Unity Plus on older versions of Unity?

News & General Discussion
1

I think I know the answer to this (probably no) but if I were to subscribe to Unity Plus for the removal of the splash screen does this allow the removal of the splash screen in Unity 4.x or 5.0? That new tier was introduced during Unity 5.3 so I’m curious if it means anything to the older versions.

Why?

I’m currently making a non game application in Unity because I need the rendering plus cross platform. That being said while I do need the 3d rendering GI is overkill and it rules out a lot of older hardware which would turn away some users in this application category. The app will be for Win/Mac/Linux so I was playing around with some old hardware I had laying around (roughly 5-8 year old laptops) to see how the latest Unity would perform. Windows actually seems to do ok, followed by Mac, but linux on old hardware really didn’t do well. So I went to steam for some simple free games made with Unity and on the old hardware using linux the Unity 5 ones all seemed to perform poor, but the Unity 4 ones the framerate was good.

That being said I don’t believe Unity Plus will allow me to remove the splash screen will it on Unity 4.x? If not 4.x what about 5.0? If the answer is no for both of these and it only applies to Unity 5.3+ then I’ll certainly have quite a bit of stripping things out to do but even then not sure if I’ll be able to support as low of hardware as I would like to.

In the past I used to be a subscriber to Unity Pro in the early 5.0 days for 1 year but I don’t meet the cap and for my usecase the price is nearly double than it used to be. $1500 for another 1 year stint isn’t in my current budget for a side project. Even when the year was $900 at the time my only real reason was access to the betas, but now that’s included and it’s really just the splash. $420 is easier to swallow, although I really wish that asset store developers that earn Unity a decent amount of money on the store could get some credit from the 30% cut.

2

What’s wrong with simply disabling realtime GI? Or even baked global illumination if absolutely necessary?

3

I did this and the framerate at least on linux went from 5 fps to 15 fps but it still isn’t really good enough on the old hardware. Obviously that was the main difference between Unity 4.x and Unity 5.x, so I definitely have already tried that but there are obviously other differences. My tests have been on 5.5.0.

The application is for 3d printing and there is a sizable linux userbase.

4

By the way I just found a post from @Buhlaine where he mentioned that Unity Plus gives you access to Pro 4.x features.

4 Likes
5

Sweet! Thanks for finding that. I did search around and didn’t find that, thanks for digging it up!

6

I can confirm from experience that a plus subscription works across the entire range of 5.x. Internally the engine seems to get by by pretending it’s a full pro lisence.

I’ve never had a reason to check any of the 4.x series.

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