So far I have purchased two post-processing assets on the asset store (a tonemapper and SSAO).
These were very popular assets. Since about a year ago the creators of these assets have stopped updating the asset, they have not responded to any technical support inquiries and have abandoned the forum.
Yet these assets are still being sold on the asset store. This is HIGHLY unusual since these guys were very eager to supply any form of technical support. Then out of no where they suddenly disappear.
Has Unity run these guys “out of business” since the Unity post-processing is now released on the Asset Store ?
Because they shouldn’t be being sold on the asset store anymore now if that is the case.
One of these assets is being sold by a Unity employee, which is even more intriguing about this situation.
I think this is really just the consequences of relying on the Asset Store. There’s always the inherent risk that the asset store devs will just stop supporting it and then you’re SOL. Its a double edged sword for consumers/devs like us, but fantastic for Unity Tech. since they reap all the upsides (cut of sales, they get to rely on the asset store to make up for things the engine lacks, etc) and aren’t really affected by any of the downsides.
So I think its great that Unity is developing their own post processing stack. Once its done (v2), we’ll have a set of core effects that will always be supported! And there’s nothing stopping asset store devs from putting out their own effects. Even if it might put a couple of devs “out of business” it’s much better for the Unity ecosystem in general.
(Btw, which asset are you talking about being sold by a Unity employee?)
Edit: Who knows why those devs have stopped supporting their asset. Maybe its just temporary and they’re on vacation, or are working on a big update.
I’ve purchased some post effects lately too, and one thing I can say about third party effects compared to the Unity ones is that they get better visual results in my use cases. So there’s definitely still a place for them. And that aside, the Unity ones cover a bunch of general purpose cases fairly well, but there’s still room for lots of more niche effects. And, we don’t want all of our games to look the same by virtue of all using the same effects with just different values.
That said, I’d love it if third party effects could be integrated into the Unity stack instead of being stand alone things. The complication there is that Unity are already moving towards a different stack of their own, so maybe that threw a spanner in the works for some people since their customers are (temporarily) spread over three different systems?
I completely agree with you. Once v2 is complete and released it should be an amazing asset. My hopes were to keep on using the one asset because currently it seems the Unity post processing is not as robust at the moment.
I’m using some old Unity legacy effects too.
I can’t speak to existing assets no longer being supported (not cool, the asset store allows the publisher to deprecate assets they no longer want to sell or support, so should at least do that), but I suspect that potential publishers of new post processing assets would be taking a wait and see approach to how the Unity supported version pans out.
If the Unity supported version is highly popular and well regarded, well we might not see as many new 3rd party effects other than niche ones.
Last I tried the v1 of the Unity effects though, I was not very impressed. Specifically the fact that you really need to be running non-default camera settings (Linear color space, HDR enabled, deferred rendering path). If that isn’t changed for v2 I still think there is a wide opening for effects that work properly with Gamma color space, non-HDR, and Forward rendering.