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[ 2023 ]

20 entries
881|openai.com

Superalignment Fast Grants

We’re launching $10M in grants to support technical research towards the alignment and safety of superhuman AI systems, including weak-to-strong generalization, interpretability, scalable oversight, and more.

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882|openai.com

Weak-to-strong generalization

We present a new research direction for superalignment, together with promising initial results: can we leverage the generalization properties of deep learning to control strong models with weak supervisors?

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883|openai.com

Partnership with Axel Springer to deepen beneficial use of AI in journalism

Axel Springer is the first publishing house globally to partner with us on a deeper integration of journalism in AI technologies.

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884|blog.unity.com

How to implement an offerwall placement strategy

Your offerwall monetization strategy is only as strong as engagement with your offerwall - that’s why traffic drivers are key. So how exactly can you utilize these call-to-action buttons to set up your monetization strategy for success? It’s all about location and messaging. Let’s break it down.Focus on high-traffic locationsTo maximize traffic driver engagement, start by putting your traffic drivers in high-traffic areas - specifically the home screen and store.Home screenWhen it comes to boosting engagement, it’s critical to put offerwall placements as early in the game as possible. The home screen is the most visible location in your game, so placing a traffic driver here will help you maximize your exposure.In fact, we’ve seen that the home screen placement makes the biggest impact on engagement. According to our research, when offerwalls include placements on the home page, it boosts their overall open rate by 38%.To boost engagement and your users’ experience, you can even get creative and put your placement in the specific home screen spot your users check the most (e.g. the stats bar).The home screen is also an ideal spot because users in the home screen are idle, and not in a hurry somewhere (e.g. to complete a level). As you expand your traffic drivers to new locations, try placing them in other screens where players spend idle time.StoreAnother strategic and natural location to place your traffic drivers is in the store. Players who come to the store are high-intent to get extra currency, so they come to the store looking for it. Since players are more eager in the store than they are in any other part of the game, traffic drivers in the store tend to have very high conversion rates.After all, timing is everything - players who come to the store are already looking for hard currency, so your offerwall traffic driver can give them the ideal opportunity to maximize their earnings.Not to mention, by promoting the offerwall in your game’s store, you’re offering players an opportunity to save their money and get hard currency for their time insteadInclude clear and exciting messagingLet’s say you decide to add an offerwall traffic driver to your home screen - now it’s time to make sure your placement converts. To optimize your placement strategy, your traffic driver messaging and design should be clear, straightforward, and exciting. The text should focus on the value proposition at hand: get hard currency for free with offerwall.In fact, according to our research, when developers emphasize in their pop-ups that the offer is free, they see a 33% boost in their overall open rate.Message to EarnMessaging is also key for notifying users about time-limited opportunities, like special offerwall promotions, otherwise known as currency sales. These promotions take place on holidays throughout the year, and users can get up to 10x the standard offerwall rewards, without any extra effort required.To encourage extra user participation during special promotions, the unique value needs to be clear - that’s where messaging, or Message to Earn, is key. The messaging can and should also be topical for users, so if a special promotion is taking place during a certain holiday, the messaging should fit the theme.In fact, when comparing two special promotion weekends, one where a client didn’t use any messaging, and another where they used Message to Earn, Message to Earn led to a massive spike in offerwall impressions.Getting startedSetting up a placement strategy is a marathon, not a sprint, but all you need is the right foundation to get started. To optimize your engagement and revenue, we recommend starting with a home screen and store placement, then making small adjustments to your messaging and A/B testing to see what works.If you have any questions about getting started with an offerwall placement strategy, just reach out to one of our experts.

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885|blog.unity.com

Creative collective: The power of community

Last month, during Unite 2023 in Amsterdam, we welcomed educational leaders at the forefront of teaching Unity from universities across Europe, Australia, Africa, and North America. These innovative educators blend theoretical knowledge with practical, real-world experience.Through our discussions, a notable trend emerged: Higher education institutions are incorporating paid internships into four-year degree programs outside the standard summer break internship. For example, Hans Wichman from Saxion Applied University in the Netherlands, integrates yearlong paid internships for students into the Creative Media and Game Technology program. Similarly, Saihesh Maharaj from Midlands Computer Training Centre in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, offers students paid work experience at a VR company founded by the college. These initiatives not only enhance academic learning but also ensure that graduates are prepared for the workforce with comprehensive portfolios and practical experience.In short, learning and earning at the same time is becoming a best practice to prepare future graduates for 21st-century careers. This approach isn’t just limited to students in Unity programs at universities; it can also be part of alternatives to four-year degree programs.What happens when creators don’t have access to high-quality Unity programs? Let’s examine one creator’s story to understand.I was lucky enough to meet with Egodi Beloved Ulinwa, also known as Love, from Portland, Oregon, to learn how a combination of discipline, brotherly support, and hard work could be an alternative to a four-year degree.“Back in high school, I started a creative collective with a few friends. We called it ‘Creative Crew’and began making games. It sort of dispersed after graduation when I went to college for accounting. I didn’t really like accounting, so I switched to computer science and still wasn’t happy. I really just wanted to get my creative juices flowing, so I called my friend Ben, who was part of the original Creative Crew, to see if we could reignite our work.”Love left school and stumbled upon an unexpected source of inspiration closer to home – his younger brother, Liight. For a 14-year-old, Liight demonstrated remarkable artistic talent. Love began nurturing his brother’s artistic abilities, steering him towards game art and animation.“There has never been anyone in my life who pushed me to take the next step and make it real,” Love recalled. “I wanted to be that for Liight, and from that day forward it was Liight, Ben, and me working on designing our game together.”Love and Liight started putting their designs into the Unity Editor and, according to them, “it looked terrible.” They realized they needed stronger skills, so they started teaching themselves everything, including game design, art, producing, and programming.Their self-taught approach included networking, getting tips from industry professionals, remaking their game several times based on user feedback, and learning for free through Unity Learn tutorials.Love recalls when Unity launched live classes during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. “I was on it every day, watching videos with my brother [and] learning how to optimize our game. Unity Learn made a major impact on our lives. Money has always been a hard part of game development, and having free classes was incredibly helpful to our work.”Today, Love runs Kaizen Creed with funding from Kickstarter, Microsoft, Sony, and other grants. The studio’s first game, 5 Force Fighters, follows five teenagers with powers granted to them by a mysterious figure, as they attempt to stop an evil villain from enacting his tyranny. The game’s audience is youth of color who adore anime and fantastical narratives – basically, the Creative Crew. “Games never really center people like us as heroes so we wanted to make sure we created something that spoke to players like us.”“We wanted to make sure we created something that spoke to players like us.”Passion, persistence, and the power of community are turning dreams into reality for Kaizen Creed. They’re charting a course from high school creativity to the cusp of gaming stardom. Love and his team are now actively looking for a publisher – if you have any leads, reach out. After all, it’s the power of our community.We look forward to sharing additional creator stories with you in the New Year. If you’re curious to hear even more about the changing workforce and how Unity is a driver for social impact, check out my past columns on future generations, AI, or global impact.

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886|blog.unity.com

Achievement unlocked: 10 Chambers, The Game Awards, and Unity

On December 7, millions of people around the world watched the biggest event of the year for video games: The Game Awards 2023. It was an incredible night celebrating some of the biggest games from the past year and the most anticipated games for the year to come. Following an evening filled with announcements and surprises, we’re excited to celebrate our friends at 10 Chambers and all of the other creators who announced their made with Unity games at the show.This year’s event was jam-packed with game reveals and updates, and there were a few Unity projects that caught our attention. One such reveal was The Odd Gentlemen’s upcoming interactive sign language musical and adventure/narrative game, Harmonium the Musical, with a charming trailer. In addition to new announcements, several Unity games picked up awards in different categories. Congratulations to the following made with Unity winners:Sea of Stars, Sabotage Studio – Best Independent GameHonkai: Star Rail, HoYoverse – Best Mobile GameCOCOON, Geometric Interactive – Best Debut Indie GameFor a complete list of winners and nominees, visit The Game Awards website.Some of the biggest news of the night came from 10 Chambers, a team who have worked closely with Unity since they first revealed gameplay footage from their cooperative horror shooter GTFO at Unite Berlin in 2018. This collaboration has continued over the years, most recently at Gamescom in Cologne, where the team joined us in a lively booth in The Ash restaurant (complete with an on-site tattoo artist) to meet players, dish out swag, and offer hands-on time with their game.On stage at The Game Awards, 10 Chambers’ Creative Director and CEO Ulf Andersson announced that GTFO would be releasing the game’s final chapter, “Rundown 8.0 Duality.” To celebrate this milestone, they hosted a free weekend through December 10 and also announced their first ever 40% off sale (through December 21) for the full game. If you’ve been waiting for the right moment to experience GTFO’s explosive action and gripping suspense, head to Steam before the celebration ends.Coinciding with the GTFO news, 10 Chambers followed with an even bigger announcement: the reveal of its next blockbuster game, Den of Wolves. Through a riveting cinematic trailer rendered entirely in-engine, onlookers were given a first peek at the action-packed heist FPS which builds on the studio’s DNA of creating thrilling cooperative shooters.When asked why they chose Unity as the engine for their game, Andersson called out the features that best support the studio’s goals and ambitions for the project. “We choose Unity for many reasons, amongst them is the short iteration times and incredible performance through the Burst compiler,” he says. “As a team, we are able to stay creative and agile throughout [a] project – this is key for us as we are a studio focused largely on gameplay.”“[With Unity] as a team, we are able to stay creative and agile throughout [a] project.”Get to know even more amazing projects using Unity, including the 15th Unity Award winners. If you’re creating with Unity and interested in being featured, share your project with us today.

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887|blog.unity.com

Get our 2022 LTS best practice guides for optimizing mobile, console, and PC games

The phones might get bigger (or smaller), the PCs more powerful, and different visual styles may come in or out of fashion. But one thing remains constant in game development: You need to optimize your game for its target hardware.Luckily, our updated optimization guides are now available. Optimize your game performance for mobile and Optimize your game performance for consoles and PCinclude the latest updates from Unity 2022 LTS and provide you with an arsenal of useful tips, tactics, and workarounds to optimize your projects.These guides are built on the deep knowledge of the Accelerate Solutions team. Made up of Unity’s most senior software engineers, this team supports a plethora of Unity customers, diving deep into game projects to help identify points where performance could be optimized for greater speed, stability, and efficiency.Note: The Unity 2020 LTS versions of the guides are still available if you’re developing on that version of the engine. All of the advanced technical and creative e-books are available in the Unity best practices hub.Each guide includes actionable tips across profiling tools, programming and code architecture, working with assets, render pipelines, UI, and much more. There are also many new and updated links to additional documentation and other resources if you want to go deeper.Here’s a sampling of the topics the guides cover.Identifying the bottlenecks: How to understand the basic methodology of performance optimization and use the Unity Profiler and Profile Analyzer; how to account for mobile device temperature, work within a specific frame budget, and see if your project is CPU- or GPU-boundMemory management: How to use the Memory Profiler, reduce the work of garbage collection, and use the Incremental Garbage collectorProgramming and code architecture: How to minimize expensive code, why you should use hash values instead of string parameters, choosing the right data structure, and using ScriptableObjects to improve performanceProject configuration: How to disable unnecessary Player or Quality settings, or physics; how to avoid large hierarchies and work with VsyncAssets: How to import and compress textures correctly, check polygon counts, automate your import settings using the AssetPostprocessor, Unity DataTools, and how to leverage the Addressable Asset SystemGraphics and GPU optimization (mobile): When to use draw call batching, avoid too many dynamic lights, and how to use Light Layers effectively; how to use Occlusion Culling to remove hidden objects, avoid mobile native resolution, minimize overdraw and alpha blending, deal with post-processing effects, and much moreGraphics (console/PC): How to optimize render pipelines and the Shader Graph, remove built-in shader settings, strip shader variants, and work with reflection probes, shadows, and shader effectsGPU optimization (console/PC): How to benchmark the GPU, optimize fill rate and reduce overdraw, look at your draw order and render queues, reduce the batch count, activate Graphics Jobs, avoid tessellation shaders, and replace geometry shaders with compute shadersUser interface: Understanding the differences between UGUI and UI Toolkit; how to split up your Canvases, hide invisible UI elements, limit GraphicRaycasters and disable Raycast Target; why you should avoid Layout Groups, large List and Grid views, and numerous overlaid elementsPhysics: How to simplify colliders, adjust simulation frequency, modify CookingOptions for MeshColliders, use Box Pruning for large scenes, modify solver iterations, disable automatic transform syncing, reuse Collision Callbacks, move static colliders, use non-allocating queries, batch queries for ray casting, and visualize with the Physics DebuggerAudio: A comparison ofmono vs stereo; compression techniques, Load Type and techniques to unload muted AudioSources from memory, use of lossless files as your source, how to reduce your AudioClips and optimize the AudioMixerOptimizing your mobile, PC, and console games is a process that underpins the entire game development cycle. Like the lists of many points in the previous section show, these e-books provide a broad range of tips for every part of your game, like scripting, rendering, graphics, and profiling.Be sure to reference the optimization guides alongside our e-books on these related topics:Ultimate guide to profiling Unity gamesIntroduction to the Universal Render Pipeline for advanced Unity creators Unity 2022 LTSVersion control and project organization best practices for game developersLevel up your programming with game programming patternsLighting and environments in the High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP) Unity 2022 LTSCreate modular game architecture in Unity with ScriptableObjectsWe hope you enjoy our latest optimization guides for mobile and console/PC games.You can find all the e-books (and many how-to articles) in the Unity best practices hub or via the advanced best practices page in Unity documentation.

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888|blog.unity.com

9 tips to boost your UA over the holidays

In a season marked by high installs per mille (IPMs), the holidays are an optimal time for user acquisition (UA). During this time, there’s a strong uptick in mobile user activity due to longer breaks from work and school, a spike in online shopping activity, and a rise in consumer spending, presenting a prime opportunity for in-app purchases (IAPs) and subscriptions.To optimize your UA strategy, doubling down on key channels, making data-driven decisions, creating content that drives conversions, and promoting high-performing creatives are key. Follow these tips to maximize your scale and improve your return on advertising spend (ROAS).Optimize your UA strategyAs you think about how to optimize your UA strategy during the holidays, consider these five techniques:1. Expand your reach: Acquiring the right users for your app during the holiday season means casting a wide net in markets with a higher number of high-quality users who are actively engaged. To make the most of the holiday season’s uplift in mobile engagement, increase your advertising reach to include all of the top geos, such as the US, UK, Germany, Canada, and France, to name just a few.2. Lower your goals and raise your bids: With access to greater volumes of high-value users during this time of year, you can lower your goals and increase your bids by ~15%. Doing so allows you to maximize scale and ROAS while bringing in users that are likely to retain well beyond the holidays.3. Use automated UA optimizers: Utilizing advanced machine learning can also help you acquire high-quality users at an optimal price. With the ROAS optimizer, you can maximize your in-app or ad revenue for D1 or D7.Additionally, the tCPA optimizer, which is currently in closed beta, will allow you to identify and acquire users more likely to complete specific in-app actions that are important to you. With so much going on during the holiday season both professionally and personally, automating your UA can free up time for where you’re needed most—like that holiday party that you still need to organize.4. Test offerwall campaigns: A good way to test the impact of offerwall during the holiday season is with campaigns that incorporate holiday messaging, include a sense of urgency, and offer users opportunities to make special purchases at the height of the shopping season. For more pointers on how to maximize growth over the holidays with offerwall currency sales, check out this blog.5. Run cross-promotion campaigns: Utilizing a cross promotional tool during the holidays can ensure that you not only retain the high-value users you’ve acquired, but also maximize the revenue they generate across your portfolio. Capture the influx of high-quality holiday users where they are most active by advertising your app in other apps within your portfolio. Doing so, you can keep these high-intent users within your reach.Refine your creativesIn addition to optimizing your UA strategy, make the most of the season by ensuring your creatives are holiday ready. Mastering your creative strategy can help grab the attention of users, positively impacting IPM and eCPM, and allowing you to buy high-quality users at a lower price. Here’s how.6. Refresh your creatives: As you refine your creatives, tap into holiday nostalgia to inspire compelling content and high-IPM creatives with some of these ideas:Use footage of real people who show pure emotionTest holiday images and seasonal concepts like snowflakes, gifts, and hot chocolateGive your pointer and buttons a holiday theme, like Santa7. Rotate your content: Amplify your best-performing holiday-themed creatives by switching up different variations of videos and end cards at least once a week. Fresh, timely, and diverse content can give you the competitive edge needed to attract new users.8. Update your custom store pages: Optimizing your app store landing page to match your holiday-themed creatives will lead to a consistent ad flow, which will likely improve your conversion rate and boost your IPM. Try this technique out with custom product pages in iOS and custom store listings in Android.Pocket Gems, a game developer with hits like War Dragons, offers a prime example of how updating your custom store pages can boost your UA. When launching their new game, Episodes, Pocket Gems connected versions of their app store landing page to specific creatives they were running on the ironSource network. As a result, they boosted their conversion rate by 8% and increased their IPM by 16%. Read more about their strategy here.Now imagine this same scenario but this time with a compelling winter holiday theme.9. Use long videos: The right length of videos that highlight more of your gameplay can attract high-quality users who are more likely to stay in your game. Recently, 60-second video ads have been performing well for this very reason. After all, only a grinch could resist a full minute of holiday-themed interactive content.The holiday season is a great time for advertisers to grow their app, leveraging the abundance of high-quality, engaged users who have embraced an online spending mindset.To ensure your app is ready to scale in the new year, it is essential to take action now by refining your UA strategy and capitalizing on holiday-driven IPMs. Running on ad networks, such as ironSource Ads or Unity Ads, can serve as valuable tools for maximizing your UA strategy over the holidays.Manage your campaigns

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889|blog.unity.com

Web runtime updates are here: Take your browser to the next level

At Unite 2023 we unveiled our latest web runtime offerings. This included more details on highly anticipated support for mobile browsers, an early look at what WebGPU can do for advanced graphics and rendering on desktop browsers, and an exciting announcement with our partners at Meta to bring Unity titles to the Instant Games platform on Facebook and Messenger. Keep reading for a deep dive on what’s in store for your next web-based project.Unity has a long history with web runtimes. In 2006, the Unity web player debuted as a plug-in for web browsers. With the advent of HTML5, browsers began to remove support for plug-ins, and Unity’s web player was deprecated in 2015. Next, we adopted WebGL to run games directly in the browser with asm.js. Unity was there at the beginning of the WebAssembly (WASM) design process, and we’ve been evolving alongside WASM ever since. This brings near-native performance of the Unity Engine to the web. In 2018.2, our WebAssembly solution replaced asm.js as the default.You haven’t heard from us in a while, but we believe we’re now at a tipping point for Unity content on the web.In addition to our tech advances, we’ve updated our naming scheme for the platform. WebGL is now known as Unity Web in order to separate WebGL technology from Unity’s web platform. We also want to prepare for a future with more than one rendering standard. Eventually you’ll be able to create a build using WebGL, one with WebGPU, or a single build with both.Offering content in this way gives gamers instant access to an experience with just the click of a link – or the scan of a QR code – without needing to install anything on their devices. In addition, when you bring your content into the secure environment of browsers, you have a direct connection between you and your gamers, without another online store getting in the way.Web doesn’t have an installation step like other platforms, which promises low friction and instant engagement. However, this means users need to download the runtime and starter assets on first load. This means that for us, for you, and for all end users, load time is everything. There’s a ton of work being done to reduce load times, and you’ll hear more about that later in this post.The depth and breadth of the engine gives developers the power to handle more complex simulations and interactive elements compared to other web technologies. That said, with users downloading the runtime and starter assets up front, smaller is almost always better in the context of the web – at least for now.Given those tradeoffs, there are certainly some types of games that work better on the web than others, such as casual and hypercasual games, with their bite-size play sessions and easy-to-grasp mechanics.Additionally, you can capitalize on the low-friction nature of the web by taking a small part of a larger game, say, your tutorial level, and making its own web build separate from the rest of the game and available for everyone. This allows for a frictionless first-time player experience without installing anything on their devices and gives you the opportunity to convert the player to the full native app after they’ve engaged with the mechanics.The Artemis Real-time Orbit Website (AROW) is an interactive real-time tracker for the Artemis I mission, launched last November and built with Unity.In mythology, Artemis is the twin sister of Apollo, so NASA named the series of missions that marks its return to the moon’s surface after the Greek figure.Space fans around the globe were able to track where the Orion capsule was in orbit, as well as see its eventual splashdown site in the Pacific Ocean, all within their desktop web browsers. NASA is planning to build on this tool for all future Artemis missions and expand it to track not only the Orion capsule, but all mission components.AROW was created by an intern, Seth Lambert, who has since become a full-time member of the NASA communications team.At Unite, we were proud to announce that Android and iOS browser support will be coming in Unity 6. You will soon be able to run your Unity games anywhere on the web, including in iOS or Android browsers themselves. You will also be able to embed your games in a web view in a native app or use our progressive web app template to make your game behave more like a native app, with its own shortcut and offline functionality. We’re confident that if you’ve been targeting Unity Web on mobile, you likely had success with high-end mobile devices released in the last two or three years, but your results may have varied depending on your content. By the time we ship Unity 6, we’ll have clearer guidance around the minimum hardware requirements for Unity Web on mobile.Here you can see our recent 2D sample project Happy Harvest running in Safari on an iPhone 15 Pro.Safari has started supporting WebGL2, allowing Unity Web to work on iOS as well as Android devices. We’ve seen continuous advancements in both mobile network speed and reliability, as well as ever-improving CPU and GPU power. With modern audiences hungry for instant experiences with very low friction, we believe players are now primed for short-form interactive content.As announced in the Unite Keynote, Unity has partnered with Meta to build support for their Instant Games platform. By unlocking this ecosystem for creators, players will be able to find and play games instantly on Facebook and inside Messenger conversations. With an audience of gamers in the hundreds of millions, this is a fantastic opportunity for you to extend your content’s reach to a whole new cohort.“The close collaboration between Meta and Unity has already yielded some promising early results in terms of performance gains for HTML5 games built using Unity,” noted Andrew Mo, product lead for Facebook Gaming at Meta. “We are excited to continue this momentum into the coming year and look forward to making it easier for game developers to bring their content to Facebook and Messenger.”He added, “We believe there’s a lot of potential in making games instantly accessible, especially when they’re designed to be played with your friends and community. And we’re excited to partner with Unity to unlock that potential on our platform.”“There’s a lot of potential in making games instantly accessible, especially when they’re designed to be played with your friends and community [...] we’re excited to partner with Unity to unlock that potential on our platform.” – Andrew Mo, Product Lead for Facebook Gaming, MetaThere are a number of things the Unity Web platform team is working on to facilitate this partnership, including a dedicated build target so you can test, optimize, and publish games in a streamlined flow tailored for Instant Games. There will be a C# SDK to interface with Instant Game APIs and a multitude of net new optimizations to ensure players can get into games in seconds.We’re also partnering with game studios to validate this new tooling. Launch partners include Coatsink, who have a few games on Meta’s platforms, including Ready, Set, Cook! Soon after Coatsink signed on as a launch partner, the team at Unity applied some early optimizations to this game, and the results were extremely promising.With just a 25% drop in load time, active sessions grew by 50% and click-to-play rates jumped from 35% to 58%. This means that at the very beginning of this optimization work, Ready, Set, Cook! went from most players never seeing gameplay to the majority getting into a game with their friends. This is just the tip of our optimization iceberg, but you can see how relatively small reductions in load time can make a huge difference in engagement.This graph shows a comparison between the original build provided by Coatsink and the optimized version with our latest Instant Games-ready tools applied. As you can see, we’ve already reduced the time to interactivity for Ready, Set, Cook! by over 50%. This particular test was run on a Pixel 5 throttled to 48 Mbps.In the chart above, you can see what the load times were before optimization and where we are currently using Ready, Set, Cook! as a testbed title. First, throttled to 48 Mbps – this is the global median mobile network speed as reported by Ookla, not even 5G. At the global median broadband speed, 86 Mbps, we’re even faster. On a solid 5G connection at 176 Mbps, we saw even faster speeds, but we also encountered diminishing returns as network bandwidth is no longer the primary limiting factor.To achieve fast load times, it’s necessary to look at all aspects of the download and initialization of your game within the web browser.A web build consists several files:WebAssembly (.wasm) file: This is the binary executable including the Unity Engine and your game logic.A large resource file (.data): This includes global metadata and asset resources for scenes included in the build.There may be asset bundles or Addressables.Your WebGL template (HTML and CSS), and some Unity Framework JavaScript files to get it all going.To begin with, there are some initial best practices you should follow to create a good release build, including:Telling the compiler and linker to build for optimal code sizeUsing Brotli compressionAdding HTTP preload tags to your web template to load any asset bundles and Addressables required for the first scene up front.We will be making these the default in the upcoming Instant Games build target.Also, consider how to reduce the perceived load time experienced by your players by displaying a splash screen or animation while the Unity Engine is loading and initializing.Depending on your game, the assets may be bigger or smaller than the WebAssembly.First, consider some best practices. Since the time taken to load that first scene is critical, consider using the Unity Addressables System to break each asset into a separate download. Then, add HTTP preload tags to preload Addressables that are required for the first scene. Subsequent scenes will then load assets on demand from the Addressables system.If your game has lots of audio usage, be sure to use compressed audio, and consider forcing it to mono and lowering the audio quality.Second, let’s look at the graphics settings used. Choosing ETC Crunch compressed textures gives the smallest download sizes and keeps GPU memory usage low on mobile devices. If you’re using ASTC compressed textures, look carefully at the block size, choosing larger block sizes for smaller textures. Likewise, configure shader stripping in the Player Settings for your project.WebAssembly technology isn’t standing still, and we’re bringing the updates to Unity. We’re incredibly grateful for the work done in the Web W3C Communities to support these advanced technologies. Web gaming isn’t possible without the investments and support from all browser developers. We particularly appreciate our collaboration with the Chrome team at Google. Together, we’ve worked on strengthening gaming use cases for WebAssembly and graphics performance for complex gaming workloads.The Emscripten compiler brings your Unity il2cpp build to WebAssembly. With each new Long Term Support (LTS) release, we include the latest version of Emscripten, allowing for faster development builds and smaller, more optimized release builds (which can take a while to build).In Unity 6,you will be able to enable 4GB memory support. This enables bigger real-time 3D experiences on the web, making use of the larger memory available to desktop browsers. In the future, this will pave the way for 64-bit memory support once all browsers release support for it.Currently, when you enable exception support for web builds, there’s some overhead, such as when code is added to all functions to support try/catch. With WebAssembly native exception handling, which will be available as an option in Unity 6, exceptions will be available with little overhead.Also in Unity 6, you can enable WebAssembly SIMD support. This accelerates CPU mathematical calculations with vectorized instructions. It works on both x64 and Arm devices, mapping the WebAssembly SIMD instructions to either SSE or Arm NEON when the web page is loaded. Improvements here vary by device and browser, but they are noticeable.These features are optional and are only available on newer web browser versions.The introduction of a new WebGPU backend marks a significant milestone for web-based graphics acceleration, paving the way for unprecedented leaps in graphics rendering fidelity for Unity web games.WebGPU is designed with the goal of harnessing and exposing modern GPU capabilities to the web. This new web API achieves this by providing a modern graphics acceleration interface that’s implemented internally via native GPU APIs such as DirectX 12, Vulkan, or Metal, depending on the desktop device you use.WebGPU will unlock support for new and exciting rendering features, enabling a level of graphics fidelity previously unseen on desktop web. Like other modern graphics APIs, lower-level control over the rendering setup and GPU execution unlocks new optimization opportunities, which could lead to reduced CPU and GPU overhead and improved throughput and latency.WebGPU also brings compute shaders to the web for the first time. GPU Compute Skinning radically improves the performance of rendering skinned mesh characters. Now, the vertex transformations are all offloaded to the GPU. The demo above takes advantage of GPU Skinning to mesh the skin of these robots to the skeleton underneath, while maintaining a relatively high framerate. If this was done on the CPU, it would run at single-digit FPS.Another example is Unity’s VFX Graph, which procedurally generates geometry directly within compute shaders. In the below particle simulation, we have just over half a million particles being animated, and they’re all being moved through compute shaders on the GPU.You may have seen the Boat Attack demo above in the past. Now, you can see it running entirely on WebGPU. WebGPU is enabled today on Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge on macOS and Windows. In this last example, we display an interactive Boat Attack, rendered in WebGPU.Throughout development of Unity’s backend for WebGPU, Unity graphics engineers have been working closely with the Chrome team to stress test WebGPU with large scenes and complex shaders, yielding fantastic results.The WebGPU graphics backend is still in development, and we do not recommend using it for production use cases. However, it’s available now in early access. Details for how to get started can be found in the graphics forum.Web is incredibly powerful because of its potential for frictionless engagement and a direct connection with your players. Because they download the WASM and starter assets up front, reducing load time is critical for web projects. Because of those tradeoffs, smaller pieces of content are typically best suited for the web.Coming late in 2024, build and deploy your Instant Games to Facebook and Messenger to access a whole new audience. If you would like to work directly with Unity and Meta to gain early access to tools and resources for making your Instant Games a success, or would like to stay up to date about this new platform support initiative, register your interest today.Mobile web support starts in Unity 6. Learn more about Unity 6 from the Unite Keynote.If you’re the tinkering type, go read our forum post about WebGPU – coming in Unity 6 – for information on early access to the WebGPU backend. Then, discover even more of the latest engine developments from the now-available, on-demand Unite 2023 sessions, including the Unite session “Instantly get your Unity game to more players on the web” (embedded below).

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890|openai.com

Sam Altman returns as CEO, OpenAI has a new initial board

Mira Murati as CTO, Greg Brockman returns as President. Read messages from CEO Sam Altman and board chair Bret Taylor.

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891|blog.unity.com

Create next-gen features with AI models using Unity Sentis

We created Unity Sentis to give developers the ability to bring AI models into games and applications. Now in pre-release open beta, Sentis allows for complex features like object identification, speech recognition, and smart NPCs in all types of projects.Once imported via the ONNX file standard, these AI models can be run directly on all Unity-supported platforms. This means that you can run the majority of AI models directly in the Unity Runtime on a user’s device, without the need for cloud infrastructure.The Unity Sentis package documentation is available here and can be downloaded via Package Manager. Once the package is installed in your project and you have the AI model you want to use, integration is straightforward.Ultimately, the model you choose to use in your project is completely up to you. Each model is dependent on the task you are trying to solve. You might start by browsing some interesting models on marketplaces such as Hugging Face, Keras, or PyTorch. You can also train your own model if you have a machine learning background, or use Unity ML-Agents for reinforcement learning needs. The main requirement is that the model must be converted to the ONNX file format. You can use an ONNX converter like TF2ONNX, if needed.See Import a model in the Sentis documentation for a code sample.Loading a model into Unity requires the same process you would follow with any asset. Simply drag and drop it into the Assets folder of the Project window within the Editor. Sentis will automatically optimize the imported model. Then, create a runtime Model object.See Load a model in the Sentis documentation for a code sample.Creating an input is fairly straightforward, just check the shape and size of the required model input in the ONNX Model Import Settings. You can then create a tensor from your data source. If multiple inputs are needed, store them all in a dictionary.See Create input for a model in the Sentis documentation for a code sample.When you're ready to run your model, you need to create a worker that breaks the model into tasks that can be run on the user’s device (CPU or GPU). Creating a worker can be achieved with this code example.Once your worker is set up, it’s time to run your AI model. Here, you are hooking up the inputs and outputs of the model to your game code, and then using the profiler to see if you are within budget. If it’s taking too much budget, you can “slice” your model across many frames, or explore other performance tuning options in Sentis.See Run a model in the Sentis documentation for more information on how to run your model, get outputs, and optimize the output.The final step is to test and deploy your game. Do this as you normally would on any Unity Runtime platform. You have a few options for shipping your model within the game binary: It can be embedded in the build, or you can run it as a streaming asset so that it’s downloaded only when needed. You also may consider encrypting your model for security reasons.See Encrypt a model in the Sentis documentation for a code sample.This beginner sample shows how to use the basics of Sentis with neural networks by running an object detection model to unlock doors in a locked room. It runs a handwritten digit (number) detection AI model called MNIST which can read written numbers and identify the most probable number drawn.This sample uses Sentis to build a bot opponent for a board game called Othello, where the game has configurable difficulty. It runs a neural network trained on the game rules and determines game win probabilities after each move, then predicts future moves that are most likely to win. It’s a simpler solution than a traditional approach using complex heuristics and tree traversal.This sample showcases how to integrate Sentis into an augmented reality (AR) experience. It uses a depth estimation neural network to allow real-world objects to occlude objects in the game scene. The depth is determined by processing video frames from the camera, so it is a more scalable solution than the traditional approach of using a lidar sensor which is limited to expensive phones.This works on mobile devices with a camera and does not require a lidar sensor.AI models can help you create engaging features that may either be impossible or very time consuming to develop with traditional code. The use cases span all categories of AI models, and the application depends on the models you choose to implement. Here are some examples, however, of instances where Sentis can aid the development process.One big reason developers choose Unity is the ability to publish more easily across multiple platforms – but optimization can still be a challenge. Using an upscaling model like Super Resolution from TensorFlow allows you to upscale low-resolution images or textures in your game to get to production quality, or help optimize assets only when needed, across different devices.Player interaction is key for connected online games when it comes to engaging with both NPCs and other players. With a speech-to-text model like OpenAI’s Whisper, you can convert live speech to in-game text. You can also bring an AI model in to automate dialog and create meaningful interactions between players and NPCs without the limitations of manual scripting.While a lot of focus in AI is on creating novel features, we’re also seeing great applications when it comes to improving game performance. One example of this is using an AI model to improve ray tracing on mobile by using an upscaling GAN AI model to hallucinate pre-rendered frames of a game scene. With an application like this, you could implement path-tracing features such as light refraction and caustics area lights in smaller projects without a hit to performance on the user’s device.Augmented and virtual reality (VR) are also a great potential use case for using AI models with Sentis. For example, you can use the Ultralytics YOLO model in VR to detect objects in a game scene, or in AR to detect real-world objects from the device camera feed. This can offer the user a super-vision sense that is only possible with AI.Unity Sentis is now available for free in open beta to all Unity developers operating on Unity 2021.3 or higher through the Package Manager.

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892|blog.unity.com

UI Toolkit: New and updated demos for programmers and artists

We’re happy to announce the availability of two new and updated educational samples to support the different perspectives of programmers and artists/designers in creating professional in-game UI with UI Toolkit.UI Toolkit provides a set of tools for developing performant and scalable runtime UI for games and applications, custom extensions for the Unity Editor, and runtime debugging tools. Its core concepts and workflows will be familiar to you if you have experience developing web pages or applications.Our aim with these educational samples is to help you build rich, responsive, and scalable UIs with UI Toolkit. The new demo QuizU, for programmers, and the updated UI Toolkit Sample – Dragon Crashers for artists and designers, are two very different projects, each with extensive supporting instructional content.QuizU is a programmer-centric sample of an interactive quiz application that shows how UI Toolkit components can work together, leveraging various design patterns, in a small but functional game with multiple screens and game flow management.The demo consists of two parts: 10 small, digestible samples that demonstrate different aspects of UI Toolkit, and a mini quiz game that consolidates many of the techniques from the 10 scenes into a complete project.The minimalist visual style of the mini-game lets you focus on the mechanics of the UI implementation, without getting lost in the design details.The quiz game illustrates how to use the state pattern for game flow, manage multiple menu screens, use the model-view-presenter pattern, implement event handling in UI Toolkit, and more. The gameplay is a very simple quiz game mechanic but the intent is to show and teach implementation techniques that you can use in your own projects.By integrating some of these design patterns consistently into your project, you can improve code readability and make your codebase cleaner. Design patterns not only reduce refactoring and the time spent testing, they can speed up development processes for your entire team.Additionally, event-driven architecture, whereby game components communicate with each other through events, promotes loose coupling for scalability and testability.The second part of the demo consists of 10 small demo scenes. Each demo scene represents a specific technique or feature. Consider them as a set of recipes to inspire and guide you as you evaluate UI Toolkit for your next project. Here's a brief sampling of the UI Toolkit features and techniques the demo scenes illustrate:UXML and Visual Trees: UXML files form a hierarchical structure of UI elements. These visual trees serve as a blueprint for your user interface.Flexbox: The Flexible Box Layout Model (Flexbox) provides an efficient layout model for arranging UI elements dynamically within a container.Unity Style Sheets (USS): USS allows developers to customize UI elements with predefined styles. Reskinning your UI is just a matter of swapping style sheets.UQuery: UQuery simplifies the process of searching through a complex hierarchy of UI elements, enabling seamless navigation to specific UI components within the visual tree.Pseudo-classes: Pseudo-classes can be used to create interactive and animated UI elements with minimal extra code, adding extra “juice” to your visual interface (e.g., enlarging a button when hovering over it or changing a text field color after selection).UI Toolkit Event System: UI Toolkit has its own event system, designed to handle your UI's clicks, changes, and pointer input, even across complex hierarchies.Manipulators: Encapsulating related event callbacks into a single class, a manipulator promotes reusability and makes it easier to define user interactions (e.g., a click-and-drag manipulator for an inventory system, a gesture manipulator for a pinch-to-zoom effect, etc.).Custom Controls: The demo shows how to define and instantiate custom VisualElement through UxmlFactory and UxmlTraits classes. These custom controls can then be reused through scripts or the UI Builder.We recommend that you download QuizU using Unity 2022 LTS. You can also follow along in our series of articles, published on Unity Discussions, that accompany the demo. The articles are here:Welcome to the new UI Toolkit sample project QuizUQuizU: State pattern for game flowManaging menu screens in UI ToolkitThe Model View presenter PatternEvent handling in UI ToolkitUI Toolkit performance tipsIn September 2022, we launched UI Toolkit Sample – Dragon Crashers (you can read the launch blog post). This demo of a full-featured interface over a slice of the 2D mini RPG project Dragon Crashers, shows you techniques for leveraging UI Toolkit in your own applications. It’s the companion piece to the e-book User interface design and implementation in Unity, also released in late 2022.You can now download a new version of UI Toolkit Sample – Dragon Crashers for Unity 2022 LTS. The improvements and updates in this latest version include:Support for runtime landscape and portrait screen modes through themes and the GeometryChangedEvent in UI ToolkitImplementation of the SafeArea API to contain UI functionality within the usable screen area of a deviceIncreased fps limit for mobile devices to 60 fpsRefactored, simplified selectors and USS stylesheetsHigher resolution iconsImproved fixed VFX spawning position for different screen ratios and some cursor inconsistenciesRefactored design patterns for cleaner UI architectureNew learning content provided via the Tutorial Inspector windowWe also added a user guide for the updated project. This is in response to feedback we received from users who asked for better instructional content to help them understand the techniques and features used in the demo.Finally, a video walkthrough of the project is now available to help you navigate through the demo. Check it out:We hope you’ll pick up many useful tips with QuizU and the updated UI Toolkit Sample – Dragon Crashers. You’ll find all of Unity’s advanced e-books for programmers, artists, technical artists, and designers in the Unity best practices hub.

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893|blog.unity.com

Top selling assets to supercharge your next project

Don’t miss the biggest asset sale of the year: Black Friday From November 15–December 6, save 50% on over 300 Unity Asset Store bestsellers – including all of the assets in this blog post – to kick-start or speed up your next project. Plus, spark your creativity with up to 70% off limited-time Flash Deals.Ready to kick off your holiday season with Black Friday magic? Dive into a treasure trove of best-selling assets that will breathe new life into your latest game or other real-time 3D project. Whether you need a quick start or complex solution, continue reading for a look at 13 community-favorite assets.Let’s kick things off with FPS Engine, winner of Best Development Tool in the 15th Unity Awards. From publisher Cowsins, FPS Engine is a powerful solution for first-person shooter games. Its user-friendly design and extensive functionality make it an invaluable tool for developers.Text Animator by Febucci Tools earned its title as the Best Artistic Tool thanks to its remarkable ability to bring text to life through captivating animations, making it an essential asset for creating visually engaging and dynamic user interfaces.Last but not least, POLYGON – Elven Realm by Synty Studios excels as the Best Artistic Content asset based on its enchanting and low-poly 3D art, providing game developers with a captivating realm for creating fantastical environments that spark players’ imaginations.Explore a treasure trove of outstanding assets, including more nominees and winners, and uncover the solutions that can elevate your endeavors with this Unite 2023 asset roundup.Unlock the future of game development with the perfect blend of generative AI, seamless AI/ML integration, and behavior AI assets, all at your fingertips.Ai.Fy – Text To Image is a game changer for Unity editors from AiKodex. This asset is your ticket to transforming text into captivating images, turning rough sketches into lifelike textures, and generating concept designs and auto normal maps with ease. Plus, it offers a seamless solution for creating smoothness maps, making it a must-have tool for your creative arsenal.Next up, we've got Emerald AI 3.0, your key to crafting dynamic AI characters without the need for coding by Black Horizon Studios. With an array of AAA-quality features, Emerald AI simplifies the AI creation process while still offering a high level of customization. Unleash your imagination and breathe life into your characters effortlessly.High-quality 3D assets can instantly elevate the visual appeal of a game. They include detailed textures, animations, and realistic models, making it easier to create immersive and visually stunning experiences.Let’s start with Low Poly Ultimate Pack by polyperfect. Step into a world of low poly graphics with more than 3000 unique prefabs with colliders, adding inspiration scenes and stunning visuals to your game, ready to ignite the imagination of both players and creators alike.Immerse yourself in the future of game development with Triplebrick’s Sci-Fi Facility, a remarkable 3D environment tool that takes you to the depths of a futuristic world, offering endless possibilities for creating immersive sci-fi adventures and captivating gameplay experiences.Looking for cute character bundles? Meet the charming yet menacing creatures in the Monsters Ultimate Pack 02 Cute Series by Meshtint Studio. This 3D character asset pack adds a delightful twist to your game development, letting you create unforgettable encounters with a range of lovable and mischievous monsters.The Unity Asset Store offers a wide range of high-quality sound effects and music, adding depth, realism, and immersion to real-time 3D projects.Step up your audio with Universal Sound FX by Imphenzia. This multipurpose asset offers a vast library of high-quality sound effects, perfect for creating immersive, dynamic audio experiences that breathe life into your game world.Next, consider your game’s audio experience with the Pro Sound Collection by Gamemaster Audio. This versatile asset pack boasts a rich assortment of professional-quality sound effects, enabling you to add depth and realism to the auditory landscape, and immerse players in an unforgettable sonic journey.Finally, explore the RPG Magic Sound Effect Pack from WOW Sound, which includes over 700 elemental sound effects in nine categories, such as dark, electric, fire, ice, water, and more.Visual effects (VFX) assets help create magical visual elements, such as special effects, computer-generated graphics, and simulations, all with the goal of making your content more engaging, realistic, or imaginative. In game development, they are also used to create stunning and immersive visuals that enhance gameplay and storytelling.To get started, check out this gamechanger: All In 1 Vfx Toolkit. From Seaside Studios, this asset simplifies the creation of stunning VFX, making them accessible to all developers. Say goodbye to hours of painstaking development and welcome a new era of immersive game design.Looking to build a VR game? Check out Portals for VR as a VFX solution. This asset by Tom Goethals can transform your virtual reality experiences by way of captivating portals that unlock new dimensions of immersion and interactivity.With hundreds of popular, community-trusted assets on sale, find your next time-saving favorite during the Unity Asset Store Black Friday Sale.Keep an eye on the Unity Asset Store for future sales and promotions offering big discounts on the most sought-after top selling, free, or new assets – and more.

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894|blog.unity.com

How to maximize growth with offerwall special promotions: tips for the holiday season

App engagement peaks during the holiday season - according to our client research, about half of people will play mobile games for at least an hour per day during the holidays. So, how can app developers and advertisers make the most of this uplift in traffic? By utilizing special offerwall promotions, otherwise known as currency sales.Special promotions are time-limited promotions that offer users 1.5-10x the standard offerwall reward in return for completing a task, like playing an advertiser’s game and reaching the end of a level, or filling out a survey. By participating in these promotions, developers and advertisers can both boost their revenue and acquire high ARPU users at scale.Combined with the uplift in mobile engagement during the holiday season, the offerwall is even more rewarding during the holidays. In fact, spend is the highest during holiday special promotions.Not to mention, the holiday season is the height of shopping season, so there’s even higher revenue potential than usual for retail.Let’s break down the most strategic ways app developers and advertisers can boost their KPIs with special promotions this holiday season.Users won’t necessarily know how valuable special promotions are unless it’s made clear to them - that’s why creativity with both text and graphics is key. Here’s how both advertisers and developers can step up their holiday messaging.App developersFor app developers using Tapjoy offerwall, the key to optimize your messaging is Message to Earn. Message to Earn are strategic pop-ups that notify and remind users about upcoming special promotions. As it turns out, utilizing messaging leads to massive growth in offerwall impressions.Special promotions messaging should be on brand with the unique themes from that promotion. That means that, just like advertisers’ offers, your Message to Earn pop-ups should include a festive theme based on the holiday.AdvertisersDuring the holiday season, advertisers’ offers themselves should create a festive mood that fits each upcoming holiday promotion. To best appeal to your users, advertisers should also include key terms like “gifting” and “holiday” in your messagingDuring the holiday season, timing is everything - so it’s critical that developers and advertisers create a sense of urgency during special promotions.App developersWhen using Message to Earn, or reminding users about promotions in general, app developers should highlight that the promotion is time-limited and exclusive. To minimize confusion, make sure to also clarify exactly when the promotion finishes. For example, this Message to Earn pop-up says exactly how long the special promotion lasts for, and clearly states when it ends.AdvertisersTo stay competitive and attractive, advertisers should also regularly switch out their offers during special promotions. This way, you can appeal to a wider pool of users. After all, different creatives will appeal to different users. And similarly to developers, advertisers should modify the text in their offers to make it clear that this offer won’t last long.Finally, timing is key when it comes to participating in special promotions. By setting yourself up to participate in special promotions ahead of time, you can maximize your opportunities for growth - especially during the busy holiday season.And with the Tapjoy offerwall, setting yourself up for special promotions is simple - just reach out to your account manager to get started.

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895|blog.unity.com

Podcast: Marketplace Morning Report’s ‘Skin in the Game’

Recently, I had the distinct pleasure to sit down with Unity Charitable Fund grantee Gameheads and Marketplace Morning Report podcast host David Brancaccio to talk about increased representation in gaming.Every day, our team learns of new ways changemakers are reshaping the industry to create more inclusive opportunities and communities. For nearly 10 years, Gameheads – a multi year Unity Charitable Fund grantee – has cultivated game development skills and industry opportunities for youth from underrepresented communities in Oakland, California. Through the use of video game design, development, and DevOps, young people ranging in age from 11–23 gain skills in the tech ecosystem, preparing them for college, careers, and everyday life.For the Marketplace Morning Report episode “Skin in the Game: Tech Leaders Roundtable,” I was joined by fellow Gameheads partners Kevin Johnson of Double Fine Productions and Trinidad Hermida of the Black in Gaming Foundation to discuss the opportunities we are seeing and the work being done to foster a more inclusive games industry. In addition to technical and durable skill development, we hope to ensure work environments are more welcoming of diverse perspectives.I invite you to learn more about this amazing collaboration and hear from these trailblazers by listening to the full episode, “Skin in the Game: Tech leaders roundtable,” hosted by David Brancaccio.To date, Unity Social Impact has awarded more than $8 million in grants to empower creators driving positive, inclusive change across the areas of education, digital health and wellbeing, and sustainability. If this sounds like you, learn more about and apply for our latest grant opportunity, the Unity for Humanity 2024 Grant.

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896|blog.unity.com

Unite 2023: 15th Unity Awards, new dev resources, and the latest Tech Stream release

Yesterday, we were joined by 1,800 creators and our awesome sponsors in Amsterdam for Unite 2023. From the Keynote to breakout sessions, listening lounges to community chatter on Discord, the event was packed with expert tips, creator success stories, and technical deep dives for real-time 3D developers globally.Whether you were in-person in Amsterdam or following along from home, here are some highlights that we know you won’t want to have missed.Winners in the 15th Unity Awards were revealed, and we could not be happier for everyone the community voted to honor – including four-time winner MARVEL SNAP. You can see some of this amazing work in a highlight reel below, or read on for highlights across a few categories.When it comes to your favorite content creators, the duo below shines bright. Press play on some of our favorite videos this year, then check out their channels.Code MonkeyWinner of Best Devlog Series, Best Tutorial Series, and Best Livestreamer | Follow on YouTube, X, PatreonJasperDevWinner of Most Entertaining and Best Newcomer | Follow on YouTube, X, InstagramThe Unity Asset Store is a critical resource for the community and, between nominations and award winners, it’s clear that the value covers so many amazing publishers and packages. Click through to explore winning content now, then browse the Black Friday sale to spot nominees and shop bestsellers.Asset Store Publisher of the Year: More MountainsBest Development Tool: FPS EngineBest Artistic Tool: Text Animator for UnityBest Artistic Content: POLYGON – Elven RealmThose present in the “Go behind the scenes with the SPACE INVADERS: World Defense team” breakout session had a chance to hear from Google’s Dereck Bridié and UNIT9’s Jakub Jakubowski about how Google, TAITO, and UNIT9 used Google’s ARCore Geospatial API, Google Cloud, and the Unity Editor to help power the next generation of immersive gameplay. The team is excited about the opportunities this tooling can unlock and can’t wait to see what you build with the world as your canvas.If you missed the session, you can learn more about the technology used to build SPACE INVADERS: World Defense in this blog post from Google. To keep up with the latest updates on ARCore, Geospatial Creator, and more, follow Google’s AR and VR accounts on X, LinkedIn, and YouTube.A much-anticipated Unite session is our “road ahead” breakout on game development with Unity, which walks through important advances for the Unity Editor and Runtime – this year’s was no exception. In addition to announcements shared in yesterday’s Keynote, the session explored upcoming Unity 6 enhancements and revealed 2023.2 Tech Stream news.This latest Tech Stream brings you accelerated lighting workflow capabilities, improved XR interactions, and so many other cool features. Each release is supported with weekly updates until the next version (that’s why your feedback is critical).Not with us in Amsterdam? Don’t sweat it. Here’s an inside scoop on new resources that were revealed or shared during the event that you can access anywhere right now.Quickstart your multiplayer game with the Netcode for GameObjects package and Unity Gaming Services’s new multiplayer template, found in the Unity Hub. This resource is compatible with 2022 LTS and above and includes a Bootstrapper tool that helps you test faster using various network modes (Host, Client, Server) and dynamic configurations, in-Editor tutorials, and a barebone event-driven gameplay flow. If you’re looking for a starting point to build small-scale competitive games (e.g., real-time strategy games) that don’t require prediction, you’ve come to the right place.Revealed as part of the Keynote, an all-new 3D sample project based on the Universal Render Pipeline (URP) is now available. With it, artists and developers using 2022 LTS can explore how to develop, scale, and configure graphics for multiplatform projects.In addition to the main conference, we spent time this week hosting day-long programming catered to how our technology impacts gaming, industry, and education. Each Summit was an opportunity for leaders to dive deeper into Unity focus areas and look at current trends in real-time 3D. Session highlights include:“Creator roundtable: Taking your game into the future” (Games Executive Summit)“Building the next generation of car experiences, with Mercedes-Benz Group AG” (Industry Executive Summit)“Succeeding in the classroom with Unity” (Education Summit)We want to thank all of the Unity folks and community volunteers who came together to give back to our beautiful host city by removing plastic from the Amsterdam canals. All in, we were able to extract 30 large bags of waste from the water in just one day. Additionally, Unity has worked with climate-conscious companies to offset the carbon footprint of Unite.It’s always so great to connect with our Unity community. We hope you’ll continue to join us on the journey of building a world with more creators in it. Follow all the latest Unity happenings in the forums or on X, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitch. On-demand session recordings from Unite 2023 will be available soon. In the meantime, watch the Keynote or explore the latest news on Unity Industry and AI.

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897|blog.unity.com

Unite 2023: New Unity Industry updates unveiled

From the Industry Executive Summit to the conference floor, Unite 2023 was packed with innovation and inspiring industry updates. Special thanks to our presenters at the Industry Executive Summit, including Mercedes-Benz, i2CAT Foundation, Airbus, Audemars Piguet, AGCO Corporation, the Vancouver International Airport, Capgemini, TomTom, and the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital.The event’s Keynote included exciting announcements about the release of Unity Cloud, AI tools, and more.Unity Industry enables developers, artists, and engineers across industries to build and deliver custom real-time 3D experiences for augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), mobile, desktop, and web. Now it’s getting even better with updates to help Industry subscribers take the developer experience to the next level.Unity CloudAt Unite, we introduced Unity Cloud, a suite of new and existing cloud tools designed to accelerate development and improve collaboration between teams, now in early access. Cloud helps to make your Unity real-time 3D projects more creator focused, accessible, and connected.Unity Cloud Enterprise is now included in your Unity Industry subscription at no extra cost and includes Unity DevOps and the Unity Asset Manager.Unity DevOpsUnity DevOps is purpose built to provide robust version control and CI/CD solutions in the cloud, so you can release more often, catch bugs earlier, try more ideas, and deliver higher-quality experiences. Your Unity Industry subscription now comes with one DevOps seat, allowing you to:Leverage Unity Version Control to help your team of developers, artists, designers, and engineers collaborate efficientlyTest faster and more often with Unity Build Automation, which enables you to host multiplatform builds in the cloud to free up your computing resources and accelerate development.Unity Asset Manager betaTailored specifically for 3D content development, Unity Asset Manager is a digital asset management (DAM) tool that provides teams with a single source of truth for both owned and licensed content. Your Unity Industry subscription includes 120 GB of storage per seat, pooled with your organization, enabling you to:Manage your project’s 3D assets with simple upload tools, metadata tagging, version history, and sharing tools with permissions and rolesMake your 3D, CAD, or BIM data real-time 3D-ready on ingestion into the Asset Manager, and export your data to a wide range of formatsVisualize assets with the web viewer and collaborate with comments and annotations on any 3D assetIntegrate cloud assets into your experiences at runtime with cloud APIs, enabling you to stream massive 3D models to end users, collaborate on assets, and moreBuild cloud-connected applications with a ready-to-use reference project for viewing and collaborating on cloud-hosted 3D assetsPixyz Plugin 2.0Pixyz Plugin 2.0 for Unity includes new features and enhancements to help developers, 3D data preparation specialists, and 3D technical artists perform critical tasks more quickly. This tool is available to Unity Industry subscribers starting today. Here are some notable new features:Pixyz Plugin for Unity is now available directly in Unity’s packages registry, making it easier to add it to your projects.Unity’s Universal Render Pipeline (URP) and High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP) are now supported. You can import and optimize your project’s CAD and 3D files with the Toolbox. Materials and textures are then automatically converted into URP- or HDRP-compatible assets.Unity Prefab compatibility has been significantly improved, including the ability to generate Nested Prefabs at import, keeping part of the hierarchy from CAD models.Explore the release notes for more information.Tools for AIAI is transforming every industry and opening the door to more creative possibilities. Unity is launching new tools to help industrial developers boost productivity and creativity while remaining fully in control of their vision. It changes how your customers interact with your experiences by embedding AI models directly into the runtime, so content reacts and responds to users in new ways.With your Unity Industry subscription, you get access to Unity Sentis, an AI tool that gives you the ability to leverage AI models directly in projects. Unity Sentis is free for subscribers who use Unity 6 and later.Unity Muse, a platform of AI-powered tools, apps, and more that simplifies and accelerates all aspects of real-time 3D development, was made available as an add-on subscription at Unite.Unity visionOS betaWe’re also thrilled to share that the Unity PolySpatial beta for Apple visionOS is now available to all Unity Pro, Enterprise, and Industry subscribers.This means that you can leverage Unity’s familiar workflows and powerful tools to build and bring your apps into a new frontier of spatial computing.Beyond support for the visionOS platform, you will be able to use Unity’s PolySpatial technology to run content alongside multiple applications while in the Shared Space on your device.With Unity Industry and visionOS, you can start creating Industry apps for Apple Vision Pro.Talk to our team to learn how Unity Industry can help your business build without constraints.

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898|blog.unity.com

Unity 2023.2 Tech Stream is now available

We’re excited to announce that the Unity 2023.2 Tech Stream is now available to download.Unity 2023.2 Tech Stream is the latest release of our 2023 development cycle. But after this version, we’ll be changing things up to make it easier to see what version is right for you.As announced in the Unite 2023 Keynote, we will be bringing back the clarity of our original release naming by changing the name of Unity 2023 LTS to Unity 6. This means that all 2023 releases, from 2023.1 (release in July) onwards until LTS, will be rolled up into the new Unity 6.With this change, you’ll start to see us migrating over to the Unity 6 naming convention for releases moving forward, but we’ve left this 2023.2 Tech Stream unchanged so you can find it easily. As always, our Tech Stream releases are fully production-supported until the next major release, so you can have confidence in using these great additions to the Unity Engine.For a sneak peek at what else will come in Unity 6, check out the Product Roadmap session from Unite 2023, where we talk about our focus on delivering elevated graphical performance, accelerated multiplayer workflows, dynamic AI capabilities, and support for web platforms on mobile and the latest XR platforms.Keep reading for highlights from this release, and check the full release notes for more details. We look forward to your feedback so we can continue working together to bring you the best possible Unity Editor experience.2023.2 features several improvements to cross-platform lighting performance, enhanced atmospheric capabilities for the High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP), and improved artist workflows in VFX Graph to elevate the quality and realism of your projects.Adaptive Probe Volumes (APV) has received significant upgrades to enhance iteration times and runtime performance, especially for the Universal Render Pipeline (URP) on mobile devices. The introduction of HDRP Light Probe Data Streaming from Disk allows smoother runtime experiences, optimizing CPU pools to accommodate all probe data in large scenes.Previously, APV supported only per-pixel quality indirect lighting, however this may be unsuitable for a range of mobile devices since it can lead to APV running below acceptable performance levels at runtime. With per-vertex quality settings for APV, you can determine quality levels for indirect lighting from light probes that enable them to efficiently run light probe-lit environments on mobile devices.The production release of the GPU Lightmapper is a game-changer, providing lightning-fast baking of lightmaps and probes that surpasses the capabilities of the CPU Lightmapper. The GPU Lightmapper can more than halve the time it takes to process your lighting data as compared to the CPU Lightmapper, and it is ideal for larger scenes and higher-resolution lightmap textures.Additionally, if you’re using Static Global Illumination (GI), the new Interactive Preview functionality enables simpler authoring and troubleshooting of baked lighting data, replacing “Auto Generate.”If you’re building modular content, including Light Probes, you’re no longer limited to read-only Light Probes positions. With this release, we provide you with an API that allows you to modify light probe positions after probes have been baked.HDRP delivers enhancements to extend visual experiences. HDRP Night Sky now supports time-of-day transitions, integrating stars and celestial bodies like the moon for more immersive scenes. Volumetric Clouds have also received significant visual quality improvements through better shadow maps, delivering more realistic and visually appealing self-shadowing effects.SpeedTree visual quality is enhanced in HDRP, leveraging the new Transmission Mask to apply subsurface scattering only on leaves. You can now remove unintended light transmitted from tree bark and twigs, as well as fix the overly bright billboard lighting that doesn’t match the 3D geometry’s lighting.Improvements to decals include compatibility with the Pathtracer Shader Graph-based decals can affect transparent objects, so you can build procedural effects like raindrops, ripples, custom engravings, dirt effects on glass, and more.In 2022 LTS, we introduced VFX Graph 6-way lighting for HDRP, and now it’s available for URP. These tools allow you to bake lightmaps and simulate the lighting in sprite sheets at runtime, so you can create customizable effects, like smoke, clouds, or steam, that work under different lighting conditions.VFX Graph Motion Vectors support, in conjunction with URP Object Motion Blur support, allows artists to blur objects moving faster than the camera’s exposure time. This enables you to deliver impressive visual effects that are seamlessly integrated with systems like Temporal Anti-Aliasing.The new VFX Graph Templates and Wizard gives you access to a template window that provides predefined effects, acting as a starting point for creating unique effects with ease.Additionally, for more seasoned VFX artists and developers, we have added a Custom HLSL Block. This extends the possibilities of VFX Graph, so you can add effects like flocks (through neighbor search) or reading back from a buffer to trigger audio.Shader Graph updates include Shader Graph for UGUI, allowing you to create an infinite array of animated effects and tune the behavior and appearance of the UI while also reducing performance and memory costs.The latest visual improvements across multiple platforms enhance the graphics-rich experiences gamers crave, while improving overall mobile gaming with added stability for Android devices.With the release of High Dynamic Range (HDR) cross-platform display support, you can reproduce images with a higher range of difference in luminance that’s closer to natural lighting conditions. HDR output allows for better preservation of the contrast and quality of the linear lighting renders and HDR images displayed on devices. The Unity Editor and Standalone Players now also provide full HDR tone mapping and display support across all rendering pipelines and capable platforms, including mobile and XR.Unlock stunning hardware-accelerated ray-tracing effects and simulations with inline ray tracing, which can be utilized in rasterization and compute shaders when targeting DXR1.1-capable Windows platforms, Xbox Series X|S, and Playstation®5. You can now issue ray queries from within shaders in order to traverse the bound ray tracing Acceleration Structure and perform intersection testing.In partnership with Google, the install and runtime experience on Android were improved to help you reduce the download size and provide valuable insights into issues that impact the overall stability of your game.Play Asset Delivery and Texture Compression Format Targeting are coming to Addressables, the recommended Unity asset management solution. With the new Addressable for Android package, you can use a new or existing Addressables setup to benefit from Play Asset Delivery’s dynamic delivery options. When you combine this with Texture Compression Target Formatting, players will get textures customized for their devices, at a smaller initial install size. Read more about the new package here.You can now integrate a host of new C# APIs that provide access to your Application’s exit reasons. These insights can help you to fine-tune user messaging in case of crashes and Application Not Responding (ANR) events, send to your analytics, or even adapt how your game launches. You can read more in the documentation.Unity has added support for Meta Quest 3 in 2022 LTS, 2023.1, and 2023.2. You can create VR games with familiar workflows utilized for previous Quest devices. Moreover, you can leverage AR Foundation to craft captivating mixed reality experiences for Quest 3 and take advantage of enhanced passthrough to seamlessly blend digital content with the physical world.Get started with new project templates for mixed reality, virtual reality, and mobile AR. These templates help you build and deploy for OpenXR, Meta Quest, Windows Mixed Reality, and ARKit– and ARCore–supported devices. Learn the basics with example scenes that use AR Foundation and XR Interaction Toolkit (XRI) to demonstrate world tracking and input and interaction features. Download templates from Unity Hub, and learn more in our documentation.XRI will include loads of updates to help create better interactive experiences. We’ve updated the ray-based interactions with several visual improvements to increase accuracy when grabbing objects. To help you build more interactive cross-platform games, we’ve added new Gaze and Hand functionality, such as: target objects with gaze, swap hands with controllers, spawn menu on wrist, and more. We’ve also updated climbing-based interactions to help you build more flexible climbing functionality.These are only some of the key updates, and you can learn more about what’s new in both XRI 2.4 and XRI 2.5 in our documentation.You’ll find additional improvements to Unity Transport with support for WebGL and simplified integration with Unity Gaming Services Relay. This update also introduces a new Network Simulation tool to Netcode for GameObject that simulates network conditions.The latest update to UI Toolkit for Unity enhances the ease and flexibility of connecting data to UI elements, streamlining the development process for UIs in both the Editor and Runtime environments. The new Runtime Bindings feature can now be configured using the UI Builder or directly through C# code using a comprehensive API. Additionally, the introduction of UXML Serialization and Attributes allows you to quickly create custom UI elements, reducing the need for repetitive coding by leveraging C# Attributes and integrating Custom Property Drawers within the UI Builder.The UI Builder itself has received significant enhancements with new features that reveal the sources of style properties, faster canvas manipulation, and support for UXML Objects authoring. This includes editing capabilities for complex UI components like multi-column TreeViews and ListViews. There are also new UI Toolkit controls such as ToggleButtonGroup and TabView, alongside improvements to existing widgets such as icon support for Buttons and customization options for ListView and TreeView elements.Unity’s Scene View has been upgraded with a new Context Menu, accessible through right-click or keyboard shortcuts, created using UI Toolkit and extensible via C#. This menu offers quick access to common commands and can be tailored for new tool development. Spline functionality has also been improved, with new data storage options on Spline objects and a refined point-editing interface in the Inspector. The Scene View Context Menu can be utilized here as well, providing added efficiency when working with Splines.In this release, we’re introducing the Audio Random Container, or ARC. Designed to enhance audio workflows, ARC offers randomized audio elements for various applications within Unity. This addition marks a significant step toward creating more dynamic and immersive audio experiences without needing to code. Now available at the asset level, ARC provides the ability to configure randomized effects such as general ambient noises, impact sounds, dialogue clips, and more, which can be triggered as needed, rather than being configured through scripts.A new Highlights module is available for the Unity Profiler. It helps you quickly identify CPU/GPU bottlenecks so that you can have a starting point to your performance optimization journey. In 2023.2, this module is not enabled by default, so you will have to open the Profiler window, then select the Profiler Modules dropdown menu to toggle the Highlights feature on to use it.To learn more about what’s in the 2023.2 Tech Stream, check out the release notes for a comprehensive list of features and the Unity Manual for details on how to use them. As you dive in, keep in mind that while each Tech Stream release is supported with weekly updates until the next version, there is no guarantee of long-term support for new features.Also, remember to always back up your work prior to upgrading to a new version. Our upgrade guide can assist with this. For projects in production, we recommend using Unity 2022 LTS for greater stability and support.The Tech Stream release is an opportunity to both get early access to new features and to shape the development of future tech through your feedback. We want to hear how we can best support you and your projects. Let us know how we’re doing on the forums, or share your feedback directly with our product team through the Unity Platform Roadmap.

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899|blog.unity.com

Unite 2023: Deepening our commitment to game development

We’re excited to get together with the community at Unite 2023, our first large-scale in-person conference in four years. Unite is all about meeting up with Unity developers from around the world to make connections, share inspiration and expertise, and dig deep into the present and future of the Unity platform.Today’s Keynote is packed with developers sharing their stories and games, new Unity demos, and updates about what’s coming and what’s here now to support all of you as you design, build, deploy, and run video games.In the Keynote, we’re kicking things off with a preview of the next major, supported version of Unity – with a new name. Say “hello” to Unity 6, our next Long Term Support (LTS) release, heading your way in 2024. Unity 6 will come with major performance enhancements and accelerated multiplayer game creation, as well as early access WebGPU support and deeper XR device support.We’re previewing some of these capabilities in Fantasy Kingdom in Unity 6, a stylized environment demo built around assets from Synty Studios that showcases upcoming enhancements for rendering, lighting, and scaling richer worlds with significant performance improvements. A major part of the demo is Adaptive Probe Volumes, which deliver more immersive, natural lighting scenarios. GPU Resident Drawer, GPU Occlusion Culling, and Spatial-Temporal Post-Processing (STP) unlock hardware-based optimizations and additional performance boosts.Unity 6 will also bring support for a brand-new WebGPU graphics backend. Starting from Unity 6, you will be able to run your Unity games anywhere on the web, including in a web view inside native apps or inside a browser. The new capabilities unlock support for new and exciting rendering features and enable next-level of graphics fidelity.You can check out our Roadmap session, available on demand soon, for more details on Unity 6.While we can’t wait to bring you this new version, we’re also highlighting some key features from our latest Long Term Support release, Unity 2022 LTS, including its full DOTS support and Universal Render Pipeline (URP) graphics features in a 3D sample that shows you how to develop, scale, and configure graphics for multiplatform projects. Download 2022 LTS and the URP 3D Sample Project today to get started.Building on the multiplayer capabilities unlocked with LTS 2022, StickyLock Studios is joining us to describe why they turned to Unity when developing their multiplayer competitive shooter game Histera.We’re offering a sneak peek of the upcoming Megacity Metro demo and sample game, created to highlight the end-to-end capabilities you need to deliver awesome multiplayer games. Megacity Metro refreshes our Megacity sample from 2018 with a new aesthetic and greater focus on cross-platform play. This game sample will show you how you can create and scale multiplayer experiences with support for over 100 players through the use of Netcode for Entities and Multiplay Hosting.We’re also showing you Safe Voice and Moderation, tools for managing toxicity in your multiplayer games that you can access in open beta today to provide a safer community for your players.At Unite, we are also unveiling the new Unity Cloud, with tools to connect and streamline workflows. Unity Cloud includes Unity Asset Manager, Unity DevOps, centralized Team Administration, Editor integrations, and an improved Dashboard UI to bring order to the game development lifecycle.Unity Cloud is in early access today for every version and subscription tier of Unity, including Personal Edition.As part of the Unite announcements, we are also unveiling the latest evolution of both Unity Muse and Unity Sentis. Unity Muse helps you iterate more quickly using AI capabilities like Chat, Sprite, and Texture to refine your vision.With Chat, you can use natural language prompts to find exactly what you’re looking for. In seconds, you’ll have well-structured answers and instructions – and even project-ready code. Using the Sprite capability, you can produce and modify 2D art directly in the Editor, generating production-quality textures for 2D and 3D projects, in any style, all inside your project.We’re also offering a glimpse of the next set of Muse capabilities, currently in prerelease and fully supported later in 2024: Behavior, Animate, and Sketch. Behavior enables you to instantly set up character interactions. Simply describe the desired actions, and Muse will create behavior trees in the Editor. For both aspiring and skilled animators, Animate lets you bring humanoid characters to life with just a few text prompts. With Sketch, you can get started mocking up collaboratively on the web before importing your sample scene into the Editor.Muse produces game art that can be tweaked and modified for production use, so you can drop the asset directly into a Unity project. To learn more about how we trained our models and the techniques applied for quality-controlled outputs, check out our blog post on responsible AI and enhanced model training at Unity. Since it’s powered by our custom-built, responsibly trained model, you don’t have to worry about accidentally generating someone else’s copyrighted materials. We’re committed to ensuring that Muse provides safe and original assets for all paid subscribers. After this early access period, if anyone claims that your Muse-generated assets infringe copyright, we’ll defend you ourselves.Muse is available now in early access, and subscriptions are $30 a month. While Muse is still in early access, you can experiment as much as you want, without limits. During this period, as we learn with you, all features have unlimited usage. At the conclusion of early access, which we expect to be in the spring of 2024, we’ll update the Muse terms and conditions and allow you to purchase overages if needed, and we’ll give you plenty of notice before we make any changes. Follow the latest on Muse in Discussions, and be sure to check out the FAQ that will be updated as development progresses.With Unity Sentis, you can embed AI models in the Unity Runtime in your game or application, enabling enhanced gameplay and other functionality on end-user devices. You can take models from places like Tensorflow, Pytorch, Meta, and OpenAI, or marketplaces like Keras or HuggingFace. Sentis uses the open ONNX file standard to import and optimize them for the Unity Runtime.Because Sentis allows trained AI models to run locally on all Unity-supported devices, you can imagine and deliver experiences like smart interactive NPCs with open-ended quests, object recognition, and more – without worrying about cloud compute costs or latency.Sentis continues in open beta and is free for all Unity users at this time, with a full release to follow with Unity 6 next year. Follow the latest on Sentis in Discussions, and be sure to share the amazing things you build with the community.At Unite, we’re announcing a new partnership with Meta to bring Unity titles to Instant Games across Facebook and Messenger. This will be available in beta late next year.We’re adding more ways to build mixed reality games and experiences for Meta Quest 3 by officially launching AR Foundation for the Quest platform. This lets you bring the real world into your mixed reality games – and use our templates to start building for it right now.Earlier this year, Unity’s platform support for Apple Vision Pro was announced at WWDC, and the world was introduced to Unity PolySpatial, which allows you to build unique spatial experiences that can run alongside other applications in Apple Vision Pro’s Shared Space. Thousands of you, from 145 countries, registered interest to participate in our beta program for visionOS – and during the Keynote, we’re announcing that Unity visionOS Beta is open to all Unity Pro, Enterprise, and Industry customers as of today.Finally, we’re concluding the Keynote with a look at your amazing creations and by announcing the community-nominated and elected winners of the 15th Unity Awards. Congratulations to all the winners!Unite 2023 is happening now with technical sessions, roadmap deep dives, and more. Select content from the event will also be made available on YouTube over the coming weeks. Watch the full Keynote address below.

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900|blog.unity.com

Responsible AI and enhanced model training at Unity

Unity Muse helps you explore, ideate, and iterate with powerful AI capabilities. Two of these capabilities are Texture and Sprite, which transform natural language and visual inputs into usable assets.Introducing AI into the Unity Editor with Muse offers you the option to realize your vision more easily by being able to quickly transform ideas into something tangible. You can also adjust and iterate with text prompts, patterns, color and sketches that can transform into real and project-ready outputs.In order to provide useful outputs that are safe, responsible, and respectful of other creators’ copyright, we challenged ourselves to innovate in our training techniques for the AI models that power Muse’s sprite and texture generation.In this blog post, we share how Muse generates results, unpack our model training methodologies, and introduce our two new foundation models.As we debut Muse’s Texture and Sprite capabilities, we are also pioneering two bespoke diffusion models, each trained from scratch on proprietary data that is Unity owned or licensed.One key technique we employ to enhance the scale and variety of our datasets is data augmentation, which allows us to produce many variations from original Unity-owned data samples. This significantly enriches our training sets and enhances the models’ ability to generalize from limited samples. We also utilize techniques like geometric transformations, color space adjustments, noise injection, and sample variations with generative models, such as Stable Diffusion, to synthetically expand our dataset.Recently, Stable Diffusion has been the subject of ethical concerns because the model was originally trained on data scraped from the internet. We limited our reliance on pretrained models as we built Muse’s Texture and Sprite capabilities by training a latent diffusion model architecture from scratch, on original datasets that Unity owns and has responsibly curated. By using the Stable Diffusion model minimally as part of our data augmentation techniques, we were able to safely leverage this model to expand our original library of Unity-owned assets into a robust and diverse repository of outputs that are unique, original, and do not contain any copyrighted artistic styles. We also applied additional mitigations on top of this that we’ll describe below. Our training datasets for the latent diffusion models underpinning Muse’s Texture and Sprite capabilities do not comprise any data scraped from the internet.Below are some examples of content expanded through the augmentation techniques described above.After augmenting our existing data, there were still gaps in a range of subjects that we needed to fill. To do this, we trained Stable Diffusion on our own content until its behavior was significantly changed. Using these derivative models, we created entirely new synthetic data using a prefiltered list of subjects. The list of subjects went through both human review and additional automated filtering using a large language model (LLM) to ensure we did not attempt to create any synthetic images that would violate our guiding principles and go against what we were trying to achieve: a dataset completely devoid of recognizable artistic styles, copyrighted materials, and potentially harmful content.The result was two large datasets of both augmented and fully synthetic images, which we had high confidence would not contain unwanted concepts. However, as confident as we were, we still wanted to add even more filtering to ensure our models’ safety.Since our main priorities were safety, privacy, and ensuring our tools help you without negative impacts, we developed four separate classifier models that were responsible for additional dataset filtering. These models helped ensure that all content contained in the dataset met the standards we set with our guiding AI principles, as well as additional checks for image quality.Together, the reviewer models were responsible for determining that synthetic images:Did not contain the features of any recognizable humanDid not contain any non-generic artistic stylesDid not contain any IP characters or logosWere of an acceptable level of qualityIf an image did not pass the high confidence threshold required by any of the four reviewer models, it was discarded from our dataset. We decided to err on the side of caution and weighted our models towards rejection so that only the images with the highest confidence would pass the filters and make it into the final dataset.At Unite, we announced early access for Muse’s Texture and Sprite capabilities. The first iterations of the models that power these tools are internally referred to as Photo-Real-Unity-Texture-1 and Photo-Real-Unity-Sprite-1. These models are designed to only have a basic understanding of stylization and are primarily focused on photorealism.Additionally, if you want to guide the models to match an existing style in your project, you can teach our models how to create content in a specific art style by providing our style training system a handful of the your own reference assets. This creates a small secondary model that works in tandem with the main model to guide its outputs. This small secondary model is private to you or your organization as its trainers, and we will never use this content to train our main models.Because our models focus on photorealism, we did not have to train our main models on countless different styles. This architecture makes it easier to train the main models while maintaining our commitment to responsible AI and, at the same time, giving you a deep level of artistic control.These models today are just the beginning. We expect Muse to continue getting smarter and to provide better outputs, and we’ll be shepherding the models on this path with our model-improvement roadmaps.At the moment, our texture model is quite capable all around. It knows a significant amount of concepts, and you can freely mix completely unrelated concepts and achieve beautiful results, such as “metal slime” or “blue crystal glass rocks,” as shown above.While the model is quite capable in its current state, after learning how it responds to different prompts and input methods, we’ve observed that it may be difficult to achieve advanced material concepts with single-word prompts. There are additional methods to help guide the model to reach your vision, but we want to continue giving you more control, both in terms of basic prompts’ accuracy and by adding new methods of guiding the model.In the future, we plan to add a color picker, additional premade guidance patterns, an improved system for creating your own guidance patterns, and other new methods of visual input, which we’re currently experimenting with.Going forward, our primary focus for Photo-Real-Unity-Texture-1 is to identify any weak material concepts and continue to improve the overall quality and capability through frequent retraining of the model. Your feedback through the in-tool rating system is critical to helping us build the best tool we can by helping us identify weak points in the model’s capabilities. Combined with our frequent training schedule, we are rapidly improving the model, making it easier to use and more knowledgeable of the material world.Similar to Photo-Real-Unity-Texture-1, our foundational sprite model is overall very capable and knows many concepts. As the tool does not yet have built-in animation capabilities, we chose to focus our initial efforts on maximizing the quality of the most commonly used static sprite concepts. You can see the raw outputs of the base model in the image above. In normal use, these would be guided by a user-trained model to match a specific art style.While static objects are quite reliable already, we’re still working on improving the anatomical accuracy of animals and humans. It’s possible to get good results on these types of subjects, however you may encounter cases of extra or missing limbs or distorted faces. This is a side effect of our commitment to responsible AI and having strict limitations on what data can be used. We’re taking privacy and safety seriously, even at the expense of quality for some subjects in our initial early access release.This is a side effect of our commitment to responsible AI and having strict limitations on what data can be used. We’re taking privacy and safety seriously, even at the expense of quality for some subjects in our initial early access release.You may also experience cases where a generated sprite is completely blank. This is caused by our visual content moderation filter. We have chosen to be overly cautious during our initial launch when it comes to output filtering on Photo-Real-Unity-Sprite-1, and, as a result, some art styles may trigger false positives on the filter. We intend to ease the restrictions over time as we continue to receive your feedback and improve our content filter.We expect the quality of all subjects across the board to rapidly increase as we get feedback and continue to source more data responsibly. We intend to put Photo-Real-Unity-Sprite-1 through a similarly rigorous training schedule to Photo-Real-Unity-Texture-1.Unity Muse is our first step toward bringing greater creative control to our community with the power of generative AI in the most responsible and respectful way possible. We’ve built this product with a user-first focus, and we aim to continue to change and improve based on your feedback.We recognize the potential impact of generative AI on the creative industry, and we take it very seriously. We have taken our time in developing these tools to ensure that we are not replacing creators but instead enhancing your abilities. We believe the world is a better place with more creators in it, and with Unity Muse and the models that power it, we continue to support this mission.Stay tuned for future news about Unity Muse and AI development. If you have questions about these products, check out the FAQ on our website, or visit Discussions to chat with us directly.If you’ve come here from Unite 2023, we’ll be sharing session recordings from the event in the coming weeks. You can find full coverage here.

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