Unity Technologies, creator of the world’s most widely-used real-time 3D development platform, announced today that Unity 2018.1 is now available. Unity 2018.1 is a major upgrade which introduces the start of several innovations, including the Scriptable Render Pipelines and the C# Job System, which make it easier and faster to achieve beautiful graphics and high-end performance.
Brett Bibby, VP of Engineering, Unity Technologies, said:
“With Unity 2018.1 we are introducing one of the largest upgrades in the history of our company, and it’s centered around two major concepts – next-level rendering and performance by default. We have brought the world’s best talent together with the goal of making Unity 2018 the premier choice for all creators, from high-end studios to individuals experimenting with the boundaries of what’s possible and everything in between.”
Unity 2018.1 is the start of a new cycle that enhances Unity’s core technology and gives creators the power to express their talents and collaborate more efficiently. The foundation is built upon the start of two new innovations: the Scriptable Render Pipelines and the Entity Component System. Together they make it easier for creators to deliver beautiful graphics, while unlocking the performance of modern hardware to make richer experiences possible.
Unity 2018.1 introduces more than 330 new features, innovations and improvements. Highlights include:
- Scriptable Render Pipelines (Preview) – Experience total control of Unity’s powerful rendering pipeline. Developers targeting high-end experiences can take advantage of the High-Definition Render Pipeline (HD RP), while the Lightweight Render Pipeline (LW RP) can be used for a powerful combination of beauty and speed, all while optimizing battery life for mobile devices and similar platforms.
- Entity Component System (ECS) and the C# Job System (Preview) – A new high-performance multithreaded system that makes it possible to take advantage of multi-core processors without the heavy programming headache. The new programming model, the Entity Component System, combined with the C# Job System and the Burst Compiler enables developers to optimize creations for significant increases in performance. Developers can add more effects and complexity to their games, or use that horsepower to add dynamic AI, to make rich worlds that immerse gamers.
- New Features Make it Easier for Teams of Artists, Designers and Developers to Collaborate More Efficiently – Unity 2018.1 makes it easier for teams to create levels, cinematic content and gameplay sequences without coding. ProBuilder and Polybrush offer new ways to design levels, Cinemachine Storyboard lets creators previs, storyboard and edit inside of Unity, while the Visual Shader Graph gives artists the power to design shaders without the need for programming skills.
- Support for the Latest Platforms – Unity solves the hard problems of development, enabling creators to reach 25+ platforms easier. Thanks to strategic partnerships with the world’s greatest innovators, Unity now offers optimized support for Magic Leap One, Oculus Go and Daydream Standalone. Unity currently powers more than 60% of the world’s VR/AR content and more than 50% of all new mobile experiences.
As the press release reads, Unity 2018 is the premier choice for all creators and it exists to democratize development, solve hard problems and enable success. The company’s engineers and artists, many of whom hail from the world’s leading game studios such as Insomniac, Bungie, and Naughty Dog, are working alongside the company’s 800 engineer team responsible for bringing the technology that will power the real-time revolution to all developers around the world. Games and experiences made with Unity reached more than 3 billion devices worldwide in 2017 and were installed more than 24 billion times in the last 12 months.
Unity will be showcasing the latest innovations for Unity 2018 during Unite Berlin (June 19 – 21). More than two thousand attendees will take part in an event that demonstrates how Unity powers the world’s best mobile experiences, unlocks next level rendering and enhances high-end performance. Unity will also debut its vision for democratizing connected gaming experiences, powered by its recent acquisition of Multiplay. Additionally, Unity will go into more detail on developers can leverage the Unity Editor to build smaller, faster, lighter experiences for web and lightweight devices on the company’s new compressed core runtime.
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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Good to see new improvements with this Engine, but I presume the Entity–component–system/ECS design methodology has been used in the past as well, with few select PC titles.
Though, if they have combined this with the C# Job System, then this might give the DEVs slight “flexibility” to add more features.
Unity engine has got potential though. How far the developers can push this, still remains to be seen.
Escape from Tarkov looks good but need some optimalization
Indeed. I’m still waiting for this FPS to get a full release date, but the Devs (Battlestate Games) have so far done a lot of work on this title.
Some of the game levels look beautiful, and I hope the final game is optimized for the PC as well.
some serious*
That’s really nice and all, really it is. But at the end of the day, we’ve yet to see a plethora of devs working close with Unity to produce ADAM levels of visual quality and then we’ve also got to expect higher performance (which we currently have yet to see).
When I first saw ADAM I was like “wow, this is amazing, I wish devs took note and tried to emulate such quality”. Now I’m still waiting for that level of detail, and so far Star Citizen is the only game doing that, despite it not even being a Unity based game.
Takes so much horsepower for that to happen we won’t see it on the general desktop for some time. I think its cool that its still possible with current software. But we’re finally at a point where we’re starting to see software surpassing hardware, which hasn’t been a thing in a really long time. Now its just up to alleviated the software bottlenecks and wait for the 7nm LP nodes to be released and there was just a 3D wafer announced for GPU’s which allowed GPU’s to be stacked on top of each other (like micro-electronics FinFett technology with stackable transistor gates for 14nm and the like. Think of it like a single graphics card with 2 GPU’s on the PCB, but all you see is one) so we might be at an age where we see games start hitting ADAM levels in maybe 3-6 years.
I haven’t liked the last few versions of Unity. It used to allow you to choose which of your displays to put the game on when you ran the game and now it doesn’t and just guesses……badly. The majority of newer Unity games display the game on my wrong monitor and I have to spend the first few minutes going into the config file to manually force it on the correct screen. Annoying. Might be just a bug with the Linux version of Unity, I don’t know.
It’s even worse on Linux. It can be impossible to get some games to run on your 2nd display in fullscreen. They just keep defaulting to whatever your 1st screen is.
Oh I use Linux, I know your pain. I use to love seeing games use Unity over Unreal 4 because Unity used to be a sign of less issues on a Linux release but these days I have far less issues with Unreal 4. I chalk that up to Unreal 4 being open sourced and having people such as Yaakuro working on it while Unity isn’t.
Anyone interested should watch their Twitch stream on enhancing Unity’s “out of the box” performance.
Really great stuff. Even as a CRYENGINE user, I really like the direction Unity is headed in. The HD render pipeline has some very new stuff that is industry leading in some cases.
It all doesn’t matter if people using it on Steam still use flatboard grass
« High-End » performance is only as good as the developper implementation.
Ugh.
Is there any optimized game made by Unity at all ? or is it just devs can’t do what they want with it or being free made them lazy ? ffs even Hearthstone have performance issues with it, a 2D card game.
Nah.
Every unity made game has hitching, stutter and frame drops fest some of them can even use more than 1-2 cores :v
That PC Bulidng Sim can drop 40fps just by walking from room to room :v
And then there is Ori.
Congratz, you named one game (also 2D) out of what ? hundreds ?
Previous iteration ran like a dog unless developers put loads of work in, so gotta hope this one is easier to work with
Unity =/= high-end performance