Introducing Unity 6, the next major release of Unity.

Off topic discussion/posts moved to that product's thread. Please stay on topic.

 

any accurate release date? pls someone reply me

 

End of this year.

 

I THINK this is relevant to this thread. Unity 6 is the next LTS release to my knowledge and this upcoming game has some impressive visual features to check out that they might be shipping in the next LTS within the HD render pipeline:

Twitter post:
https://twitter.com/HaroldHalibut/status/1752763539301802463

Free Demo:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/924750/Harold_Halibut/

If nothing else looks like a really cool experience to check out made in Unity with some really awesome visual tech and style.

 

Been waiting for this game ever since the early previews a few years back.
So cool there is a demo out (yesterday), but ouch 54GB!

However I think its a real stretch to promote this as Unity 6, unless they have recently claimed so?

Checking out their Unity page here they make several points to asset store packages they are using like 'Next Gen Soft Shadows', Amplify Texture etc and the only reference to Unity is that they started prototyping back in Unity 4 and 2017's Timeline/Cinemachine.

The style and visual features thus appear to be down purely to a great development team, and strong art direction, with little to no input from Unity. I'd be surprised if its even using the new render pipelines unless they jumped onto them very early in development as most graphics can easily be achieved using the builtin renderer.

I certainly doubt with an imminent release ( you don't release a demo more than a few months before launch ) that they are on a recent Unity version, let alone aiming for Unity 6 as that is just a QA nightmare. You only update a project so close to release to a newer version of Unity if its for a serious bug you can't fix yourself or perhaps if the project is for mobile with ongoing development that needs updates.

 

I don't think they'd mind me posting this link here considering they posted it on Twitter, here's the post I was referencing:

 

Thanks for the link and making me feel stupid

Fair enough, I guess they switched pretty early to use HDRP. But now i'm intrigued to see which version of Unity its on, using the SRP might suggest they are forced to use more recent versions due to the frequency of fixes and updates they get.

Will be interesting to see it in person ... if my download speed wasn't so slow - still 90 minutes to wait ;(

 

Ha, it's fair, we're just outsiders posting random crap on these forums, if i'd have seen my post i'd have called BS too. Also, great to see cool sh*t going on again with this engine.

Another little nugget of info:

 

No. Unity has never had a release date.

 

It's relative what you call "early", on Halibut's scale it's relatively early, but they were 4 years in already (if we count the early prototypes). Again, it's relative. Them talking about they are planning to move to HDRP in 2018.

And link to the playlist if anyone is interested in the three part interview with them, and another interview: Unity Creator Spotlight from two years ago.

 

I don't have enough patient for this

 

Then face hars through and drop game dev.
It is not for you.
Because you don't even understand, why you need latest Unity.

 

What is it that you're waiting for, exactly? I still haven't heard of any new features or anything that are supposed to be coming with Unity 6.

 

Unity 6 is the LTS. Some people are unwilling or unable to use the non-LTS releases.

 

That's fine, but what feature is it that they can't live without that 6 has?

 

Unity 2023.2 greatly simplified custom controls for UI Toolkit. That's about the extent of my knowledge of the tech releases.

 

I mean, cool, but also that's not quite "can't wait to use Unity 6 omg" worthy.

 

Are you living under the rock? Resident drawer, GPU culling, STP these features alone worth the wait not considering tons of good stuff from 2023.1 and 2023.2

 

The potentially exciting part is to see whether these features will be in a good enough state by the time LTS releases. Because the GPU driven rendering thread has enough examples in it where enabling the feature makes performance worse, that I think it's actually at least 2-3 more years away from being somewhat usable.

 

The Unity experience.

Personally, the Awaitable API and 2D renderer's soft shadows are the only things impacting my workflows.

 

while there are many things which will be available come unity 6 it is hard that nothing can progress at all without..

 

I think the editor feels more responsive in the 2023 betas, but that could be because parts of my project don't work properly in it.

(or, now that I think of it, it probably is indeed a bit snappier, since the same stuff also don't work in 2022LTS as well, and 2022 doesn't feel good at all).

 

Do not worry, things make it usable will be rolled back like the finally usable context menu was. We can't have nice things. Also, those, who were responsible for the improvement, will be laid off in traditional Unity fashion.

 

If they haven't been already, considering the size and scope of the last round.

 

RIP in peace Fullscreen Play Mode options. At least Fullscreen Editor on the asset store can do it I guess.

 

The fullscreen Playmode definitely needs to come back!

 

The last time I used Unity was about 6 months ago on a mobile game but the engine has become painfully uncomfortable to use it's so slow and loading times make me begin to get superstitious if the universe is telling me this is not the way.
So I took a long break.

Now so I ask again now has the engine sorted itself?

Also it seems I am actually one of the few people who has no issues with Unities new payment method - if the game makes a lot of money then it makes sense to give them a tiny share of the profits especially since the engine is free
unless there's some other factor I missed.

 

Your mileage may vary, but in the past few months, updates have had marked improvements to how often the engine crashes, console errors, memory leaks, etc. in my experience with using Unity.

We've also heard murmurs from employees they are optimistic things are turning around, moral is on the upswing, and there may be progress again making the engine better.

 

But there are rumours like this

https://twitter.com/gekido/status/1753107847230152820

One can hope its not true .

 

Maybe i'll catch sh*t for stating this, but there's a lot of "fog of war" that happens at a company that's in the state Unity is in. Some people are burned out, some are coasting, some put their heads down and do great work, others not so much. And in any big group of people, there are going to be notions of what's good, what's bad based on a lot of congnitive dissonances and a need to stand with their brothers and sisters in arms.

As outsiders, or even insiders, we all have to second guess our notions of what's happening through the lenses of everyone's accounts, their hidden motivations, etc.

The render pipeline debacle for reasons that would take pages to describe has been an absolute catastruphuck for the past several years. There should have been a shakeup long ago regarding these teams, but dysfunction begets dysfunction from the top down, and in poor work environments everyone starts going crazy and becomes tainted.

I'm selfishly hoping as a user of this engine that the hard working talent at Unity gets burned as little as possible through these trying times and that they're fostering a culture that employees can grow in, and take pride in their contributions in the future.

 

I dont know what are the feelings inside Unity...but what I know is that I really want them to cleanup the mess and finally come clean with the Engine . In one way or another. If it is scrapping SRP and going back to BIRP and modernize it, I am all for it.

 

Please, never do this. If it took 4 years to get things on track, it would be another 4 years to rebuild

 

Very likely more than that seeing how long it took to make everything related to SRPs.

 

Could be it took that long because of SRP

 

Considering everything else they make is similar?

 

I got a release date that is more accurate than just 2024 - April this year )

 

More nice features, and the also no unity intro at the start of my game, so I want to update my version as soon as it release

 

I've been using 2023 beta, and its phenomenal.

Some notes:

• AMD FidelityFX Super Sampling 2 and Spatial Temporal Post Processing are both great, and included in 2023.3. In certain test cases, they can almost double my framerate.
• Adaptive Light Probe Volumes, which automatically adjust to your scene so you don't have to spend a lot of time placing light probes to get awesome lighting.
• All the render pipelines now use the render graph and have a lot more optimization. Its free performance for everyone.
• If your'e using GameObjects, you'll get the GPU Resident Drawer, which bridges GameObjects with ECS's fast path for rendering. Its not as fast as using ECS, but, its still an improvement, and its just a one-click solution for free extra performance.
• Small Mesh GPU Culling, which will cull meshes that are smaller than a threshold percentage of your screen, works. This one can be a one-click free performance gain in the right circumstances.
• GPU Occlusion Culling is partially working now, but could definitely use some improvement. When its ready, it should be a one-click performance gain.
• ECS is now in version 1.2, with many improvements. Along with Entities Graphics, Unity Physics, and Netcode For Entities. Note about ECS: Just dropping renderers into an Entities subscene increases my performance by a significant amount, just to render them as entities instead of gameobjects. Its powerful stuff. And on my 2011 generation 2 intel CPU, I can dynamically query and iterate 1 million entities, getting 3 components from each entity, doing a distance check, and setting 3 values on those components (such as setting the position of the entity), in about 0.02 millisecond of main thread time, in the editor. ECS is just crazy fast. (but also in part thanks to the burst compiler and jobs)
• The package manager and various context menus have had major overhauls.
• Most rendering related menus have had overhauls
• Probuilder is in version 6.0, for whomever that may concern, and has had its UI integrated.
• The Scene view has had an overhaul, with much more flexibility over which controls you see. You can create toolbars, drag stuff around, etc.
• VFX Graph has had some huge improvements to its UI/UX and overall functionality, and has many new features.
• If you're using GameObjects, then physics will get a nice performance boost, as transform synchronization is now threaded, among other improvements.
• The water system is really great. It has significantly improved with new features and better performance.
• There's quite a lot of new Material Types and Block nodes in Shader Graph, which is nice. Huge list of options to choose from.
• Some new Unity Gaming Services packages are out of beta now, or will be soon.
• Screen Space Global Illumination has had some work done, which we need. Its currently our best Lumin-like feature for completely real time dynamic GI. Its not as good, but luckily it has better performance, so that's a good tradeoff.

Those are just some things off the top of my head, I could continue, but, ya' know. I'm barely scratching the surface there.

 

does it have animation for ECS/DOTs yet? Because its been absolutely ages and yet core things like this are still not there, making ECS a glorified alpha/beta for the vast majority.

 

Yes, it's called the "Animator" or "Mecanim" or "Please wait another 2-3 years for a beta".

 

In another thread, they implied that they're working on a unified animation system that can work for both ECS and GameObjects, mentioning how it doesn't make sense to split that between two, when Mecanim needs an upgrade as well.

However: ECS works with GameObjects. They're not mutually exclusive. Think of ECS as an extension of your scene. In fact, a container that you author entities in is called a Subscene. You may have as many subscenes in your scene as you want, and they function along side your GameObjects.

So, where you need it, you can reap the performance gains of ECS, while still utilizing whatever you want from GameObject land.

There are currently a number of solutions for animation that yield ridiculous performance. The current most popular technique seems to be to just do it all on the GPU. You bake the animations to textures, and read the textures to offset the vertices. Its significantly faster than getting & sending bone transforms from the CPU to the GPU, and then doing the calculations. If you only need to animate rigid stuff, though, such as robots, or voxels, or whatever, then you just use a bursted entity job to move the entities.

Speaking of animation -- Batched GPU Compute Skinning was added in 2023.1+, so Skinned Mesh Renderers are faster. More free performance.

 

You say free performance but I have trouble imagining those working well when there are even more basic things broken.

My biggest hope for Unity 6, is if I can enable multithreaded rendering again without both iOS and Android crashing and I'm not holding my breath.

 

All this free performance talks.

Download new URP demo scenes, upgrade to newest beta and slap instanced drawer and GPU occlusion + DX 12 and compare vs without all those fancy features. Then You will see yourself its not a magic wand .

 

Main dev behind that tech was laid off today. https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@NOTimothyLottes/111885552293823752

What ever this restructuring of the company is, it doesn't appear to be tech focused.

 

Omg. Are they f***ing dumb?

 

Who the hell would want to work at unity now when you can be laid off at any time without any reason. I feel like the more they do this the harder it will be for them to find any new programmers because people wouldn't want to risk working at Unity. Bad reputation is real.

 

keywords: mobile ads

 

I love how this is their key Unity 6 technology and it's already dead before release. Unity is evolving from abandoning packages post release to shipping them dead on arrival.

 

Maybe check my post. Most Unity developers don't keep up on features, but, that's partially Unity's fault, because their advertising and PR is terrible.