Unity 3.4

We’re about to enter release candidate 1 with Unity 3.4, which is a feature + bugfix release. Here are some highlights:

Allegorithmic Substance integration

Procedural textures are built directly into Unity. Substance procedural textures can be tweaked in Unity. You can even update your textures at run time. It can be used for anything from ageing effects on textures to customizable characters.

Shadow improvements

Directional lights got a new shadow projection mode called “Stable Fit”. Now there’s no more shadow boundary shimmering when rotating the camera!
Regarding optimizations, we cull shadow casters much better now, which means fewer draw calls. Shadow culling can also use occlusion culling data.

Skinning performance & multicore

Skinning performance is 2-3x faster on PCs due to SSE2 optimizations and multicore improvements. There’s also multithreaded skinning for the latest iOS and Android devices.

Downloadable content with caching for complete scenes and asset bundles

This is a cross-platform  feature including iOS and Android that’s perfect for downloadable content. Asset bundles and even complete scenes can be downloaded on demand and cached locally. The caching API gives you full control over when to download a newer version of the asset. Using the caching API dramatically reduces memory usage and has a huge impact on load times.

Script execution order

Unity now gives you eplicit control over the execution order in your scripts. Awake, OnEnable and Update calls are sorted by execution order. Execution order can be defined on a ‘per script’ basis in an easy-to-understand dialog.

Animation & skinned mesh bounding volumes

Pre-computed bounding volumes for skinned meshes & animations let you have more animated characters in your scene.

Graphics optimizations

We implemented various graphics optimizations, ranging from faster deferred lighting (due to more compact light shapes & better occlusion culling) to faster OpenGL ES 2.0 and more mobile optimized shaders.
Last but not least: Terrain works on iOS and Android now.

Image effects & water

There’s a big upgrade to image effects & water. Both have been optimized for performance and, at the same time, visual quality has been improved. They’re also easier to tweak for artists.

Unity Xbox 360 and PS3 release in parallel

All console versions are now released at same time as 3.4. and projects can easily be moved between all platforms.

Rochard, our first PS3 game, has just gone through the Sony submission process.

Better gizmo/handle control

You no longer need to code to add icons to your game objects. Now you can simply set the icon in the game object inspector to quickly see and select things in your scene view. If you want to see icons for tools like pathfinding nodes, just set the icon on the node script in your project and they’ll all show up in the scene.

You can also toggle the display of handles on a per-component basis so now there’s no need to hold back when writing custom editors.

Fast collider tweaking

If you select a collider and hold down Shift, small dots for resizing the colliders will appear. This makes it really quick to set up efficient collision levels so they run really fast on mobile devices.

Hundreds of minor improvements and fixes

Unity 3.4 also has loads of smaller improvements, shine-ups and fixes.

Next release: Unity 3.5

This year we’re focusing on enabling you to push all platforms to their limits. Unity is the most optimized game engine for mobile devices and we’re working hard to also make this true of all other platforms. It’s a big step for Unity to support AAA productions. We have tons of performance optimizations, better multi-threading and a big graphics engine upgrade. At the same time, we are also improving work flows, especially when working in larger teams. Unity 3.5 is a late summer / fall 2011 release.

Please note that the features in this roadmap are not commitments! They may or may not end up in a final release. If a feature isn’t ready in time it will not be included in the release.

Multithreaded renderer

We will be moving most of the rendering workload and driver overhead away from the main Unity thread and onto another CPU core. This is an ongoing project that is currently working on the PC but we plan to make it available on all multicore platforms, from desktop to mobiles. Plus, we’re going for wider multicore utilization (using as many CPUs as there are) for tasks like culling and particle systems. How much of this is ready for 3.5 and on which platforms is still an open question, but we can say that the performance gains look very promising!

Pathfinding

Unity will automatically generate navigation meshes from your level geometry.
Beautiful, natural-looking crowd simulation using RVO and PLE algorithms wrapped in a simple API. Agents can find paths to target locations with built-in crowd simulation, or can be moved directly on the NavMesh in a similar way to the character controller.

New particle system

We re-wrote our particle system from scratch. The new particle system is completely curve and gradient driven, and is composed of modular blocks to boost functionality. Also, it utilizes multicore CPUs on all platforms!

UI framework

We’re rewriting the in-game GUI system from the ground. We’ve made it simple and intuitive to create modern game interfaces with tons of animations and other effects. Everything is assembled in a visual GUI editor. A lot of effort is going into optimizing the GUI system for minimizing run-time overhead through automatic texture atlases and aggressive coverage-based batching.

Light probes for character lighting

Light probes are an advanced technique for lighting dynamic objects and characters with high-quality baked lighting. We capture incoming direct and bounced lighting within a scene at a number of points (light probes). As a character moves through the scene, nearby probes are picked, interpolated, and the result is then passed to the shader to light the surface. It’s a hard problem to do all this efficiently but thanks to our tetrahedra-based space division, the technique is extremely fast even on mobiles and has a very low memory footprint. For more details check out the video and blog post.

RNM lightmaps

To add more flexibility to our lightmapping solution we’re adding the option to bake directional lightmaps (radiosity normal maps and similar schemes). That will also enable bump and specular effects on surfaces lit by indirect light only.

LOD support

Built-in Level Of Detail support. LODs are currently authored manually in your favorite modelling tool but we’re also experimenting with automatic LOD generation techniques.

Intuitive editor tools for setting and inspecting LODs are included as well as integration into the pipeline to automatically create LODs based on naming conventions. We’re also offering support for fading level of detail transitions using screen-space dithering. Get more information in this blog post.

Integrated Perforce and Subversion version control

We’re working on fully integrated version control support for both Perforce and Subversion. There’s a complete UI including support for file locking.

Text-based scene/prefab/… format

Unity will now write all data in a text-based file format for scenes, prefabs, materials and other binary files in your project folder. The format is based on YAML and is optimized for being easy to merge. Multiple team members can work on a scene at the same time and merge the resulting changes afterwards.

Prefabs

The prefab system has been rewritten. It allows you to add and remove components without breaking prefab connections. Materials can be instantiated with the prefab instance. This paves the way for nested prefabs.

Profile & allocator improvements

A new allocator framework helps us reduce memory usage and fragmentation and improve performance. Now there’s a much better memory overview in Unity’s Profiler.

GameCenter and social APIs

We are working on a pluggable social API with backends for Facebook and Apple Game Center.
Companies like OpenFeint or publishers with custom social platforms can easily create their own implementation. This makes it easier to port games between platforms.

Audio

We are working on low latency audio buffer access. This will enable you to write your own filters, effects or make the audio data precisely affect your application or let your application dynamically mix and procedurally generate audio samples.

Microphone support will also be introduced across all platforms. Microphone input can be accessed transparently as an AudioClip.

WebCam support

We’re adding support for streaming video from cameras or other input devices into a texture to allow you to develop augmented reality games, or for uploading pictures for integration with social networks or other online services. This was implemented at our last NinjaCamp week.

Umbra sPVS rewrite

Umbra’s sPVS occlusion culling system has been rewritten from scratch. The algorithm now guarantees conservative PVS results and baking PVS is around 10x faster.

And loads more!

As usual, we fully expect Unity 3.5 to deliver tons of other small features, improvements and fixes.

More future features that we’re currently working on. They don’t have a specific release yet

Again, the fact that we are working on it is not a promise that it will ship in a matter of weeks. We just want you to know what we’re trying to do. Some plans might change!

Flash export support

As announced, we are hard at work to add support for building a Unity project that can be played back by a browser equipped with the Flash “Molehill” plugin. We’ll bring as many Unity features to the Flash Player as we can, and aim to be the very best tool available for people who want to target the 3D functionality in the new Flash Player.

Cache server

Everyone loves Unity’s completely automatic asset pipeline and the ability to quickly modify any asset in your project folder without jumping through hoops.

But when working in larger teams, everyone has to import the same assets again and again. If it could only be 3000x faster to import all assets… We have a solution for that. Early prototypes show that we can import a project folder with 1GB of assets in 9 seconds.

HDR & gamma correct rendering

Built-in HDR, proper linear space lighting. Making the pipeline, the shaders and the render targets work together to produce the output that artists anticipated. It’s a tricky area to get right across all platforms – which is why we want to solve it for you!

Texture streaming

We’ve been working on a texture streaming solution. Unity will load the textures at the necessary resolution just before it needs it. You have a texture memory budget which Unity will fill with the most important textures necessary. Unity automatically analyzes your scene but you can also manually specify the needed textures & resolutions at specific locations in your game.

This means you can have more textures at a higher resolution, especially on mobile devices and consoles. Unity automatically analyzes your scene to allow for prefetching of textures. Even on iOS we’re able to stream textures in the background at 60FPS.

Audio improvements

FMOD designer support: Import FMOD designer banks (.FSB) and event files (.FEV) and access them as standard audio clips.

Audio DSP graph: Get full access to the mixer engine and create custom routing and advanced signal chains either from a visual node editor or through a simple API.

Dynamic mixing: Mixing audio seems to be the big issue in today’s audio field. We’re working on a dynamic mixing solution that lets you group audio sources and mix them, apply effects, modulations and save these settings as snapshots. You can trigger the snapshots from script or from animations at any time. This makes it easy to duck audio and precisely control the audio levels at all times.

This is only part of what we are working on. We’re also developing more features that are much further away from completion. So stay tuned!

Recently, some Unity customers who have been very anxious to get their iPhone game approved by Apple, have received a rejection notice because they use something that was no longer approved by the Apple rules.

We have been working hard on this issue as it stalls and affects our iPhone developer customers. We were able to correct the issue 2 days after we first heard about it and delivered that fix to those who had reported the problem. Many of them have been already resubmitted their application to Apple. The first Unity game to completely pass the App Store Submission Process is “Star Wars: Trench Run”.

We will be releasing this new version, Unity iPhone 1.5.1, publicly on our website sometime next week. In the meantime, if you have an urgent need or concern, please contact oleg@unity3d.com and request an iPhone build with this issue fixed.

Note that Unity games already on the app store are not affected by this.

For those who are interested here are the technical details:

What do those functions actually do?

_NSGetEnviron is used by the Mono runtime to provide an implementation of the .NET core API method: Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable(). On UNIX environment variables are often used to pass arguments to applications. Due to how the function is exposed, it does not let developers do any data collection.

exc_server is used by the Mono runtime to provide graceful NULL reference exception handling. This is useful for developers, when they dereference a null pointer, we can avoid a crash and instead throw an exception and continue the game.

While those functions are useful for debugging purposes, Apple now rejects Apps that use them.

In order for us to solve this problem we simply removed any calls to _NSGetEnviron and exc_server. Update Unity iPhone 1.5.1 was sent out to developers days ago. Most of them have already resubmitted their Apps to the AppStore with the functions removed. Unity iPhone 1.5.1 will go live this week. The first Unity game to completely pass the App Store Submission Process is “Star Wars: Trench Run”.

Getting started
The best way to get started if you know nothing about Unity is to go through the 3D Platform Tutorial. With this in-depth tutorial you can learn how to make a 3rd person platform game in Unity, but at the same time you will learn all the basics of Unity that will give you a head start when creating your own game.

Unity Locomotion system
If you are doing a lot of character animation in your game, you must check this out. Rune’s Locomotion system was presented at GDC 2009 in a fully packed session. The great thing about it is that it does stylized IK, meaning that it uses the existing animations to do good looking motions and only minimally adjusts them to place feet on the ground etc. It also scales really well, you can start out with a simple walk cycle and it will automatically synthesize sidestep / run / backwards animations for you. If you provide more animations the animations will simply look better.

Get the project folder here

Watch the Unite 2008 talk here.

Visual Studio Integration
In our roadmap we announced Visual Studio integration for Unity 2.6. However you can already use Unity with Visual Studio very well. Lucas Meijer has a blog post on how to create Visual Studio projects from a Unity Project folder automatically here.

Shaders
Amir’s Unite 2008 Shader talk is the defacto best tutorial on building shaders. He reshot the session into a 2 hour talk so he could go through all the details.

Customizing the asset pipeline
Lucas is really into tightly controlling the asset pipeline and automating every single bit. Fortunately Unity is very extendable, so he has a lot of places where he can plug in. Watch the talk here.

Matthew’s Physics Talk at Unite 2008
I generally love hearing Matthew’s talks. Got to love the pictures. This year on car physics was very useful.

Unity GUI
Nich’s Unite 2007 talk on how to create your own GUI controls is still very relevant.

The wizkid Forest talks about particles
Forest Johnson, a (then) 15 year old kid single handedly programmed the Avert Fate demo, he did some awesome particle effects too and then gave a kickass impromptu particle talk at Unite 2007.

Rune on dynamic walking	Amir on shaders	Lucas on pipeline
Matthew on physics	Nich on Unity GUI	Forest on particles

Blogs about Unity:
The Flashbang guys have an awesome blog about Unity, that contains deep technical information that sometimes even I didn’t know about.

Lucas has a great blog about Unity with a lot of very useful information.

Somebody made  a site collecting video tutorials about Unity.

Unity 2.6

Unity 2.6 is our next big release in the Unity 2.x series (And will be available as a free upgrade). We are planning to release Unity 2.6 sometime later this summer. Here’s some of the things to come:

Threaded Background Loading
We originally implemented background loading Cartoon Network’s FusionFall MMO, and are now integrating this into mainline Unity. The Cartoon Network guys built a huge streaming world where the entire game is split into 16 x 16 scenes. Scenes are loaded and unloaded on the fly while the character runs around in the world. There are no noticeable framerate hiccups while loading because all loading code is running in a different thread. It’s a single line API for you to use, and Unity does all the heavy lifting for you completely automatically.

Built-in Realtime Profiler
Dmitry, who just joined us from EA (and previously head of R&D at Crytek), is working on a hierarchical Performance Profiler. It gives you a quick overview of where Unity is spending its time and how you are spending time in your scripts. Profiling times are separated out by frames, so you can step through previous frames. The profiler shows you all managed memory allocations, so it’s gonna be great for reducing garbage collector hiccups!

Memory Optimizations + Performance Optimizations
Aras has spent some time optimizing the graphics rendering pipeline. For example shadow rendering code is up to 30% faster now. Renaldas “ReJ” has been working a lot on hardcore iPhone optimizations recently, and some of those will carry right over into Unity, so we will see some gains from that as well. And lastly, during 2008 we worked on a lot of optimization for FusionFall (after all, we’re pulling off running a full MMO on very low end hardware), and they will all find their way back into Unity 2.6. We don’t know what performance increase this will end up being when it’s all combined, but it’s safe to assume that you will be blown away when you see it.

Visual Studio Integration
Unity has always been a tool where designers, artists and hardcore programmers work together and do group hugs sharing the love. With Unity 2.6 we will automatically generate Visual Studio projects and you can double click on an error in the console log in Unity and it will bring you right to that line in Visual Studio. Let’s face it, Visual Studio is the world’s best IDE for writing C# code, and we’ll make it easy to take full advantage of Visual Studio for Unity users.

Keyframe & Animation Curve Editor
Rune and Nicholas are working on an all new Curve Editor for Unity. You can see some more information about this in Nicholas’s blog post a few days ago. But to sum it up, it rocks. It’s a full on curve editor with support for editing curve tangents, it’s as powerful as what people know from 3ds Max and Maya but a lot more intuitive. It lets you animate any type of property and you can even animate material properties, like UV offset & scale, color, float and vector properties.

I just can’t wait to see what people do when they get these material animation tools in their hands, combined with our shader system where you can expose arbitrary properties to artists for tweaking… this is going to open up a whole new world of awesome graphics effects!

Improved Asset Unloading
We are working on an a method for unloading of assets that will look at exactly what assets are referenced from scripts or used by any object in the scene using garbage collection.

Vertex Shader based Vertex Lighting
Currently Unity mixes the fixed function pipeline for vertex lit objects and vertex shaders for pixel lit lights. On Direct3D this creates some rendering artifacts on very close or self intersecting surfaces. We want to end this by implementing a full fixed function emulator in vertex shaders. You won’t have to do anything, it will just work!

Anti-aliasing with Image Effects
Anti-aliasing should work with image post-processing effects. ’nuff said!

Later Releases

There are some other very important features that we are working on. We want to have them in Unity as fast as possible. They won’t be ready for 2.6 and we also don’t know when they will be finished,  but they will come as a free upgrade for Unity 2.x.

Debugger
While Unity provides a lot of debug utilities like live watching member variables in the Inspector as scripts are modifying, we don’t yet have a full on line by line Debugger. We are currently internally working on adding a debugger to Mono for OS X and we have contracted another company to work on the debugger for Windows.

Perforce and SVN integration
Perforce and Subversion integration for Unity is very much on our minds these days. As we are getting more and more large game studios on board with Unity this is a very much requested feature. For the time being, rest assured that support for Perforce / SVN is coming.

2.5.1 Bug fix Update

New features are cool and all but before we get there, we will make sure that Unity 2.5.1 is working rock solid for everyone. We have just released a complete rewrite of the entire editor for the first time on Windows, from what we hear it’s working very solidly but there are some corner case issues we need to fix. So expect a Unity 2.5.1 very soon that focuses only on bug fixes.