I’m still at Unite 2014 this week, so I thought I’d deliver a quick recap of the Unite 2014 keynote, courtesy of Jaime Rodriguez, of Microsoft.
Here was my favorite talk of Unite as well:
- Unite 2014 – IL2CPP: The next generation of scripting in Unity
- Unite 2014 – WebGL Deployment in Unity 5
Opening stats:
[David Helgason, CEO]
- 600k active montly game developers .. [compared to 120k users, 3 years ago]
- 54% of games use middleware [compared to 10% 4 years ago]
- 47% mobile developers use Unity [17% in 2009]
- 8.7B Unity mobile app installs [not all inclusive, that is people who opt-in to analytics]
- PC has strength [mobile devs targeting PCs as they get better]
Industry:
[David Helgason, CEO]
- Unity working w/ Apple on Metal (their equivalent of iOS)
- Unity working on ‘smart TVs’ with Samsung
- Unity working w/ google on Android TV. Google giving away set-top boxes to all attendees.
- Showed several demos of small Studios ( 2-5 people shops )targeting many platforms (more than employees)
- “Native games” (e.g. Plague Inc) are being ported to Unity to get x-plat efficiencies
- Asset store: 7.2M downloads/year, 14K packages. They played it on productivity -asset store accelerates apps
Positioning:
- Unity has to be more than an engine! Boil down to: Create Game + Connect it to others.
Roadmap:
[Lucas Meijer, Engineering Director ]
Engineered focus on prioritized stabilization and agility ( accelerate their 4 month cycles:)
IssueTracker.Unity3d.com has their (non-sensitive info) open). People can vote on it.
They have moved to near weekly patches.
Unity 4.6
- Unity 4.6.. uGUI is main feature..
- Unity 4.6 goes open beta today.
- uGUI will be open source, MIT license.
Unity 5
- Unity 5 graphics features
o Realtime GI, physical based shaders.
- IL2CPP [converting C# to C++ code, turns to native code]
o Basic test scenario for mandlebrot generator showed faster than current mono-runtime, near native. Seems a bit niche on scenario to generalize specially on .net comparisons
- WebGL
o WebGL Exporter FREE for everyone.
- 64-bit support..
o Big deal for Windows, since we were running out of memory often, more often than Mac OS did.
- PhysX — updated to latest. Improved.
- SpeedTree importer
- Asset Bundles improvements (less manual work)
- Collaboration Improvements
o Changed how they serialize prefabs. Using references now.
o Better scenes merge
Futures, way in the future..
- “Director” is a simple, yet powerful storyboard editor (video, audio, motion/animation) ..
Really cool; really powerful.
Services:
[Todd Hooper]
- Unity acquired Tsugi.
o Unity cloud build: Continuous integration (Build, test, commit)
o Beta Now: http://build.cloud.unity3d.com (iOS, Android, WebPlayer)
o Free during beta, subscription later w/ free tier for Unity developers
- Unity acquired playnomics
o Product still upcoming. No dates announced.
- Everyplay
[Jussi Laakkonnen]
o Social interface launching in october..
o Available today as Everyplay was
- Unity Ads [ used to be Unity cloud, now cloud is broader]
- Rewards based advertisement: Video support
- Estimates to pay $20M in 2014, it was closed beta
- Cross-promotion is now live, open beta today
- Free video advertisement on cross—promotion.
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@DaveVoyles
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