applications, developers building with such aspirations in mind would therefore not use Unity. David Rosen, the programmer at Wolfire which the origins of the HB can be traced back to frequently uses Unity to develop prototypes and game jam style games. I’m sure they’d be more likely to consider using Unity on future larger projects with the Linux support so they can target their Humble Bundle.
And there are many professional developers that use Unity and not having that Linux limitation should take away any thoughts in the back of their minds about limitations of the revenue streams of their game. Personally, I’m really glad the option will now be there. I’m prototyping new features for Lunar Flight with Shovsoft at the moment and I know they’d feel the same way.
That’s hardly the point. The point is the quality of the game, it’s immaterial what you use for it. Realistically, a large % of this forum doesn’t have what it takes to get on the bundle (assuming the number of users using unity is correct). Same for UDK, Cry or anything.
They’re going to favour what will sell, not because it was made in unity.
Trying to point out linux support is this magical gateway to riches (which is a running theme with linux support) is just stupidity (not talking about you, but in general). It’s tough for anyone to make a decent game and linux has nothing to do with it, that was my point.
This does not mean linux support won’t get used though, I suspect it will provide quite the boost to linux in general support wise.
Watching your London Usergroup sessions I was surprised by how similar the topics you covered were to what I’d been doing at my previous full time job with Unity. Also how similar our Unity coding methodologies seemed to be. Now I see that we also think alike as this is what I was getting at earlier. Now I just need to grow my beard a little more and speak in a british accent…
It looks to me like Mechanim is going to be very useful for me, so I will be upgrading on pre-order. The workflow improvements also look good, but I think the real point is that you aren’t paying $850 ($1.7k/$2.5k etc) for just those features, you are paying for the updates that will take us to the end of the version 4 product too.
Yep it sucks that I bothered to buy an extra pro license on spec (hoping for a version 3.6) to get the $400 discount on IOS Pro when I haven’t really needed that license, but in the scheme of things this is really not expensive for a game engine with royalty free distribution. Over the course of a number of years of working with Unity I will have to pay for upgrades at some point, that’s the cost of being in the business (or you do it for free with standard), in the fullness of time the cost is evened out…
Whenever you build product based on 3rd party technologies, in any industry, you are always reliant on them having the features you need, relying on features that haven’t been released is something you could do, but then you are taking the risk and should be aware of it. Paying an upgrade fee for a bug fix is not good, paying it for a feature that didn’t make it is just business - Unity has to make money too.
So you want to be hosted by uLink, or Photon, or SFS or Electrotank or Player.IO etc.
Hosting isn’t that profitable, and U3D aren’t the experts.
We have no idea what they’d charge or on what terms - it could even be cheaper than now!
Example: In addition of their $800 license photon now sell cloud hosting starting at $9/month.
Now I’m not saying it should be cheaper - but it shouldn’t be off the drawing board. U3D’s goal is hopefully to make money, not some arbitrary price point.
Having debt is bad, and even then there is a limit to how much credit one can have.
But the problem with that is people are saying they ALREADY paid for those updates when they bought v3… so why do they now have to buy v4 for them to be realized?
No disagreements with what you’re saying, but I’m just not sure who you’re arguing against. Unless I missed it no one has suggested anything contrary to what you’re saying there.
The new features looks interesting: Mecanim looks the best animation tool ever (even if I will hardly use it because being a pure programmer I’ll ever prefer to buy animations from professional artists), improvements on mobile (shadows and whatsoever else), DirectX11 support and…yes may be also the Linux support (which I think will never use, since I’m completely convinced that it has very few market because they are too tied to the idea of open source and “everything for free”, I already read some posts yesterday about Unity4 on few Linux forums where people were crying about another proprietary software coming out on their open source world…bah, they did never worth companies’ interest and probably will never do with such behavior!).
Though I think as many other here that the upgrade price ON PREORDER is higher than what I usually see on other software, which usually costs lesser than half of full version (e.g. Photoshop, just to make an example of a well known product). What I expect from a PREORDER is usually an advantageous direct discount on the price (both upgrade and full versions), not a voucher to buy other stuff, so I probably think that it would have been more fair to cut off those 200$ from the upgrade cost instead of giving away a voucher. I know that probably for someone it would have been the same, but I probably will upgrade gradually, earlier my Unity Pro, later my iOS, later my Android, so I would have preferred to save my 200$ from my very first upgrade that is what is a reasonable amount (850$ is nothing for an established company, but for a startup freelancer it’s not really cheap after having spent other 1800$ [I bought Pro when I hadn’t a VAT so I was charged of a very much higher VAT than I ever had, 25%? it’s huge!]).
However, I will definitely upgrade to the new version some day along the current or starting of next year, since I chose Unity as my main platform to make games and 3D interactive, so keep up the good work UT!
It seems like there are a number of features that have “Read more” links pointing to the Unity 4 info page which does not actually contain information about those features. I presume they’ll update the feature descriptions at some point, but it would be good to have some more technical information about new features.
I’d like to know more about how Unity are handling compute shaders. I’d heard before, I believe it was in the GDC presentation that some/all compute shader logic could be written in regular scripts (e.g. C#)?
Compute shader is a new asset type. You write them in DX11 HLSL. From a script, you can set up parameters to them (much like you can setup material parameters), and invoke them (“dispatch” in DX11 lingo).
Maybe i have missed something but i have not read a clear answer on these features in the previous pages.
Anyway i hope we will have Windows 8 metro support and facial animation support in the next release.
A question on future facial animations, how will they work? Will they be bone animations or will we finally get morph target support? I hope morphs as that could be used for more than just facial animations.
