Unite 16 Los Angeles keynote - watch the livestream

The Unite '16 Los Angeles keynote is starting soon! Watch it on our livestream at 10am PT today and discuss your thoughts around our announcements and demos

Unite '16 LA keynote livestream

 

I'm here! pretty nice setup!

Also noticed our @Gigiwoo is speaking on games tomorrow. Looking forward to it !

 

Discuss the Image Sequencer over in the new VFX Toolbox subforum.

 

Timeline is crazy

 

not being able to test the preview lightmapper.. very sad news.. I guess all good things come to those who wait.........z....z...z....zz...z...zz...zz...zz...zz...zz...

everything cool in this stream ... keyword "Unity 5.6"...

eta for Unity 5.6?

 

There is no ETA. We don't even have an ETA for 5.5.

 

Yes we do. 5.5: "Stabilization in progress. Target : Nov 2016"

 

Well colour me surprised. I just saw they released yet another beta today and assumed otherwise

 

It all looked awesome. Timeline is cool, the Editor VR looks really cool. Minority Report level stuff right there...

 

I remember walking past the R&D Content Team the other day, in the Brighton Unity Office, and seeing the Fish Boid Demo on a screen; running incredibly smoothly. Blew my mind!

 

I'm just gonna stare off into the distance, daydreaming about that new lightmapping system...

 

I want to know more about the timeline!

 

Great Unite! looks like a bright future for Unity

 

That was a great Unite Keynote Very excited for the features presented.
That game "Project Wight" was phenomenal! We now know the game @tomaszek is working on (correct me if i'm wrong though)

Looking forward to watch the Unite talks when they come out on Youtube. Lots of interesting topics to watch and learn.

 

Dream come true, Instancing and Multi-threaded jobs!

Any timeline for it's release?

Think of the massive RTS battles, Zombie Hordes and Shoals of fish that this update will unleash!

If only I was any good at writing games I could make good use of this!

Still my Cubemark benchmark should now be able to melt some GPU's!

 

Pretty much everything we heard about in this keynote will be usable in the future, around 5.6 or something,
but there are a few usable things now, like Adam's film assets and new post-processing filters.
Nice keynote, delivered fast for those who cannot be there.

 

I'm loving the Post effects stack. I'm so glad they invested in this area. Very well thought out indeed.

I hope the volumetric lighting doesn't get abandoned like the blacksmith's atmospheric scattering.

And yes everything they've shown there is pretty awesome work. Welldone guys!

 

Yes the post effects stack is truly awesome. And so are the progressive Lightmapping and the Timeline tool. But I also love the instancing and performance stuff.
Unity is shaping up nicely.

 

Will the roadmap be getting an update as it's been stuck on the released 5.4 for some time now and 5.5 should be going live later this month.

 

It's been updated every now and then if you have followed the RSS feed. Some time ago they also added the recently changed symbol and not there is 5.6 stuff too.

 

No licensing change announcements? Is this really a Unite keynote?

 

Is there somewhere we could see the video of the keynote where the audio is not out of sync by 19 minutes?

 

There is a version that's in synch with the audio on the blogpost here.


The video on the official channel has been edited and upload is in progress, just takes a little while for YouTube to process. It should be finished sometime later today.

 

In the breakout for Timeline (in my opinion, the absolute coolest thing announced) someone said "early next year" for the beta, and other features (like Facebook support) were described as shipping-quality sometime next year (I got the impression that meant 5.6 itself would ship).

The Timeline feature is going to change everything, and I'm not the kind of person who normally says that sort of thing. If you haven't been to a Unite yet and you're at all serious about Unity, do whatever it takes to go, and try to stay at the event hotel. Very worthwhile.

The good:

• Timeline (it's not just animations and cut-scenes)
• High-quality modern video player
• Latest progress on cinematic image effects package
• Octane + Image Sequencer = creating assets without leaving Unity...
• Microsoft Surface Studio (I don't even do art and I really, really want one)
• Universal Studios (among the best convention parties in 20+ years of attending dev cons)
• A literal ocean of free coffee
• Finally, closure on the legendary Case of the Stolen Ham
• Did I mention Timeline?

The bad:

• Can't have All The Toys now
• App: Speakers not always listed as Attendees (harder to follow/connect with them)
• Some sessions weren't nearly as technical as I felt they should be (shader optimization...)
• Insufficient space for certain sessions (1000-cow shader animation, I'm looking at you)
• Badges and Unite app should associate to forum profile (met quite a few people who agreed)
• The new Connect feature looks like Lithum (shudder)
• Microsoft wasn't demoing Hololens?!?
• Many sessions were rushed (30min should have been 60min; easily another day of content there)
• Making @Gigiwoo compete with the Unity Roadmap breakout

The ugly:

• The Unite app on Android (non-stop crashes, deleting pix from my phone, etc... a real trainwreck)
• NFC chip in the badges aren't writeable (surely I'm not the only one who tried)
• $100 Uber bill from LAX to Hollywood on Sunday night

Although I don't personally care about anything Apple-related, I'm kind of surprised they didn't bother to host any sessions or set up a booth. Someone told me there were Unreal employees lurking about, but we didn't spot any.

It's no secret VR / AR was everywhere. About the only thing I'd consider a failure (on our part) is that we didn't manage to get our hands on a Hololens for a few minutes, and that was one of the reasons we went. I found it discouraging that Google's Daydream is Pixel-only until "maybe late next year" ... overall I'm feeling marginally better about the chances for VR to catch on (AR not so much). A couple years into it, it still feels like people are trying to figure it out. Even Google's demos (which were very limited and overbooked) broke many of Google's own best-practices presented in their breakout...

One thing that came up over and over again is real, successful studios that make HEAVY use of the Asset Store. I'm at just one year into Unity (almost to the day), and from hanging around the forums I got the impression that Real Studios didn't have much use for Asset Store products. There are folks here that will swear up and down by that statement. I'm here to tell you they're very wrong.

Seriously -- go to a Unite.

 

@MV10

Nice trip report. How many asset store vendors were present? Did you visit any of them? If so anything new and exciting from any of them?

How many technical sessions did you go to? You mentioned they seemed rushed at 30 minutes each. Were all sessions limited to 30 minutes? Did they have enough time between sessions to ask more detailed technical questions of the presenters? Do you think adding more days would solve that problem vs making the meeting agenda longer. For example instead of 9am - 5pm you could have 8am to 6pm.

Did they have any early bird sessions? For example at some conferences they have some really early sessions which are generally open discussions on a given topic and they are not vendor driven. Birds-of-a-Feather is what I have seen them called most often.

Did the show have a good attendance? How many attended in your estimation?

Other than VR/AR hardware did any vendor have any interesting hardware?

 

My wife and I were trying to guess, I'd say somewhere around 1,000 people were in attendance. I count that as a decent turn-out. They seemed to size the venue correctly, in general, in terms of seating (most of the time), and non-session events (mixers etc).

There were a few Asset Store vendors, including one of my favorites, Stephan from TextMeshPro (he was always busy so I didn't find time to say hi; good problem to have, right?). It doesn't look like the Unite web page lists Asset Store supporters (I don't see Stephan's Digital Native Studios there) but you can see the major vendors if you scroll to the bottom. You can also see the list of sessions and times (a mix of 30 and 60 minute intervals). There were only three spaces available for the talks. Oh and some of the big vendors like MS had their own little private presentation rooms, but there wasn't anything about them on the schedule, so I guess you had to be Somebody to get invited to whatever those were.

https://unite.unity.com/2016/los-angeles

Some sessions had Q&A but there was no down-time between sessions, generally. ALL the presenters were happy to talk offline though, whether your badge said "Google" or you were a nobody like us. Unity has a pretty unique challenge with these events. Most conventions have a pretty specific audience, but Unity attracts all skill levels and two very different viewpoints -- artists and developers. So in that regard they did a good job, even if I personally wished for more technical depth.

My wife is the artist, so that Microsoft Surface Studio was a pretty cool new piece of equipment. Beautiful touch/pressure-sensitive screen, great hand/arm-contact rejection, very tough (one of the presenters was a big guy and demonstrated leaning on it hard), and good CPU/GPU options. At $4K for the top-end version, though, I doubt she'll be getting one any time soon (we just built her a new monster desktop machine). Other than that, I didn't see any new hardware. Not too sure what other types of new hardware Unity might attract, now that I think about it. The little pointer thing that ships with Google's Daydream VR headset turned out to be a decent simple/cheap compromise for VR control.

One interesting thing, hardware wise ... in the closing "fireside chat" David Helgason alluded to getting some hush-hush demos of very advanced (e.g. small form-factor) VR products in the LA area.

 

I've been watching the video...

I'm excited for the optimisation of the transforms. (Even though should have been done like 5 years ago!) And all the multi-core stuff. (It would be nice if it will support things like Parallel.For but I doubt it). And other things like optimising mesh bounds and things sounds excellent. (One nice thing to add would be a ray cast into a mesh that didn't require the a collider for people not wanting to use the physics engine. I had to write my own which is far from optimal).


If I have a object that is a child of a child of a child... several times. Then alter the local rotation of the bottom child, when working out the new world transform it would be nice if the transform of the parent is cached so it didn't have to work that one out again. I wonder if the optimisations do this? Or does it unnecessarily recompute the whole transform each time?


I try and work with local transforms as much as possible but sometimes I need to compare two world transforms and if this is getting optimised that is very good! Well done.


I try and make my games work on low end PCs so I try and be clever and optimise and not be too CPU intensive. But all optimisations make me happy.

 

Any chance you guys release a roadmap session video?

 

They said videos of all the breakouts will be posted within a few weeks.

 

Oh, amazing, thanks for letting me know!

 

Optimisation is all I care about. Every time Unity mentions they've optimised something, I pause and feel impressed that there's people there that really know their priorities.

Will Unity ever be in a position where it could do 60fps console games at the level of Dice or Blizzard? Yes - if they keep on doing it. That's impressive.

Optimisation is the biggest and most important feature each time, because it simply means you can add more to your games. That totally matters on mobile, on console, VR and for any desktop that doesn't sound like a jumbo jet taking off.

 

Timeline is good too. So, one day Unity might be as good as Flash for animations!

But my main conclusion from watching the video is that all participants in the presentations should be required to dress as cyber goths. And sort of have the attitude of 'I'm just taking time out from fighting aliens in the Matrix to tell you about these new Unity improvements...'. Awesome.

 

Pretty much anything to do with optimizations is awesome that is out of reach to us (being closed source) is good to us. We are also kinda trying to reach solid 60fps on consoles with the intended graphical design we went for and no hickups, no fps drop. Still pretty hard to do but with these new optimizations it will now be possible. At least, pretty darn possible.

Other than that, Animators and specially directors will be happy with Timeline Editor, Octane and Image Sequencer.
Unity went from no real cinematic tools to almost a complete package for real-time image composing, kudos.
Not presented in the Keynote but still waiting to put my hands on it, is the new Mixed Lights mode and the Scriptable renderers.
But again, I do not care that much on those feature as much as i care about optimizations. Keep making Unity way faster, for me is more than enough.

 

I don't recall hearing about those in any breakout sessions either...?

 

When do the videos go out for the talks? I'm excited to catch a few I missed, rewatch a few I liked, and share my own with my wife .

Gigi

 

With so many Unite events, I'm a little surprised they don't have their own forum niche somewhere...

 

And it begins!

So many Unite talks to look forward to! Will be alert to my Youtube feed for more Unite videos.

 

Unite16 talks are finally being uploaded on Youtube right now
6 are already up! Go ahead and go watch them
https://www.youtube.com/user/Unity3D/videos

 

Woohoo, roadmap, let's watch it!