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Unity 2020 roadmap: Recapping the tech and solutions coming this year

April 6, 2020 in Technology | 6 min. read
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A lot is happening at Unity this year, and we’re excited to share some of the highlights. So grab your favorite beverage and dive into this post to learn about our recently shared roadmaps on core Unity technology and game-changing offerings for live content, as well as the upcoming Unite Now digital programming series.

Unity Roadmap 2020: Core Engine & Creator Tools

In 2020, we’re fully committed to bringing more intuitive workflows and additional capabilities to help ensure project success for all Unity users across gaming, entertainment, automotive, architecture and other industries. Our guiding principle is to ensure that Unity is a reliable and highly performant platform for all your creative and business goals. To that end, we recently shared our four top priorities in this online session, Unity Roadmap 2020: Core Engine & Creator Tools.

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1. Reliability and performance

To start, we’re now shipping two TECH stream releases per year instead of three, extending the alpha and beta phases to ensure more robust and stable core releases. As well, more features will be delivered as modular packages.

We’re also continuing to update Unity under the hood to enable the highest performance, both to facilitate more immersive experiences at runtime and to accelerate your project iterations. On the features front, we have an internal production team embedded within our R&D department battle-testing them to ensure production-readiness for you.

2. Creative workflows

We aim to provide you with the tooling you need to be more productive and reduce the time from concept to final render. To help you, we’ve introduced a wide range of new tooling for artists and designers over the past few years, such as Shader Graph, 2D Tools and Visual Effect Graph as well as new features for programmers, including additions to profiling and improvements like Configurable Enter Play Mode. Our focus for 2020 is on updating existing features, with the priority on stability, performance, and smoother workflows.

3. Scalable quality

We want to ensure that you can build anything from the lightest 2D game to the biggest 3D world with optimal efficiency. This year, we will continue to make the import pipeline more scalable and ensure robust dependency-tracking in our quest to better support large teams and large projects, including those with complex assets.

On the graphics side, we are investing substantial resources in the Scriptable Render Pipeline. If you need scalability for all supported platforms, high performance, and best-in-class visual quality, the Universal Render Pipeline is now our recommended production-ready solution. We’re adding improvements that enable more creative options such as Camera Stacking and multipass rendering for XR.

To help you achieve stunning high-fidelity graphics on high-end hardware (PC, consoles, and future hardware), the High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP) is now out of Preview, which means a consistent upgrade path for those of you already working with it. We will continue to improve HDRP as well as bring real-time Ray Tracing to your projects.

Our Data-Oriented Technology Stack (DOTS) will continue to lay the foundation for an architecture that delivers performance by default.

4. Reaching your audience

To make it as easy as possible to put your content in your users' hands wherever they are, our goal is to provide a stable and highly performant runtime that supports all current and upcoming platforms. We want to help you get the most out of any hardware, including augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) devices. We’re also working on Project Tiny, a runtime that enables you to build instant games and experiences across mobile and web, with the most optimal file size and load times.

Unity Roadmap 2020: Live Games

The most successful games are those that are live and can keep players much longer than 24 hours, the typical dropoff point for the majority of players. In order to keep players engaged, it’s imperative to deliver fresh and personalized experiences.

In our Unity Roadmap 2020: Live Games session, we highlighted three products that help solve the challenge of engaging and retaining players. Whether you’re a developer, product manager, designer or producer, there are a lot of useful tools to discover in deltaDNA, GameTune, and Cloud Content Delivery, all designed to work with Unity or any game engine.

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Understand the player journey to increase engagement

To build a successful game, you need to deeply understand your players and treat them differently based on their behaviors and play styles. In 2019, deltaDNA joined the Unity family to give you the analytics, customer relationship management (CRM), and messaging capabilities to understand the player journey and increase player engagement.

This year, we’re working on bringing additional intelligence into deltaDNA with Unity machine learning. One of the first features we’re developing is Predictive Segments – understanding when users are likely to take an action, such as churn, so games can build campaigns that will retain them. Sign up for a free 30-day trial of deltaDNA or the Predictive Segments alpha.

Machine learning personalizes the gameplay experience

We’ve heard from many users who are interested in implementing machine learning for personalizing player experiences, but who do not have the data science resources to build it themselves. GameTune gives everyone access to Unity’s machine learning to iterate and optimize games in real-time.

Since we announced GameTune's beta availability, we’ve made improvements to ease of use, such as templatizing some of the most common use cases like ad frequency and in-app purchase (IAP) offers. We’re also improving machine learning models with reinforcement learning, and we’re excited to release it to more developers later this year. Sign up for the beta today.

End-to-end content management and delivery

Every game developer is laser-focused on keeping players engaged. To do this, you need to keep players in your games with regular streams of new content. With Cloud Content Delivery, you can focus on creating content without worrying about the infrastructure for managing and delivering it.

Cloud Content Delivery is much more than a content delivery network (CDN). It's engine-agnostic (but with benefits for Unity users, like Addressables integration), has artist and developer-friendly interface options (dashboard or command-line interface), and is reliable, managed, and headache-free with robust support. We are releasing our full self-serve offering later this quarter. In the meantime, sign up for the beta today.

Tune in to Unite Now to learn even more

Beginning April 14 and continuing throughout the spring and summer, join us for Unite Now, a digital programming series designed to bring you the latest on Unity tech. Enjoy a free, weekly lineup of sessions, roundtables, and discussions that provide a deeper look at the Unity tech and solutions that can help you succeed at any or every stage of your project.

Sign up for email or add Unite Now programming to your Google calendar to stay up to date with the latest content over the coming weeks and months.

Interested in providing feedback on the Unity 2020.1 beta?

We make the Beta version of every core release available to Unity developers interested in seeing the upcoming features so they can plan their future development. To take part in our beta program, you can download Unity 2020.1 beta from the Unity Hub or from our beta page. As always, we don’t recommend using the beta for live or in-production projects. If you decide to try it, please make sure you back up your project before getting started. To learn more, sign up for our Beta 2020.1 Overview webinar on April 20.

Tell us what you’re excited about

That’s a wrap! Comment below to tell us what Unity tech and features you’re most looking forward to in 2020 and, if you haven’t already, be sure to watch both the Core Engine & Creator Tools and Live Games roadmap videos on our YouTube channel.

April 6, 2020 in Technology | 6 min. read

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