Unity's Target Market

News & General Discussion
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Howdy guys,

First I hope this thread doesn’t get locked but I just wanted to discuss what is Unity’s target market when it comes to 3D ?

You see there are few things that have got me confused and it’s mainly to do with the 3D potentially AAA side of the engine.

IMO, I feel the way unity is marketed is fragmented when it comes to 3D facilities and some 2D and visual scripting facilities, or they encourage fragmentation. What I mean by this is asset authors are having to step in to bridge the gap and to me this is bad because we can’t rely or assume these assets will be supported in later versions of the engine.

To give an example, is sonic ether’s SEGI which I’m sure most of you have seen. It looks great, sure it’s never going to be as optimised as say cryengine, but it’s a big step forward in getting a better GI look and feel.

Why aren’t unity simply recruiting these people to develop side by side in the engine.

Or is it more complicated than that, I realise unity is supposed to run on all OS, clearly SEGI is limited to direct X, microsoft systems with decent graphic cards, these fancy additions come at significant performance costs and OS restrictions.

The other thing, is @zenGarden mentioned the need for a simple SSS shader, which to be fair there is one on the asset store, but again it is not part of the core engine and therefore encouraging fragmented workflow again.

Additionally, I’ve seen the showcases such as the Adam demo and the more recent real time emissions which did look impressive, but again this seems an ice age away from making it into a recent unity version. Years even.

Is it a clever marketing ploy? A restriction in making it cross platform compatible and performant, or just my nativity, I’d love to know, because I’m stumped.

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Unity is fragmented because enlighten is terrible and there is no SSS? (is that the point you are trying to make?)

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Game designers mostly.

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No, not limited to that but they were just examples, we could make a case for better shadows, overall better lighting and many other things but I realise these aren’t easy to solve across all operating systems with different hardware.

My main issue is when lone developers feel the entire lighting system in the core engine isn’t good enough and decide to engineer a new one from scratch something isn’t quite right…

Or is that stupid to assume?

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SEGI is a different thing though and it’s for different uses than a traditional lightmapper.

For example → I would still be unhappy if enlighten was replaced by a more optimized SEGI.

Enlighten is meant for Deferred/Linear and there it sort of works (especially in recent versions). For everything else it is terrible, because Geomerics (Arm? Softbank?) isn’t interested in making those. I am speculating of course, but all the functionality that exists because Unity needed it is subpar.

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I got off on a tangent about how much I dislike enlighten and forgot to address your main point :slight_smile:

Yes, lighting ATM is a problem with Unity. I’m guessing that the collaboration with Geomerics (Arm, Softbank) didn’t turn out as well as they hoped. Enlighten is a real problem for Unity now. Maybe the new progressive lightmapper will fix that, maybe not. We’ll see.

But I don’t think there’s anything else that is equally important and is missing from Unity. ( for example: I consider SSS something that would be nice to have, but non-essential ).

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Yes, I know that, I wasn’t suggesting that a real time GI solution would replace a decent lightmapper. They’re two different animals altogether. They were merely points to address the issue of fragmentation with the core engine and developer assets being created.

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Everyone.

Unity as an engine is trying to be the best choice for any game. This often means its not the best choice for a specific game. Unity targets as many devs as possible by making as broad strokes as possible. The AAA super polished game is only a small part of the game dev market these days. So while it gets some attention, most of Unity’s effort goes elsewhere. A vast majority of games made with Unity don’t need the fancy lighting models.

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It is the most suitable for non-photorealistic rendering, cartoon rendering, top down and isometric games. IMO.

Do you have an AAA budget to worry about that?

It also has that problem where it takes a second for lighting change to propagate through the scene.

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this one has been biting me in the ass lately and I honestly think it may be more prudent for me to build one of my projects in Unity 4 to get past it.