GamingBolt had a chance to speak to Unity founder David Helgason about the changes and improvements that Unity 5 brings to games, the engine’s biggest strengths and what we can look forward to in the future.

" We do the hard work behind the scenes so that developers can focus on making games rather than porting to different systems. Unity 5 adds a lot of incredibly powerful features that will help developers create even prettier games and push the limits of hardware on devices."

Rashid K. Sayed: Republique Remastered is the biggest stand-out from the jump to Unity 5, especially when it comes to the improvement in lighting. How have you improved the global illumination in Unity 5, especially with regards to the different workflows?

David Helgason: One of the great things about Unity 5 is the inclusion of Enlighten from Geomerics. It’s known for in-game real-time GI, but it also provides is a vastly improved lighting workflow for artists. Faster workflow means faster iteration which means better looking levels and content in general. Part of this is due to an iterative mode which removes the need for explicitly baking the scene. This basically means the scene will pre-compute and bake in the background and the Editor will automatically track changes made to the scene and execute the tasks needed to fix up the lighting. Many of these lighting iteration tasks will be nearly instantaneous.

Rashid K. Sayed: The biggest strength of Unity throughout its history has been its wide range of support across platforms. How will Unity 5 influence the development and porting of new titles on mobile platforms, high-end PCs and gaming consoles?

David Helgason: Unity 5 supports even more platforms than ever, and we just announced support for the New Nintendo 3DS and HoloLens, and we are working on some other things in the lab. We do the hard work behind the scenes so that developers can focus on making games rather than porting to different systems. Unity 5 adds a lot of incredibly powerful features that will help developers create even prettier games and push the limits of hardware on devices. The introduction if the groundbreaking IL2CPP technology will also increase performance to native speeds on all platforms, eventually making it even easier to bring the best quality games to multiple platforms.

Rashid K. Sayed: Mobile devices haven’t quite had games with AAA production levels, especially in the graphics department. With the ever-increasing power of mobile phones – the recent Tegra K1 allegedly outperforming the PS3 and Xbox 360 – how will Unity 5 help developers leverage the hardware for better quality visuals?

David Helgason: Mobile devices are getting more powerful with each new release and the energetic competition from entrenched device manufacturers such as Apple, Samsung, and newcomers  such as China’s Xiaomi is accelerating that improvement. As you know, Unity 5 is a graphics powerhouse with features like physically-based shading and real-time global illumination using Enlighten. If target device hardware supports what you want to render, Unity has the power to display it. As each year’s new generation of supercharged mobile devices comes out, Unity 5 helps developers be prepared for the transitions, especially with huge performance boosting backend features like IL2CPP.

"Unity really stands out is in workflow and the ease of making games work on many different platforms, with Unity having support for 23 platforms including the recently announced New Nintendo 3DS and HoloLens."

Rashid K. Sayed: Unity 5 is available for free to start-ups with less than $100,000 of revenue or funding. While this helps the vast majority of indie and crowd-funded devs, especially those which can’t reach Star Citizen levels of funding, how does it ultimately benefit Unity as a whole?

David Helgason: One of Unity’s core principles has always been to strive towards the democratization of game development. The end goal is to get these creative tools in the hands of as many people as possible so that the world can be full of as many creators as possible and not just consumers.

Having those who may not have a technical background have access to some really powerful tools like these is likely to spark some really imaginative ideas which ultimately has a great and positive impact on the industry as a whole. From our standpoint as well, we want developers to be successful.

Partly because it’s a great feeling to know that we’ve had something to do with that, but selfishly, we hope they become successful enough that they can invest in the Professional Edition which helps us invest into making the core technology (and our range of services that help developers in various ancillary ways) even better.

Rashid K. Sayed: How would you contrast Unity 5 with Unreal Engine 4, especially since both engines are becoming more and more accommodating of smaller devs? What features of Unity 5 do you believe will ultimately help distinguish it in the current generation?

David Helgason: Unity really stands out is in workflow and the ease of making games work on many different platforms, with Unity having support for 23 platforms including the recently announced New Nintendo 3DS and HoloLens.

Rashid K. Sayed: Tell us more about “The Blacksmith” demo and how you went about creating it. What various graphical features of Unity 5 does it best show off?

David Helgason: The Blacksmith was created by a team of three full time developers out of our Stockholm studio and supported by some contractors creating art and music. Of course, the demo would also not have been possible without the work of the core team creating all of the wonderful features in Unity 5. The demo was created to show how far Unity has come and what can be accomplished with a small team in a realistic technological setting (a reasonable gaming PC that anyone can buy, and not a futuristic rig which is what new demos are often shown on).

"We have been able to hire many of the world’s best game engine developers to work with us, and the intention is to make Unity impossibly good to use. In short you’ll see massive improvements, tons of innovation, and a torrent of incredible games made by an insanely talented community of game developers."

It takes advantage of pretty much everything in Unity 5, but the showcase features are physically-based shading and real-time global illumination. It makes an incredible difference to the look of a realistic environment to see materials and shaders functioning in a way that’s predictable to real-life and have Enlighten working with those surfaces to calculate correct bounce lighting. It really is easier to believe in a place as being real with those kinds of features working in unison.

Rashid K. Sayed: What kind of impact do you think DX12 will have on Unity when used in conjunction with the Xbox One?

David Helgason: The API alone doesn’t give a significant performance boost, it simply allows scaling on multiple cores, and that’s what we demonstrated at GDC.

Once our code is ready Unity rendering will just be faster – most users probably won’t have to change a thing in their projects to receive the performance improvement,  because all we will do is scale their rendering on to multiple CPU cores.

Rashid K. Sayed: Oculus Rift support is another key feature of Unity 5. There will be a wide variety of VR devices in the coming year though with HTC Vive, Sony’s Project Morpheus and Samsung Gear. Will Unity cater to these devices as well?

David Helgason: We haven’t announced anything specifically about official support at this time for Vive though nearly all of the demos shown at Valve’s GDC booth were made with Unity. Morpheus is part of PlayStation 4 and we already support that system. Samsung Gear VR is also already supported as part of the upcoming Oculus integrated support currently in beta.

Rashid K. Sayed: With all the improvements made with Unity 5, what does the future hold for the engine?

David Helgason: The result of our intense commitment to the quality and usability of Unity is that we are able to pour ever-increasing resources into the platform. We have been able to hire many of the world’s best game engine developers to work with us, and the intention is to make Unity impossibly good to use. In short you’ll see massive improvements, tons of innovation, and a torrent of incredible games made by an insanely talented community of game developers.

Designer, programmer and Midgar Studio founder Jeremy Zeler-Maury spoke to GamingBolt about the process of developing the game, the influences that past JRPGs had on Edge of Eternity, the overall visual direction with the advent of Unity 5, bringing the game to Xbox One and PS4, working with legendary JRPG composer Yasunori Mitsuda and much more.

"It’s true that Unity 5 is a major advance. We made an update about it recently showing screenshots of an early portage of Edge of Eternity. This is really impressive. In a few days we made dramatic changes to the current demo."

Rashid K. Sayed: Edge of Eternity will look to pay tribute to the JRPGs of eras past. The Final Fantasy influences are clearly visible but what other games directly inspired Midgar Studio?

Jeremy Zeler-Maury: Indeed Final Fantasy is a major influence to us but its far from the only one. As we said, Edge of Eternity is a “tribute” to classic JRPG but also a proposal of a mix of Japanese and western RPG. So the list of games that inspired us is long and quite eclectic. If a list had to be made we would say Star Ocean, Valkyrie Profile, Grandia, Vagrant Story… But we also could name games like The Elder Scrolls, Dragon Age, Fable or Mass Effect.

Rashid K. Sayed: Having looked at some of the early footage of the game, we’re impressed at just how good Edge of Eternity looks for its budget. Can you tell us a bit more about Unity and how it’s helped in the development?

Jeremy Zeler-Maury: Unity is full of features that convinced us. First, it is based on C# and associates it with tools really dedicated to video game development. It means for us both power and simplicity and allows a small time studio like ours to achieve during short development cycles what was so far only possible for large teams.

Unity also offers an intuitive and artist-friendly interface that allows artists and game-designers to be easily active in the development without the help of integration specialists. It’s the engine that currently supports the most platforms, from PC to consoles, including many mobile systems. You can release your game almost everywhere, that’s a major asset compare to its competitors.

And finally, when we chose Unity its price was also a major asset. At the time, it was almost the only affordable engine for an indie team. Even now, as competitors like the Unreal Engine became “royalties based’, we think it still offers the best value for money on the 3D engine market, even more with this new Unity 5.

Rashid K. Sayed: Wasteland 2 developer inXile Entertainment recently talked about moving from Unity 4.5 to Unity 5 and reported significant improvements in visual quality thanks to physically based shading support. What effects will Unity 5 provide for Edge of Eternity and could the game look even better than it does now?

Jeremy Zeler-Maury: It’s true that Unity 5 is a major advance. We made an update about it recently showing screenshots of an early portage of Edge of Eternity. This is really impressive. In a few days we made dramatic changes to the current demo. On the visual side we made a significant step forward and in the same time everything comes a lot less greedy in terms of resources and better optimized.

Rashid K. Sayed: How will the dynamic events affect combat? What kind of gains or losses could enemies and party members potentially suffer based on weather conditions and the time of day?

Jeremy Zeler-Maury: Just to give you a simple example, if it’s raining the lightning bolts damages will be multiplied considering water increases conductivity. On the contrary, in the same weather conditions, the fire spells will not be as efficient as usual. A first version of this system is already functional on the demo if you want to try it. We are also working on an interaction system with the set of the combat scene, but we can’t tell you more at this point.

"We all agreed without a doubt that Mr. Mitsuda was the one composer we could dream of. We had the opportunity to introduce him our project and he really liked it."

Rashid K. Sayed: Though we love a good nostalgia trip, one of the main criticisms of JRPGs in the past has been the lack of variety. What does the world and setting of Edge of Eternity do to advance the JRPG genre?

Jeremy Zeler-Maury: As we said, we want to mix Japanese and western influences. The uniqueness of Edge of Eternity will come from this merging of gameplays. We are also working on a real renewal of the ATB gameplay. We are trying to change it the way Lost Odyssey dramatically changed turn based gameplay.

Rashid K. Sayed: Midgar Studio’s Kickstarter campaign has been a strong success thus far but it carries some pretty hefty promises including a non-linear story, day/night cycle, open world, dynamic events and much more. Is there ever a case where you feel that it’s become much more ambitious than originally planned?

Jeremy Zeler-Maury: Really no. We would not commit to promises we know we will not be able to deliver.

Rashid K. Sayed: How did you come into contact with composer Yasunori Mitsuda? How far will his work go towards completing the authentic JRPG experience that Edge of Eternity is going for?

Jeremy Zeler-Maury: Well, we just asked him! This is that simple. Our friends at Fusty Game (another indie studio that we host in our office) showed us the way when they just dared ask Hideki Naganuma to compose music for Hover: Revolt of Gamers. We thought it was impossible that a great composer pays attention to a small French studio. They not only got an answer, but it was a positive one!

We all agreed without a doubt that Mr. Mitsuda was the one composer we could dream of. We had the opportunity to introduce him our project and he really liked it. His understanding of the constraints of an indie studio made the rest.

Rashid K. Sayed: Edge of Eternity will be heading to the Xbox One and PS4 via a recent stretch goal being fulfilled. What about the current generation of consoles excites you most?

Jeremy Zeler-Maury: All major JRPGs were released on consoles. We are very happy with achieving this goal as it was almost a duty to make Edge of Eternity available on consoles. The next-gen consoles offers impressive technical possibilities, and we are very happy about the results of the early portages we made. But don’t get the idea that the PC/MAC/Linux versions are not that important to us. There are very few 3D JRPG on these platforms, we feel gamers would expect a game like Edge of Eternity.

"If we decided to propose the console release as a goal of our Kickstarter, it was to gather resources to make the best possible version for PS4 and Xbox One and to take advantage of each console specificities."

Rashid K. Sayed: Given Midgar Studio’s indie status and desire to maintain creative freedom, is there any concern about having to ally with either Sony or Microsoft to bring Edge of Eternity to their consoles? There’s also ID@Xbox’s parity clause which has garnered its fair bit of controversy in recent times.

Jeremy Zeler-Maury: At this point we do not have these kinds of concerns. We met both Sony and Microsoft representatives and we have regular discussions with them about Edge of Eternity’s development. They both provided us with Dev Kits and both made sure that we planned to release our game on their consoles. It’s all very friendly with everyone actually. We do not feel any pressure from any of them yet.

Rashid K. Sayed: Will Edge of Eternity run at 1080p and 60 frames per second on both the PS4 and Xbox One?

Jeremy Zeler-Maury: It’s hard to answer this question right now as we are in the very early development of the next-gen consoles versions. But if we decided to propose the console release as a goal of our Kickstarter, it was to gather resources to make the best possible version for PS4 and Xbox One and to take advantage of each console specificities. And with Unity we have a perfect tool to do so.

Rashid K. Sayed: Since Edge Of Eternity will also launch on PC, what are your thoughts on DX12 improving performance by 50% and boosting GPU performance by 20%?

Jeremy Zeler-Maury: We only just begun to learn about DirectX 12. But on paper it sounds very interesting. We look forward to test it and verify the real performances with Edge of Eternity.

Rashid K. Sayed: Do you think DX12 will have a substantial performance impact on Xbox One?

Jeremy Zeler-Maury: Same as previous question. We barely started with DX 12, so its too soon to know.

Rashid K. Sayed: What are your closing thoughts on Edge of Eternity and the success of its Kickstarter currently?

Jeremy Zeler-Maury: We are all thrilled with how everything happened. We achieved the Mitsuda partnership and that was really a dream for us to have such a composer working on our musics. It’s also great to see there are so many fans of this kind of game. We got so much feedback and encouragement, it was hard to answer every single message. Thanks to this incredible support, we will be able to add a lot to Edge of Eternity. We now have resources to make the game we had in mind for years.

Rashid K. Sayed: Is there anything else you want to tell us before we let you go?

Jeremy Zeler-Maury: Just thank you for your support and giving us the opportunity to present our game to your readers. I hope some of you will feel like supporting us and help us achieve an even better Edge of Eternity!

Endnight Games’ The Forest has received a fairly hefty update – as we’ve revealed before – so just log into Steam and it will be automatically downloaded. What does it add? Along with the usual optimizations and tweaks, the first person sandbox survival horror is now running on Unity 5. This adds several new graphical improvements including sub-surface scattering for plants, physical based rendering and plants that bend.

The developer has also added new graphical options to help slower computers run the game faster. One can also adjust the view distance from an ultra level of detail to ultra low. Support for 32-bit machines which use less than 4 GB of RAM has also been added and there should be improvements all around to performance. That’s not including the new skin shaders, billboarding systems, new tree models and a new ocean shader.

Check out the full changelog here. However, that’s not all – a new hotfix has also gone live, adding even more improvements. Windows 32-bit users can rejoice – volumetric lighting no longer shuts off automatically for you. Increased grass draw distance at highest settings and other bug fixes have been added so make sure to check out the hotfix notes here.

The hit indie survival horror game, The Forest, has seen an upgrade to its engine, to Unity 5, it was announced today.

The change in engines brings with it multiple changes and improvements to the graphics as well- the plants and skin shaders have been rewritten, and many other visual tweaks, now only possible because of the new engine, have been made.

This shift to Unity 5 comes as part of the 0.61 update to the game (as the version number suggests, the game is still pre-release, and is in fact only available on Steam Early Access). Apart from the gameplay and performance improvements, there are also changes to the gameplay experience- multiplayer gameplay should be better thanks to a new network prioritization algorithm.

Unfortunately, all of these changes have come at a cost- the environment has been largely re-written, and all save games have also been wiped.

Still, this is part of the territory when you offer to  play-test a pre-release game. And at least the improvements here are regular and substantial.

Unity have announced that Unity 4.3 is now available for the PlayStation 4. The latest version supports all the next gen features that the system is capable of, which includes compute shaders and shader model 5. Furthermore, it will also support DualShock 4’s features like touch pad and light bar along with depth detection, and PS Move detection.

Unity are also working on releasing Unity 5.0 for the PlayStation 4, but they will be releasing patches and continuous improvements to 4.3. Unity 5.0 was announced at this year’s GDC along with Enlighten support for the same. Unity has been used in a few PS4 games like Stick It To The Man by Zoink! Games.

Interested developers can get the license and then register for developer access via official PlayStation Channels. For more on Unity and PlayStation 4, check out this awesome interview we conducted with them last year.

Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below. Stay tuned for more news and updates.

Unity Technologies have announced that they have begun the Call for Speakers initiative for Unite 2014. The event will take place in Seattle from August 20th to 22nd.

Developers who are interesting in giving a speech/presentation need to submit their presentation proposals. They will then be evaluated based on their relevancy towards the subject and whether the content has potential to educate fellow developers. In addition, Unity will offer free pass to the show along with exposure for the developers and their respective companies.

The talks will need to focus on Unity and how developers are utilizing it in an effective manner. The submissions are being accepted through April 16th.

During GDC 2014, Unity showed off their latest iteration of the engine, Unity 5 which supports Geomerics, a lighting solution for video games. Last year’s show was a success with talks ranging from Windows 8 to connecting Unity gamers across platforms with Facebook.

Unity Technologies has revealed their next engine iteration at GDC 2014 with Unity 5. It is currently available to pre-order and permits access to existing updates and Unity 4.

Some of the new features include the Enlighten lighting system, physically based shaders, a unified shader architecture, in-editor real-time lightmap previews, a new Audio mixer and much more. It is also a 64-bit engine for the first time and include support for Nvidia PhysX 3.3 and integration with SpeedTree.

David Helgason, CEO of Unity Technologies, stated that, “Every time we ship a new version of Unity, we’re looking to empower developers with technology that’s more powerful and easier to apply than ever before. With the huge additions of physically-based shading, lighting workflows, a new platform, and a new built-in method for user acquisition, we’re improving Unity dramatically from both a creative and business perspective.”

The release of Unity 5.0 will also see the introduction of Unity Cloud for cross-promotion of mobile games to add developers. Check out some of the newer features in the screenshots below.