Feature Request Request for better and complete URP mobile tooling

Hi @optimise,

Thanks again for your feedback!

24/7 mobile day and night cycle: Our first focus for realistic time of day is for PC/Consoles with HDRP since it implies a lot of systems working nicely together and enough computing power that goes with it to offer a complete solution. Again, if we think it is doable to offer an out of the box feature on PC/Consoles, in our experience, studios doing this on mobile each time did something very custom to support such scenarios and often were stylized games. However, there are a few systems that are common between URP and HDRP that can be leveraged in such system, already here like Enlighten, or coming, like Adaptive Probe Volumes (incl. APV blending that is planned -no ETA- and dynamic GI).

Mobile specific realtime and baked global illumination, mobile APV: URP Support for APVs is in 23.1 already and per vertex lighting planned for 23.2 for improved performance on mobile. We also continue investing in the lightmapper especially for mobile, since lightmaps are still offering the best ratio of visual fidelity over cost on constrained mobile devices

Mobile terrain: there has been a lot of improvements made in 21LTS on the terrain in terms of authoring and performance but nothing more is planned at the moment.

Characters: Nothing specifically planned at the moment on URP side. Again, in general mobile developers tend to use a wide variety of approximations to fit the performance budget with a vast choice of examples available on our ecosystem. Note that the experimental hair system as well as AMD's TressFX plugin are compatible with both URP and HDRP. You can also find some very nice mobile character Shader Graph based shaders in the UnityxAMD Defender demo: Marschner lighting hair shader, Pre-Integrated skin lighting shader, Parallax eye shader, Anisotropic lighting shader, Multi Detail or Thread map shader.

Blob Shadows: Under consideration on our public roadmap but not planned yet.

Specialize mobile documentation e-book: There are already multiple resources: Optimize you mobile game performance ebook, URP for advanced unity creators ebook and many other very valuable resources here. With the upcoming URP sample scenes in the Unity Hub you should as well get some nice hands on good practice setup for Unity projects on mobile (see this talk for a sneak peak). Any specific topic(s) you would like to see covered?

Mobile is very important for us, but what we hear from users is often that they prefer that we invest on the core optimizations rather than working on more specific features which would anyway only run on a small portion of the devices. We know that features are important as well and as you can see we are constantly investing in them. We try to find the best balance.