Reading the patch notes, I read ‘Geometry Instancing with low draw calls Support’ as one of the big features. It is a big feature indeed, but are we back to 2004?
I’d try to sneak it in rather than show it as a big feature out of shame.
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Huh. I wasn’t aware this was supported as far back as the GeForce 6000 and Radeon 9500 cards. Today I’m learning a lot.
https://forum.beyond3d.com/threads/how-to-enable-geometry-instancing-in-far-cry.15412/
Just google ‘Far Cry geometry instancing.’
So you guys ignored most of our lobbying to have instancing in the last 6 years or so.
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I only rarely go to the graphical sub-forums so if any of it took place there that’s why. 
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Next big thing: material / shader editor. Moan moan, moan.
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Now that complaint I’m quite aware of and agree with.
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Better be nice to them, or we’re getting Lithium back! “Complaining” about getting a new feature seems strange to me.
Instancing could be useful for my current project. I’m a bit scared of trying 5.4 again though. Last time enough things seemed broken, for me to go back to 5.3.5. Did anyone try the non-beta release yet?
Shader editor would be amazing! I’m sure it’ll come, probably right after I’ve finished coding my first complex shader myself in painstaking trial and error for days on end ^^.
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Fixed that for you. Because it’s inevitable. We’re doomed.
We shall defend our forum, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the threads, we shall fight on the landing pages, we shall fight in the fields and in the carets, we shall fight in the emails; we shall never surrender.
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The question is what other GPU DirectX / OpenGL / Vulkan magic API calls and features are hidden by Unity?
Okay, so you got a point that Unity is late to the party.
But they shouldn’t make a big announcement when they finally arrive? So that people still assume Unity is not at the party and will never be? Sorry, that is not a good way to handle public relations.
No matter how “shameful” something is, Unity devs need to know, and yes, also the guys that didn’t used Unity till now because they weren’t part of the Instancing party should be told.
Might not be enough to make them join the Unity party, seeing how Unity is always late to the party, and most probably always will be.
But are we now really complaining for getting something we wanted? Do it like @hippocoder implies, be thankful for what you got, and complain about the next thing on the priority list still missing.
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Did anyone else notice they are giving us direct links to the downloads in the release notes? That’s a nice addition.
Whoa, I completely missed that 5.4 actually released. Was that during the Lithium Incident, maybe? Odd that the Editor hasn’t nagged me to download it.
Edit: Oh, yesterday. 
A pipeline and built in support to do Skinned mesh instancing with animation on the GPU.
GPU GEMS 3 (cira 2007) http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems3/gpugems3_ch02.html
Wasn’t this approach or something similar used in the Adam demo reel?
Editor version notification has been unreliable forever.
Speaking of which, I need to check out if their promised progressive lightmap baking actually works or not.
—edit—
Aaand judging by release notes it is scheduled for 5.5. Oh well.
Coming in Unity 6.0.
Unity 6.2: Working shader editor.
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The moaning in this thread is mostly a contented moaning, there’s no rage here as far as I can see… which means 5.4 must be less buggy!
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Not that I’m doing anything particularly unusual, but my project loaded up and ran just fine (which wasn’t true with the beta, I hit several showstoppers even fairly late in the beta).
As for future toys… I’m glad updating .NET at least made the “Research” list.
If you want to help them get to that promised land one day then consider joining in with testing something they need to do now as part of a multi-step upgrading process that eventually, hopefully, ends up with new .NET version. In this case the very early first step, the experimental unity version that has an upgraded compiler:
http://forum.unity3d.com/forums/experimental-scripting-previews.107/
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