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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