UNITY TECHNOLOGY ROADMAP - PDF Free Download

Objectives Decide if upcoming releases are right for your project Understand Unity s plan on how to deliver new releases Review that Unity is working on needed areas Collaborate with Unity to prioritize which areas need the most attention The objectives for this session are the following I will start with a short presentation where Unity s technology is going and how Unity plans on getting there. After that, I would like to switch to an open discussion to bring in all your questions and concerns into our understanding of what needs the most attention. First, let me do some quick introductions. I am Alex Lian, a director in Unity R&D department based in Copenhagen. With us, we have a number of Unity R&D engineers who have been speaking in the other talks to help fill in details and perhaps answer particular questions when they come up. In addition, Hiroki-san will join for our open discussion. Now, let s start with a little history.

What you asked for Pre-5.0 Fix Bugs Faster Unity now has a weekly Patch release system http://unity3d.com/unity/qa/patch-releases Communicate More More developer participation Roadmap Last year, we heard the biggest issue for users was instability and that Unity did not fix bugs fast enough. To address this, we created a weekly patch system where we fix critical bugs as quickly as we can. Once a month we roll up these patches into a fully tested release. You can access these releases on our website at this URL. The second concern from users was that we were not communicating enough and talking with all of you. Our communications are a work in-progress. For now, we have increased our developer participation in the forums, Unite conferences and right here with this roadmap talk.

Over the last year, we were busy working on 5.0 which we released last month. I won t go through the highlights as plenty of other talks will cover them, but for those that are not aware: this was an incredibly large release with 57 pages of release notes with numerous features, over 290 improvements, and over 500 fixes. We took our time with this release to try and make sure everything we wanted was in it.

Quality Before Keep all features Take all the time needed Now and Future (5.1 and beyond) Quarterly cycles Features can be cut even through beta However, we want to change that. Before, we aimed to have a big feature set and take all the time we needed to make a high quality product. 5.0 was a perfect example of this style. For the future, we re moving towards being high quality and faster releases. That means development of features may be more incremental and have interim usefulness while still being polished, but not be complete from a feature standpoint. This means that we ship what s ready in a release, not wait for features to complete.

Current Schedule We are beginning to transition to this plan with 5.1. So, as you can see, we re on a 3 month release cycle, with a 4 month development time.

Unity 5.1 Currently in Beta Beta Access for Pro users: http://unity3d.com/unity/beta Shipping in June Unity 5.1 recently entered beta. Since the 5.0 release, beta access is now a feature for all Pro customers. You can download it soon at this URL. Unity 5.1 will ship in June.

5.1 Refactoring, Code Cleanup Unification of OpenGL pipelines Editor localization preparation Multiplayer Networking replacing RakNet Animation Window Numerous other cleanups, bug fixes and improvements 5.1 has a lot of focus on fixing things, re-work and refactoring. Here s a short list of things that were addressed Note that you can go see Sean Riley s talk here in this room at 5pm.

5.1 New Features Runtime Assertion Library Crunch Texture support HDR Color Picker Sketchup Asset Import VR Integration The rest are features that were worked on in parallel to 5.0 and were ready for this release. So, what s past 5.1?

Unity 5.2 Shipping in September Possible work includes Services Analytics Ads WebGL 2 support Updated WWW class Multithreaded rendering 2D Tools improvements More UI features and performance il2cpp for Android Screen Space Ray-Traced Reflections (SSRR) No guarantee on making the cut We re still putting together that full list. Here s the early look at what may be in Unity 5.2 which will be due in September. Let s take this opportunity to let Tim Cooper, our lead for the UI team to expand on the UI features and performance plans for 5.2. Please remember, these are just candidates for refactors or features that may be ready for September, but with our faster cycle and keeping high quality we may need to remove them from the release if they end up not being ready.

What do users want? Re-work Input Manager MonoDevelop Terrain Improve Particles Animation NavMesh Mono HD/SD Asset Pipeline 2D Tools/Usability Add Nested Prefabs Cinematic Tools Visual Programming Collab Tools Visual Shader Editor Linux Editor What s after 5.2? That s still being determined, but while 5.0 was in-progress we did a lot of talking with users to see where their pain points and concerns were. This was the initial list that we collected. Of this list, most have begun investigation, prototyping or already in active development. They re just not ready in the near term and able to predict which release they ll land in.

Driven by Users Unity is about user success Making it easier to build games is our goal We want to hear from you Unity s mission has always been to democratize game development, and the only way to do that is to listen to the users, and this is what this open discussion is about. Unity wants to collaborate with you by taking your questions and requests and gather them up to see what are the most pressing issues.

Discussion Ground Rules No introductions Keep question simple One question at a time So, let me invite Hiroki-san up to the stage to begin the discussion. For this open discussion here are the ground rules. We want to keep this quick to let everyone have their question, so: Please, no introductions, keep questions simple and only one question at a time. You may ask more questions, but please only one at a time. We re open to all topics, though some may be easier for us to answer than others. To help figuring out what areas we have direct expertise present with us

Kim - Core Jan - Audio Jesper - Lighting, Graphics Rene - Core Rune - UI/Editor Sean - Networking Tim - UI/Editor Veli - 2D/Animation

Further Resources Roadmap Not published yet, but soon https://www.facebook.com/groups/unityuserj/ http://feedback.unity3d.com/ Just to wrap up, thank you all very much for all your input and the discussion. For further information and resources, please see the Unity Japan Facebook page, plus the feedback site for submitting further requests. I ll be working on publishing a more complete roadmap, and I hope to share that out soon. If there are any follow up questions, please come by after. We thank you very much for your participation Have a good day JP CN http://forum.china.unity3d.com/forum.php KR

Nested Prefabs? Most requested feature Definition: Any GameObject in a prefab can instantiate another prefab as a child GameObject Delayed over the years for various reasons (perceived higher priorities) Work is resuming to address this Also in the pipeline: Prefab inheritance which is inheriting an entire prefab, but storing only the delta to apply on top

Localization? Re-working text handling in Editor for 5.1 to allow for localized editor Manuals are in process http://translate.unity3d.com Bugs Submissions coordinated through country offices

Bug Process 1. Submission 2. QA Verification (send to translation if necessary) 3. Development Triage (no milestone) 4. Investigate/Scratch Head/Fix 5. Close 6. QA Verification in version (Resolved)