The FUTURE of Unity - Roadmap GDC 2023 (DOTS, Multiplayer, Rendering, AI)

hello and welcome I'm your code monkey GDC was last week and unity invited me and a bunch of other kind of creators so here let's do a quick recap of everything that I saw mainly on the topic of the feature of unity based on the roadmap talk this involves dots multiplayer rendering new ugs tunnel several new samples and a bunch more then EMT also had some exclusive talks where we saw a bit more detail on a bunch of tools like for example the recently unveiled dntai a lot of it is behind NDA but still there are some details that I can share there was also a general q a at gedc where tons of people asked all kinds of interesting questions and we had a meet up where lots of people showed up which was really great this was my very first GDC so this was an awesome very busy week here I'm going to try to cover everything in this quick recap video so let's do it and like I said ENT flew me over there so this video is sponsored by yinty okay so starting off with the thing that most people are interested in which was the roadmap Tonk I believe they won't be publishing this one and some more talks on their YouTube channel in the coming days the roadmap covered quite a lot of things a bunch of those are already out in version 22.2 a bunch more are coming out or getting some upgrades with the 22 LTS which should be coming out in the next few months and finally we got a bunch of previews on what's coming up in 23.1 and Beyond this talk actually started in a very important Way by reiterating what they've already said several times before which is how they're always looking for feedback every tool they build there's always a way to get in contact with the team you can post on Discord Forums on Reddit personally I know that recently as I was researching game server hosting and Matchmaker I had a bunch of questions and feedback which I post on the forums then one thing they've been doing recently are the game Focus blog posts where they talk about all kinds of things they've been doing all related to game development and they've also done a bunch of devlets this is where one team from UNT won't be present for an entire day and you can ask them any questions you want so if you have any issues or feedback with unity definitely go ahead and tell them that's the main way that the engine improves for everyone the thing that most people want to hear about is on dots which continues to be on track for hitting 1.0 production ready in the 22 MTS version so that should be out before summer the 1.0 version is actually already out in preview I've made a pretty detailed tutorial on it and the final 1.0 version should be very similar to that honestly for this part what stuck out me the most was simply just how many examples already exist of games using dots even though it's not technically production ready there aren't really many games using it either currently in production or already out the mini XML for this talk was heroish it's a nice action strategy game that doesn't really have hundreds of thousands of units but still benefited from using dots another example is re-rising which use dots for worm streaming the recent game Axion also had a huge scale with tons of systems detonation racing was one that was showcased in a previous Tonk and uses dots for control and determinism then the game Hassan Mars uses it for massive simulation scale and in multiplayer the game hysteria is using netcode for entities also very important is how all of these games are using a hybrid workflow meaning they are combining entities and game objects instead of going 100 empties that means that the workflows that you've already learned using Game objects they are still very much applicable when working with entities now if you use writer as your code editor then it's also getting a huge upgrade to support the dots workflows it helps you quickly create systems and inspect the generated source code you can easily create Bakers and authoring components as well as generating some aspects it also helps you find problems in your code like for example some missing queries so if you use render and you want to work with dots this can really help you speed up development also on dots you might have heard a while ago they acquired a really awesome dance character controller that used to be a paid asset but now it's free instead of being on the SSR it is now in the package manager each package has its own verification process but hopefully this one will also hit 1.0 verified alongside the dots 1.0 also one very important detail that I heard in one of the exclusive Tonks was their plans for Dots in the future after 1.0 obviously they are working on building upon this 1.0 base in the future they won't be adding things like a dots animation system however very very importantly is how they made it very clear that the primary focus for Dots is stability and Bug fixes over adding new features they really want this to be a very solid release that will help you build games that were simply not possible previously so the focus is first on stability and only secondly on adding new features then the other really big area they've been working on this past year and they are continuing is multiplayer as you might know netcode for game object is already production writing I made a phone free course on it a while ago it's already a very capable very robust tool set network for game objects is meant for small scale co-op games so an excellent example that they showed is she performs it's a perfect example of the small scale Co-op game then for super fast competitive games you have an echo for entities I believe this one is also meant to hit 1.0 alongside the 22 LTS version and one really awesome piece of news is how they have taken the awesome Mega City demo that the bump for Dots a long time ago and they refactored it to make it work with dots 1.0 and also made it using netcode for NTS so this is a really awesome fully working sample with up to 64 players and it should be coming soon related to multiplayer is the entire Unity gaming Services Suite of tools they already have tons of them I've already covered quite a lot of them for example in my free multiplayer course I use NECA frame objects then I use Lobby to create a Lobby and relay to handle the connections later on I also made dedicated tutorials for using Matchmaker and Game Server hosting and of course all of those tools require authentication and I've also covered cloudcon delivery in my ultimate TNT ovary course coming soon are also a bunch more interesting tools there's Unity friends to help you easily manage a friend list you until leaderboards to help you track player scores and something really exciting which is user generated content I actually got to see a bunch more details on this one too on an exclusive talk in their offices I'm not allowed to share any details but I can say that what I saw looks really awesome I generally think this will be an excellent addition to this entire ugs tool Sac nowadays user generated content is a really big thing players really enjoy it and having a way to add it much more easily to your game is an excellent thing and of course they also highlighted how all of these symbols are engine agnostic meaning that you could use any of these in a game made with unreal Arc though like for example Apex Legends is not made with the NTM engine but it does use unity's Game Server hosting then for a bunch more ugs announcements Cloud code is getting c-sharp support instead of just JavaScript it is also getting some triggers and events so you can run logic periodically instead of just when called upon by a player Cloud save is getting support for binary data instead of just Json this way you can store anything you want remote config is also being expanded to support both Json and basic strings you can also add rules to prevent incorrect data so no there's a bunch of new tools and plenty of improvements to already existing ones something obviously very important to a successful game are Graphics this portion actually started with a really nice statistic nowadays most games are already using one of the two script mode render pipelines either urp or ajrp and something very important for visuals is simply performance their attacks 12 is finally fully production ready this one has been in preview for ages so it's great to finally see it come out this gives you a great performance boost pretty much across the board with regards to lighting adaptive Pro volumes is the one big feature coming soon handling light probes is always a pain so this is definitely a welcome addition these are currently already available in ajrp and they are coming to urp in 23.1 basically this helps you easily Place light probes in your world another great addition is per pixel Lighting on light probes this helps you generate much more accurate lighting when using light probes especially on very large objects another feature are lighting scenarios this is how you can bake lights in various ways and then seamlessly swap between them this makes building a then night cycle really easy speaking of making the GPU on light mapper is coming out of preview in 23.2 this is another one that I had been in preview for a very long time and they've also managed to lower the requirements from 4 gigabytes down to 2 gigabytes already in 22.2 is the excellent water system for egrp it already looks really gorgeous with the ability to simulate all kinds of bodies of water for a bunch more rendering announcements for it was rendering in urp which allows you to have tons and tons of Lights found the Crossfade which makes for some really smooth transitions you have decal layers so you can place down some decals and not have it affect certain objects then temporal anti-aliasing which can really help cut down on the kind of Shimmer effect the Shader graph phone screen masternode is excellent for making custom post processing effects there is also something called custom rendered textures now this actually unrelated to the usual render textures instead this is about generating a texture using nothing but a Shader hdrp is getting some really awesome looking volumetric fog and there's a whole bunch of samples that you can try out also the shaders using the enemy's demo they are available for you to download and inspect I also saw a really impressive Ziva demo on the show floor basically this is facial motion driven by Machine learning which means you can achieve it in a really tiny size the guy at the booth mentioned how the original enemy's demo required something like a gigabyte of data just for the facial performance whereas with a civil puppet they could get very close to the same level of quality which is 15 megabytes it still encounters quite a bit to create a Ziva pump end that costs apparently eighteen hundred dollars but you can imagine how over time as that cost comes down soon enough every NPC in an indie game could have this level of quality for facial capture another tool that is also owned by unity but personally I've never used it is speed train this one continues getting updates it has exists for many many years I actually saw a really nice demo at the UNT booth and it looks really powerful and actually pretty simple to use I need to do some research but I might do a tutorial on this sometime in the future then swines which are already available in 22 and they are being used more often like in letting you create Dynamic meshes to populate your worlds you can also merge meshes create multiple splits and so on and for urp the one big update is actually the brand new sample scene now this is one simple scene but really it's three in one you have an intro area where it showcases photorealistic visuals then there's a garden showcasing a more stylized look with tons of dynamic lights and finally there's a space game showcasing a hyper stylized scene with some really nice custom lighting I'm definitely looking forward to trying out this simple when it comes out then the evfx graph is also getting improvements in 22 LTS they are adding instancing support this lets you spawn multiple instances of the exact same effect with very little CPU overhead there are also some Boolean ports that let you enable or disable only certain parts of an effect you can now write custom agent LSL blocks so if you have some logic where it's easier to just write the code instead of using nodes and this can really help you you can mix both nodes and code and perhaps most impressive of all is six when lighting this lets you bake lighting from multiple directions all in the same flipbook on different channels then you can place that object that effect anywhere in the world and it works perfectly in any lighting condition the results look really awesome wherever the effect is placed it always looks good there's also a blog post diving into more detail on this one and of course another pillar of unity is how it runs on everything it supports basically every platform so there are a bunch more improvements when it comes to mobile now this is an area that I don't know much about but new features do seem very useful like for example mentioning the config files directly inside Unity desktop and console got some incremental builds this feature was actually already be super helpful to me when I was making my multiplayer course in there I had to make builds all the time and thanks to this incremental builds feature making each of those builds was super easy really fast then you can soon deploy to Chrome OS and there's rm64 support coming to Windows for the web this is also getting a ton of improvements mobile and browser support has been lacking for quite a while but now they're really working on it and something pretty amazing is webgl multi-threading so soon enough you won't be able to run multi-threaded native C plus code on a webgl build that is really impressive another very important platform is XR so that's VR and AR it's also another topic that I'd love to cover whenever I can find the time again they support pretty much every platform including the recently released PlayStation VR2 and metaquest pro for psvr 2 they added support for foviated rendering this one feature really helps on performance another performance feature is single pass rendering this really reduces CPU overhead when rendering both eyes as well as haptics and audio and again lots of awesome games already out on Playstation VR2 all of them made with yinty for input the XR interaction toolkit continues getting updates and something really impressive is the simulation package this helps you test AR and VR directly in the editor without having to physically put on a headset there are a bunch more interaction examples coming soon as well as some project templates so really regardless of your target platform Unity has a team working on it then for some smaller but still very important improvements on rating 22 is the bone package management with this you can select and manage multiple packages at once really useful they also added support for the USC found format this apparently really widely used in many Industries addressables now gives you a addressable build Report with this you can identify how the asset bundles are being created for code they are updating.net migrating to Microsoft's course CLR as well as continue the improvements to enter play mode faster there are also unifying their existing asynchronous code base making it to use the regular c-sharp async await keywords you can already see this unification in action in all of the ugs tools like the 11 really they already use async await in similar ways the input system continues getting updates in the future they are working on streamlining the getting started process the memory profiler is now a verified package ey tonkit got a bunch more upgrades including a really awesome sample that is already out as well as some more search improvements including searching through right-click menus and a whole bunch more so Unity truly is massive nowadays so many areas so many use cases it's impossible to cover everything that everything is doing but this roadmap really shows you the scale of the engine there are so many things already out and so many still to come in every area one very important thing that was absent from the road map was actually announced literally on that very same day was yinty AI this is an extremely important topic so I'm actually going to cover this in a separate dedicated video I want to do that because I imagine tons of people are going to be looking for info specifically on the anti AI so I want to separate that from the general roadmap and GDC recap but for now I can say that the response has been pre-mixed and most of it actually for a very good reason since it's extremely light on details but I can also say that Unity had an exclusive session where they showed us the tools that they're working on and what are their goals and getting principles with unity alley and based on what I've seen I would say that the team is very much on the right track they are very focused on doing it ethically and correctly it's all behind NDA so I can't say too much but I'm going to cover that in a bit more detail in the next video they also have a signup form I've Linked In the description so if you want go ahead and sign up and stay tuned for the video later this week one very interesting topic was right at the end it was the ENT q a a basically about a dozen Unity people from all kinds of teams were there ready to answer anything all the questions were extremely varied on all kinds of topics I wrote them all down so here's some quick highlights one of the more important questions was with regards to empty answers if you've ever been there then you know there's a really annoying bug where it replaces the word high with Anonymous which makes so many answers nearly impossible to read a while ago EMT actually planned on doing something pretty dumb they were going to close in the answers and can only remove it from the internet obviously the response from the community was very negative and very intense thankfully unity and listened to that feedback and walked back on their plans so even the answer still exists but it does exist with that bug and a very old very hard to use platform the answer to this is that instead of fixing just that one specific bug they're actually working on upgrading the entire platform itself so rather than just a Band-Aid they are working on a proper Unity answers platform no details on any timeline but hopefully soon related to feedback someone asked why does ent have so many options there is Discord Reddit forums GitHub threads and many more the answer is that each platform serves a different purpose and personally I very much agree with that answer personally I do not like Discord because I don't have the time for a real-time platform so I can't really use it I much prefer the asynchronous form but tons of people do love Discord so in this case I would definitely say more options is definitely better then someone asked about mixing local and online co-op with Nesco for game objects meaning for example have a game where you have two local clients playing in the same session and two more online clients you need to answer that right now it's not really made for that but it is something they are actively working on they're working on abstracting out the netcode layer which would then enable you to create a domain local client someone asks an interesting question on the ENT bug reports and what does won't fix mean the answer is it can actually mean several things it could be there's already a valid workaround or it could be that this specific bug is some of using a different better tool or it could simply be that the number of users affected by it is a tiny number and fixing it would actually require a massive refactor of whatever system it involves and based on that it's simply not worth it to take developers from other projects to fix whatever that bug is one interesting question was with regards to accessibility and what is Unity doing about that their answer is they are in the beginning stages of implementing accessibility options to the UNT editor itself so that everyone can make aims and for game accessibility there is apparently a colorblindness post-processing sample which you can inspect in the Shader graph samples and if you want to learn more about this topic then they also recommend the website gameaccessibilityguidelines.com then for a two-part question are unity themselves working on some kind of multiplayer multi-platform game the answer to the first part is Unity making a game themselves the answer is no some people always get annoyed at that answer but honestly I can see their point of view their answer is they already use the engine themselves through the various programs they have where they work closely with developers this way they can improve the engine by having a team constantly go out and interact with dozens of unique projects instead of having just a single in-house team building a single project I definitely wish gigai had continued but I can also see their point of view and the second part of that question is with regards to multi-platform the answer is this is a tricky subject because pretty much everything related to platforms like the console sdks all of that is behind strict NDA so they can't really share any specifics on it but they did mention they are actively working on providing some kind of abstraction and some ways to help you pass certification then someone asked about upgrading a ENT version and how it sucks to be stuck on a known version and doing an upgrade could be too high risk so what to do about that and which version to pick when starting a new project the answer is depending on your death cycle you should choose the version that won't be on LTS by the time you release so for example if you're launching a game in the next six months go ahead and use version 22 which won't be in LTS by then but if you're for example more than a year out then perhaps use version 23 and with regards to upgrades they mentioned that they've been working on simplifying that process and I can definitely confirm that is the case I remember back in the unity five days that upgrading the UNT version really meant fixing tons and tons of bugs whereas nowadays honestly I don't remember the last time that I had issues upgrading I can take a version from Unity 2019 and upgrade it to 22 and everything works fine one thing that could cause issues are the graphics since those have gone through some pretty significant changes over the past few years the answer to that one is check the Apex website and look at the upgrade guides someone asked a question on what resources to help students learn Unity pointed out that there are plenty of courses and tutorials on untl learn they also have tons of resources on resources.dmt.com their free ebooks are especially excellent I've read a bunch of them and they do contain tons of awesome info so that's unt's answer and of course my own answer in terms of learning material is I would suggest browse this Channel or just YouTube in general then there was a high school teacher helping their kids make a punk game using NGO and trying to deploy to webgl but it didn't work the answer is that nope right now webgl does not work with UNT transport the version 1.0 doesn't work on the web because it has no websocket whereas Transformer 2.0 will support it it is currently an experimental and it might be production ready in 2020s so that's a bunch of questions this q a section was pretty great lots of interesting questions including things that I'd never thought to ask about then one thing that happened during GDC was actually the Meetup this was mainly organized by Matt from Game Dev guide and and mark from game maker sungit I then really announced it myself because it was my very first GDC so I had no idea if I was going to be busy watching some talks at that time but I did end up going I was there alongside a bunch of other awesome content creators and tons of people showed up I'm gonna say that I am very much an introvert so I was pretty stressed out about going to a Meetup but thankfully everyone was super nice even though I don't use the camera in my videos there was still a bunch of people that recognized me and said hello it was awesome to meet so many people working on so many interesting unique projects there was someone building a game like Animal Crossing and using my grid system tutorials to make the house furniture system someone was working on a game and needed to learn pathfinding and they used my video to learn the algorithm a bunch of people said they were going through my turn-based strategy course then also spoke to someone who was building an MMO another one working on the Diablo like all in all tons of awesome people working on lots of different projects and everyone was super nice so thank you all to everyone who showed up I hope you had fun meeting myself and all the other content creators if you don't know any of these then go ahead and subscribe to them the Meetup did go really well so hopefully next year let's do this again beyond that since this was my very first GDC everything was so new to me I very much enjoyed walking around the show floor looking out all the awesome things on display there were lots of awesome motion capture suits a bunch of server tools some audio tools lots of AR glasses and tons more companies that I have no idea what they actually do just by looking at the booth I also enjoyed watching the various booths for each country as someone who loves management and simulation games I definitely enjoy the Germany booth there was a section for the ngf awards with tons of awesome Indie Games also some game Publishers which is where I found out the awesome game Dyson Sphere program is actually getting a really nice update soon then it was fun to see both the unity and unreal boo side by side both had some learning sessions to learn how to use the engine a bunch of demos showcasing all kinds of tools and of course Showcases of lots of games built using the engines looking at those really tells you how the engines are just zooms it's all up to the developers to use the tools to make some awesome games Unity had Ship of Fools Undisputed and a bunch of mobile and tablet games then unreal had like a dragon Edition blue protocol and Hi-Fi Rush so both of them really showcase how the engines can be used to build any awesome game you can think of although I would say unreal actually had the better booth for one simple reason they had free cookies and Olive cookies so my suggestion to Unity is definitely add some cookies to the booth next year okay so that's my recap of gdc23 tons of awesome stuff this was a really busy week as always the featuring looks bright lots of great tools and updates already out and more coming in the future stay tuned for tutorials on a bunch of these new tools like for example int friends and leaderboards and stay tuned for the video covering neon TI coming later this week thank you to everyone who came to the Meetup and said hello thank you to Unity for flying me over for my very first CDC thank you for watching and I'll see you next time foreign

Channel: Code Monkey

Views: 53,956

Keywords: code monkey, unity 3d, unity, game design, game development, game dev, game development unity, unity 2d, programming, coding, c#, code, software development, unity roadmap, unity gdc, unity 2023, gdc 2023, roadmap 2023, unity future, unity ai, unity 2022 LTS, unity 2023.1, unity 2023.2

Id: nUJrEa06nes

Length: 23min 30sec (1410 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 27 2023