The engine is about to become faster and more efficient.
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Unity has recently published a video from its Unite 2023 presentation, sharing the company's game development roadmap.
In November, it announced Unity 6, the next version of the engine, which will bring performance enhancements, accelerated multiplayer game creation, early access WebGPU support, and deeper XR device support in 2024. This time, Unity went into more detail about the changes.
Unity 6 will feature the GPU Resident Drawer, which should optimize your games so you can render larger and more complex scenes without needing to tweak them for optimization. Moreover, there's new GPU occlusion culling, which takes some heat off your CPU to make sure that you aren't rendering things you can't see on the screen.
Another highlight of the Keynote was Spatial-Temporal Post-Processing (STP), an upscaler that makes the frames render faster, ensuring that high-quality content can be scaled to more platforms without any changes. "STP should make it easier for you to achieve high target performance while maintaining your target quality."
Unity also shed more light on Adaptive Probe Volumes (APV), "a new way for you to build global illumination lighting."
"As well as simpler probe placement workflows and faster duration for light probe-based indirect lighting, you can now benefit from improved image quality and more control of optimizations for runtime performance based on your target platform. APV and URP enable you to choose between per-vertex and per-pixel quality so that you can run your content more performantly even on low-powered devices. And having APV integrated seamlessly with atmospherics means that effects like volumetric fog in HDRP and the effects graph particles in URP and HDRP are now beautifully lit by indirect lighting."
Image credit: Unity
Apart from this, Unity talked about its ties with Apple's Vision Pro, announcing that all Unity Pro, Industry, and Enterprise subscribers can build apps for the headset in beta now. In the future, the company will bring more advanced features for mixed reality development, like Shader Graph, the particle system, and improvements to iteration and debugging tools.
In addition, Unity launched AR Foundation for the Quest 3, introducing features such as passthrough, plane detection, occlusion, and an interaction toolkit.
Notably, the presentation mentioned Unity Wētā Tools, saying that integrating Ziva's soft-tissue simulation abilities into Unity is "really just the beginning," and next year, the company will bring topology deformation transfers for enhanced LOD support, GPU optimizations, and enhanced quasi-static clothing support for real-time deformations of clothing.
Speaking of Wētā, Unity has recently revealed its plans to end the agreement with the company, resulting in the termination of 265 positions.
Image credit: Unity
Finally, Unity talked about its AI achievements, like Sentis – its neural engine that allows you to import and run AI models in Unity. In 2024, the company wants to make Sentis use neural processing units (NPUs) to speed up model inference and offload work from the CPU and GPU. "We'll also make it easier to interpret your AI model in code by adding a graph editor that allows for intuitive model visualization and layer and optimization edits."
"Lastly, there are cases where it's preferable to host your AI model on a cloud server such as with large language models that are very large on disc. For these cases, you'll be able to use the Sentis HTTP wrapper for the API calls without changing the C# code, keeping the local and cloud inference inputs and outputs consistent to work with."
Unity's new generative AI assistant Muse has also been officially launched recently. It offers a suite of capabilities that help simplify and accelerate game creation. With it, you can add textures and sprites, program behaviors and create animations, as well as use Muse as a chatbot. Next year, the company plans to improve the chat feature, add more customization features, and "make the AI work for you."
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