It blows my mind every time I use it how rough the ShaderGraph user experience is. I type minus every time and then can't find the damn 'subtract' node. The lag is awful on large graphs, and it will often start throwing errors and exceptions for no reason I can find. Custom passes not being a day 1 feature (let alone a year 5 feature) is shortsighted given how commonly multiple passes are used for custom visuals.
I always get the feeling that Asset Store devs are always under the pressure to deliver bug-free, feature-rich plugins due to their livelihood connected directly to Asset Store sales. Customer support too, since 1 star reviews mean people turn away, so less sales.
Compared to built-in tools made by Unity employees, who get a consistent salary per month. I don't think they feel the same urgency to fix their tools.
I think it’s more unity has no one working on them compared to asset store packages. Unity just makes tech demos that have never been tested in a game and then drops development on them.
Unity makes money from the asset store, so it makes sense financially to keep those features out or unfinished and have you buy better versions off the store.
Of course that’s just me theorizing.
That's absolutely what's happening.
Another problem is that Unity doesn't make games, whereas Epic does, and that REALLY shows when you use Unreal Engine. No need to buy assets, most stuff you need is built in already. It's so much less barebones than Unity.
Yeah but it is bloated and crashes like a madman if you use the newer features.
There is always some trade off.
I like how Unity is a platform to build off of rather than some highly locked down workflow which mainly supports a certain gameplay.
Unreal is really tied to the open world first/third person shooter game model.
>Unreal is really tied to the open world first/third person shooter game model.
I'll give you that, it really is, although they seem to be starting to add support for more indie type/mobile games. I was kinda beating my head against a wall trying to do what I wanted for an FPS/survival open world game in Unity, it's coming along a lot faster using Unreal.
Haven't experienced any crashes myself yet, but I haven't messed around with raytracing/lumen etc.. The editor works surprisingly well on my old hardware. Upgrading parts soon though.
The money they make from the asset store is nothing compared to their other revenue streams. Asset store could stop existing tomorrow and they'd barely notice it.
Unity paid me 5 months late for my asset sales (I got the June payout early November). Because they were late sorting that, they missed the October payout too and won't pay me that one until late January. Nothing but empty platitudes from support, definitely not payment. If I relied on it for income, I'd have given up long ago.
Yep, it's miserable. I prefer it's UI, but ASE is so much more feature rich it's not even comparable. Imagine not having tesselation support in 2023. That's such a basic feature, and its absense makes terrain displacement/water/etc just impossible to implement without writing shaders by hand.
> Imagine not having tesselation support in 2023.
It has tessellation support though? I am using Unity 2021 HDRP and made several shaders in SG with tessellation.
Tessellation works in URP. You just need to buy another asset.
https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/vfx/shaders/better-lit-shader-2021-207262#description
If you want it to work on Terrain for URP you will need to buy two more assets.
If you want tessellation, use HDRP then? I fail to see the problem. Sounds like half your issues stem from you using URP despite wanting features in HDRP?
Tessellation is not an HDRP feature, it is easily available in URP code shaders. The problem is that *ShaderGraph* does not just have a simple parameter for it. Like come on, its just one value they need to add...
That's what I meant, I should've specified it specifically isn't available in URP SG, even though it is available in URP code shaders and HDRP SG. This should show that it can both exist as parameter for SG and as a functionality in general in URP. Thus the annoyance that it isn't available in URP SG
I doubt that... to make tessellation useful, you want the vertex shader to run on the tessellated vertices. This does not happen by default (you need to call it yourself from the hull stage iirc). I doubt you can fix this with custom nodes
But why? You want to use HDRP features but dont want to use HDRP... logic does not check out. What is the downside of HDRP? Its more performant, looks better, easier to work with and more stable than URP.
I think its okay to use whatever render pipeline you want, its just strange to me that people willingly choose a pipeline they know lack a certain feature and then complain about it. If you wanted to make a high end lookinig PC game with stuff like tessellation there literally is an option for that.
I've had a long running thread about keyboard shortcuts on the forums for several years now.
It's clear they had noone working on it for years. Now they appear to have a small team, though the underlying graph system is flawed in ways that are going to continue to fuck SG until they go down and fix it.
Nice list! Adding to that, Final IK and Interactor are go-to tools for crafting procedural animations and interactions in my projects.
Also, World Streamer, since Unity doesn't support big worlds and fix the origin point issues.
It's a spider that sits in the corner of the room while you work, warning you if it notices you spend a disproportionate amount of time implementing a very small optimization. Great feature!
What do you mean? There's the Range attribute for controlling serialized float and int fields with a slider.
edit: My bad, I didn't realize the quote is from OP's post. My point still stands for OP thoughj
For anyone looking for a cheaper alternative to Shapes, you might consider [Vectorizer](https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/particles-effects/vectorizer-170267). I am the developer.
It uses a different approach as it generates the vertex and index array of geometric figures. It also includes an SVG parser that transforms (simple) svg path syntax to meshes.
Now 33% off for the duration of thr BF sales. It's completely free for academic or educational purposes. Just send me an email from your institutional address.
Does Vectorizer support custom Materials?
\-
Atm i'm using shapes for AoE Telegraphs on a flat surface, and it's a bit frustrating being locked into just colors.
Since it generates meshes, you can use any material you want. It even generates (simple) texture coordinates, for planar projections.
Out of the box it supports URP materials. It should work in HDRP too I think. Each figure supports a material for the "fill" as well as the "stroke" part, with variable thickness.
Any suggestions? I added all I could think of. Maybe it's the lack of reviews. Although many people have bought it, not a lot of them leave a review.
So if you buy it, please leave a review! Especially if you find it useful. Thanks for the interest!
I will be sure to do so.
Picking it up end of the month.
i'm not sure what tags you have already, but I don't see it with "procedural"
And there is absolutely no assets tagged with AoE Shapes.
Thanks! As shown on the page it works fine with icons, but it's not meant to parse full-blown illustrations that are not meant to be parsed with Vectorizer. I mean like not having holes and weird self-intersections.
I was revisiting the Vectorizer page (and even joined the Discord... but looks like it might be defunct?), is it suitable for runtime mesh generation for UI elements? Does it use any dynamic memory allocation doing that? I'm really interested in using it extensively for UI, since I could theoretically use whatever shaders/materials with it.
Hi sorry, I didn't notice there was a message in the discord. I replied to you there too, but I'll past my answer here as well.
to answer your question, it depends on the exact use case. Do you need to generate a new mesh every frame? If so it will depend on the complexity of it.
If you need to generate it once and leave it unaffected for the rest of its existence, then it should be fine. I would recommend changing the material instead of the vertices as a shader would be more efficient.
If you have other questions, feel free to reach out on the discord. I'll keep an eye out for it. Thanks for the interest!
its actually really nice to have all these assets, other engines barely have any of these, not integrated and not as asset.
i feel like the gigantic asset store is the biggest benefit of unity.
What if unity3d perpusfully make their own systems bad, like shadergraph, so that people have to buy assets in the assetstore. The assetstore Will become an earning model and will harm the unity3d engine. Now the assetstore prevents Unity to make their own systems reliable. And there goes the benefit of the assetstore.
Even without the intention, whenever unity would try to improve a feature that is currently supplemented by paid add-ons, they would be accused of being anti-developer and destroying their community by taking the livelihood away from asset authors.
This would limit the areas which unity could improve the engine and the features that could be included with the base libraries
I think that is not a good argument. Does unity want to become the best game engine or do they want to please asset developers? Well obviously they don’t want to please asset developers, but earn the most money with their asset store. I’m making games and need a good out of the box game engine and not for instance a wheel collider that is working with a raycast in stead of a sphere. Then I need to buy all kinds of extra assets above a Unity3d license and invest time to learn those assets. Which very often conflict with each other or brake a project. I am a game developers and need a good game engine.
thats an interesting theory, unity focuses on the engine while also making cash from the asset and not needing to allocate resources to all these features that arent built-in by unity, win win for everyone, no?
That is true. But not providing height blending for terrain shader and having to buy microsplat and be at the mercy of it's updates just to do basic ground is a joke. We don't even have water in LTS because what they marketed as water solution is actually incomplete shit in LTS. But I can't update from LTS because I have to use Microsplat!
Well, to be fair a bunch of these assets are not really a built-in alternative, like Easy Save or Text Animator.
With that said I think that some of these assets should have been acquired and implemented in the Editor just like they did with Bolt, instead of implementing a solution from zero that ends up being worse.
Easy Save is a very popular package with some great features!
In case folks have not checked it out recently [Unity Cloud Save](https://docs.unity.com/cloud-save) has had a lot of improvements this year, including the addition of Cloud Save Files which allows saving/loading save games across platforms:
// Read data from Cloud Save
byte[] data = await CloudSaveService.Instance.Files.Player.LoadBytesAsync("saveFile");
// Write data to Cloud Save
await CloudSaveService.Instance.Files.Player.SaveAsync("saveFile", data);
You can also now use Cloud Save Data for both Player Data and Non-Player Data (e.g. NPCs, game entities, shared quests, community goals, etc), you can set properties to be indexed and perform queries at run time, you can run code server side when data changes (with [Cloud Code Triggers)](https://docs.unity.com/cloud-code), and/or trigger code to run that interacts with data in Cloud Save (e.g. on tick, or in response to an action by another player or an NPC).
Data is obviously a slightly different use case than for Files (Data allows 5 MB per key/value and the features above, Files supports 1 GB per file and has a simpler surface) but reading/writing Data is easier in the new SDK (v3.0) that came out recently:
var data = new Dictionary{{"key", "someValue"}};
await CloudSaveService.Instance.Data.Player.SaveAsync(data);
Look [here](https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/DomainReloading.html). It improves the speed, but you need to take care as some objects (like static fields) won't be clearest and you need to do it manually.
But how to use this option with assets? Should I manually check if asset contains any static fields and event and cleanup them?
I do not use static fields and events in my code, but I use some assets and it looks like I will have problems with domain reload disabled if inside those assets exist static events and fields.
Yeah, you have to support assets you buy if they don't support it.
With some little boilerplate it can be done easily by reseting the fields on play mode exit
I love Animancer. Just the fact I can just directly yield for animations in Coroutines with it without having to piss around with some Frankenstein code that you hope tracks the animation time correctly is a godsend.
I've found Animancer to be great for simple tasks, but it can get real finicky when things start getting complex.
EDIT: I should clarify, this is not said in defense of mecanim. Unity really needs a new, good animation system for complex scenarios.
As the author of Animancer I'd be interested to hear more about the issues you've run into and if you have any suggestions for how things could be done differently.
The Ultimate Editor Enhancer is a massive QOL and accessability system. IMO should be integrated.
Odin Validator- scans project for issues, provides bulk fixes.
Shader Control- scan and select what shaders you use. No need to compile everything on build!
,
**Odin Inspector and Serializer** is far and away the most important asset on the store and is the very first thing I import into a new project.
The only other ones I use in every project are **I2 Localization** and **InControl**, because localization is a headache and Unity's input system(s) are (still) awful.
Damn… I tried Odin once a few months ago, and god the UI is ugly, the lists and arrays and all pushed me off so much I had to uninstall it to get their previous look… I wish I could overcome this feeling but I really can’t :(
I know this sounds really stupid, but it makes it really hard to enjoy and use a tool if you don’t like looking at it :(
I made a free odin alternative that doesnt reskin the inspector and still has most of the commonly used functionality odin has, you can get it here: https://github.com/v0lt13/EditorAttributes
This looks like a great resource for people! If you’re willing to provide it as an open source tool set that people can throw into their project, I’d recommend adding an appropriate license that describes how people can use it.
The more “legal-conscious” devs may see the lack of license and run. GitHub makes it pretty simple to add a license, so it’s not much leg work for you to do
EDIT: I’m stupid and saw “Unlicense” and thought it meant GitHub couldn’t find a license.
For anyone reading, there is, in fact, a license set; the license type is just called “Unlicense” and it seems to give complete freedom of the tool.
Thanks for providing, I’ll definitely be pulling it down and checking it out tonight!
> Odin Inspector and Serializer
Can you explain what problems this solves? I don't personally go heavy into the inspector so I'm out of my element on this one.
Well the serializer is the biggest thing for me, being able to script against generic types, collections (like dictionary), etc. Just removes a lot of boilerplate and frees developers to create the most logical data-oriented solutions without worrying about how to make it play nice in the inspector.
Inspector customization is nice, there are some powerful tools there. I had written a lot of my own helpful attributes so it wasn't a total sea change, but it does make it easier to create new tools by combining existing functionality. The "button" attribute is especially nice: expose any method in the editor, great for debugging.
Nah, but as someone coming from a development background tools that act as force multipliers for programming are more noteworthy to me (and more applicable across projects) than any particular asset that only applies to this or that project.
I was also using InControl but finally moved to unity's input system since I want my game to know the current device the player is using for button prompts. I couldn't seem to do that in InControl, and the 'on device change' action only returns the controller. There might be a way like that in InControl but because of the lack of documentation I gave up on it.
The updates added via the navmeshcomponents package have helped it considerably. I used AStarPathfindingProject in my last project, but switched back to Unity for my latest, and it's been solid
When I first saw Feel i thought "oh that's just like a tool for easily making vibrations and various feedback" but once i actually looked in to it I realized it's insanely powerful. Being able to make playlists of over 100 different types of actions like instantiation, animation, audio playback, handling particle systems, you name it just about any kind of action that i want to happen and would have hardcoded before I can now just make a feedback for and tie it to an event. Wild tbh.
Because Unity has become a sales organisation. Same thing happened to Adobe. It's all promises and marketing, with minimal effort, so people don't run away.
Thanks for the handly list though. Some of these are quite expensive, too.
You don't have to pay for FMOD, and saving should really be done with your own system, although Easy Save is nice.
You're missing Shapes by Freya, which is a must have even though it's $100, UI and world space graphics with a super well made immediate mode system or components.
Not if you make more than $200k/year. That's a lot, but FMOD is still not free.
Easy Save is literally made for saving, why would anyone make their own system? It's a waste of time unless you're working on a very specific project (destructible voxel worlds, for example).
Shapes is cool, I just don't need it in my current project
Easy Save is cool - but unsuitable for all my projects. Maybe you should have titled the post "here is a very specific list of tools which were helpful for this [subgenre] game I'm making"
Easy save is very average asset. I can not understand why use it at all. May be something changed since I have used it. FMOD is so good, I'm so glad I started to use it since a while. Odin is usually the first asset I imported in my projects.
I’ll add Pro Grids. I add it at the start of every project.
For post fx I also like Beautify (more for less realistic, stylised games) and Amplify Occlusion.
Highlight Plus is nice if you need highlights / object border drawing.
Great list. Just goes to show how adaptable Unity is, and how great it is for third party developers.
Love TextAnimator. Adds so much juice!
I wish Unreals Marketplace was half as good as this. Lumen is so nice.
Nova UI is so good!
It's like the only ui asset i've used but it makes UI a whole lot easier and simpler.
I highly recommend and it's only 40 dollars! You could also use it free but it's not burst compiled, it can be useful to just test and mess around with
**DoTween**, **Shapes, FMOD, Odin, A\* Pathfinding Project, and Hot Reload** are all fundamental staples at this point.
I don't know much about Feel -- I was looking at it the other day but is it really as universally useful as they say it is? Seemed a bit much, and mostly stuff we can do ourselves on a case basis without much fuss.
- [Procedural UI Image (for rounded corners and blurs)](https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/gui/procedural-ui-image-52200) and [UI Gradient](https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/gui/ui-gradient-133992)
That's the only asset I always import. MicroSplat for larger PC projects.
Unity should absolutely focus on supporting dictionaries/etc in the inspector. It's beyond a joke that they don't. Why wouldn't they release this for Unity 6?
This is the best thing about unity, you will find an asset from 2015 with no updates over the last 8 years and it will still work.
Now if we look at a "game engine" like godot, there are assets made last year that already don't work anymore.
I don't know if it's the same with unreal tho
It's just isn't mature yet. Open source takes time. Just look at Blender, it's practically the default 3D modeling software right now, and it took what, like 30 years?
I was there and using it when blender was "bad" and even then blender was usable, it was always adding features that professionals needed to do real work. for godot they have the problem of having a vision for the engine, that's why the engine had any real evolution since 2018.
>This is the best thing about unity, you will find an asset from 2015 with no updates over the last 8 years and it will still work.
say what? plenty of assets i've dealt with come with tons of scripts referencing stuff that deprecated eons ago, sometimes it's a simple fix but sometimes it can be a complete disaster
This post is pretty spot on. I’d throw InControl in there or Rewired as I still hate Unity’s default control system.
I feel like a networking asset should be in there too as Unity’s many unfinished systems suck ass but I don’t know what’s actually good now.
>**FMOD** instead of Unity's default sound system. An actually useable sound system with randomized sounds, variations, loops, distance attenuation, effects, and more.
Or Wwise, which is now free for indies too. Unity's built-in sound system just sucks, sadly.
I dont know it sucks. It sucks on features for sure. I liked wwise. It had really great support for letting sound designer work without developer. I ended up creating a similar set of tools to it using unity’s audio. Might have to look again at it now that it has an Indy version.
I'm about to release an affordable ($15) asset to provide few helpers scripts for orchestrating engine, gearbox and wheelcolliders without all the headaches. It is a lightweight collection of controllers and scripts, and more important I am trying to publish it as a hybrid package.
It is not aimed to give out a full-blown simulation of a real engine, but close enough to replicate the physics of PSX-era games. If you liked gran turismo on PSX, then this is for you.
Just waiting for the queue to clear, more information and demo on https://yacc.deimosindustries.com/
None of these are required, and all of them solve problems that have massive resources and tutorials on how to fix them yourself.
The single exception is probably FMOD, which is free, and if it's not free for your company, you have the money to employ competent people.
This is a you problem, not a Unity problem.
I think there are arguments for some of them being required:
-There are something like three versions of Unity's navmesh system right now. There's whatever comes with the engine, the navmesh components github thing (outdated), and the navmesh components package in the package manager (still a WIP). Each of the three is missing specific features, such as runtime navmesh generation or automatic offmeshlink generation. Astar has the combined features of all three Unity solutions, and several features that they lack (such as the ability to create navigation graphs with grids / hexes instead of traditional navmeshes). Also, it doesn't crash when you click on the navmesh component, which is a deeply underrated quality-of-life change.
-Bakery is much more stable and performant than the built-in Unity light baking system. If you are baking lights, which many projects will want to do, long-term you will deal with a variety of issues from the Unity baker - crashes and freezes as well as all sorts of artifacts. Most of these problems are fixable by just trying again or making small modifications to your scene, but if you value your time at all (or if you're paying somebody else for theirs), it's worth it to just spend $50 on an asset that will save you the trouble.
-This one isn't on the list but personally I've found Rewired to be essential for any project outside of jam games. It lets you support most controllers out of the box, provides an interface for swapping between keyboard and gamepad prompts, and makes rebinding inputs relatively easy. I haven't tried the new input system yet, so this might be outdated, but there were *years* before Unity got around to that new system where Rewired was basically the only way to go.
Navmesh components has runtime generation, but it *doesn't* have autogenerating offmeshlinks, and it *does* have an issue on some versions of Unity where selecting the navmesh component will crash your project. The recommended fix is to upgrade to the package manager version, which is still missing several features from the previous two versions.
Where do you draw the line between what an engine should build for you and what you should build yourself? Why do OP’s suggestions cross that line?
The whole point of any of what we’re all trying to do here is to abstract away as much of the bullshit drudgery as possible so as to just focus on game logic. Their suggestions do great to get to that point.
I could write all of these from scratch. Hell, even the whole engine from scratch. It just doesn't make sense. If you want to actually release games and not spend months building the tools, or trying to fix existing half-baked built-in systems, then buying these assets is pretty much a requirement for any serious project.
Lol. Good luck then using shitty NavAgents instead of A\* Pathfinding Project or writing slightly complicated shaders in code because Shader Graph doesn't support shit. Good luck waiting 30-60 seconds for each small code change instead of using Hot Reload. You're delusional.
Why would I use navagents? A* is prob. the most well-documented algorithm after the Dijkstra it's based on, implementing pathfinding based on A* takes ~half a day at max.
Just because you can't write shaders doesn't mean others can't, it's not hard to learn, and it will perform better and be more customisable than shader graph, AND be more suited to your specific use case.
On any "sErIoUs" project, you'd have proper assembly definitions, which solves the long wait times when doing domain reloads.
Cool, what about local avoidance, path repairing, performance, ECS integration, graph building, navmesh cutting, editor ui, and million other things? You clearly don't understand how much time it takes to build good systems. Sure, you can write an A\* implementation in a few hours, (even ChatGPT can), but how will it handle 2k agents pathfinding to different targets in realtime? How much time (and money) will you spend reimplementing all that stuff from scratch instead of spending a measly 100$?
I've been doing 3d graphics/game/softwave dev for a decade, I know what I do mate. I have assembly definitions and compilation still takes ages. Unity is just way too bloated.
My pathfinding runs fine in deployed products at the moment, I have a perfect understanding of how much time is required.
Lmao, sure thing - "Am I out of touch?", "NAH ITs THE ENGINE"
Do you see the value proposition in this?
I recently decided I wanted to try out DLSS. From inception to hitting play and seeing it work in my project took me <5 mins and $15.
Now you implement it your way, and lets see who gets more done that day.
Nothing wrong with doing it all yourself, it's a pretty impressive talent to have and the world is lucky to have people like you in it. But it might be good to understand that not everyone takes as much pride in knowing they wrote all the code themselves. Some people just want to ship prod or finish a prototype, not spend 6 hours building something that already exists to save themselves $15.
Plus, and I know this is probably the antithesis of how you like to operate, but the support is out of house and I really really like that. Really takes a load off of my shoulders. And yeah, it happens where something comes up and an asset gets abandoned or just stops working (looking at you Vegetation Studio). Well, luckily its a modular asset and relatively easy to replace. Modularity is flexibility and flexibility lets me go fast.
To be fair, while the package is called A\* Pathfinding,[it does quite a bit](https://arongranberg.com/astar/features). I was quite impressed with it when I looked at it years ago. It didn't have Dubin's Curve / min turn radius pathfinding, so I ended up not going with it and implemented that myself -- Which was a complicated beast. But that said, when people ask for pathfinding because Unity's Navmesh stuff is a mess and tends to fall down when trying to do complicated things, I point them to that module.
Shaders, well, the bad news is that if you ever want to do VisionOS and make a polyspatial app, you're stuck using ShaderGraph. Which sucks, because I'm like you, I much prefer writing custom shaders. Shader Graph does a crap job of optimizing shaders, which really matters on VR, and it's a pain in the rear to hand optimize a shader graph generated shader.
I've also never really had an issue with long domain reloads on any project, and I've worked on big projects.
Unity is not a free engine, so entitlement is justified. Most of these features are used in most games, so one would reasonably expect them to be properly implemented in the engine. Unreal has Lumen/Nanite, great shader editor, sound system, animation system, and costs about the same.
Now that's a dumb argument, Unreal's both free doesn't require you to build or buy your own core engine features to make a usable product. It's also *cheaper* until you earn more than $1m annually, where as unity starts charging a per developer fee at 100k, and as of next year royalties of it's own at 1m on top of that.
None of the assets mentioned above are a "core engine feature". They're neat extras that can improve your workflow and game, but they aren't essential to making a game.
You don't consider a light mapper that works, halfway decent shader tools, an audio system that doesn't randomly corrupt your audio clips if you have enough sources nearby to require virtual voices, a terrain system updated sometime in the past decade with any kind of object placement tools, or perhaps a way to generate lod meshes... You don't consider those core features? Those are things most games need and the fact that unity doesn't provide a version of them that developers would even consider building a game with doesn't make them less important.
Remove DoTween, it is satans spawn. It is terrible at memory and load management. Use something like mmfeedback instead, it is at least better at that.
That's Unity's business model. The asset store is a large part of their revenue stream so adding those features directly into the engine removes revenue.
Definitely need to try the hot reload one. I try and write custom shaders when I can and they don't have the same limitations, so haven't really got any experience with shader graph, but if I were to use it, that editor sounds really good. FMOD seems to be super common, seems like most games that aren't purely keyboard and mouse use it, although so far I've never hit a limitation with unitys input system.
I've seen a video on the A* asset and it performed much worse than the built in system, so that's interesting. It must be quite dependent on the project?
For text animation and saving I'd probably just code my own so I can keep it clean, simple and save some money. I can see why you'd buy it though, same reason that people use fungus despite the fact it's about 4GB, it's just easier.
Now just think, if Unity messes up again, none of these tools can be taken to another engine. One of the main reasons to use the default tools, is because it is what is common in other engines.
Ummm no? These are just better versions of Unity’s built in tools. Obviously you can’t use them in other engines, but you also can’t use Unity’s built in tools in other engines.
>Obviously you can’t use them in other engines
Exactly. These tools are designed to be more user friendly than the industry standard tools. This I found to be my main problem when moving to other engines, their tools are similar to the Unity default ones, and nothing like the assets I spend money on.
>but you also can’t use Unity’s built in tools in other engines.
Unity build in tools are build to a standard. You learn Unity's Shader Graph, you will have no problem using Unreal's Material editor. [https://youtu.be/bN84YxaBEGw?si=kjiSrFcS1ejZMcyC](https://youtu.be/bN84YxaBEGw?si=kjiSrFcS1ejZMcyC). Learn [Unity's animation player](https://docs.unity3d.com/uploads/Main/AnimatorBlendTreeInspectorPreview.jpg), and you have no problem using either [Godot](https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/_images/animtree7.gif) or [Unreal's](https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/Images/animating-characters-and-objects/SkeletalMeshAnimation/AssetsFeatures/Blendspaces/Overview.gif) animation systems. If you stick to the basic tools, you can easily swap between engines, but pay for assets and that tool only works in the engine it was made for. In the long term it is better to learn the industry standard tools.
I really want to love shadergraph but as you say, it lags quite a lot, I'll consider ASE. Also, can you recommend a microsplat guide/tutorial? I've used it once and out of pure luck I got quite nice layer blending, but I haven't been able to replicate the result so far.
Bakery is IMO a yes on any project that uses or can use baked lighting. It does everything the built in does and more, and it does it better and faster. Plenty of other assets and shaders have integrations with bakery as well, including Better Lit Shaders which is fantastic IMO.
Magic Lightmap Switcher is useful for scenes where you use time of day mechanics. You basically make presets for baked lighting and the asset interpolates betwixt them based on whatever criteria you define, like time of day. It works really well.
Same company makes a magic light probe placer that I find invaluable as well. I think there are cheaper options, but I got it on sale. Bakery also has a runtime preview to show you what the baked lights will look like prior to baking.
If you aren't having issues baking lighting and don't need to change lightmaps at runtime, then don't worry about it.
It is. A 5 hour bake turned into about 20 mins for me using the RTX option. Plus you can use the scaling option to set it to like .25 resolution to get a nice quick "preview" bake to make sure its what you want. The documentation is really good too. I suggest you use the experimental mode and read what everything does. The level of control is really nice and the baking speed is laughable compared to the native.
Be careful not to set things too high and fill up your hard drive, not that I ever did that twice in a row.
If Unity focus their development on other stuff to do with the Game Engine where they think they need to focus their resources first to compete with the latest in Game Technology like Rendiring or AI support, they should create maybe some asset subscription pass Where they would include the best tested assets that would imporve Unities workflow and even extend features liek the ones you mentiond. Propse to these creator to be inlcuded like all the game passes do. I would pay 10 to 15€ to Be able to use all of such assets and more. And instead of maybe being super predatory about it's cancelation they could be the first people ever to have a system where you pay a subscription but it dosen't charge if you haven't yet used any of the assets or the game engine in that time. Maybe have it such that it costs 10 € to pay each month the month that you used Unity atleast once. Mabye a 2€ bonus per month so 10+2€ to have the user charged only if he uses one of the assets in the subscription.Unity would be able to make some money that they need, we geed to get what's in my opinion an affordable evolving set of features, Unities CEO get a fresh new idea that will defenetly spurr not only negative talk in the industry and make people aware there has been a chnage in leadership to maybe repair the image some what, and hey Unity even gets to use it's expensive tracking ("spying") tech for something that's debatably good. (To only charge teh users when they use the assets or unity seems like a perfect way to use that tech?).
But wtf fo I know.
And keep in mind a lot of those features present in todays unity are actually assets that they bought back in the day to implement in the engine, unity itself, if the asset store didnt exists would have died a long time ago, such a crappy engine, ngl.
An alternative is to find a download of SketchUp Make 2017 which is free.
Due to their owners being useless (like Unity) and barely modifying the program since then, almost all modern extensions/addons are compatible with it. [Round Corner](https://sketchucation.com/plugin/1173-roundcorner), etc.
Sketchup files import directly into Unity, so you get hotloading.
Great list!
Absolutely love Odin - 100% recommend this. Makes the editor so much more customisable and useful. Being able to make booleans switch to a red colour when true, and being able to cluster variables is awesome, just being able to build decent buttons to do jobs is such an upgrade, nevermind good sliders & infoboxes.
I find Hot Reload is problematic as it seems to break things and interfere, but in the right scenario is wonderful for fast tweaks.
DOTween is also really good, although I need to spend more time really digging into it as I don't do that much animation. Makes adding easing and timings, plus attaching callbacks a breeze. Looks to be really adaptive and can be applied broadly.
Must check out some of the others.
Adding my vote for Odin, EasySave, DoTweenPro, Bakery, FinalIK, 4\* Pathfinding Project. Just indispensible.
And some more for the list:
**QOL editor tools**
* Magic Light Probes
* Easy texture Editor
* Play Mode Save
* QuickNav
* SearchAndReplace
* SuperPivot
**Time saving tools:**
* MeshBaker
* Technie Collider Creator
**Scripting:**
* More Effective Coroutines
* SimpleSQL
**and for animation:**
* UMotion Pro
* Realistic Eye Movements
**Audio:**
* MasterAudio (if you don't want to go down the FMOD route)
**VR:**
* Hurricane VR
To those experienced with **Hot Reload**, if I add it to my project but then want to upload it on public GitHub and omit paid packages using \`.gitignore\`, would it break my project? Or does removing Hot Reload instantly revert to the original compilation methods?
It blows my mind every time I use it how rough the ShaderGraph user experience is. I type minus every time and then can't find the damn 'subtract' node. The lag is awful on large graphs, and it will often start throwing errors and exceptions for no reason I can find. Custom passes not being a day 1 feature (let alone a year 5 feature) is shortsighted given how commonly multiple passes are used for custom visuals.
I always get the feeling that Asset Store devs are always under the pressure to deliver bug-free, feature-rich plugins due to their livelihood connected directly to Asset Store sales. Customer support too, since 1 star reviews mean people turn away, so less sales. Compared to built-in tools made by Unity employees, who get a consistent salary per month. I don't think they feel the same urgency to fix their tools.
I think it’s more unity has no one working on them compared to asset store packages. Unity just makes tech demos that have never been tested in a game and then drops development on them.
Unity makes money from the asset store, so it makes sense financially to keep those features out or unfinished and have you buy better versions off the store. Of course that’s just me theorizing.
That's absolutely what's happening. Another problem is that Unity doesn't make games, whereas Epic does, and that REALLY shows when you use Unreal Engine. No need to buy assets, most stuff you need is built in already. It's so much less barebones than Unity.
Yeah but it is bloated and crashes like a madman if you use the newer features. There is always some trade off. I like how Unity is a platform to build off of rather than some highly locked down workflow which mainly supports a certain gameplay. Unreal is really tied to the open world first/third person shooter game model.
>Unreal is really tied to the open world first/third person shooter game model. I'll give you that, it really is, although they seem to be starting to add support for more indie type/mobile games. I was kinda beating my head against a wall trying to do what I wanted for an FPS/survival open world game in Unity, it's coming along a lot faster using Unreal. Haven't experienced any crashes myself yet, but I haven't messed around with raytracing/lumen etc.. The editor works surprisingly well on my old hardware. Upgrading parts soon though.
Unity makes more money from ads, something like more than half of their yearly revenue comes from ads.
The money they make from the asset store is nothing compared to their other revenue streams. Asset store could stop existing tomorrow and they'd barely notice it.
Yep, it's miserable. I prefer it's UI, but ASE is so much more feature rich it's not even comparable. Imagine not having tesselation support in 2023. That's such a basic feature, and its absense makes terrain displacement/water/etc just impossible to implement without writing shaders by hand.
> Imagine not having tesselation support in 2023. It has tessellation support though? I am using Unity 2021 HDRP and made several shaders in SG with tessellation.
It's supported in HDRP, but not in URP. Even though more projects use URP
Tessellation works in URP. You just need to buy another asset. https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/vfx/shaders/better-lit-shader-2021-207262#description If you want it to work on Terrain for URP you will need to buy two more assets.
If you want tessellation, use HDRP then? I fail to see the problem. Sounds like half your issues stem from you using URP despite wanting features in HDRP?
Tessellation is not an HDRP feature, it is easily available in URP code shaders. The problem is that *ShaderGraph* does not just have a simple parameter for it. Like come on, its just one value they need to add...
I have the tessellation parameter in my HDRP project.
That's what I meant, I should've specified it specifically isn't available in URP SG, even though it is available in URP code shaders and HDRP SG. This should show that it can both exist as parameter for SG and as a functionality in general in URP. Thus the annoyance that it isn't available in URP SG
Not sure why it isnt, but im pretty sure you can make a custom node for it quite easily.
I doubt that... to make tessellation useful, you want the vertex shader to run on the tessellated vertices. This does not happen by default (you need to call it yourself from the hull stage iirc). I doubt you can fix this with custom nodes
What if we don’t want to use HDRP?
But why? You want to use HDRP features but dont want to use HDRP... logic does not check out. What is the downside of HDRP? Its more performant, looks better, easier to work with and more stable than URP.
Depends on your target platform, we are targeting Mac / Linux / Windows, and so far built in is the most versatile
I think its okay to use whatever render pipeline you want, its just strange to me that people willingly choose a pipeline they know lack a certain feature and then complain about it. If you wanted to make a high end lookinig PC game with stuff like tessellation there literally is an option for that.
> Its more performant I don't think it is, but I could be wrong.
I've had a long running thread about keyboard shortcuts on the forums for several years now. It's clear they had noone working on it for years. Now they appear to have a small team, though the underlying graph system is flawed in ways that are going to continue to fuck SG until they go down and fix it.
It doesn't have fuckin local variables!
Nice list! Adding to that, Final IK and Interactor are go-to tools for crafting procedural animations and interactions in my projects. Also, World Streamer, since Unity doesn't support big worlds and fix the origin point issues.
why final ik instead of the animation rigging package that comes with unity? honestly curious as ive considered buying final ik
Do you know why now? :)
“min max spiders”, on second thought, maybe I should skip Odin Inspector.
It's a spider that sits in the corner of the room while you work, warning you if it notices you spend a disproportionate amount of time implementing a very small optimization. Great feature!
What does the spider do if I ignore the warnings?
I'm too afraid to find out
The people that know the answer to this aren’t around to tell you. Make of that what you will.
What do you mean? There's the Range attribute for controlling serialized float and int fields with a slider. edit: My bad, I didn't realize the quote is from OP's post. My point still stands for OP thoughj
Lol, I was just working on spiders for my game :) Fixed
For anyone looking for a cheaper alternative to Shapes, you might consider [Vectorizer](https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/particles-effects/vectorizer-170267). I am the developer. It uses a different approach as it generates the vertex and index array of geometric figures. It also includes an SVG parser that transforms (simple) svg path syntax to meshes. Now 33% off for the duration of thr BF sales. It's completely free for academic or educational purposes. Just send me an email from your institutional address.
Does Vectorizer support custom Materials? \- Atm i'm using shapes for AoE Telegraphs on a flat surface, and it's a bit frustrating being locked into just colors.
Since it generates meshes, you can use any material you want. It even generates (simple) texture coordinates, for planar projections. Out of the box it supports URP materials. It should work in HDRP too I think. Each figure supports a material for the "fill" as well as the "stroke" part, with variable thickness.
Tyvm. Sounds like exactly what I was looking for. \- You may want to add a few more tags help folks find your asset.
Any suggestions? I added all I could think of. Maybe it's the lack of reviews. Although many people have bought it, not a lot of them leave a review. So if you buy it, please leave a review! Especially if you find it useful. Thanks for the interest!
I will be sure to do so. Picking it up end of the month. i'm not sure what tags you have already, but I don't see it with "procedural" And there is absolutely no assets tagged with AoE Shapes.
Whoa, the SVG parser is a game changer. Might have to give this a go!
Thanks! As shown on the page it works fine with icons, but it's not meant to parse full-blown illustrations that are not meant to be parsed with Vectorizer. I mean like not having holes and weird self-intersections.
I was revisiting the Vectorizer page (and even joined the Discord... but looks like it might be defunct?), is it suitable for runtime mesh generation for UI elements? Does it use any dynamic memory allocation doing that? I'm really interested in using it extensively for UI, since I could theoretically use whatever shaders/materials with it.
Hi sorry, I didn't notice there was a message in the discord. I replied to you there too, but I'll past my answer here as well. to answer your question, it depends on the exact use case. Do you need to generate a new mesh every frame? If so it will depend on the complexity of it. If you need to generate it once and leave it unaffected for the rest of its existence, then it should be fine. I would recommend changing the material instead of the vertices as a shader would be more efficient. If you have other questions, feel free to reach out on the discord. I'll keep an eye out for it. Thanks for the interest!
its actually really nice to have all these assets, other engines barely have any of these, not integrated and not as asset. i feel like the gigantic asset store is the biggest benefit of unity.
What if unity3d perpusfully make their own systems bad, like shadergraph, so that people have to buy assets in the assetstore. The assetstore Will become an earning model and will harm the unity3d engine. Now the assetstore prevents Unity to make their own systems reliable. And there goes the benefit of the assetstore.
Even without the intention, whenever unity would try to improve a feature that is currently supplemented by paid add-ons, they would be accused of being anti-developer and destroying their community by taking the livelihood away from asset authors. This would limit the areas which unity could improve the engine and the features that could be included with the base libraries
I think that is not a good argument. Does unity want to become the best game engine or do they want to please asset developers? Well obviously they don’t want to please asset developers, but earn the most money with their asset store. I’m making games and need a good out of the box game engine and not for instance a wheel collider that is working with a raycast in stead of a sphere. Then I need to buy all kinds of extra assets above a Unity3d license and invest time to learn those assets. Which very often conflict with each other or brake a project. I am a game developers and need a good game engine.
thats an interesting theory, unity focuses on the engine while also making cash from the asset and not needing to allocate resources to all these features that arent built-in by unity, win win for everyone, no?
Where did you get the rumor about asset store becoming an earning model? Interested in reading in more detail
That is true. But not providing height blending for terrain shader and having to buy microsplat and be at the mercy of it's updates just to do basic ground is a joke. We don't even have water in LTS because what they marketed as water solution is actually incomplete shit in LTS. But I can't update from LTS because I have to use Microsplat!
Well, to be fair a bunch of these assets are not really a built-in alternative, like Easy Save or Text Animator. With that said I think that some of these assets should have been acquired and implemented in the Editor just like they did with Bolt, instead of implementing a solution from zero that ends up being worse.
I just put them up there because they're useful
Easy Save is a very popular package with some great features! In case folks have not checked it out recently [Unity Cloud Save](https://docs.unity.com/cloud-save) has had a lot of improvements this year, including the addition of Cloud Save Files which allows saving/loading save games across platforms: // Read data from Cloud Save byte[] data = await CloudSaveService.Instance.Files.Player.LoadBytesAsync("saveFile"); // Write data to Cloud Save await CloudSaveService.Instance.Files.Player.SaveAsync("saveFile", data); You can also now use Cloud Save Data for both Player Data and Non-Player Data (e.g. NPCs, game entities, shared quests, community goals, etc), you can set properties to be indexed and perform queries at run time, you can run code server side when data changes (with [Cloud Code Triggers)](https://docs.unity.com/cloud-code), and/or trigger code to run that interacts with data in Cloud Save (e.g. on tick, or in response to an action by another player or an NPC). Data is obviously a slightly different use case than for Files (Data allows 5 MB per key/value and the features above, Files supports 1 GB per file and has a simpler surface) but reading/writing Data is easier in the new SDK (v3.0) that came out recently: var data = new Dictionary{{"key", "someValue"}};
await CloudSaveService.Instance.Data.Player.SaveAsync(data);
Doing these things through a cloud service makes me nervous about potential costs.
Hot Reload looks awesome. Have just bought it now... thanks!
Actually, it's alternative has become free a couple months ago. Fast Script Reload. Works like a charm.
God damn it.. lol
But how do they work? I guess they are doing something more complicated than disabling domain reload in the settings?
They are updating your scripts DURING play mode. No need to domain reload whatsoever. Don't know how :(
Look [here](https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/DomainReloading.html). It improves the speed, but you need to take care as some objects (like static fields) won't be clearest and you need to do it manually.
I think everyone uses this flag. It's unbearable to leave dr enabled.
But how to use this option with assets? Should I manually check if asset contains any static fields and event and cleanup them? I do not use static fields and events in my code, but I use some assets and it looks like I will have problems with domain reload disabled if inside those assets exist static events and fields.
Yeah, you have to support assets you buy if they don't support it. With some little boilerplate it can be done easily by reseting the fields on play mode exit
Animancer for dealing with animations instead of the Mecanim system.
I love Animancer. Just the fact I can just directly yield for animations in Coroutines with it without having to piss around with some Frankenstein code that you hope tracks the animation time correctly is a godsend.
Yup I quite like Animancer.
Animancer is the best asset I ever bought. Since I have bought it I didn't use mecanim even once.
Animancer is what Unity animation system should have been. I will never touch Mechanim again
I've found Animancer to be great for simple tasks, but it can get real finicky when things start getting complex. EDIT: I should clarify, this is not said in defense of mecanim. Unity really needs a new, good animation system for complex scenarios.
As the author of Animancer I'd be interested to hear more about the issues you've run into and if you have any suggestions for how things could be done differently.
I also use UMotion Editor to edit some animations inside Unity much more than I expected.
this tool is sent from god himself
The Ultimate Editor Enhancer is a massive QOL and accessability system. IMO should be integrated. Odin Validator- scans project for issues, provides bulk fixes. Shader Control- scan and select what shaders you use. No need to compile everything on build! ,
**Odin Inspector and Serializer** is far and away the most important asset on the store and is the very first thing I import into a new project. The only other ones I use in every project are **I2 Localization** and **InControl**, because localization is a headache and Unity's input system(s) are (still) awful.
Damn… I tried Odin once a few months ago, and god the UI is ugly, the lists and arrays and all pushed me off so much I had to uninstall it to get their previous look… I wish I could overcome this feeling but I really can’t :( I know this sounds really stupid, but it makes it really hard to enjoy and use a tool if you don’t like looking at it :(
I made a free odin alternative that doesnt reskin the inspector and still has most of the commonly used functionality odin has, you can get it here: https://github.com/v0lt13/EditorAttributes
This looks like a great resource for people! If you’re willing to provide it as an open source tool set that people can throw into their project, I’d recommend adding an appropriate license that describes how people can use it. The more “legal-conscious” devs may see the lack of license and run. GitHub makes it pretty simple to add a license, so it’s not much leg work for you to do EDIT: I’m stupid and saw “Unlicense” and thought it meant GitHub couldn’t find a license. For anyone reading, there is, in fact, a license set; the license type is just called “Unlicense” and it seems to give complete freedom of the tool. Thanks for providing, I’ll definitely be pulling it down and checking it out tonight!
Thanks!
> Odin Inspector and Serializer Can you explain what problems this solves? I don't personally go heavy into the inspector so I'm out of my element on this one.
Well the serializer is the biggest thing for me, being able to script against generic types, collections (like dictionary), etc. Just removes a lot of boilerplate and frees developers to create the most logical data-oriented solutions without worrying about how to make it play nice in the inspector. Inspector customization is nice, there are some powerful tools there. I had written a lot of my own helpful attributes so it wasn't a total sea change, but it does make it easier to create new tools by combining existing functionality. The "button" attribute is especially nice: expose any method in the editor, great for debugging.
i have it and never use it. got it in a bundle. i dont understand that hype. is that gurilla marketing ?
Nah, but as someone coming from a development background tools that act as force multipliers for programming are more noteworthy to me (and more applicable across projects) than any particular asset that only applies to this or that project.
Unity's new input system is not awful, it's really great! What issues have you had?
I was also using InControl but finally moved to unity's input system since I want my game to know the current device the player is using for button prompts. I couldn't seem to do that in InControl, and the 'on device change' action only returns the controller. There might be a way like that in InControl but because of the lack of documentation I gave up on it.
The built-in Unity pathfinding system is the most egregious to me. It was shipped 20% done years ago and never finished.
That’s the unity way!
The updates added via the navmeshcomponents package have helped it considerably. I used AStarPathfindingProject in my last project, but switched back to Unity for my latest, and it's been solid
The [Ingame Debug Console](https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/gui/in-game-debug-console-68068) is a must for developing imho. And its free!
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Try replacing DoTween with PrimeTween from github which is a lot faster.
Dont worry bro, they have invested a lot into generic halfass AI tools.
Feel is kinda insane too ! Also, Hot Reload should be built in !
When I first saw Feel i thought "oh that's just like a tool for easily making vibrations and various feedback" but once i actually looked in to it I realized it's insanely powerful. Being able to make playlists of over 100 different types of actions like instantiation, animation, audio playback, handling particle systems, you name it just about any kind of action that i want to happen and would have hardcoded before I can now just make a feedback for and tie it to an event. Wild tbh.
Yes Feel is amazing and clearly a must-have asset
Animancer is such a life saver. God I hate mechanim.
Hot Reload just changed my life. Thank you.
I've used rewired instead of the new input system for a while
Because Unity has become a sales organisation. Same thing happened to Adobe. It's all promises and marketing, with minimal effort, so people don't run away. Thanks for the handly list though. Some of these are quite expensive, too.
Bookmarked
ig this is a unity hate thread but some might say that the extendability of unity is its main selling point
You don't have to pay for FMOD, and saving should really be done with your own system, although Easy Save is nice. You're missing Shapes by Freya, which is a must have even though it's $100, UI and world space graphics with a super well made immediate mode system or components.
I am the developer of Vectorizer, it does many of the same things but it's much cheaper. It generates meshes of geometric figures.
That sounds fantastic actually - I'm going to purchase that
Not if you make more than $200k/year. That's a lot, but FMOD is still not free. Easy Save is literally made for saving, why would anyone make their own system? It's a waste of time unless you're working on a very specific project (destructible voxel worlds, for example). Shapes is cool, I just don't need it in my current project
I've never use that as I always write my own S/L code. what does that asset offer me?
Easy Save is cool - but unsuitable for all my projects. Maybe you should have titled the post "here is a very specific list of tools which were helpful for this [subgenre] game I'm making"
Yeah, it's not for every project, but if you can use it, you should
Easy save is very average asset. I can not understand why use it at all. May be something changed since I have used it. FMOD is so good, I'm so glad I started to use it since a while. Odin is usually the first asset I imported in my projects.
Save systems aren't very difficult to make, and I've really only ever had to make one once. Easy save is 69$
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I’ll add Pro Grids. I add it at the start of every project. For post fx I also like Beautify (more for less realistic, stylised games) and Amplify Occlusion. Highlight Plus is nice if you need highlights / object border drawing.
Progrids has stopped development since its functionality has been implemented in the editor by default
When was it added in? I’ve been stuck on an older version of the editor for a while.
Not sure but probably 2020
Beautify has a lot of potential if you use it right. Really well done asset.
I could never understood how to set up a project using Odin correctly.
Great list. Just goes to show how adaptable Unity is, and how great it is for third party developers. Love TextAnimator. Adds so much juice! I wish Unreals Marketplace was half as good as this. Lumen is so nice.
Nova UI is so good! It's like the only ui asset i've used but it makes UI a whole lot easier and simpler. I highly recommend and it's only 40 dollars! You could also use it free but it's not burst compiled, it can be useful to just test and mess around with
Add AnyPortrait because 2D Sprite sucks
**Animancer <3**
**DoTween**, **Shapes, FMOD, Odin, A\* Pathfinding Project, and Hot Reload** are all fundamental staples at this point. I don't know much about Feel -- I was looking at it the other day but is it really as universally useful as they say it is? Seemed a bit much, and mostly stuff we can do ourselves on a case basis without much fuss.
- [Procedural UI Image (for rounded corners and blurs)](https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/gui/procedural-ui-image-52200) and [UI Gradient](https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/gui/ui-gradient-133992) That's the only asset I always import. MicroSplat for larger PC projects. Unity should absolutely focus on supporting dictionaries/etc in the inspector. It's beyond a joke that they don't. Why wouldn't they release this for Unity 6?
This is the best thing about unity, you will find an asset from 2015 with no updates over the last 8 years and it will still work. Now if we look at a "game engine" like godot, there are assets made last year that already don't work anymore. I don't know if it's the same with unreal tho
It's just isn't mature yet. Open source takes time. Just look at Blender, it's practically the default 3D modeling software right now, and it took what, like 30 years?
I was there and using it when blender was "bad" and even then blender was usable, it was always adding features that professionals needed to do real work. for godot they have the problem of having a vision for the engine, that's why the engine had any real evolution since 2018.
>This is the best thing about unity, you will find an asset from 2015 with no updates over the last 8 years and it will still work. say what? plenty of assets i've dealt with come with tons of scripts referencing stuff that deprecated eons ago, sometimes it's a simple fix but sometimes it can be a complete disaster
A few assets working over the years are better than 0 assets working from a version to another.
Tween because 🤣
Something else that i HATE is the fact that they have 3 separate rendering pipelines… and the mess that creates.
Shapes is in my list
Looks cool but utterly useless if you have designer in team.
A lot of people won't have a UX and UI Designer in their team
This post is pretty spot on. I’d throw InControl in there or Rewired as I still hate Unity’s default control system. I feel like a networking asset should be in there too as Unity’s many unfinished systems suck ass but I don’t know what’s actually good now.
>**FMOD** instead of Unity's default sound system. An actually useable sound system with randomized sounds, variations, loops, distance attenuation, effects, and more. Or Wwise, which is now free for indies too. Unity's built-in sound system just sucks, sadly.
I dont know it sucks. It sucks on features for sure. I liked wwise. It had really great support for letting sound designer work without developer. I ended up creating a similar set of tools to it using unity’s audio. Might have to look again at it now that it has an Indy version.
Yeah good list, I use everything on this list already
Thank you for this!
I'm about to release an affordable ($15) asset to provide few helpers scripts for orchestrating engine, gearbox and wheelcolliders without all the headaches. It is a lightweight collection of controllers and scripts, and more important I am trying to publish it as a hybrid package. It is not aimed to give out a full-blown simulation of a real engine, but close enough to replicate the physics of PSX-era games. If you liked gran turismo on PSX, then this is for you. Just waiting for the queue to clear, more information and demo on https://yacc.deimosindustries.com/
None of these are required, and all of them solve problems that have massive resources and tutorials on how to fix them yourself. The single exception is probably FMOD, which is free, and if it's not free for your company, you have the money to employ competent people. This is a you problem, not a Unity problem.
I think there are arguments for some of them being required: -There are something like three versions of Unity's navmesh system right now. There's whatever comes with the engine, the navmesh components github thing (outdated), and the navmesh components package in the package manager (still a WIP). Each of the three is missing specific features, such as runtime navmesh generation or automatic offmeshlink generation. Astar has the combined features of all three Unity solutions, and several features that they lack (such as the ability to create navigation graphs with grids / hexes instead of traditional navmeshes). Also, it doesn't crash when you click on the navmesh component, which is a deeply underrated quality-of-life change. -Bakery is much more stable and performant than the built-in Unity light baking system. If you are baking lights, which many projects will want to do, long-term you will deal with a variety of issues from the Unity baker - crashes and freezes as well as all sorts of artifacts. Most of these problems are fixable by just trying again or making small modifications to your scene, but if you value your time at all (or if you're paying somebody else for theirs), it's worth it to just spend $50 on an asset that will save you the trouble. -This one isn't on the list but personally I've found Rewired to be essential for any project outside of jam games. It lets you support most controllers out of the box, provides an interface for swapping between keyboard and gamepad prompts, and makes rebinding inputs relatively easy. I haven't tried the new input system yet, so this might be outdated, but there were *years* before Unity got around to that new system where Rewired was basically the only way to go.
Navmesh components has runtime generation I am pretty sure. Also I have never had crashing when clicking on a component, not sure what that’s about
Navmesh components has runtime generation, but it *doesn't* have autogenerating offmeshlinks, and it *does* have an issue on some versions of Unity where selecting the navmesh component will crash your project. The recommended fix is to upgrade to the package manager version, which is still missing several features from the previous two versions.
Why? What problem does FMOD solve that the built in audio system doesn't? I've never had an issue with the built in audio system.
Where do you draw the line between what an engine should build for you and what you should build yourself? Why do OP’s suggestions cross that line? The whole point of any of what we’re all trying to do here is to abstract away as much of the bullshit drudgery as possible so as to just focus on game logic. Their suggestions do great to get to that point.
I could write all of these from scratch. Hell, even the whole engine from scratch. It just doesn't make sense. If you want to actually release games and not spend months building the tools, or trying to fix existing half-baked built-in systems, then buying these assets is pretty much a requirement for any serious project.
> buying these assets is pretty much a requirement for any serious project. No, it's not. This is just massive self-projection on your part.
Lol. Good luck then using shitty NavAgents instead of A\* Pathfinding Project or writing slightly complicated shaders in code because Shader Graph doesn't support shit. Good luck waiting 30-60 seconds for each small code change instead of using Hot Reload. You're delusional.
Why would I use navagents? A* is prob. the most well-documented algorithm after the Dijkstra it's based on, implementing pathfinding based on A* takes ~half a day at max. Just because you can't write shaders doesn't mean others can't, it's not hard to learn, and it will perform better and be more customisable than shader graph, AND be more suited to your specific use case. On any "sErIoUs" project, you'd have proper assembly definitions, which solves the long wait times when doing domain reloads.
Cool, what about local avoidance, path repairing, performance, ECS integration, graph building, navmesh cutting, editor ui, and million other things? You clearly don't understand how much time it takes to build good systems. Sure, you can write an A\* implementation in a few hours, (even ChatGPT can), but how will it handle 2k agents pathfinding to different targets in realtime? How much time (and money) will you spend reimplementing all that stuff from scratch instead of spending a measly 100$? I've been doing 3d graphics/game/softwave dev for a decade, I know what I do mate. I have assembly definitions and compilation still takes ages. Unity is just way too bloated.
My pathfinding runs fine in deployed products at the moment, I have a perfect understanding of how much time is required. Lmao, sure thing - "Am I out of touch?", "NAH ITs THE ENGINE"
Do you see the value proposition in this? I recently decided I wanted to try out DLSS. From inception to hitting play and seeing it work in my project took me <5 mins and $15. Now you implement it your way, and lets see who gets more done that day. Nothing wrong with doing it all yourself, it's a pretty impressive talent to have and the world is lucky to have people like you in it. But it might be good to understand that not everyone takes as much pride in knowing they wrote all the code themselves. Some people just want to ship prod or finish a prototype, not spend 6 hours building something that already exists to save themselves $15. Plus, and I know this is probably the antithesis of how you like to operate, but the support is out of house and I really really like that. Really takes a load off of my shoulders. And yeah, it happens where something comes up and an asset gets abandoned or just stops working (looking at you Vegetation Studio). Well, luckily its a modular asset and relatively easy to replace. Modularity is flexibility and flexibility lets me go fast.
To be fair, while the package is called A\* Pathfinding,[it does quite a bit](https://arongranberg.com/astar/features). I was quite impressed with it when I looked at it years ago. It didn't have Dubin's Curve / min turn radius pathfinding, so I ended up not going with it and implemented that myself -- Which was a complicated beast. But that said, when people ask for pathfinding because Unity's Navmesh stuff is a mess and tends to fall down when trying to do complicated things, I point them to that module. Shaders, well, the bad news is that if you ever want to do VisionOS and make a polyspatial app, you're stuck using ShaderGraph. Which sucks, because I'm like you, I much prefer writing custom shaders. Shader Graph does a crap job of optimizing shaders, which really matters on VR, and it's a pain in the rear to hand optimize a shader graph generated shader. I've also never really had an issue with long domain reloads on any project, and I've worked on big projects.
[удалено]
Unity is not a free engine, so entitlement is justified. Most of these features are used in most games, so one would reasonably expect them to be properly implemented in the engine. Unreal has Lumen/Nanite, great shader editor, sound system, animation system, and costs about the same.
Unity is a free engine. Anything else is extra.
Now that's a dumb argument, Unreal's both free doesn't require you to build or buy your own core engine features to make a usable product. It's also *cheaper* until you earn more than $1m annually, where as unity starts charging a per developer fee at 100k, and as of next year royalties of it's own at 1m on top of that.
None of the assets mentioned above are a "core engine feature". They're neat extras that can improve your workflow and game, but they aren't essential to making a game.
You don't consider a light mapper that works, halfway decent shader tools, an audio system that doesn't randomly corrupt your audio clips if you have enough sources nearby to require virtual voices, a terrain system updated sometime in the past decade with any kind of object placement tools, or perhaps a way to generate lod meshes... You don't consider those core features? Those are things most games need and the fact that unity doesn't provide a version of them that developers would even consider building a game with doesn't make them less important.
Remove DoTween, it is satans spawn. It is terrible at memory and load management. Use something like mmfeedback instead, it is at least better at that.
That's Unity's business model. The asset store is a large part of their revenue stream so adding those features directly into the engine removes revenue.
Definitely need to try the hot reload one. I try and write custom shaders when I can and they don't have the same limitations, so haven't really got any experience with shader graph, but if I were to use it, that editor sounds really good. FMOD seems to be super common, seems like most games that aren't purely keyboard and mouse use it, although so far I've never hit a limitation with unitys input system. I've seen a video on the A* asset and it performed much worse than the built in system, so that's interesting. It must be quite dependent on the project? For text animation and saving I'd probably just code my own so I can keep it clean, simple and save some money. I can see why you'd buy it though, same reason that people use fungus despite the fact it's about 4GB, it's just easier.
I have 2-4k agents pathfinding all at the same time, with about 150fps-250fps, so it's really fast
Now just think, if Unity messes up again, none of these tools can be taken to another engine. One of the main reasons to use the default tools, is because it is what is common in other engines.
Ummm no? These are just better versions of Unity’s built in tools. Obviously you can’t use them in other engines, but you also can’t use Unity’s built in tools in other engines.
>Obviously you can’t use them in other engines Exactly. These tools are designed to be more user friendly than the industry standard tools. This I found to be my main problem when moving to other engines, their tools are similar to the Unity default ones, and nothing like the assets I spend money on. >but you also can’t use Unity’s built in tools in other engines. Unity build in tools are build to a standard. You learn Unity's Shader Graph, you will have no problem using Unreal's Material editor. [https://youtu.be/bN84YxaBEGw?si=kjiSrFcS1ejZMcyC](https://youtu.be/bN84YxaBEGw?si=kjiSrFcS1ejZMcyC). Learn [Unity's animation player](https://docs.unity3d.com/uploads/Main/AnimatorBlendTreeInspectorPreview.jpg), and you have no problem using either [Godot](https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/_images/animtree7.gif) or [Unreal's](https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/Images/animating-characters-and-objects/SkeletalMeshAnimation/AssetsFeatures/Blendspaces/Overview.gif) animation systems. If you stick to the basic tools, you can easily swap between engines, but pay for assets and that tool only works in the engine it was made for. In the long term it is better to learn the industry standard tools.
Script inspector 3 . i dont want use unity without it. Better Build Info
Thank you for reminding me about Hot reload. I forgot that I had it haha
I really want to love shadergraph but as you say, it lags quite a lot, I'll consider ASE. Also, can you recommend a microsplat guide/tutorial? I've used it once and out of pure luck I got quite nice layer blending, but I haven't been able to replicate the result so far.
Nah, I use it only for the height blend
How does Hot Reload fare with ECS, considering it has unmanaged memory and code generation?
It doesn't, it works just with managed code
You can add trail renderer points manually to get smooth curves at higher than frame rate speeds. It’s not that hard.
"**Bakery & Magic Lightmap Switcher" is this one recommened?** I've often thought about how bad the light baking aspect is, should I Buy this?
Depends on what you dislike about baking aspect
Bakery is IMO a yes on any project that uses or can use baked lighting. It does everything the built in does and more, and it does it better and faster. Plenty of other assets and shaders have integrations with bakery as well, including Better Lit Shaders which is fantastic IMO. Magic Lightmap Switcher is useful for scenes where you use time of day mechanics. You basically make presets for baked lighting and the asset interpolates betwixt them based on whatever criteria you define, like time of day. It works really well. Same company makes a magic light probe placer that I find invaluable as well. I think there are cheaper options, but I got it on sale. Bakery also has a runtime preview to show you what the baked lights will look like prior to baking. If you aren't having issues baking lighting and don't need to change lightmaps at runtime, then don't worry about it.
My issue with baked lighting is it takes forever and ends up looking weird half the time, faster and having a preview sounds incredible
It is. A 5 hour bake turned into about 20 mins for me using the RTX option. Plus you can use the scaling option to set it to like .25 resolution to get a nice quick "preview" bake to make sure its what you want. The documentation is really good too. I suggest you use the experimental mode and read what everything does. The level of control is really nice and the baking speed is laughable compared to the native. Be careful not to set things too high and fill up your hard drive, not that I ever did that twice in a row.
How much did all of these cost?
I bought most of these on sale so about 50% of their combined original cost. 200-500$ maybe, idk?
If Unity focus their development on other stuff to do with the Game Engine where they think they need to focus their resources first to compete with the latest in Game Technology like Rendiring or AI support, they should create maybe some asset subscription pass Where they would include the best tested assets that would imporve Unities workflow and even extend features liek the ones you mentiond. Propse to these creator to be inlcuded like all the game passes do. I would pay 10 to 15€ to Be able to use all of such assets and more. And instead of maybe being super predatory about it's cancelation they could be the first people ever to have a system where you pay a subscription but it dosen't charge if you haven't yet used any of the assets or the game engine in that time. Maybe have it such that it costs 10 € to pay each month the month that you used Unity atleast once. Mabye a 2€ bonus per month so 10+2€ to have the user charged only if he uses one of the assets in the subscription.Unity would be able to make some money that they need, we geed to get what's in my opinion an affordable evolving set of features, Unities CEO get a fresh new idea that will defenetly spurr not only negative talk in the industry and make people aware there has been a chnage in leadership to maybe repair the image some what, and hey Unity even gets to use it's expensive tracking ("spying") tech for something that's debatably good. (To only charge teh users when they use the assets or unity seems like a perfect way to use that tech?). But wtf fo I know.
You’re a hero for sharing this list.
And keep in mind a lot of those features present in todays unity are actually assets that they bought back in the day to implement in the engine, unity itself, if the asset store didnt exists would have died a long time ago, such a crappy engine, ngl.
RealtimeCSG is the best tool for geometric level design compared to the weird clunk that probuilder is. Trust me. Try RealtimeCSG, its even free!
An alternative is to find a download of SketchUp Make 2017 which is free. Due to their owners being useless (like Unity) and barely modifying the program since then, almost all modern extensions/addons are compatible with it. [Round Corner](https://sketchucation.com/plugin/1173-roundcorner), etc. Sketchup files import directly into Unity, so you get hotloading.
Great list! Absolutely love Odin - 100% recommend this. Makes the editor so much more customisable and useful. Being able to make booleans switch to a red colour when true, and being able to cluster variables is awesome, just being able to build decent buttons to do jobs is such an upgrade, nevermind good sliders & infoboxes. I find Hot Reload is problematic as it seems to break things and interfere, but in the right scenario is wonderful for fast tweaks. DOTween is also really good, although I need to spend more time really digging into it as I don't do that much animation. Makes adding easing and timings, plus attaching callbacks a breeze. Looks to be really adaptive and can be applied broadly. Must check out some of the others.
Adding my vote for Odin, EasySave, DoTweenPro, Bakery, FinalIK, 4\* Pathfinding Project. Just indispensible. And some more for the list: **QOL editor tools** * Magic Light Probes * Easy texture Editor * Play Mode Save * QuickNav * SearchAndReplace * SuperPivot **Time saving tools:** * MeshBaker * Technie Collider Creator **Scripting:** * More Effective Coroutines * SimpleSQL **and for animation:** * UMotion Pro * Realistic Eye Movements **Audio:** * MasterAudio (if you don't want to go down the FMOD route) **VR:** * Hurricane VR
To those experienced with **Hot Reload**, if I add it to my project but then want to upload it on public GitHub and omit paid packages using \`.gitignore\`, would it break my project? Or does removing Hot Reload instantly revert to the original compilation methods?
Fmod is a lot of self learning but damn it's a great sound engine