So today I have been going through at least $1,500 in Assets (All VR Compatible). 98% of them do NOT work in Single Pass Mode. This of course causes issues when you must use a Single Pass VR tool, Because you are cut off from a huge portion of your toolset.
It should be a requirement that both modes are supported in order to be in the Asset Store. But I would settle for 98% of my Money back 
Itās not just single-pass. VR support of many assets is not satisfactory, e.g. with many of the water assets. I am not sure if Unity can apply a policy demanding all assets are single pass VR capable. But what they could do is demand from developers to state in the asset description whether there is VR capability, and if so, whether single pass is supported. That would help already.
Surely that would hamper sales. Many of us have bought assets which have proven useless, and getting the money back depends on the good will of the developers. But I hope this will be addressed, even though Unity also gets a cut from each sale, no matter how useful an asset turns out to be for one of their users.
All assets certainly should NOT support single pass, thereās just some stuff you canāt do in a single pass. Does that mean the asset is useless? Absolutely not. Would a better solution be to remove 98% or VR assets from Asset Store because they wonāt support both? No, maybe for $10 I can get a good example / script and even though its not perfect for my exact VR app, itās a lot better starting point than me starting from scratch.
Whatās wrong, when you have a certain requirement, with contacting developer and asking them if it works in single pass. Almost all assets even have a forum page here.
Now youād have 98% of your money still in your pocket.
And Unity puts developers contact info directly on front page of any asset. So instead of being ridiculous, ārequire all assets to be both single and multipassā just take the time to research the asset you want to buy, since thereās only a 2% chance it will meet YOUR expectations / requirements.
And VR Supported certainly does not mean single/multi compatible. Vr supported means the asset works with VR. The term youāre looking foe is:
Single pass and multipass supported.
True, one can read the description, comments, forum, and ask the developer before spending money. All I am asking for is that assets come with a short description whether VR is supported, and in what form. That would also help the devs, I guess at least, as they wonāt have to deal with potential customers as much.
Honestly, even the default unity Vignette effect by unity is compatible with single pass rendering. Why would any vr developer need a vignette, itās not like motion sickness is a thing.
Iām curious, what is it you canāt do in single pass?
Also, next year, someone will post the exact same thing about foveated rendering, Iām guessingā¦
Itās not so much that you canāt do everything in single pass that you can do in Multi, itās that you must take Special provisions in some shaders to correctly process single pass. Most prominently these are Image effects that process the entire Image must be altered to not erroneously Access the wrong part of the image: ambient occlusion, Anti-Aliasing or Screen-based snow effects. These shaders must be re-programmed, which takes time, and is not in everyoneās skill set (letās say the artists uses a shader generation tool). If you recall the brouhaha around Livendaās CTAA, you may remeber that it was ecactly the fact that single-pass didnāt work because they couldnāt get acces to vector Information for one of the eyes. Eventually this got fixed. but it did require additional work. Iām not Aware of anything that would not work in single-pass that works in multi-pass, but even my own simplistic shaders required re-work for single-pass, so in many instances, itās a matter of ability and effort.
I would agree that items that are labelled as VR-capable should include Information wrt single-pass stereo capability.
Oh, and I completely forgot:
To this date, I have not seen a single water asset that correctly works with single-pass stereo. Not by Unity, not by anyone else, and I believe I own every single water system available on the asset store. Iām still looking for one, so if you know of a realistic water asset that works correctly with single-pass stereo, please PLEASE let me know.
Cheers,
-ch
True! I am currently working on a VR project for a client and I am totally stuck with a nice plane-reflection-based water solution like aquas or anything, that works in single pass.
Did you found something? I am really desperate with this issue.I was also looking for github projects, but without success.
BLOOM AND TAA (XTAA) which are BOTH basically ESSENTIAL!!! STILL searching for a solution AFTER ALMOST A YEAR.
Has anyone got any water shaders or asset store products to share that work for single pass on the Oculus Quest/Go as well as PC VR headsets?
See my forum post asking about this here
Actually, PlayWay Water had been working with Single Pass Stereo rendering since 2016. Unfortunately, it has been discontinued and I havenāt followed the new package (the PlayWay Water developer passed it on to some other company but I believe they eventually also discontinued it). PlayWay Water has been awesome (even worked on PS4 / PSVR ā¦ except performance probably wouldnāt have let you pass their certification) but I recently moved to Crest (Crest also has an LWRP version on the Asset Store - the legacy render pipeline version is Open Source / free).
I never needed underwater rendering, so I canāt confirm that worked well with Single Pass Stereo rendering, too, and Iām not using Single Pass Instanced (because I donāt think even half of what Iām using supports that).
After working to make all my systems for single pass, i can say that is almost like remaking the asset from scratch 3 times in time required, because 1. Unity has an extremely convoluted way to support them across various cases and 2. the mock system to emulate it does not seem to work or cover all modes even so essentially one need to have all VR devices and test on all.
At this point this is like making Unity own engine, since Unity is supposed to handle all that in a way that wont take 2-3 lifetimes to make a simple image effect in single pass VR, so the whole issue is that Unity should not introduce single pass if is near impossible to implement.
If a system works in multipass, it should be handled completly internally and transparently to work in single pass and until that, single pass is in an actual pre-pre-pre Beta stage and not to be used for anything actual, like the new SRPs are same as well, just incomplete new thoughts, not actual systems like the core unity.
Yeah, and now on some platforms, Single Pass isnāt even supported anymore - you have to use Single Pass Instanced, which is the same mess all over again (in our project, Single Pass is actually working quite fine and has been for a few years).
Unity has successfully turned single-platform development into gazillion-platform development because the different āmodesā that Unity has (Multipass, Single Pass, Single Pass Instanced, Legacy RP, Universal RP, HDRP, PostProcessing V1, PostProcessing V2, PostProcessing for URP, PostProcessing for HDRP) have turned into literal āplatformsā where going from one to the other is significant porting work, not too different from porting from one platform to another. Itās quite a nightmare.
Instead of taking the pain out of game development, Unity adds more and more pain.
Iām definitely looking forward to Valveās Source 2 whenever that may become available. And Unreal also looks more interesting with each Unity update (because Unity is getting worse and worse and worse). That new Unreal 5 video is also quite the bomb and looks like while Unity is making things more and more complicated for developers, Unreal goes the other direction and makes things really easy for developers (throw those unoptimized billion-triangle objects at the engine and it will just make it work).
I really wish Unity Technologies would go back to being a 7 to 10 people company with David, Nicholas and Joe (the founders) leading the way instead of that ridiculous corporation it became during the last 8 or so years.