Unity 5 [Is now available]

[TheDog]

*Laughs continuously*

on Linux it apparently is, as lots of people here confirm... maybe I have to setup dual-boot...

[problemecium]

Did I read the title right? Unity 5 is literally and seriously available so I could go over there and literally download and install it right now?

...of course I'm going to check for myself as soon as I finish typing this post, but hey, maybe someone else'll drop by thinking the same thing xP

[sumghai]

I wish to point out to whoever started that poll that the current options are too limiting.

The devs do plan on porting KSP to U5 eventually, but not for 1.0. Therefore, a better poll should be structured as follows:

When should KSP be ported to Unity 5?

- 1.0

- 1.1

- 2.0 or later

- Never

[NoMrBond]

KSP already looks ok, stock is good enough in my opinion, mods don't make the game insta-crash, and 64 bit is also pretty stable in my opinion. So WHY do you think Unity 5 should be our game engine?

(This is my opinion so don't hit me.)

Stock KSP might not push the boundaries (graphically) of what Unity 4 can offer but that doesn't mean it can't take advantage of Unity 5's improvements in other areas, including those on the development side.

Only the 64-bit release of KSP for Linux is considered stable, but that's leaving a lot of players out in the cold. Ted the QA lead posted about the 64 bit situation for windows, and it's not good under Unity 4.

What Unity 5 will let Squad do that wan't possible under Unity 4 is a mountain of conjecture and hopes for miracles outside the developers who probably have specific concerns to address, but the possibilities on offer must be compelling for Squad to consider it a priority after the release of 1.0

All we can do is read the brochure while we wait for Squad to implement a decision they've already been made.

[tsotha]

On a not particularly similar topic, we are thrilled to see the release of Unity 5, and look forward to digging into it once we’ve released 1.0, as development on the next update is far too advanced now to throw something as complex as an engine update on top of it.

Hahahaha. Unity released 5 with enough time for everyone to think it might get integrated but without leaving enough time to actually integrate it. Did you .... them off somehow?

[Axelord FTW]

I wish to point out to whoever started that poll that the current options are too limiting.

The devs do plan on porting KSP to U5 eventually, but not for 1.0. Therefore, a better poll should be structured as follows:

When should KSP be ported to Unity 5?

- 1.0

- 1.1

- 2.0 or later

- Never

Since we can't dictate when Squad does things (or anything), I think it'd be better to ask players how much importance they put on KSP being ported to U5.

Like, How far would you go to get you hands on a stable U5 version of KSP, right now?

[Azimech]

KSP already looks ok, stock is good enough in my opinion, mods don't make the game insta-crash, and 64 bit is also pretty stable in my opinion. So WHY do you think Unity 5 should be our game engine?

(This is my opinion so don't hit me.)

Maybe you're satisfied with crafts built with a max of 75 parts ... Today I'm building something and I find 750 parts isn't enough ... again. And the amount of people that wants to build big, detailed projects grows every day.

[NoMrBond]

Scene showing the packaged default ocean shader (and some physics) for U5

[Der Kosmos]

I'd love to see the ocean in KSP looking like that, even if it's just a prepackaged stock effect.

[nli2work]

Moving to Unity 5 is only a matter of time. KSP is still using animation and particles from Unity 3 judging by PartTools 0.23. PartTools will need a big overhaul to take advantage of the new stuff in Unity 4 and 5.

Edited March 9, 2015 by nli2work

[Der Kosmos]

When should KSP be ported to Unity 5?

- 1.0

- 1.1

- 2.0 or later

- Never

1.2 sounds like a good place. 1.1 should be reserved for inevitable bugfixes that come after every whole number release.

[Eric S]

Maybe you're satisfied with crafts built with a max of 75 parts ... Today I'm building something and I find 750 parts isn't enough ... again. And the amount of people that wants to build big, detailed projects grows every day.

Yes, but I really don't think we're going to get that much of a PhysX boost from U5. It can multithread physics, but you still have a single thread handling each set of connected parts, as I understand it. So games where you usually have multiple part-sets will have a large benefit, but in KSP it mostly means that docking to a space station won't be as much of a slideshow because the craft and the space station can have their physics handled in two separate threads. There's a 5-15% performance boost from optimizations between physx 2.X and 3.X, but the real wins in performance improvements of U5 probably won't apply to KSP as much as some people hope.

That said, even the occasional use case that can justify this makes it worth doing in my opinion, just not prioritizing it like it's the only thing that matters. It's not a magic wand that will make everything better.

1.2 sounds like a good place. 1.1 should be reserved for inevitable bugfixes that come after every whole number release.

Bugfixes with no feature changes would go into 1.0.X, leaving 1.1 open for being an update.

[Arugela]

They should have set up the game for the potential performance first. Unless they have it that well thought out... which still has some potential drawbacks. It leaves the games potential vulnerable.

I really don't know why these game engines don't all have these capabilities(actually I think I do). This type of coding was done in the 50's and back with every computer in existence if I'm not mistaken. Really shows what has happened in the last 20 years or so.(or what hasn't). we need to get those maths skills up again.

[nli2work]

migration to Unity 5 is just a matter of time, and it will definitely be a worthwhile improvement for KSP. I'd like to see PartTools overhauled and fleshed out to support MechAnim, Shuriken, PBR. Additional tools to mod Kerbals Planets and Systems.

[Broax]

I really don't want to start a flame war on this but I'm also very interested in getting any information.

I've been a bit absent from these forums lately but I make sure to take some time and read the devnotes every Tuesday. With the recent news of the release of Unity5 and since, every time squad talked about Unity5 they referred to it as "stop everything and update the engine" I'm puzzled as to why I can't find any info about this on either of the last two devnotes.

If I'm not mistaken the unity announcement was made at either last Monday or last Tuesday but either way I accept it would be a bit hard to include it on last week's devnotes. I was really looking forward to hearing something about it this week but nothing.

And before you give me a hard time, the biggest reason I'm interested in the engine update is for the added 64bit stability so I can run more mods on the windows version.

So if anyone could please point me to some information or at least update me on the unity upgrade status I'd be very happy. Also I'd like to add I did search the forums but didn't find what I was looking for. If the question was already answered and I missed it I apologize in advance.

[sal_vager]

Is there any info regarding Unity 5?

Yes, there is

On a not particularly similar topic, we are thrilled to see the release of Unity 5, and look forward to digging into it once we’ve released 1.0, as development on the next update is far too advanced now to throw something as complex as an engine update on top of it.

Wait till after 1.0

[Broax]

Yes, there is

Wait till after 1.0

Oh... Oh my... I actually saw this thread but the posts I've read were all about unity itself and not how it relates with KSP. Obviously I missed Maxmaps posts.

Thanks for the info!

[Francois424]

In my humble opinion, this needs to be done asap. Even if it's not the perfect, shiny little thing we all think it will be, whatever improvement to memory it can give us and versus lag with large crafts, even if only 25 is well warranted.

Also even if not 100% stable in x64, as long as the game runs fine with occasional odd crash every 2h or so, I'm fine with that. x32 simply doesn't do it anymore, and I know of nobody that can install me with Linux to make this work, and even, not really interested as I am a Windows kinda guy.

Based on the Poll, I feel most think like me on that one.

Let's wish us good luck !

[Joshwoo70]

On the poll

Welp I am surprissed that A LOT of people wanted a yes.

On sumghai topic:

If it ports to unity I would like a 1.0 to 1.5

1.5 being the unity 5

[PTNLemay]

I've been checking the news regarding Unity lately, and I'm a bit confused.

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/03/unity-5-game-engine-brings-enhanced-graphic-tools-new-cloud-services/

At the Game Developers Conference this morning, Unity announced the immediate availability of the fifth numbered version of its popular game engine, which can compile games for 21 different platforms from a single code base. New to Unity 5 is support for Oculus Rift VR games. (March 2015)

But at the start of this very thread, it's mentioned that in March of 2014 they were poised to release Unity 5. So... when did it actually come out? Or rather, what's the difference between last year's Unity 5 and this year's Unity 5?

Also, semi related eye-candy.

(is it just me or does that temple look like the main reactor room of some super cool futuristic spaceship?)

[NoMrBond]

Unity Technologies started talking about Unity 5 features etc in March 2014

The closed Beta of Unity 5 came out October 2014

The general release (for non-Pro/non-preorder) just happened for everyone after being announced at this years GDC

The next planned releases with ROSLYN/IL2CPP and the APEX extensions sound neat, still no sign of what it could do for KSP though until the Squad codemonkeys (does that make them Captain Monkey Monkey's?) get their hands (paws?) on it

[uglyduckling81]

"How long did it take to port Rust to Unity 5?It was probably about two hours, there wasn’t really much to it. Unity updated all our code automatically, in an instant."

http://blogs.unity3d.com/2014/11/19/porting-to-unity-5-the-untold-rust-journey/

This is a grab from an article about the RUST team porting to Unity 5. 2 hours to port then bug fixing. Surely Squad can't keep saying "the problem with 64 bit is with the engine, Unity needs to fix their engine ",when they have released the new engine with native 64 bit support and it's a 2 hour port.

I'm not saying do a 2 hour port and release. I'm saying do a 2 hour port and spend as much time as is needed to get the game back to the way it was with full 64bit support.

Edited March 20, 2015 by sumghai
Stripped formatting

[sumghai]

"How long did it take to port Rust to Unity 5?It was probably about two hours, there wasn’t really much to it. Unity updated all our code automatically, in an instant."

http://blogs.unity3d.com/2014/11/19/porting-to-unity-5-the-untold-rust-journey/

This is a grab from an article about the RUST team porting to Unity 5. 2 hours to port then bug fixing. Surely Squad can't keep saying "the problem with 64 bit is with the engine, Unity needs to fix their engine ",when they have released the new engine with native 64 bit support and it's a 2 hour port.

I'm not saying do a 2 hour port and release. I'm saying do a 2 hour port and spend as much time as is needed to get the game back to the way it was with full 64bit support.

No two games are created equal. Therefore, what might take the Rust development team two hours to port their game to Unity 5 may take much, much longer for SQUAD to port KSP to Unity 5.

Also, an engine port late in the development cycle of a new release is very bad software engineering practice, especially given that Unity 5's implementation of Physx 3.3 differs significantly from the version of Physx that came with Unity 4:

We’ve been using PhysX 2.8.3 for a while now. We’ve not just used the plain stock PhysX, but extended it with numerous patches made by Unity engineers over the years. It’s been so long, and we say thanks to PhysX 2 for all the fish. As announced at GDC’14, Unity 5.0 features an upgrade to PhysX 3.3. Let’s give it a closer look.

PhysX SDK 3 is a radical redesign of the good old PhysX SDK 2.x. Basically, the PhysX team have taken the best ideas and best approaches from 2.x and rewritten the whole SDK from scratch. That means the entire codebase is different, all the interfaces are different and most of the functionality is different.

By "different interfaces", this means different ways for various functions, classes and methods in KSP's codebase to talk to the physics portion of the game engine. A port from U4 to U5 would most certainly require the developers to divert valuable time into validating that whatever hypothetical automatic port translated the interface definitions correctly. This time is better spent on getting KSP scope complete for 1.0 instead.

[Climberfx]

At least if we have a shader mod/plugin that import the standard shaders from Unity 5 to KSP ignore, and the camera post FX to, so, that manner, we already can have the visual improvements of it.

Instead of only been able to use the kip parttools shaders.

By the way, already have a Unity 5 version for download for free.

[boxman]

"How long did it take to port Rust to Unity 5?It was probably about two hours, there wasn’t really much to it. Unity updated all our code automatically, in an instant."

http://blogs.unity3d.com/2014/11/19/porting-to-unity-5-the-untold-rust-journey/

This is a grab from an article about the RUST team porting to Unity 5. 2 hours to port then bug fixing. Surely Squad can't keep saying "the problem with 64 bit is with the engine, Unity needs to fix their engine ",when they have released the new engine with native 64 bit support and it's a 2 hour port.

I'm not saying do a 2 hour port and release. I'm saying do a 2 hour port and spend as much time as is needed to get the game back to the way it was with full 64bit support.

There are even unity 4 games that properly do 64bit without any stability issues. A perfect example is the new cities: skylines which is only available in 64bit and was made in unity4. It also properly uses all cores of the CPU as well.

- - - Updated - - -

No two games are created equal. Therefore, what might take the Rust development team two hours to port their game to Unity 5 may take much, much longer for SQUAD to port KSP to Unity 5.

Also, an engine port late in the development cycle of a new release is very bad software engineering practice, especially given that Unity 5's implementation of Physx 3.3 differs significantly from the version of Physx that came with Unity 4:

By "different interfaces", this means different ways for various functions, classes and methods in KSP's codebase to talk to the physics portion of the game engine. A port from U4 to U5 would most certainly require the developers to divert valuable time into validating that whatever hypothetical automatic port translated the interface definitions correctly. This time is better spent on getting KSP scope complete for 1.0 instead.

Funny how it was just months since they stated that unity5 was absolutely first priority. It was such high priority that they would halt everything else as soon as they got access to it, so that they could use all resources to get it ported over to unity5. Then suddenly soon after they announced 1.0 instead....

And this is why it to me makes absolutely zero sense to suddenly rush towards 1.0. The more they add to the current version, the more they will have to fix when they finally get to porting it over.