Unite Berlin 2018 - Roadmap session

Direct link:
youtube.com/watch?v=BW9qSy6ZB0A&t=4h02m08s

Starts at 4:02:08:

 

I feel like Unity 2018 is basically Unity 6:

• New rendering engines (HDRP and LWRP)
• New scripting architecture (ECS)
• New editor
• Nested prefabs

Super excited for this year.

 

I'm holding back my excitement for 2020 it's got to be even better right

 

It's ridiculous. Unity's run out of things to add so I'm trying to figure out how next-gen I will become in 2020.

 

Plus:

• New input system
• Revamped terrain
• VFX editor
• Kinematica
• Networking
• And more...

 

Hoooo wow, Kinematica. Isn't motion matching the system that big games like The Last of Us used? I don't think any third party engine even has that yet. Crazy.

Unity 4: 2012
Unity 5: 2015
Unity 2018
Unity 2021

Nope, sorry. Gotta wait for 1 more year than that

 

It's even better than motion matching.


From the blog post comments:

"Kinematica will indeed feature a full body inverse kinematics system that can be used to procedurally modify the generated animation frames, similar to the talk that you linked in your comment.

...

Kinematica supports motion captured animation data as well as handcrafted animation clips.

...

Kinematica is not Motion Matching and has been built from the ground up to be able to support any kind of movement – not just locomotion. We already demonstrated Parkour with stable and precise environment contacts. Stay tuned for more demos coming later this summer where we will be showing a full climbing system, melee combat and physically simulated characters.

...

Also, just searching for matching poses in a brute-force fashion at runtime does not scale and would be prohibitively expensive. Kinematica executes in a fraction of a millisecond regardless of the amount of animation data."

 

No, there is no schedule on features any more. The whole point of Unity moving away from version 4, 5, 6 and a pay once model was so that it did not matter when features became available.

Now, Unity just releases features whenever they want, as often as they want. They don't have to save or hold back features like before. This is one of the benefits of a subscription business model. People expect you to keep releasing cool things.

So since version 2017, Unity has been releasing cool things all the time, sometimes on a daily basis if you use Package Manager.

Don't look at the Unity editor you download. That is not where features come from any more. It's all about package manager.

 

There are already many announced features that are in preview for a long time.
Preview = Not production ready = They change at any time, so what you build using them may not work with future versions of these features, may not work with future OS updates.
Basically, using preview features means that the developer becomes a beta tester.

Now, when these features become "production ready", usually they are buggy. It takes a while until they are cleaned up and work as advertised. When the number of bugs that remain becomes acceptable, these features become usable. Shuriken (the particle system) and UI are two examples of usable features, you can find others too.
Usable features represent the real value of Unity to the developers.

New usable features need more love.

Kind regards.

 

Yeah I'd agree with you a year ago, but one of the key points of Package Manager deployment is... Unity staff can fix stuff in a truly unprecedented way.

As I understand it the old way is:
- fix something
- wait weeks for it to be peer reviewed and then wait for the right time so it doesn't clash with other stuff
- hope it still makes it into the Unity build
- someone finds a bug

Package Manager:
- fix something
- ship it same day (preview) meanwhile QA can verify it
- get bug report.... fix it and ship it again same day (if they want)

So it's gone from a screwed up place taking weeks and months to even get a bug report back, to something that can get cycled same day. It's an incredible difference. Now I'm not going to imagine it will be same day all the time... but I have seen these things get fixed in the same day

Obviously, some things need Unity updates and these will take longer, but the majority of the features people care about are coming in Package Manager.

That's the difference.

 

Is it unprecendented if the open source communities have been doing it for years?

 

I'm afraid so... you caught my tone