Wednesday, April 15, 2015

Unity 5 Update

Earlier this week we rolled out a rather large update to the Unity plugin. The update went mostly into improving the workflow between Voxel Farm and Unity. You can get an idea of how it feels from the following video:


My favorite feature so far is now we get to see all the voxel geometry while in Unity's Scene mode. This makes possible to place your traditional Unity objects (lights, geometry, characters, etc.) in precise reference with the voxel content.



Another key feature was we now have working physics inside Unity. You can tell this is new because the video spends a good deal of time just cutting chunks out of buildings to watch them fall.

The shading has improved as well. Although this is an area I hope adopters of the engine and SDK will expand by producing all sorts of cool new looks. The realistic rendering included by default in the plugin is an example of what can be done and how to approach rendering in general.

The plugin is still Windows only. That is probably the second most frequent request/question we get. This is because our code is unmanaged C++. I wish there was a simple way around this. At this point we are contemplating re-writing parts of the engine in C#, which will take precious time we could be spending on new features.