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What's new in Unity 4.3

unity3d.com

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Re: What's new in Unity 4.3

#61

Post by Cacti »

jamii wrote: post #57
TillE wrote: post #36

Unity really desperately needs a Mono upgrade, as their version is years old. Unfortunately it seems to be a licensing issue with Xamarin, because of LGPL constraints on mobile platforms. It's quite frustrating to work with C# without all the features of the last few versions, particularly if you want to use third party libraries.

It's especially frustrating because ClojureCLR won't run on such old versions of Unity. I spent a good three days trying to backport all the necessary library code and eventually gave up. I was really hoping to get a decent interactive environment working with Unity.

Never used Clojure but Boo has pretty good support for this, including an interpreter and repl hook.

The compiler and parsing pipeline is exposed, there is an interpreter built-in, you can hook into the assemblies, etc. I have a console in my game that does input/output from a Boo interpreter and it is exposed to everything in the game scope with no real extra effort on my part.

Only took a few hours to set up, most of which was spent either writing a UI for it or sorting out some compatibility issues (Unity doesn't come with a copy of Boo.Lang.Interpreter).

It's pretty sweet.

Re: What's new in Unity 4.3

#62

Post by Narishma »

Cacti wrote: post #40
TillE wrote: post #36

Unity really desperately needs a Mono upgrade, as their version is years old. Unfortunately it seems to be a licensing issue with Xamarin, because of LGPL constraints on mobile platforms. It's quite frustrating to work with C# without all the features of the last few versions, particularly if you want to use third party libraries.

Agreed. It's starting to become a bit of an issue, particularly, like you said, with third party libraries. It's one thing if you're a major version behind (unfortunate, but manageable), but 2.0 was 5 years ago. That's not a major version, that's practically an entire generation. Also, lack of compute shader support for anything other than Windows and DX11 is a bit of a drag. Compute shaders are really the future of…

AFAIK, compute shaders only became available in D3D11 and OpenGL 4.3. MacOS was stuck on OpenGL 3.2 for a long time, and even the latest version only supports 4.1. On Linux, Intel and open source drivers (Mesa) only reached OpenGL 3.2 support last month. So that leaves proprietary drivers from AMD (4.3) and Nvidia (4.4) + D3D11 on Windows. I don't know much about mobile platforms but I don't think they support compute shaders.

Re: What's new in Unity 4.3

#63

Post by Cacti »

tieTYT wrote: post #60
Cacti wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Source: me. I don't work for Unity. Software engineer and use Unity for a lot of 'traditional development'. You'd be surprised... there isn't a ton of documentation about it, but most of the engine is pretty well exposed for programmers. You can punch into the rendering pipeline (down to immediate OpenGL mode if you need to), the compilation pipeline (recompiling on the fly or setting up a custom preprocessor), hook…

You seem knowledgeable so I figure I'd reply here since I keep getting mixed messages on this point: Is it easy to commit your Unity code in a VCS and have teammates work on it with you simultaneously? Some people say yes, some say no.

Personally I haven't had a problem using Git. I also haven't done that in a heavy team environment but I've heard good things in general since 3.0ish.

There are a couple things to be aware of regarding how you set up your .gitignore, and now, in 4.3, apparently meta files, but, it's pretty straight-forward, IMO.

I'd ask on the forums and get a current response... a lot of problems with the external VCS were things from back in 2.0ish land, which was quite awhile ago.

Re: What's new in Unity 4.3

#64

Post by Cacti »

Narishma wrote: post #62
Cacti wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. It's starting to become a bit of an issue, particularly, like you said, with third party libraries. It's one thing if you're a major version behind (unfortunate, but manageable), but 2.0 was 5 years ago. That's not a major version, that's practically an entire generation. Also, lack of compute shader support for anything other than Windows and DX11 is a bit of a drag. Compute shaders are really the future of…

AFAIK, compute shaders only became available in D3D11 and OpenGL 4.3. MacOS was stuck on OpenGL 3.2 for a long time, and even the latest version only supports 4.1. On Linux, Intel and open source drivers (Mesa) only reached OpenGL 3.2 support last month. So that leaves proprietary drivers from AMD (4.3) and Nvidia (4.4) + D3D11 on Windows. I don't know much about mobile platforms but I don't think they support comput…

You're right. It still sucks though. :)

AFAIK you can do OpenCL on OSX with Unity, you just don't have the typical Unity integration so you'd have to handle all the details yourself. It's on my list of things to try out soon... the switch to general purpose GPU processing is too large of a revolution to ignore.

Re: What's new in Unity 4.3

#65

Post by robterrell »

Jare wrote: post #13
zura wrote: post #2

I'd be more happy if Unity goes toward being more programmer-friendly. Fully code-only projects support, no need to waste a lot of time tinkering in that complex UI, etc...

For 2D, Futile may be almost exactly what you're looking for https://github.com/MattRix/Futile

Speaking as a Futile fan -- Unity 4.3 includes a whole suite of 2D classes and tools. No need for Futile anymore unless you prefer the way it works.

Re: What's new in Unity 4.3

#66

Post by [deleted] »

socialist_coder wrote: post #58
TillE wrote: post #36

Unity really desperately needs a Mono upgrade, as their version is years old. Unfortunately it seems to be a licensing issue with Xamarin, because of LGPL constraints on mobile platforms. It's quite frustrating to work with C# without all the features of the last few versions, particularly if you want to use third party libraries.

I mostly program C# inside of Unity. What are some of the newer C# language features that it's missing that you think are pretty cool? I have my game server as a C# MVC app as well (latest .NET running on Windows, not Mono/Linux) and the only things new that I seem to be using are the async and await keywords. But you don't need them inside of Unity since they have Coroutines and yield.

[deleted]

Re: What's new in Unity 4.3

#67

Post by nacs »

tieTYT wrote: post #60
Cacti wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Source: me. I don't work for Unity. Software engineer and use Unity for a lot of 'traditional development'. You'd be surprised... there isn't a ton of documentation about it, but most of the engine is pretty well exposed for programmers. You can punch into the rendering pipeline (down to immediate OpenGL mode if you need to), the compilation pipeline (recompiling on the fly or setting up a custom preprocessor), hook…

You seem knowledgeable so I figure I'd reply here since I keep getting mixed messages on this point: Is it easy to commit your Unity code in a VCS and have teammates work on it with you simultaneously? Some people say yes, some say no.

I have been using git for source control with no issues (haven't tested in a team environment however).

Not sure if you were aware of this already but theres a non-default setting in the Unity preferences for enabling "Version control support" that basically makes Unity save metadata in a text format instead of its standard binary format: http://docs.unity3d.com/Documentation/Manual/ExternalVersion...

Re: What's new in Unity 4.3

#68

Post by orvado »

300bps wrote: post #6

As someone who made games throughout my childhood, I'm looking forward to trying out the new built-in 2D functionality with my 9 year old. We've used Scratch, RPG Maker and a few other things but it would be nice to use a framework that has such wide publishing capabilities so he can show his friends his creations more easily. I didn't think he was ready to tackle 3D game creation so we haven't tried Unity yet but I…

For younger developers, you might try out the Intel XDK - it has a really simple interface and emulator for Android, iOS and web browsers (for building HTML5 apps). It includes publishing features and its totally free.

Re: What's new in Unity 4.3

#69

Post by nacs »

viseztrance wrote: post #24

I wonder how does this compare to Corona.

I've used Corona to develop a hobby project in the past and its great for 2D (easier to use and more programmer friendly than Unity) but completely unsuitable for any 3D work so its really just depends on what kind of game you're making. With Unity 4.3, the 2D experience should be much better (before 4.3, you needed ~$100 addons for decent 2D sprite support in Unity).

Re: What's new in Unity 4.3

#70

Post by ijk »

saidajigumi wrote: post #54
ijk wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which might be why this version of Unity updates to MonoDevelop 4.0.1.

MonoDevelop != Mono. MonoDevelop is a standalone application, the default Unity code IDE. No doubt an improvement (at least for folks who don't switch Unity to another editor entirely), but not a change in the Unity C# runtime.

Checking the forums, it's indeed only an update to MonoDevelop. I stand corrected.
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