Unity 6 Unveiled at Unite 2023

During Unity’s first large-scale conference post-pandemic, Unite 2023, developers announced the different games and resources that users can anticipate. Of course, Unity also had its keynote, which included Unity 6. This is the upcoming LTS version of the Unity Game Engine, which is slated for a release in 2024.

Rolling back to the original naming system

Unity’s most popular and successful release of the engine was Unity 5. After that, they changed the naming convention of the succeeding versions. The new Unity 6 may confuse beginners due to the gap. However, reverting to the numbered naming system might be Unity’s attempt to assure their community and rebuild the trust of the game developers, especially due to the recent backlash they’ve had.

One of the major improvements coming to Unity 6 is the new WebGPU graphics backend. It allows developers to publish their games anywhere on the internet. It will benefit small and medium-scale studios and developers who want to explore outside the conventional game distribution markets.

The GPU Resident Drawer also helps developers optimize the graphics with only one button click. Another major feature they showcased is the GPU occlusion culling. Unity 6 also has an Adaptive Probe Volume, which removes the hassle of setting up light probes manually. It also has spatial-temporal processing using hardware-based optimization to provide additional performance.

Speeding up the development process

The company also highlighted Unity Muse and Unity Sentis during the conference. These two AI programs can enhance the game-development experience and embed AI systems into the game.

Unity Muse is a chatbot that can answer any concept, create ready-to-use code, and generate and modify game art like 2D sprites and textures. Some upcoming features for Unity Muse are Sketch Behavior Trees and Animate. In Unity 6, developers can visualize and discuss mock-ups collaboratively, create behavior trees, and create humanoid characters with text prompts.

Meanwhile, Unity Sentis is an embeddable AI model for game projects and seems to act differently from ML agents. Developers can embed AI models from platforms like Meta and OpenAI into their projects. It supports the ONNX file type. While it’s impossible to train AI using Unity Sentis, a discussion post on Unity Forum explains that Unity plans to use ML agents’ train functionality to support Unity Sentis. It will enable developers to train their AI models and use them in projects.

Unity also showcased its improvements on AR Foundation. Developers can develop AR and VR software for the upcoming Apple Vision Pro and Meta Quest 3. Unity 6 will also have the Unity Splash Screen as an option in all subscription tiers. However, there has been no mention of this in the Keynote.

Rebuilding commitment

After the heavily criticized Install Tax plan, Unity ultimately canceled it and proposed a more developer-friendly approach. Unity 6 seems to be another promise of them trying to rebuild the trust of the developers. Previous LTS releases tended to include promises of loads of high-tier game-developing tools. It made small studios and solo game developers, who were the majority of the users of Unity, feel left out. Unity 6 focuses on tools that will help all kinds of developers.

YouTube: Fantasy Kingdom in Unity 6

Photo credit: The feature image is symbolic and has been done by Christopher Isak with Midjourney for TechAcute.