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Unite Keynote summary: A peek inside Unity 6
This week, Unity developers from around the world gathered in Barcelona, Spain for Unite 2024, and today’s Keynote packed in over an hour of new feature reveals, dev success stories, and in-Editor technical demos highlighting Unity 6 in production.We announced that Unity 6, the most stable and performant version of Unity, will be available on October 17, 2024, and supported over the long term. Unity 6 gives you the tools you need to build the games you want to build and reach even more players across more platforms. It comes with improved graphics rendering for greater control over your game visuals, simplified multiplayer workflows, and improved support for web browsers. You can still download the preview here.The Keynote was livestreamed on Twitch and YouTube (where you can also watch the whole show on demand), but if you just want the highlights, we’ve got you covered.“With what we’re showing today, we mean to demonstrate just how we will play our part, to become the partners we once were, only better,” explained Unity’s CEO and President Matt Bromberg, kicking off the show. “More focused on things that make a tangibledifference to you every day. Investing more in powering the ecosystem that makes Unity unique. More focused on stability and what you need to be great. More capable of helping you through the entire game development lifecycle. Put Simply: Unity is here to help you develop great games, and connect with players.”Unity 6 includes powerful graphic performance features like Render Graph, a rendering framework for Universal Render Pipeline (URP) that reduces memory bandwidth along with energy consumption on mobile. The release’s new lighting features are available for both Scriptable Render Pipelines (SRPs), URP and the High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP), including a new Light Baking Architecture and Adaptive Probe Volumes (APVs), a system that places light probes automatically based on geometry density to power realistic lighting and dynamic effects like lighting scenarios.We also showcased new tools to help you maximize CPU and GPU performance, like the GPU Resident Drawer and Split Graphics Jobs for faster rendering, or GPU Occlusion Culling, which improves GPU performance by reducing per-frame overdraw. Spatial-Temporal Post-Processing (STP) takes frames rendered at a lower resolution and upscales them, producing a high-quality and temporally antialiased image.Many of these features were first teased in the Unite 2023 Keynote, where we also debuted the Fantasy Kingdom in Unity 6 demo for HDRP. This year, we showed the same demo optimized for URP and running on mobile, and shared that the Fantasy Kingdom in Unity 6 project and assets will be available to learn from on the Unity Asset Store, free for non-commercial use, landing alongside the Unity 6 release next month.The best part of new feature reveals? Seeing them in production to get a sense of what they can help you achieve.We debuted the latest cinematic demo from Unity’s Originals team, Time Ghost, featuring a massive, highly detailed outdoor scene with realistic high-fidelity characters – all in real-time. The team opened up the Editor to show how the clip’s world was made possible in real-time using features like the Entity Component System (ECS), APVs, Scenario Blending, SpeedTree vegetation, and more.We also zoomed in on a unique solution to a chronic CG problem. We showed how an artist on the team created an AI model that he brought into the Editor with Unity Sentis in order to approximate complex, high-fidelity cloth deformations that were fast enough for real-time.We followed that up with another look at the tools in production, this time a hotly anticipated game, the next high-octane co-op heist from 10 Chambers, Den of Wolves.10 Chambers COO Svante Vinternatt and Unity’s Mike Geig jumped into the Editor to look at some of the Unity 6 features delivering big gains for the team, like GPU Resident Drawer, APVs, STP, and support for DirectX 12 Split Jobs. “We originally intended for Den of Wolves to be made with Unity 2022 LTS,” explained Vinternatt. “But after seeing the improvements in Unity 6, both in terms of performance and rendering quality, upgrading became an obvious win.”Accelerating your multiplayer development is another big focus area for Unity 6 to make integration, iteration, and deployment faster and more reliable. We dug into a few new features that streamline this process, like Multiplayer Center, which recommends tools and learning materials tailored to your specific project’s needs, and Multiplayer Services Package, which simplifies adding more modular networked features as you need them. We also demoed the new Multiplayer Play Mode, showing just how easy it is to simulate and test multiplayer scenarios right in the Editor using our free Megacity Metro demo (which we’ve also updated for you to use and start learning with in Unity 6). In just a few clicks, the team was running multiple instances, all wired together, side by side next to the Editor.We also looked beyond buildtime tooling for multiplayer. Distributed Authority (beta) is a new network topology that keeps the state of the gameplay server-side while the simulation is distributed to your players’ game clients for seamless host migration as you scale.To wrap up our multiplayer coverage, Highrise Studios’s founder and CEO Milan Peschl came onstage to talk about how the team is using the full suite of Unity 6 Multiplayer Services in their upcoming game Degenheim, coming to Steam this fall. He recounted how they started out with a mix of solutions and third-party asset packs, but ultimately opted to use the complete multiplayer ecosystem that’s already pre-integrated in Unity 6.“As an indie startup,” explained Peschl, “this unlocks ‘big studio possibilities’ and abstracts away the complexity our devs hate, allowing us to focus on what we love: the game itself.”Of course the real key to any game’s success is finding and keeping players. So next we turned to building, managing, and optimizing live games, looking first at a Unity LiveOps workflow called Releases (beta), designed to make it easier for teams of all sizes to safely experiment in live games. Coming soon to open beta, this new process will enable you to smoothly roll out updates, new levels, and other content that helps drive player engagement and retention, monitor the new release’s performance using Cloud Diagnostics, and then roll back changes quickly to tweak and rerelease if there’s an issue.Building on this concept, Google’s Jack Buser took the stage to share Google Cloud’s vision for living games, games that grow and adapt to become even more successful through a mix of scalable infrastructure and AI.From there, we turned our focus to tools for building a successful game business. We started by looking at mobile gaming leaders like SYBO, whose hit game, Subway Surfers, has been thrilling millions of players for over a decade. We then dug into how mobile studios of all sizes can strike a balance between monetizing for revenue and offering players an awesome gaming experience using Unity LevelPlay.LevelPlay is now integrated into the Unity Editor, enabling you to access not only Unity Ads and ironSource Ads, but up to 25 different ad networks, which all compete for the best price for space inside your game. It includes a suite of tools to fine-tune your ad experience by previewing them from players’ perspectives, A/B testing, real-time performance reports, and the ability to build ad experiences segmented for different user groups. You can also tap into help with player acquisition, even transferring your monetization revenue to fund your user acquisition campaigns.
We’ve always prided ourselves on our extensive reach – over 20 platforms and counting – and in Unity 6, we’re offering new ways to target mobile with Unity Web. Offering fast load times without installs, mobile web is growing in popularity by offering bite-sized content for casual gamers, and they’re great for samples like Stratton Studios’s jaw-dropping Project Prismatic.We’re excited to see more of you jump into developing web games, so we’re working with Crazy Games on a game jam, where you can leverage Unity 6’s runtime support to create a game just for web browsers.We’re thrilled about Unity 6 – we’ve partnered closely with customers to make it the best, most stable and performant Unity release to date. But we wrapped our Keynote with a sneak peek at what we’re working on to help you build and run incredible games in upcoming generations.Most importantly, we’re committing to supporting Unity 6 for as long as necessary to better serve our customers, and expanding the way we provide that support to help you get more value out of the Editor and Engine. We started with the Unity 6.1 Update early next year – that’s still part of the Unity 6 release generation, but, well, updated. It will continue to build on the same core Unity 6 capabilities, but will also include new features like support for foldable and larger-screen formats, Deferred+ rendering in GPU Resident Drawer, and new build targets and build profiles. You’ll be able to access these new features and improvements, and we’ll make it easy to bring your Unity 6 projects to the update when it ships next year.But we’re also well into production on the next major release generation after that, driven by your feedback. It will bring a fundamental shift in approach for the Engine, and just a few of the major features include bringing ECS into the heart of the Engine and introducing a new content pipeline approach, worldbuilding system built on DOTS, animation system, and better scripting. This generation offers a lot to be excited about, but it’s a ways out yet.We are so excited to have you dive into Unity 6 in less than a month! We can’t wait to see what you create.Unity 6 releases October 17, 2024. Stay tuned for more coverage of Unite 2024, including highlights from our deep-dive technical breakout sessions, and share your thoughts and questions with the rest of the community on Discussions.
