Unity 5 [Is now available]

[Alshain]

Subsequent to Beta 22, Unity 5 is now onto Release Candidates

Exciting news

[Yellowburn10]

Subsequent to Beta 22, Unity 5 is now onto Release Candidates

Wait, release candidates as in, when a stable candidate is confirmed, Unity 5 will be officially released?

[Motokid600]

Anything on better Dx11 support? Or is that even relevant to Unity?

Also... the previous pages posts got me thinking. The other day I was in orbit around Laythe. Jool had eclipsed the sun and yet... Laythe was still fully illuminated. So with U5's new lighting system would we actually get proper, multi-body lighting? Lookin' for some munshine.

Edited February 10, 2015 by Motokid600

[NoMrBond]

Wait, release candidates as in, when a stable candidate is confirmed, Unity 5 will be officially released?

I assume so?

The list of fixes in the release notes looks a little long so there's no real sign of how many candidates there will be

Anything on better Dx11 support? Or is that even relevant to Unity?

Also... the previous pages posts got me thinking. The other day I was in orbit around Laythe. Jool had eclipsed the sun and yet... Laythe was still fully illuminated. So with U5's new lighting system would we actually get proper, multi-body lighting? Lookin' for some munshine.

Unity 5 will ship with DX11 support, DX12 support is expected to be released with (or shortly after) Windows 10 [Additional Unity blog about DX12]

I'm not really sure what the new Enlighten illumination technologies will offer for KSP

[Motokid600]

So when Squad incorporates U5 could we run the game in Dx11 mode without all the issues? Right now I'm strictly opengl. Great memory savings, but it's ugly without AA and has a good performance impact. And I believe if Dx11 can become the norm the communities memory hunger could be alleviated.

[NoMrBond]

So when Squad incorporates U5 could we run the game in Dx11 mode without all the issues? Right now I'm strictly opengl. Great memory savings, but it's ugly without AA and has a good performance impact. And I believe if Dx11 can become the norm the communities memory hunger could be alleviated.

I'm not sure what the current issue with DX11 is for KSP, sometimes (for me) it runs fine, other times everything goes pink and horrible. I'm not sure if that's just straight up Unity 4 DX11 problems, or some interaction between the KSP shaders and U4/DX11 implementation but if that could be fixed, yeah, yes please (plus eventually DX12 support).

I'm forcing AA with KSP/OpenGL via the (nVidia) driver panel which seems to work fine (I'm assuming the CCC gives you the same options), runs noticeably slower than DX9 mode though.

Don't recommend changing your Aniso/AA force/override settings etc while KSP is running though, yikes.

[Motokid600]

I tried AA overrides for opengl with Nvidia Control, but even at 16xQ you still get jaggies.

[AbhChallenger]

DX12 with multithread Physics... KSP will run smoooth as butter!

[NoMrBond]

I tried AA overrides for opengl with Nvidia Control, but even at 16xQ you still get jaggies.

That's a bummer, standard 2, 4 and 8x all work for me (with program settings>ksp.exe>antialiasing mode> override>setting)

[Edit]As a side note there, none of the non-standard (Q/Quincunx) settings or 'enhance' worked for me, only mode override to 2/4/8 (and not 16x).

[Edit2] The force override doesn't work (at all) if I change it after launching either, maybe it needs to hook in at launch?

Maybe FXAA would work for you if the standard mode overrides don't?

Edited February 10, 2015 by NoMrBond

[Agost]

Sorry guys, probably someone has already asked this, but will physx 3.3 support gpu acceleration with nvidia cards? Or it's just multicore?

[jsisidore]

I understand right now unity can use only one core of my four core cpu? Will unity 5 give me more fps?

[*Aqua*]

Unity currently uses several cores, one for each thread. There's one thread for graphics, one for physics (that's what limits KSP), one for networking, etc.

Unity 5 will allow more threads for physic calculations, so an acceleration can be expected - if Squad ever decides to switch to Unity 5.

[Renegrade]

So when Squad incorporates U5 could we run the game in Dx11 mode without all the issues? Right now I'm strictly opengl. Great memory savings, but it's ugly without AA and has a good performance impact. And I believe if Dx11 can become the norm the communities memory hunger could be alleviated.

I'd actually prefer that Unity fix their OpenGL stuff; it's a lot less idiotic than DirectX, far more portable, and you don't find yourself behind upgrade walls quite so often. Probably not going to happen though.

Unity currently uses several cores, one for each thread. There's one thread for graphics, one for physics (that's what limits KSP), one for networking, etc.

Threads don't get assigned to specific cores unless one sets their affinity directly (and assuming the thread library in question even supports real multitasking at all; many are actually cooperative designs which are basically a waste of memory). Without the affinity being set, it's up to the OS's process scheduler as to which CPU resource is executing which thread. Ideally that means that the OS can load balance intelligently, and also support machines with more or less cores than the programmer designed for.

I can't say anything NICE about Windows' process scheduler, so I won't say anything at all about it*.

* I lied. I am going to say things about it. Windows' process scheduler was written by a bunch of muppety orangutans and invariably assigns everything to the slowest and busiest core it can find, and it does it's level best to move threads from a CPU/core that has their data cached to a CPU/core that does not. Manually setting affinity actually often improves performance in Windows (see the old Supreme Commander forums) dramatically, and the newer Windows is, the dumber the process scheduler is, so the better the performance gain from static assignment is. Improvement! Performance! Excitement! Planned Obsolescence! Epic idiocy!

Disclaimer: I am an MCSE and am heavily biased in favor of Windows.

[stupid_chris]

Unity currently uses several cores, one for each thread. There's one thread for graphics, one for physics (that's what limits KSP), one for networking, etc.

Unity 5 will allow more threads for physic calculations, so an acceleration can be expected - if Squad ever decides to switch to Unity 5.

No, that's not the problem. Unity is multithreaded, and so is KSP. The problem is not there. The problem is that the Unity API is not threadsafe, meaning you can't split the *same* process over multiple different threads, potentially across multiple cores. All the physics calculations in KSP are not done in the same thread, but what is slowing it down is that one big physics calculation cannot be split into multiple small segments. This is killing KSP because orbital calcs are a very huge part of the deal.

Upgrading to Unity 5 won't magically split everything. Unity 5 introduces a threadsafe API, but it's not a magic button you press on that fixes everything. Once you have the threadsafe API, you need to exploit it. That means going back over aaaallll the code, seeing what you can split into threads, and then do it. That can be a very long process, and threaded coding can be very complex and confusing. Given the size of the codebase for KSP, that may be multiple months before anything worthwhile comes out of it.

[NoMrBond]

Is this a good time to say RC3 is out, because RC3 is out, the list of fixes still looks kinda long though

I wish more people would do some 4->5 up-ported comparisons;

Can't just load up your U4 project in U5 though or things go funky

Hopefully the migration isn't too much work

[Rhea]

We have a few pretty big projects at work, and to go from u4.6 to u5rc3 was pretty easy. TrippleA prototype with very complicated physics went smoothly, just had to fix the code because they removed properties on MonoBehaviour, so now you have to go getComponent instead... simple small tweaks really...

Another mobile game project - exactly the same changes required to get it running, but here we will be changing the whole animation, ui and audio systems to use the new u5 stuff...

[rkman]

Apparently Unity 5 is stable enough that some games based on that engine are already released; "Republique Remastered".

[Rhea]

There have been serious bugs in RC2 even...

[Joshwoo70]

Soo I think squad is like "when unity 5 releases then we will update to it and then people can stop Complaining!*"

* may or may not be true!

[MartGonzo]

New video showing off the deferred lighting, I doubt this will apply to KSP but beautiful none the less

[NoMrBond]

Apparently Unity 5 is stable enough that some games based on that engine are already released; "Republique Remastered".

I haven't seen any complaints about 64 bit windows builds either, which is promising, although there seems to be quite a few complaints regarding iOS not getting on with the new IL2CPP scripting

There have been serious bugs in RC2 even...

There have been two releases (3 and 3+) in the week since RC2, with RC4 expected tomorrow, so I at least they seem to be trying hard, although I get the feeling they're rushing to have a '1.0' release for GDC

New video showing off the deferred lighting, I doubt this will apply to KSP but beautiful none the less

The Viking village is also pretty neat

[NoMrBond]

Unity 5 is now out and available

[Edit] LOL Max

[Edit2] Lots of Unity 5 release videos up on the Unity YouTube

Edited March 4, 2015 by NoMrBond

[marach]

Apparently Unity 5 is stable enough that some games based on that engine are already released; "Republique Remastered".

The devs of republique were contacted last summer by unity themselves about making a move to U5, the reason being Republique actually shows off pretty much every change they made to the engine from lighting to physics changes and things like scripting of NPC's. KSP well doesn't...

However U5 is now out so I expect to see a comment in a future dev notes about them looking at Unity 5.

[stupid_chris]

Harv already talked about Unity5. I can't find the post, but the transition to Unity5 would be an extremely long, complex, and hard process, which is not even guaranteed to work correctly. If they try to fit this in 1.0, bad stuff is bound to happen.

[marach]

Harv already talked about Unity5. I can't find the post, but the transition to Unity5 would be an extremely long, complex, and hard process, which is not even guaranteed to work correctly. If they try to fit this in 1.0, bad stuff is bound to happen.

oh yeah I reaaaaaaaallly doubt 1.0 for unity5, though Squad could always surprise us with an announcement along the lines of "1.0 is officially being delayed here instead is 0.91"

more likely 1.1/2 will be announced as the change over with a "this update will be much delayed compared to our normal patch rate" and we'll see it in 6-8 months after 1.0