Yes or no?
You’d be just as well off asking here.
In seriousness, they haven’t announced anything about what will be in 3.1 yet. UT is typically pretty careful about when and how they release information so if it wasn’t in the official newsletter / official Announcements page of the forums / plastered on the front page of unity3d.com, then it’s probably not meant to be public knowledge yet. You haven’t missed an announcement (as far as I can tell), if that’s what you’re asking.
The magic 8 ball advised me to ask again later. So I guess I’ll wait 20 mins.
The reason I’m enquiring is that the 2D drawing library is 75 dollars but will go up (!) in price after 3.1 and I’m not sure why it would go up in price when its built into unity. If anything it might go down in price if its a native unity feature soon.
Nobody knows what 2D functionality Unity will host once it hosts any.
It could be from something on the level of SM2 to something like an automatic camera + depth sorting system only with a particle alike sprite system which can not remotely touch SM2 (ok reasonably, thats granted to not happen anyway. even hoping for animation with non uniform sheets etc and correct autoresizing will guarantee frustration and unfullfilled hope as it will not happen. so if thats something thats important you you, better get SM2 now)
i thought unity said there might be a sprite engine in 3.x or later
They initially announced some kind of in-game GUI overhaul / 2D system for 3.0 and later announced that that feature was being pushed back to a later 3.x release. But 3.x does not necessarily mean 3.1. There’s been a lot of speculation that it will appear, given that 3.1 is a major point release and not a minor (which would indicate just bugfixes, typically); but nothing has been announced about 3.1 except for the newsletter announcement that it’s arriving at Unite. I can’t seem to find the newsletters on the Unity site, but here’s the relevant text:
As for whether to buy SM2 or not, it’s up to you but I’d second Dreamora’s advice that if it does what you need it to do and you can afford it now without going hungry, it’s not likely to magically stop functioning when UT’s own 2D implementation comes out.
I highly doubt Unity 3.1 will have anything too major. Unity 3.0 was just released about a month or so ago. If something major is released, well then props to Unity programmers 