After watching the unity 5 announcement I got extremely excited by those new features, and now that I think of it, should I be that excited? I mean, I don’t have unity pro neither I have money to buy it, so does anyone have a brief idea which of these features will be coming to unity free? I have a small feeling but I might be totally wrong in some aspects, so I’ll just say what I think will be for indie, and what I feel that will be pro-only.
Pro-only:
Global Illumination, this is where I have most doubt, unity has always had a better lighting in unity pro, so I have the idea that they will make it pro only, same with reflection probes and other lighting aspects, however unity free may actually have a worse version of it
Audio, I believe this will be only unity pro, since it’s not a crucial part for games, but it helps a lot in polishing and making the final product better
Profiler, I think this is quite obvious that it will be pro-only, since it already is.
Avaible On free:
Shaders, the new shaders that have been showcased. Well, I think they will be avaible on unity free, and I can take that from this quotes: “High-end shaders for all” and the title of a video “Unity 5 - The standard shader”, so this feels like something that will be a standard in both unity pro and unity free.
UI Tools, come on, it’s UI, it’s something that is very important in games, and from the current versions of unity, we can see that unity free as enough tools to make a good game, while unity pro is more for polishing and making everything look fancier.
Physics effectors, same as UI, it’s something that I feel like will be avaible in unity free
So is there something you would like to add/change, I would love to hear more stuff about this, since unity 5 got me kinda excited, expecially because I haven’t covered all the aspects.
Interesting.
Since audio is one of the core priorities of my project, I wonder whether fmod studio will still work with Unity 5. We were planning on using it since it became free for indies.
Best case scenario would be if the Unity plugin would still work or get fixed quickly after Unity 5 gets released.
there is small chance that UT move one-two pro-only feature to free becase unity 5 come with some new feature seller like real-time GI and past time UT moved some pro-only features like shadow. There are my candidates:
Profiler
rendertexture
LOD
full free navmesh (i think its good move because now navmesh is limited for free and for that in most cases its useless for extension provider like RAIN because some basic game type like RTS need some dynamic features which required Unity PRO)
i hope that one of them move to free when U5 finally arrived
I did not know that at least some part of Navmesh is in Unity Free. Thats great to know. When the Navmesh thing came out first, I was under the impression that the whole thing was pro only
and @Breyer
i hope that one of them move to free when U5 finally arrived
I had the small impression that Rendertexture would become free also, since on the unity 5 video they shown a minimap rendered in a texture (I think that’s how it works), the other features would be awesome if they became free, however, this might not happen
It seems only off-mesh links are Pro only now. That means you can get a lot done as long as you use only one navmesh, or work around it if you need multiple meshes.
I’ve been trying to find confirmation on this, but I see conflicting answers everywhere
It’s a quick thing to test, though. Navmeshes are surprisingly quick to implement. I’ve got Pro, so NOT IT.
If the realtime GI were Pro-only, they’d have to either drop lightmapping support for Free users entirely - which I don’t think they’ll do, partly because I don’t think they’ll reduce the featureset like that and partly because lightmapping is a quick way to make the content produced by thousands of Free users look a lot better - or they’d have to support Beast just to keep Free users covered, which seems dumb.
So I think they will ship some parts of the realtime GI in Free.
