Hi everyone,
As you might’ve already read on the blog, Unity 6 is now available to download. On that note, our team is excited to share with you four updated technical e-books, and a few sample projects, to help you get started with the latest release.
In this post, you’ll find a quick overview of what’s covered in the e-books. Whether you’re an artist, technical artist, a programmer, or someone who wants to get started with Unity 6, there’s a little something for everyone.
We hope you find these resources helpful. Feel free to suggest other topics that you would like to see covered in future e-books, articles, or video tutorials.
Introduction to the Universal Render Pipeline for advanced Unity creators
This guide can help experienced Unity developers and technical artists develop as efficiently as possible with the Universal Render Pipeline (URP) in Unity 6.
URP is Unity’s default renderer for 2D and 3D games for mobile, XR, and untethered hardware. It’s the successor to our Built-In Render Pipeline, designed to be efficient for you to learn, customize, and scale to all Unity-supported platforms.
Here are some of the areas where the Unity 6 updated guide provides expert guidance and how-to tips:
- Set up URP for a new project, or convert an existing Built-In Render Pipeline-based project to URP.
- Work with URP Quality settings.
- Use all lighting tools available in URP, including new features like Adaptive Probe Volumes (APVs) for real-time global illumination and lighting scenarios that blend between day and night lighting.
- Use URP shaders for lit scenes and understand the differences between URP and Built-In Render Pipeline shaders.
- Use custom shaders, includes and HLSL includes.
- Use the URP post-processing framework, including adding a Local Volume and controlling post-processing with code Use Rendering layers.
- Apply many kinds of performance optimizations with tools in URP, including the newly-released GPU Resident Drawer, GPU occlusion culling, and more.
- Customize the render pipeline using Renderer Features and the Render graph system.
Optimize your game performance for mobile, XR, and Unity Web in Unity
Mobile, XR, and web games have active user bases reaching the billions. Optimizing your game to be as performant as possible is essential for the widest reach.
In this e-book we gathered knowledge and advice from Unity engineers who have partnered with developers across the industry to help them launch the best games possible.
You will find more than 75 actionable tips for optimizing performance in XR and Unity Web for Unity 6. We also share some tips on how to use Unity’s profiling tools, and get tips on programming, project configuration, assets, GPU, audio, UI, animation, physics, and more.
Optimize your game performance for consoles and PCs in Unity
While your audience may take it for granted that your PC or console game runs at silky-smooth 60+ frames per second, achieving your performance goals across multiple platforms is not always easy.
To optimize effectively requires effort to make both your code architecture and art assets more efficient and an understanding of how your target hardware operates within its limitations.
This guide assembles knowledge and advice from Unity’s expert software engineers who have tested these best practices with our industry partners in real-world scenarios. Follow these steps to get the best performance from your PC and console game.
We collected more than 100 pages of best practices for optimizing console and PC games in Unity 6 along with tips on profiling your project, programming architecture, optimizing assets and graphics, and more tips for large-scale projects.
Best practices for project organization and version control
Version control can be a daunting topic for many, especially if you’re not a programmer. But it doesn’t need to be that way. There are a number of tools that integrate with Unity to help your team work effectively with versioning.
This guide explains the key concepts of version control, compares some of the different version control systems (VCS) available, and introduces you to Unity Version Control and additional tools like Unity Asset Manager and Build Automation.
It provides tips and tricks you can use when setting up your Unity project to help ensure team collaboration is smooth and efficient.
More resources: sample projects
We’ve also updated a few of our sample projects to Unity 6 and will continue to do so over the next few months. In the meantime, here are the samples that you can start exploring today:
Level up your code with design patterns and SOLID
Learn how to implement programming design patterns and SOLID principles in your Unity 6 projects in order to achieve cleaner, more efficient, and maintainable code.
Here’s a rundown of the patterns included in the project:
SOLID Principles:
- Single-responsibility principle
- Open-closed principle
- Liskov substitution
- Interface segregation
- Dependency inversion
Design Patterns:
- Factory pattern
- Object pooling
- MVP
- MVVM
- Singleton
- Strategy
- Command
- Flyweight
- State
- Dirty flag
- Observer
Happy Harvest – 2D sample project
Happy Harvest is an official Unity sample project that showcases the capabilities of the native 2D tools in the Universal Render Pipeline (URP). This sample is a 2D top-down farming simulation game that shows what’s possible with 2D lights, shadow effects, skeletal animation, sprite libraries, visual effects, and more.
Gem Hunter Match - 2D sample project
Gem Hunter Match is an official Unity cross-platform sample project that showcases the capabilities of 2D lighting and visual effects in the Universal Render Pipeline (URP). It’s been tested on popular desktop computers and common iOS and Android devices.
The techniques you’ll see in the sample include using:
- A Sprite Custom Lit Shader Graph to apply custom lighting per tile.
- VFX Graph to create glare and ripple effects.
- The Tilemap system for the gameplay logic and background board visuals.
- UI Toolkit for in-game UI.
- The 2D Animation package for smooth skeletal animation and Inverse Kinematics (IK).
- A sprite mask and render texture to add the character to the UI.
Dragon Crashers – UI Toolkit sample project
This sample showcases a vertical slice of a mobile game with runtime menus built with the UI Toolkit.
This demo uses UI Toolkit with UXML and USS files to recreate common game interface layouts and styles, showing both simple and more advanced use cases. The naming convention and structure of the demo can also be used as a reference for creators starting projects with UI Toolkit.
Actions illustrated in the demo include how to:
- Style with selectors in USS files and use UXML templates
- Create custom controls such as a circular progress bar or tabbed views
- Customize the appearance of elements such as sliders or toggle buttons
- Use Render Texture effects for UI overlay effects
- Apply USS animations, seasonal themes, and more
- Handle different screen ratios, particularly, changes of UI styling at runtime between portrait and landscape mobile screen orientations
- Use the SafeArea API to contain UI functionality within the usable screen area of your device
- Follow design patterns for clean UI architecture to ensure scalability and maintainability.
As usual, if you have any feedback about the best practices covered in the e-books, or about the sample projects, let us know through a comment on this post.
Thank you for reading!
