Have you ever considered being a beta tester? You’ll get early access to the latest new features, and you can test if your project is compatible with the new beta.

Thanks to everyone who helped us introduce the next generation of Unity by being part of the 2017.2 Beta Program. We’re now ready to invite you to help test the 2017.3 Beta version.

Participating in the Unity Beta Program will help our engineers and QA team ensure that the next stable version of Unity works for your project, your team, and your goals. It will give us insight into how you use new features in your projects, where you run into issues, and how we can help resolve them.

How to become a beta tester

If you’re new to the Beta program and aren’t sure where to start, just follow the four steps below. (If you’ve already downloaded the new beta version, just skip to Step 3.)

1. Download the latest beta build. To see the new features that you can try now, click on the Release Notes tab.
2. Run the Installer. Choose your options as usual, and be sure to install the beta in a new directory. It’s ok to have multiple versions of Unity side by side.
3. Make a copy of the project you plan to use for testing the beta. That way if the beta has regressions, it won’t affect your project. You also avoid having to re-import your project when you go back to your current stable version.
4. Open your project in the latest beta version. Once you’ve installed the beta version, you can continue developing as usual.

If you experience problems in the beta

If you experience issues with the beta, we encourage you to file a bug report using the Unity Bug Reporter accessible through the Help menu in the editor, and to post in the Beta Forums.

The Unity beta forum is a great community resource where you can see what other people have reported, find workarounds, and keep up to date with fixes. It’s also a good way to get in touch with someone at Unity if you have additional questions or information.

Another great resource is the Public Issue Tracker, where you can vote and comment on bugs reported by other users. This helps our team prioritize which bugs to tackle first.

Sign up to our beta tester tips newsletter

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What’s included in 2017.3b?

Over the course of the release of the 2017.3 version, we will add multiple fixes and improvements as we launch new beta versions. As of today, however, some of the features that you can test include the following additions:

• Improvements to panoramic 360/180 2D/3D video workflows, now with XR support to Experimental Scriptable Render Pipelines.
• Mono/.NET 2.0 support for Memory Profiler. This Makes it possible to take managed memory snapshots in the editor while using .NET 2.0.
• Unlit and Surface shaders for use with Particle Systems, ribbonized particle trails, and various other Particle System improvements. 
• Support for HDR compressed lightmaps (BC6H) on PC, Xbox One and PlayStation 4. This is enabled by setting the Lightmap Encoding option in Player Settings to High Quality.
• Dynamic Resolution provides Dynamically Scaling to some or all of the render targets to reduce the workload on the GPU.
• Assembly definition files feature for script compilation pipeline in the editor. Allows you to define your own managed assemblies based upon scripts inside a folder. By splitting your project’s scripts into multiple assemblies, script compilation times in the editor can be greatly reduced. Note that the latest version of Visual Studio Tools for Unity is required for this feature to work with solution and project generation for Visual Studio.
• Support for capturing VR device refresh rate, dimension, aspect ratio, HMD tracking and Controllers tracking as part of device info and device status events

For a list of all features, improvements and fixes, check the release notes, which also includes a list of the known issues.