Roadmap 2014

[scott.richmond]

The biggest problem in my eye is a very poor GUI framework. It took us months to implement something good looking. Things are not scaling well if resolution changed and so on. Currently it's just pita to work with the GUI part.

 

My opinion is that the future should aim primarily to fill the usability gaps and then moving forward to new fancy features.

 

In my opinion the Unigine team shouldn't focus on GUI at all. These days any kind of home-made GUI system just isn't going to be up to scratch. It just isn't. This is why Unreal uses scaleform for top notch GUI frameworks. Our team is currently using a framework called CoherentUI for the GUI - Which is basically a chromium browser that renders the GUI for you so you can use all the power and functionality of HTML5 and JS to build exceptionally awesome GUIs. The Unigine team, in my opinion, aught to start looking at outsourcing some of these components such as GUI to best-in-breed third party frameworks so they can focus on the unique features that they do best.

[demostenes]

All together Unigine is a good and stable engine. There are some points that decrease productivity, I think a big problem is the small community. If you have a problem there is usually no community response to it or community made tutorials are non exists.

 

I can only speak for the code part of the engine but currently usage is good. Yes, debugging is horrible and a good code completion for IDEs is missing. (extern_info.h does not provide all and is missing type information)

 

Maybe it's because I developed assembler stuff but I like the API and debugging is not that bad. (Back some years the interpreter errors were useless, in the meantime this improved a lot)

 

The biggest problem in my eye is a very poor GUI framework. It took us months to implement something good looking. Things are not scaling well if resolution changed and so on. Currently it's just pita to work with the GUI part.

 

My opinion is that the future should aim primarily to fill the usability gaps and then moving forward to new fancy features.

 

Community is no problem at all, important is quality, not quantity. According to our experience Unigine community is the most mature we have met so far. Unity3d has 400k community members, on the other side there is almost nobody able to give you answer on more advanced questions and also majority of good information is lost between zillion of posts like "how to install unity, i need to make mmo". Also unigine documentation is far better, than what you can find on other engines.

 

I agree, that biggest problem now is productivity. For example asset import pipeline is very slow even after all upgrades (fbx import...), no drag and drop for GUI actions like texture selection in material browser, no asset browser, no intellisense for script...but these problems were mentioned hundred of times.

[scott.richmond]

I disagree about the community - It's almost non-existent by most comparisons to other engines. But this I expect - As I'm sure we all know Unigine is or was a sim engine first, and a game engine second. The majority of 3D engine communities are composed of hobbyist and indie developers. Unigine barely exists in that market at all right now, so there will be little to no community around it. The community will come when the engine as more easy to develop in.

[demostenes]

I disagree about the community - It's almost non-existent by most comparisons to other engines. But this I expect - As I'm sure we all know Unigine is or was a sim engine first, and a game engine second. The majority of 3D engine communities are composed of hobbyist and indie developers. Unigine barely exists in that market at all right now, so there will be little to no community around it. The community will come when the engine as more easy to develop in.

 

But you dont need community. If you have some problem, support from Unigine team on this forum is quite good. We are comming from Unity3d and we are really dont missing these 400k people. The real advantage is zero, or maybe even negative, all good is lost in huge quantity of trash posts. Also added value of community mods/plugins is very questionable, because you have not guaranteed support/newer engine version migration and almost all valuable mods died after some time because authors stopped developing it. And if you are doing serious product, you cant afford to rely on unreliable 3rd parties.

[werner.poetzelberger]

Quality is so much more important!

[manuel.gysin]

In my opinion the Unigine team shouldn't focus on GUI at all. These days any kind of home-made GUI system just isn't going to be up to scratch. It just isn't. This is why Unreal uses scaleform for top notch GUI frameworks. Our team is currently using a framework called CoherentUI for the GUI - Which is basically a chromium browser that renders the GUI for you so you can use all the power and functionality of HTML5 and JS to build exceptionally awesome GUIs. The Unigine team, in my opinion, aught to start looking at outsourcing some of these components such as GUI to best-in-breed third party frameworks so they can focus on the unique features that they do best.

 

Don't get me wrong with the GUI. We hoped for the scale form integration, but it was canceled.

Unigine does not need to provide an own GUI framework, the best thing would be like you said the integration of a third party framework.

[demostenes]

It is already known, how will be limitation with 4 terrain chunk textures solved? We would like to start preparation in advance. For example in case Unigine would be able to import 16 layer splat map (instead of 4 like now), we can prepare such splat now and save some time. Thanks!

[esger.abbink_]

This is especially true as UNIGINE just stated that 80% of their customers are in the professional simulation/VR application field. This simply means absolutely no need for consoles, smartphones, etc and I would also think that Linux, MacOS and DirectX9 support is not really required by these key customers.

 

We are in the professional simulation/VR application field and for us Linux is very much required.

 

Consoles, smartphones, MacOS, DirectX9 not so much indeed. (for us)

[esger.abbink_]

- deep integration of Tracker - Q4

 

Is there anything more you can tell about this?

 

We've noticed some "clunkiness" so I have some guesses as to what it *could* be, but that's still a wild guess. And as we very likely will be either extending tracker or basing our own tool on it I'd like to avoid duplicate effort if I can. We will be doing that pre Q4 though.

 

 

On a side-note, any information about DIS/HLA? Postponed to 2015? scrapped?

[steve.brodie]

Our team is currently using a framework called CoherentUI for the GUI 

 

We are currently looking at GUI options at the moment.  How have you found the CoherentUI integration Scott?, Its something id be keen to look into.

 

We are currently assessing the Flash capabilities of Unigine, as the Oilrush GUI was done in Flash. 

[maimonides]

Hi binstream, will the >4 terrain layer shading make it to the next update?

 

thanks.

[philipp.marcks]

"-access to materials and shaders"

meaning we can implement physically based shading , or have you plans to do so anyways, so we could spare any effort on such?
 

[dave.lannan]

I don't disagree with any of the above reasons as to why it would be a hard thing to do. But you just can't develop a game in the environment Unigine provides anywhere near the efficiency you can any of the other leading engines, which is why Unigine continues to loose marketshare (At least in the games market). Prototyping and production costs are much higher than that of the other top engines. We're all really just lucky they make truly awesome tech that no one else does (primarily in the sim space). But its a battle they'll loose eventually. And of course the slower they grow the less features we'll see at every roadmap.

Hi Scott - just to let you know we have bound Unigine to C# with quite good success using clr bindings. If you are interested send me a message. Performance is good btw (comparable with our C++ version). More importantly we have been able to embed it into a WPF toolkit editor system and used WPF for editing rather than the builtin one. Its quite powerful in this design layout. In terms of script, Unigine should not have written their own - when so many capable ones are already available. I have a binding with LuaJIT which is lightning fast and plain 'fun' to use.. great for rapid prototyping. Unigine as an engine is quite complete these days, but as others have mentioned things like the C++ API, and the scripting 'get in the way' rather than be a true asset to the system. Still enjoy tinkering with it though :)

Btw I think people who claim Unigine's quality is superior to Unity, should probably look at Unity5. Im sorry, but Unigines "beauty edge" is now gone. And Unity's editing and rapid development is miles in front of Unigine - this will impact sim development greatly (imho).

[scott.richmond]

Hi Scott - just to let you know we have bound Unigine to C# with quite good success using clr bindings. If you are interested send me a message. Performance is good btw (comparable with our C++ version). More importantly we have been able to embed it into a WPF toolkit editor system and used WPF for editing rather than the builtin one. Its quite powerful in this design layout. In terms of script, Unigine should not have written their own - when so many capable ones are already available. I have a binding with LuaJIT which is lightning fast and plain 'fun' to use.. great for rapid prototyping. Unigine as an engine is quite complete these days, but as others have mentioned things like the C++ API, and the scripting 'get in the way' rather than be a true asset to the system. Still enjoy tinkering with it though :)

Btw I think people who claim Unigine's quality is superior to Unity, should probably look at Unity5. Im sorry, but Unigines "beauty edge" is now gone. And Unity's editing and rapid development is miles in front of Unigine - this will impact sim development greatly (imho).

 

That's fantastic to hear! I've sent you a PM for further discussion around the C# CLR bindings.

 

You're entirely correct on your other points as well - The features and rapid release of Unity 5 shows just how fast paced the 3D engine world has become these days. Unreal Engine 4 release isn't much further out and they have their own big box of features too (One of which may be C# integration). Its a bit sad to see Unigine in light of all this because I know these guys want to push up into the game developer space beyond just simulation, but the direction they're heading in right now is taking them the wrong way and their niche is shrinking (Unity has a growing suite of sim features).

[demostenes]

Btw I think people who claim Unigine's quality is superior to Unity, should probably look at Unity5. Im sorry, but Unigines "beauty edge" is now gone. And Unity's editing and rapid development is miles in front of Unigine - this will impact sim development greatly (imho).

 

Unity3D was always miles ahead in great workflow, asset pipeline, userfriendliness, etc => rapid prototyping. But thats all what is Unity3D good for (and for what is Unity3D used by major gaming studios). It is very unstable and full of bugs once you start to develop something serious, instead of 2d(!!)/3d casual trash like 99% of people there. We had to leave Unity some time ago, it was impossible to continue development there. It was full of showstopper bugs (memory leaks, crashes...), nothing works properly (Umbra, Beast - try to bake more complex scene...), documentation is terrible and Unity team ignored any requests to fix it. According to my knowledge majority of these bugs wasnt fixed up to day. It is silly, that since Unity 3.0 import of bigger Unity package still causes crash (memory leak).

Just for comparison identical scene we have imported from Unity3d to Unigine eats 3x less memory and gives 2-5x bigger framerate and of course no crashes. Jumping to any location in such world is matter of 1-2 seconds on Unigine, 50-90 seconds on Unity3D.

 

On the other side it does not mean, that Unigine shouldnt do something with GUI/Workflow/intellisense, because productivity is now very low, thats absolutelly correct.

[werner.poetzelberger]

These are two different products with different focus. So in a sense you cannot really compare them.

Our choice was Unigine, because Rendering, Terrain, Sky are not usable for High Quality Visualization in Unity4.

 

(Even with the potential new focus in 'physical based lighting' etc. i am very curious if you could produce the same projects in the same quality with Unity5.)

 

But, yeah it depends on what you want to do. (I even would'nt pick Unity for a serious high quality game production).

 

As a Unigine 'newbie' I can say, that for us it was the right choice so far, and I personally love the direction of the simulation, rather than game. 

[scott.richmond]

Well. Looks like things just got a whole lot worse for the Unigine guys and a whole lot better for developers in general - Unreal Engine 4 with full C++ source code is now available for $20 a month and profit share! That's insane. I really do hope the Unigine guys here take that as evidence enough that they need to change direction now.

[nat.harrold]

he, we were already dl'ing.

 

PBR is the future.. for now...

 

 

(Unigine we are not defecting...) just longing for PBR...

[philipp.marcks]

yea BUT we had worked with unreal 4 for last months, and i hated it because:
fully deferred rendering - no specs on transparent objects - if you want to have glass you got to fake your reflections somehow via emissive texture - and best you can make your cubemap or .hdr in another software, cause feautures like in udk3 are gone (where you could "grab" your environment for cubemap)

also tessellations are "broken" - cannot mask tessellations like in unigine with tessellation texture, well theoretically u can, but it'll give bad looking "cracks" within surfaces - so either mesh is tessellated or not - performance killer! - no support of SLI,...
them demos on youtube look awesome , but them run on 2FPS so unreal took out their real time radiosity again (got to license enlighten for that), and you won't see a "glass-like" material within infiltrator demo (which would run at simillar framerate in "real time") cause of reasons mentioned above.

no support for 16bit normal maps! , which is essential for smooth looking "big-radius" surfaces which look really bad in UE4

we just did a "pitch" where we used unreal4, unity and unigine, and unigine killed it all , except there are issues about PBR (physically based i guess) ....
but imo these are "small (already existing) things" that now urgently needed to be integrated into unigine - roughness and metal (BRDF) attributes to shaders as well as more freedom of blending shaders via masks (maybe 2nd or 3rd UVSet or even multiple patches like Mari or amplify textures,..) and a realtime radiosity solution like enlighten -
if such features could be implemented easily , not necessarily by unigine itself, but by being compatible and offering 3rd party plugins, unigine could easily kill Ue4 and unity5
also there is a huge potential for Unigine connecting directly with Maya and or Katana for feature-film previsualization and whatnot
just my oppinion


 

[maimonides]

Following all this, it makes me wonder, what does Unigine think about all the UDK/U5 development. Did you guys change any plans in light of all this?

[ulf.schroeter]

https://developer.unigine.com/forum/topic/979-unigine-sdk-2011-11-11/?p=4870

 

Since this discussion unfortunately also the competition in the field of simulation and serious gaming has greatly increased. Bohemia Interactive VBS2/3 is ruling big parts of the military market and other engines (e.g. Havok Vision) have greatly extended their efforts to get some pieces of the remaining cake.

[demostenes]

what about scaleform integration?

 

I think Unigine team worked on some plugin for integration (end of 2012), but I dont know what was result.

[binstream]

In the light of the recent changes we have enforced efforts on the renderer improvements, there will be a lot of changes like improved terrain, water, sky, forest pretty soon.

[werner.poetzelberger]

Hello Binstream,

 

is the planned Terrain editing improvement (layers) coming as well?

(waiting desperately ...)

 

Thx. Werner

[binstream]

Hello Binstream,

 

is the planned Terrain editing improvement (layers) coming as well?

(waiting desperately ...)

 

Thx. Werner

 

Yes, terrain improvements are the first part, including more layers.