Unity 2017 is out, performance, cinematography and more

I'm curious about the time line for moving to Unity 2017.

If particular interest to me is the new cinematography tools. The devs have said that they really have a hard time moving camera during npc dialog.

New features in Unity let it automatically adjust to keep everyone on frame, switch cameras if something unexpected ruins the shot, and more.

"Cinemachine is an advanced camera system that enables you to compose your shots like a movie director from within Unity, without any code, and ushers in the era of procedural cinematography."

 

They JUST got up to speed with 5.6

I don't want to piss on the dev team more than I really have to but, while Cinemachine would prove useful for them, what they really need to spice things up is actually have animated set pieces for the story elements of the quests. That's most likely a budget limitation, though.

What I'd want them to do eventually is set it up so that dialogue like "...That tower over there..." would actually show us whatever tower the NPC is talking about; instead of looking at a close up of the NPC's emote-less face.

I also want to point out that procedural generation doesn't necessarily translate to "on the fly"; it just means that a computer can set it up instead of a human... it doesn't mean that your view won't suddenly stop being blocked by opened doors or whatever because those things are being moved in a live environment. Unity's "Real-time Global Illumination" isn't computed at run-time, for example. That's the case for any existing graphics engine out there.

A CameraAI that works at run-time would be CPU intensive. SotA can't afford that performance hit just yet.