Book of the Dead Technology Demo and New Unity 2018 Features

A few days ago, the Unity's Demo Team introduced a teaser for a new impressive demo demonstrating the capabilities of the new version of the Unity engine 2018.1.

For many, the Unity 2018 release will be a real event - the long-awaited Scriptable Render Pipeline (SRP) and C # Job System will finally appear in the engine . SRP will allow experienced developers to customize the rendering pipeline using C # and material shaders, and the C # Job System to write secure multi-threaded code in C #.

Scriptable Render Pipelineenthusiasts have been waiting for a long time, since it is assumed that this feature is made for modern GPU models and will allow them to squeeze out much more than the obsolete built-in Unity pipeline. Previously, developers had to go to various tricks in order to achieve good results from it. For example, one of the most popular games on Unity, Cities: Skylines , was made technically possible due to the fact that the developers had access to the source code of the engine and they were able to make the necessary changes to the rendering mechanism (it certainly could not have done without involving specialists from Unity itself )

To create a technological demo, the team resorted to photogrammetry - textures and objects were taken from the real world; most assets taken from Quixel Megascans library, and their own assets were created using the Delighting Tool , an experimental tool created by Unity Labs ( you can pick up the tool from Github ).



Of course, some Unity users can be frightened off by the wide possibilities of the prospect of the need for an independent rendering pipeline configuration. Several presets will be available for them in the engine, starting with Lightweight and High-Definition - the first is for cross-platform development, the second is for high-end desktop computers and consoles. However, some can continue to use the good old built-in rendering pipeline .

Also in the engine will appear its own visual shader editor Shader Graphand if you are working with Substance Designer, you will have one more surprise: support for importing materials will be removed from the editor, and you will need to install the Substance plug-in from the Asset Store (you can read about it here ).



With the C # Job System feature sauce, Unity marketers promise programming for multi-core processors without a headache, thanks in large part to some new experimental Entity Component System . If you are interested in learning more about the C # Job System, the following reports are offered to your attention (you can read this thread on Twitter as a bonus ):





Engineers and artists from Insomniac, Bungie and Naughty Dog joined the Unity team to work on Unity 2018; total in the company today employs over 1000 people. More about the Unity Demo Team, Veselina Efremova and previous demos on Habré wrote earlier .

Some other details of creating a demo are available on the Unity website .

The first beta version of Unity 2018.1 is already available to everyone , new features will gradually be rolled out in beta, and the release will take place in the next few months. A more detailed Roadmap can be found here .

Update. Today, Robert Cupisz unveiled the secrets of the technical side of the demo on his Twitter .