Unity3D working on SDL, Wayland and Mir support

You should also include: https://twitter.com/natosha_bard/status/730147691372646401

You should also include: https://twitter.com/natosha_bard/status/730147691372646401

Yeah, that was supposed to be in, I accidentally duplicated one. Fixed.

Nice news! More comfortable and efficiency are the developping tools on Linux, more developpers will develop on this platform.


Last edited by legluondunet on 11 May 2016 at 11:51 am UTC

They should also stop collecting user data without their explicit consent.
Hopefully you guys haven't forgotten. :)
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/unity3d-games-phone-home-with-details-of-your-hardware-software.4452


Last edited by devland on 11 May 2016 at 12:06 pm UTC

What is the difference between SDL and X11?

What is the difference between SDL and X11?

One is a complete windowing system that is based around a 20-something year old design (x11), one is a toolkit that can generate windows and handle input for multiple windowing systems and is substantial more modern in it's design (sdl)

What is the difference between SDL and X11?

SDL in an abstraction layer with multiple backends. It provides access to audio, keyboard, mouse, joystick, and graphics hardware. X11 is a windowing system that functions as a backend for SDL, but also can be used directly. They are moving away from using X11 directly to SDL abstraction, which allows it to work on other backends such as Wayland.

I especially hope that SDL itself will profit from it (bugfixes/performance wise). It it in my opinion still not very good. For example even Trine 1 is unplayable even on lowest settings (extremly ugly) on my intel laptop (<10 fps), which should not be the case for such a simple sidescroller imho.
Not sure if it is good for a game engine to put a additional layer between it and the system in general, but for unity I personally dont care much as long as it works better than before.

But if I'm not mistaken none of the current distributions is using any of the new display servers as a default yet. I hoped at least that Fedora 24 will use Wayland as a default, but unfortunatly it's still too unstable. Everything goes soooo slow.

What is the difference between SDL and X11?

One is a complete windowing system that is based around a 20-something year old design (x11), one is a toolkit that can generate windows and handle input for multiple windowing systems and is substantial more modern in it's design (sdl)

That means, that SDL is much better then X11?

I especially hope that SDL itself will profit from it (bugfixes/performance wise). It it in my opinion still not very good. For example even Trine 1 is unplayable even on lowest settings (extremly ugly) on my intel laptop (<10 fps), which should not be the case for such a simple sidescroller imho.
Not sure if it is good for a game engine to put a additional layer between it and the system in general, but for unity I personally dont care much as long as it works better than before.

A games performance has little to do with using SDL.

Wondering about performance though which already seems to be still lacking a bit behind Unity's DX implementation. Would have expected it to be even lower then when "directly" talking to the windowing system (though I actually thought it would more or less talk directly to some OpenGL stuff?) instead of having SDL as an additional layer in between?

Wondering about performance though which already seems to be still lacking a bit behind Unity's DX implementation. Would have expected it to be even lower then when "directly" talking to the windowing system (though I actually thought it would more or less talk directly to some OpenGL stuff?) instead of having SDL as an additional layer in between?

It has practically no effect on performance. It has more effect on system stability and usability. Most of the performance is stilt in hands of those who writes OpenGL implementation.

What is the difference between SDL and X11?

One is a complete windowing system that is based around a 20-something year old design (x11), one is a toolkit that can generate windows and handle input for multiple windowing systems and is substantial more modern in it's design (sdl)

That means, that SDL is much better then X11?

SDL and X11 aren't competing projects. As has been mentioned SDL sits at a higher level of abstraction. SDL is one way of using, among others, X11. This means that Unity will more easily support various new technologies. It is up to the developers of SDL to support stuff like X11, Wayland, Mir, etc. So that if SDL adds supports for things like that, then the developers at Unity don't have to worry about that.

Changing the method of window handling should not influence performance -- it is just a way of getting information from the display server (like X11(...)) where in the computer memory you should be creating images to be presented in your window and what format should it be in (of course it is very simplified definition :) ).

But if I'm not mistaken none of the current distributions is using any of the new display servers as a default yet. I hoped at least that Fedora 24 will use Wayland as a default, but unfortunatly it's still too unstable. Everything goes soooo slow.

You, sir/madam, need to read up a little bit. Gnome 3 on Wayland is perfectly stable and perfectly usable for most use cases. It not being the default in Fedora is because there are a few things that aren't quite at parity with the X11 version of Gnome 3. Remote desktop and the on-screen keyboard are the major ones, but the list also includes things such as better handling of mice and some Mutter specific code changes

I especially hope that SDL itself will profit from it (bugfixes/performance wise). It it in my opinion still not very good. For example even Trine 1 is unplayable even on lowest settings (extremly ugly) on my intel laptop (<10 fps), which should not be the case for such a simple sidescroller imho.
Not sure if it is good for a game engine to put a additional layer between it and the system in general, but for unity I personally dont care much as long as it works better than before.

I think the Trine games are problematic with OpenSource drivers. I have a Core i7 and a R9 290 (radeonsi driver) and it plays like crap, even if I set everything to low.

Must be one of those bad OpenGL ports, too dependent of the forgiveness in the Nvidia proprietary drivers.

The main impetuses behind this project are:
* Getting ahead of the curve for Wayland/Mir/NextBigThing
* Potentially sharing a little more code between Linux and other "Linuxlike" platforms

SDL support should make things like multiple monitor handling much better. That is something I am especially keen for, as multiple monitor handling in a lot of Unity games is often really poor. SDL could also help them improve things like gamepad/controller support too.

I wouldn't expect SDL to magically improve this. Engine support for multimonitor systems is already there, and the same engine API will be exposed to game developers regardless of what's powering it on the back end. Similarly, SDL2-style gamepad mapping has been supported since Unity 5.0 - how developers handle it is a different issue.

Wondering about performance though which already seems to be still lacking a bit behind Unity's DX implementation. Would have expected it to be even lower then when "directly" talking to the windowing system (though I actually thought it would more or less talk directly to some OpenGL stuff?) instead of having SDL as an additional layer in between?

In this case, SDL would only be used for window setup and input - rendering would still use OpenGL directly.

1. Any special reason why would you support Unity3D?
2. Everyones acting like X11 is the past and is really buggy and slow - but really most don't have real problems with X11 and if there are problems let us fix them or rewrite parts if neccesarry.

But X11 is the past and is really buggy (try for example to create a 100% no-one-can-bypass screen saver lock for X11). More to the point is that the devs behind X11 is the same devs that are creating Wayland.

The only sad thing with these nice changes to Unity3D is that AFAIK Unity3D is statically linked to each game and does not exist as a shared resource in for example Steam so for this new version to be used games have to be updated one by one(?).

Unity is working on SDL supprot and SDL includes X11, Wayland and Mir support; Unity guys are too dumb to work on Wayland and Mir directly, so they are not working on Wayland and Mir and your headline is wrong. Mir, Wayland, X11 and other subsystems support in SDL was worked on by SDL developers an community (guys who are not dumb). It was a damn time to use SDL for an engine which claims support to multiple platforms, they aim too add "Build to XYZ" buttons all over the place but all of their builds, except Windows ones, are bad and full of bugs.

According to screnshoots they are using Ubuntu, a Linux distribution with unique DE, unique display system and unique patches to almost all librarys and unique defaults, hey my Linux traitors, do you know what that means? It means there will be all kind of bugs and issues in other distributions because game developers (engine developers also) dont understand that Ubuntu is "a little bit special kid" and at the end they dont support Linux they support Ubuntu.

kkthnxbye