2020 Roadmap Q&A - Core Engine & Creator Tools

[LeonhardP]

This thread now closed for further questions

Thanks everyone for all of the amazing questions you asked over the course of the past three days. Our team really enjoyed getting your honest feedback and we hope this type of open dialogue will be the start of many more.

If your question has been approved, we will do our best to still answer them over the next few days. Please give our experts some time to get to all of them (over 120 questions!).

Remember that Part 2 of the Roadmap Session on Live Games is next Wednesday, April 1st at 9am PT.

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We just hosted our first 2020 Roadmap Session, Unity 2020: Core Engine & Creator Tools Roadmap!

If you missed it, you can watch the session back here: https://on.unity.com/2xru0zq

Alternatively you can check out the full slidedeck used in this session here: https://www.slideshare.net/unity3d/unity-roadmap-2020- core-engine-creator-tools

You can also subscribe to our YouTube channel to be notified about any future video releases from us: https://www.youtube.com/user/Unity3D

Together with this Roadmap Session we are also hosting a Q&A here in this thread to answer as many of your questions as possible. Topics we will be fielding questions on are based on the topics of the roadmap:

• Reliability & Performance

• Creative Workflows

• Scalable Quality

• Reaching Your Audience

A team of product experts from across Unity will be available starting Wednesday. Our Community team will continue to field questions for the next three days to foster an ongoing discussion with the community. Please feel free to ask your questions in this thread.

Some basic rules

• The thread will open up for questions immediately following the Roadmap Session on March 25th, 9am Pacific Time and remain open for questions for 3 days.

• Don’t bundle multiple unrelated questions in one reply. One question/topic per reply.

• Only questions related to the topics of the roadmap session are permitted.

• All questions will enter a moderation queue and be fielded by our Community Managers ( @LeonhardP and @AskCarol )

• Replies will have to be approved by the moderators to show up in the thread.

• Once approved, the questions will be forwarded to the relevant experts.

We really look forward to hearing from the community.
Thank you!

[Win3xploder]

When will Speedtree Import for HDRP be supported?

Answer:

@quixotic

We have started developing a new non-destructive layer-based environment system for terrain and other environment elements, we’ll follow up with more detail once we have plans to share, including SpeedTree support. In the meantime, current terrain system is in maintenance mode - we’re evaluating support for features like SpeedTree and will share the plans once we have them firmed up.

[Kolyasisan]

Do you have any plans on upgrading Unity’s Runtime (editor and player) to a newer one (.NET Core for example)?

Answer:

@""

Our current mono is circa late-2017/early-2018. We are working on updating the fork to recent master. At this point, it’s likely to be available during the 2021 release cycle. The work is underway, but it likely won’t be ready for 2020 releases.

[Rowlan]

About Splines: When?
Will they be backported to 2019 or are they 2020+?
Which features will it have? Need rotation along the spline, move along the spline in distance steps, move in relative steps [0…1], etc
Will they support various easing functions out of the box?
Will splines be usable on terrain / environment system, e. g. to create roads, rivers etc?
Will Unity make their own prefab placement along splines?
Will snapping be supported while moving a spline point, so that one e. g. doesn’t move a point below the terrain?
Parallel splines along a base splines? (e. g. you have a center spline and one left and right offset by a certain distance)
Catmull-Rom or Bezier?

This is most exciting!

Answer:

@""

Hi Rowlan,

• We are talking here of a new unified spline framework API. It will be used to gradually unify existing and new splines applications across unity for 2020+. We are not considering backporting to 2019 at the moment.

• Splines will have many generic features (like the ones you mentioned, thanks for the input) but also application specific features (splines for rivers might differ in some ways from camera path splines for example) that are not in the API per say.

• Definitely usable on terrain, this is our top priority use case actually.

• Conforming to terrain (snapping to surface with normal alignement) is going to be supported.

• Generic offsets and parallel constraints are in the plan but will come later in the case of splines.

• We are supporting

• Bezier

• Catmull Rom

• KB Spline

• Linear

And eventually:

• BSpline
• Hermite

Thanks for your questions!

[_cinoS]

Dark Mode for free?

Answer:

@AskCarol

No new news today. We’ll share here as soon as we have an update.

[RedLogicP]

Is there an expected timeframe for the release of the visual coding solution?

Answer:

@""

Hi RedLogic,

We plan to have the pre-release version by early 2021. For more detailed information, I invite you to look at our regular experimental drops that we share with the community in the Unity forum: latest was drop 6 , we skipped 7 (was internal only because of a major revision) and the much improved drop 8 will be available next week.

Cheers!

[foshe_5]

Are we going to get on editor playtesting for AR foundation without building for mobile devices?

Answer:

@mfuad

I’ll provide a deeper view into our work on AR remoting, and hopefully address your question in doing so. AR remoting is currently in development; the first version will include the ability to test baseline AR features (camera, input, raycast, planes) on handheld AR (ARCore, ARKit) devices, without having to build the app. We we will soon be conducting user studies to gather feedback on early versions of the feature. As it continues to mature, we’ll aim to have a pre-release version publicly available for wider feedback thereafter. In terms of testing in the editor without using a device at all, we don’t have concrete plans to share at this time. We’ll share here as soon as we have an update.

[CaseyHofland]

Is there an ECS out of preview date?

Answer:

@""

Hi Casey.

There is not a date set for ECS leaving preview yet.

The release of the DOTS Sample gave us a very good indication of the things that we needed to focus on for the release of ECS, so we are going through those items now.

We will continue to update everyone on our progress at the DOTS sub forum. So stay tuned.

[sinjinn]

Where are the slides please

Answer:

@""

Slides are here - Unity Roadmap 2020: Core Engine & Creator Tools | PPT

[Kronnect]

Thanks for the presentation.
Once deferred rendering is added to URP, are you planning to add surface shader-like syntax in the future to make it easier to build multi-rendering path shaders using code?

Answer:

@quixotic

If for “multi-rendering path shaders” you want something like LODs within your shaders you can use keyword switches to build out different variants for your Shader Graphs (see documentation: Keywords | Shader Graph | 8.0.1).

If you’re looking for supporting multiple render pipelines within your Shader Graph we’re doing work there, and this will also it easier to get more specific about stages (see a UX mock up and more info https://portal.productboard.com/8ufdwj59ehtmsvxenjumxo82/c/52-master-stack-and-stage-blocks).

Currently we are not working on surface shaders and the shader team’s focus is on building the best possible shader graph and artists tools possible. Our goal is for you to be able to do what you could do with surface shaders with Shader Graph (supporting both node and code paths). That being said we are actively engaging with a users who see a big desire for surface shaders on the forums here: SRP Surface Shaders We would value any contribution.

[StephanieRowlinson]

First of, I’m happy with the amount of attention given to acknowledging the problems with Unity atm. Makes me feel heard.

Secondly, a UIElements related question, there was a quick bit there about “screen space development for all platforms” being available. Does that mean the UIElements for Runtime package is now available in the 2020.1 beta?

Answer:

@""

The plan is to share the preview package with runtime support when 2020.1 officially releases.

[optimise]

Hi. I would like to ask what’s the ETA of shipping avoid reload whole domain feature? It means each time when I change one line of code, it will not domain reload all the dlls of the packages from Package Manager. That’s the feature I really I hope it can ship at Unity 2020 release cycle. Currently with more features introduce as packages it continuously slow down Editor further and further. It really needs this kind of feature to really solve this problem. From what I know last year, the feature has been working on but this year I didn’t hear any new update yet.

Answer:

@""

This feature depends on upgrading Mono to the latest version, which is in progress, but will not be completed for the 2020.x release cycle. We hope to have more details to share with you later this year, once we have a better idea of when we will ship the Mono upgrade.

[Johnny-Fuzz1]

XR Foundation and Direct Support with external tools like MRTK.

I know the Microsoft MRTK plugin very well and in my opinion is one of the best XR toolkits out there - also given the recent work to open that up even more from the community - what my question is more so about is the roadmap and support for integrating these tools within Unity’s XR Foundation service. Microsoft has a package manager plug-in for MRTK and I know going forward this will probably be more on Microsoft than Unity - just wanted to see what additional information could be provided in these circumstances.

Thanks,

Answer:

@mfuad

We don’t have any plans for direct integration of MRTK, but it’s worth noting that Microsoft has released a new version of MRTK (2.3) that includes support for XR SDK, which is our plugin framework that AR Foundation is built on top of. So current guidance is to use Unity’s Windows XR Plugin and Microsoft’s MRTK 2.3.

[andreicfsteaua]

Regarding creation workflows, atm there is no full DOTS scene control during playmode like the traditional hierarchy for OOP. For example, if I instantiate a prefab at runtime, I cannot modify it using the editor during playmode for testing. Are you developing such a functionality?

Answer:

@""

Hello,

We are currently looking into how we can improve the user experience of working with DOTS in the editor in general. One area in particular is how to view what is in a scene more clearly.

There will be updates throughout the year on those efforts in the DOTS subforum.

[Grimreaper358]

In the roadmap they mentioned Precomputed Lighting for HDRP is released, but HDRP doesn’t support precomputed lighting (Enlighten) for new projects only baked lighting from the Progressive Lightmapper.

Is there something that we are missing or that’s an error?

Answer:

@quixotic

This was just different language than we’ve used in the past. HDRP does support precomputed lighting via baked lighting with Progressive Lightmapper (as Enlighten included precomputed realtime rather than just recomputed).

[Aurelinator]

For those of us that develop Unity tools and extensions, knowing how things work is imperative. When Prefab Mode first came out, tons of tools and extensions were broken by the introduction of the new mode. It took a number of cycles to finally stabilize the Stages api and all that. Do you think you could go into more detail about what some of the prefab improvements mentioned in the Roadmap mean (at the coding level), like what’ll it look like to detect if an asset is in one of the new modes? How should we as tool developers be preparing for changes to prefab structuring?

Answer:

@""

About Prefab Mode in Context (Unity 2020.1). We don’t expect much is needed in terms of changing tooling since the change is almost purely visual. However it’s always hard for us to predict the multitudes of unexpected ways people customize Unity so please get the beta of 2020.1 and verify for yourself and post your feedback in this thread . Your chance to affect the API is NOW while it’s in beta, while the opportunities for changing it after release are much more limited.

About Encapsulated Prefabs: This is in early development. For Prefabs Assets that you opt in to mark encapsulated, this will affect instances of those Prefabs with regard to which GameObjects are shown in the Hierarchy, which components are shown in the Inspector, and which properties overrides are allowed on. Furthermore it won’t be possible to apply overrides on instances of encapsulated Prefabs back to the Asset. There will be API to check if a Prefab is encapsulated. The encapsulation feature is intended for people who have been requesting more strict control over how Prefab Assets are modified, and restrictions over what modifications can be made to instances. People who have no need for these restrictions can refrain from using it.

About new ways to open Scenes, Prefabs, and other assets independently of one another as part of a new multi-document workflow: Perhaps Will can answer this or get the question to the right people.

[chrisk]

A quick question, the Roadmap said Kinematica is in Preview but I don’t find it anywhere.

Answer:

@""

Hi chrisk,

Kinematica preview package is ready and will be released by the end of April. I’m happy that you’re looking for it, it’s going to be awesome!

Cheers!

[TheOtherMonarch]

What is the plan for

1: Terrains
2: Graphine’s Granite / mega texturing.

Will mega texturing support height maps or only meshes? Will you be able to make custom mega / multi-tile UV textures instead of splat maps on terrain?

Answer:

@quixotic

1: We are working on a new non-destructive layer-based environment system for terrain and other environment elements, we’ll follow up with more detail once we have plans to share.
2: We are rolling out new texture streaming slowly to get user feedback the pre-release version is available here for testing. We would really appreciate feedback as to how it works for your projects, and where you think it needs to be improved.

[Jawsarn]

Working with DOTS tech of Physics, NetCode etc with debugging tools such as full stack traces and non burst code causes the editor to be very slow (around 10 fps), while built version runs very well. Are there any plans of improving the editor experience when using DOTS tech?

Answer:

@""

Hi Jawsarn,

Thanks for the feedback. This is something we are aware of and want to improve however we can.

Not directly related but we are working on improving the general visibility of what DOTS is doing while in the editor (What was previously constrained to the entity debugger). Also we have added Native debugging of Burst in the 1.3 release.

[Onigiri]

Hi! Thank you for roadmap. Is it possible to use new environment system with custom meshes or it’s working only with terrain? If i wanna paint textures or place grass on meshes will it work?

Answer:

@quixotic

We want to enable this in our new non-destructive environment, and we’re discussing how this can be integrated. We will share more once the plans firm up.