Discussion Virtual geometry in unity

I was surprised to see this in the Chinese documentation https://docs.unity.cn/cn/tuanjiemanual/Manual/VirtualGeometry.html

what is it? anyone who lives on the other side of the iron curtain use it?

 

wow!

saw this in one discord,

 

some mentions here and some video clips too.
https://developer.unity.cn/projects/64883165edbc2a116e4f941e

Quite sad if those features wont get into global unity version : /

 

That would be a real kick in the teeth for the rest of us!

 

What is even happening at unity? No communication about this whatsoever. When we thought stuff couldn't get any worse....

 

Unity always like this. No telling, no one knows it's gonna be joke. Unity is totally huge joke

 

There are more interesting features in that blogpost than "Western Unity" has announced for years.

Unity China seem to have taken matters in to their own hands in order to help devs by giving them features that they actually want. I'm hoping this is what normal Unity will turn back into, but I think it will take a while.

 

So we're doing forks for the engine split by regions now? Why? Why isn't this communicated anywhere? Will there be communication and clarifications on this matter? Are we going to get them as well?

 

This was announced a year and a half ago, I don't think people expected it to have core features that everyone wanted. Unity forms new venture to manage China operations | Unity Blog

I would bet some of the features are coming from Chinese Unity games like Genshin Impact.

 

Heh, at least they did it in agreement with the Unity mothership. As opposed to ARM China which became an independent entity when they - uh - just decided to, without permission.

 

Ohhhhhhhhhhhhh thats why for the last year Unity Western Edition has had AI features put in - so we can live translate the UI and use the China version. This is perfect! installing it now, thank you Unity China and Unity West!

 

Btw. I'm still working on NanoTech and will release it, whatever the chinese are doing...
...mine is better anyway

 

thanks for digging up info,


i guess its time to get VPN then.. or unreal for those kind of projects.

or, of course your plugin can still save us

 

My opinion and observation only, but I do remember this announced in August of 2022. This doesn't appear to be global Unity, Unity China has it's own CEO and board.

"Unity China will begin building customized local versions of its core products for game developers, including a China-specific version of Unity’s flagship Unity Editor." and importantly this bit "Unity has built a rapidly growing business serving creators in China through its talented local team"

I wouldn't think there could be an expectation that these features could be part of a version of Unity outside of China (customized editor and source, etc). They are a business set up to specifically serve China creators and or users. It is very cool to see what can be done with the engine/editor given a team that can focus on and perform that work.

https://blog.unity.com/news/unity-forms-new-venture-to-manage-china-operations

 

Ever since the first video of Nanite and Enlighten (May 2020) there was the expectation for Unity to introduce their own implementation or similar features for their HDRP pipeline. So now seeing it being developed but seemingly exclusively for Unity China is a disappointment to say the least.

 

I obviously interpreted your sentence as it sounds, that you don't expect we would want them (en masse users) in global Unity tech. Sorry if I was harsh, it's just it wouldn't be the first plain stupid decision Unity brings forth in the recent years. I am glad that you don't support this interpretation or possibility.

 

Unfortunately as far as I can tell they aren't even on the official Unity roadmap yet.

 

Okay why is Unity china so much more developer oriented than the Unity global? Serious question. It seems like those guys are actively trying to provide modern tools to its developers ?

wishing team unity all the success, it seems to be a hard year for everyone

 

Is the AI gold rush such a big thing in China?...

 

It would be funnier if it didn't hurt so much. Is the "reset" going to finally "allow" our unity team to actually start shipping and maintaining features..?

 

Unity has been undergoing a reset or a restructuring or a transition since Unity 5, this excuse is getting old.

 

John's legacy is profound.

 

So essentially, Unity gave its IP, source code, tech, etc to a China-based entity to do what they wish with the game-engine in exchange of cash.

And now Unity China is leap-frogging Unity-Global without ever contributing back to it.

I heard this story elsewhere... just can't put my finger on it...

 

I'm not mad about unity china not porting the tech back to global, as global has had many years and engineers capable of adding the same highly requested features.

It just shows me that the corporate structure over at the global branch is probably ran by MBA's and not engineers. They must think it more profitable to allow them to offload these features to asset developers than actually make them for its users.

 

If that were true, they would ensure developing assets was actually a profitable venture. Instead, they break every asset store plugin on even minor URP updates, making it very expensive for asset store developers to keep their own assets maintained.

 

Amazon Lumberyard (now O3DE) which was based on Cryengine is a similar story Amazon bought the source added/improved stuff but never contributed back, it's basically the same story of every other major software fork be it commercial or open-source

 

Is this a joke? Can we get Unity's source code, like with Unreal, so that the community can finally fix Unity?
Just today I got a valid bug report closed as "wont fix" because "it's not important". I could have fixed it myself, for everybody, but instead nobody will fix it.

Also, Unity in China has a more expensive subscription and no runtime fee. Unity Pro is ~156€/month here while it's 167€/month there.

 

Please stay strong as it's people like you the only ones who can make Unity get back on their feet.

 

Couldnt we just install the Chinese version, and port the Chinese HDRP package or some of its features back across to regular Unity?

 

What needs to happen is all Unity product managers enter a week long public debate.
Every day getting the heat or the praises from the people.
No other task on their schedule.

Why? Because this is Unity.

As an example, back in the Nicholas Francis days, he and Ante would jump into heated debate about small things like the color chooser, both would get pummeled or stick to their guns and they'd make the right decision *every single time*

That's the old Unity. And that takes a level of fearlessness I haven't seen in years.

Ever since these original founders have left, PMs are in hiding. This is the opposite of fearlessness and not a good look, definitely not Unity.

 

Be careful, your post will be deleted and you'll be accused of "hijacking" the thread because you mention unrelated things. But maybe that's just for me.

 

You might not be allowed to do that, depending on license used by Chinese HDRP package or license used by Chinese Unity.

Basically, if you want to "build our own unity with blackjack and scriptable pipelines", or improve anything unity isn't willing to improve, effectively FIRST you'd need to develop your own opensource SRP for unity and release it under something like MIT (GPL and likely LGPL are incompatible with the engine).

Same applies to other systems.

 

looks like not much hope,




@Nexusmaster any new estimates on your solution alpha? : )
https://forum.unity.com/threads/nan...ndering-for-hdrp-urp-and-built-in-rp.1292223/

 

In case anyone thinks otherwise - anything that is licensed to a Chinese entity enters a blackhole and never comes back in terms of IP/tech as it becomes de-facto nationalized. And no, we don't want Unity-China to contribute back to Unity-Global... my employer will actually force me to stop using Unity all together for security & privacy reasons if it happens.

What's sad is that all this tech was given to the Chinese Gov for probably peanuts by Unity. That's billions-worth of R&D investments over decades by Unity and in return the rest of the world doesn't get anything. Ouch. Hope it was worth it - doubtful considering all the layoffs.

 

There blog posts still allows user commenting... says it all really.

Just another reason Unity will fail long term against Godot etc where source is available and people just fix the crap themselves... terrible shame really, bit like the power house of Maya under Autowreck now just over shadowed by all the stuff that happens for Blender.

 

Nah, it's for me too (not in this thread, but still).

Any sources for this, because it strongly seems you are making things up.

 

You need Unity source code access to do those changes. Unity-China is a distinct Chinese legal entity. By law, Chinese gov can access any Chinese company IP/Tech for "national reasons" and do as their wish with it, with no regard to international IP law. So, 1+1+1 means that China has complete access to all Unity Tech.

I am not making anything up, that's how it works. Ever wondered why sensitive tech is never R&D'd in China by non-Chinese companies? That's why. Companies use China to manufacture, sure, but doing R&D is basically giving it away.

 

It was more aimed at the "peanuts" comment. This was a conscious decision from Unity, not something that happened to them and you are attempting to frame it as "poor Unity got taken advantage by China" somehow.

 

this suggests there's a value exchange, not a "donation":

https://blog.unity.com/news/unity-forms-new-venture-to-manage-china-operations

It's also unlikely an IP issue.. there are out there open source implementations of virtual geometry systems like nanite, and papers that go in-depth on this, anyone just needs a good team of engineers good direction and the will to do it

 

Never said "poor Unity". It's a bad business decision IMHO. You're the one putting words in my mouth.

They got 1B$ (depending on the terms). That's not much considering current Unity's market cap of 11B$ (which went down a lot since IPO)

 

If that's a thing with advantages, it would eventually be adopted globally as well.

Poly budget is not the real problem anyways, Lumen is what we really need.

 

I also was begging Unity to develop some kind of real-time GI for ages, seeing Unity China have this is honestly a letdown, virtualized geometry or Mesh Shading are nice to haves but not necessary for indie devs, we don't do photogrammetry, we don't have models with tens of millions of triangles, the best scene I ever made is this, and it's barely around 2M tris per frame:
But what we would benefit from is true real-time GI, Unity's "real-time" GI still needs baking, and RTGI is only supported on HDRP and RTX cards, we need a compute shader real-time GI that works in HDRP and URP as well (the game I showed is made in URP), Adaptive Probe Volume is nothing but baked reflection probes. I know it's challenging, but I also know it's possible to make real-time GI that runs on ray tracing cores with a compute shader fallback that's less accurate but still real-time. There are a bunch of algorithms that overcome the need of blasting the scene with millions of rays to get an acceptable result that denoisers wouldn't struggle with, Nvidia's ReSTIR algorithm does exactly that, it's much more efficient and produces far greater visual quality. We just Unity to dedicate some time and resources into making something that is truly real-time.

 

Man, even good Unity news are bad Unity news.

 

Realtime GI, World Partitoin like streaming solution is something indie devs would benefit greatly too. Working with multiple scenes is sooo old school...annoying as hell.

I consider nanite as a nice automatic pop-less lod solution , its nice because You dont ahve to care about lods and they polygon crunch looks perfect when u move camera...cross fade can't even compare .

 

Well CryEngine did cost Amazon only 70-80 million by the rumors, and CryEngine is still somewhat superior to unity even now

 

Maybe visually, but not by adoption and general usage. They almost went out of business.

 

Realtime GI, World Partitoin like streaming solution is something indie devs would benefit greatly too. Working with multiple scenes is sooo old school...annoying as hell.

this absolutely.. it's a train wreck of of multiple third party solutions and why people just go use UE for world building instead.

 

Ye this is always the problem, in some cases You are virtually forced to use 3rd party assets, but then You fall into a hole of trying to integrate all those 3rd party assets together .

The minuses of using sandbox engine like Unity.

 

The fork has also it's own name "Tuanjie Engine" so basically the the Chinese companies just united to pull off a (costly) licence purchase like Amazon did for Lumberyard

The engine probably also includes tooling/services for compliance with the gaming industry regulations there
Here's an announcement article from August 2023
https://en.pingwest.com/a/12100

 

I wonder how much work it'd be to export the Unity China HDRP package, plug it into our funny junior edition Unity over here, and then just tweak editors and fix errors where necessary...