As I’m sure many of you have already heard, we just released Unity 5.6! You can check out our extensive blog post or the release notes for the full run down if you haven’t. (And as always, don’t forget to backup your project first before updating!)
Has anyone given 5.6 a spin yet? What are some of your favorite new features so far and why? What’s got you most excited to try?
Let’s keep this to a discussion about what you like (or not) about 5.6 additions so far. If you have some specific feedback on the release regarding bugs or have questions, please direct those posts to the official release thread here so that Sara can make sure it’s all tracked and get you answers. Thank you!
The progressive lightmapper looks great. It’ll really help with the workflow with light maps. Before, using light maps was a pain because it took so long before you could see the result of changing things. I’m interested to see if there’s been any changes in performance, though - just having automatic baking on can sometimes slow my computer to a crawl.
The GPU instancing stuff is very exciting. We’ll want to do experiments with moving a lot of characters around the scene, and instancing might help us get that count up.
The physics debugger will be nice to have around. Artists and level designers have a tendency to just… leave the mesh collider on stuff. Finding those at a glance will be a big help.
“Editor: Improved the performance of the Hierarchy view in the Profiler Window.”
That performance has always been attrocious (10+ seconds for Unity to react to every input when I’m deep profiling and have expanded a couple of times), so this will be nice.
The navmesh stuff is neat, for sure, but it’s too little, too late. The system was never ready for production, and even with all of these (pretty great) improvements it’s half-baked. It’s still not possible to make the agents do anything else than hug every wall ever, and it’s still very cumbersome to get any information about what the agent’s going to do. agent-agent avoidance is still not good - there’s no way to make agents walk past each other without having them bump into each other and lose significant speed, which looks horrible.
Not to disparage the work being done by the people working on the navmesh, they’re doing the right thing. It’s just so many miles away from what it needs to be to get good results and not be a pain to work with.
Physics.ComputePenetration is super useful! I waited for that quite a while to make a character controller that works just how I want it to.
The TreeView IMGUI Control is cool as well. At the moment I only use button lists which is pretty bad and with the new TreeView thing will finally look how they’re supposed to.
TextMesh Pro… well the old text renderer can’t even compare. The two features that makes it especially awesome are the support for custom “links” (metadata) and emoji.
I know those things are all considered minor (or moderate in the TMP case) where as most people are all over the progressive lightmapper and video stuff, but honestly it’s not really of any use to me.
The only thing I’m sad about is the absolute garbage performance of the noise module.
Just make a particle system with ~500 active particles at a time and change settings in the noise module, it will hang Unity for like a second for every change, even when typing numbers.
I can’t imagine that this isn’t some kind of bug. Is it generating some kind of huge lookup table for noise curves? Even if that’s the case it shouldn’t take so long. Use simplex noise instead of the expensive perlin! nobody will notice the difference and its a lot faster.
The progressive lightmapper is great but I ran into an interesting scenario. Maybe it’s a bug but I think it’s intended behavior. I’m working with a terrain and spawned a bunch of game objects. The lightmapper uses a geometry cache for performance but was sucking up 24 Gigs of ram after building the geometry cache.
The progressive lightmapper by far. This is the one feature I was waiting on since betas for 5.0. The new post-processing stack is also very impressive.
The new VideoPlayer! Very flexible and powerful to be able to render video a to Camera Near Plane, Camera Far Plane, a RenderTexture or into a Material’s Texture Shader Property!
Gifs from when I was testing it out (File-size is too big to upload to Forums):
Yeah the new progressive lightmapper is probably the best one in 5.6 for me too as it will save a ton of time thanks to the prioritize view feature. Too bad it’s still missing some important features but maybe we (hopefully) get them in the patch releases.
Ceirtainly NavMesh components and abilitity to use surfaces and links. Just wishing you will improve it further and make AICharacterController compatible with it.
I totally forgot about the script reordering, thanks for the reminder! I went through the entire change log; I wonder if it simply wasn’t mentioned, or if I overlooked/misunderstood its entry.
Yeah I definitely didn’t see it anywhere on the change log either. Huge time saver. I only tried because I remembered it being mentioned recently. Glad to update just for that.
