I’ve been following Unity’s netcode team on social media, and they opened hiring for a Senior Netcode Developer back in May (if I recall correctly). There were applicants, and I remember seeing the position closed sometime around June or July. Recently, I noticed Unity reopened hiring for this position again on LinkedIn. I’m a bit concerned about whether the netcode team has enough manpower to develop the features announced on the roadmap.
Is this something to be worried about?
Hello @saskenergy you are very vigilant, appreciate you raising this concern.
I obviously cannot go into too many details regarding our recruitment process but we did indeed need to re-open the role, a candidate for the role needed to remove themselves from the process for personal reasons, therefore we needed to re-open it again. These things happen, and we go again!
Regarding staffing against our roadmap, I don’t believe we commit to a timeframe with the public roadmap but throwing more people at a problem doesn’t automatically mean you deliver a solution faster. What we are delivering for Unity 6 is a huge amount of work, which I hope breeds confidence from the community that we are investing heavily into Unity’s Multiplayer solutions.
Is there anything in particular from the roadmap that you want to see soon enough which relates to your concern?
Thanks!
Is there anything in particular from the roadmap that you want to see soon enough which relates to your concern?
Mostly prediction for NGO. I remember it was talked about over a year ago in Discord and was hoping it would make it for the Unity 6 release. I did see that anticipation has already made it into the 2.0 branch though which is a subset of the feature so I guess work is steadily going that way.
I believe that is part of the Netcode unification process. More details here but of course no ETA: Multiplayer Networking roadmap | Unity
Prediction isn’t actually that hard to implement but has challenges depending on what you want to predict (player movement / player actions / animations).
It’s the server-side rollback that’s both challenging and crucial for competitive play.
Not really, the Anticipation API is as far as we will go for Netcode for GameObjects.
If you are happy leveraging ECS and the Data Oriented Tech Stack, then Netcode for Entities is your best bet as it supports Prediction and Rollback.
The Unified Netcode offering will unlock Prediction and Rollback (from Netcode for Entities) for those who don’t want to write data oriented design code via Netcode for Entities directly – but this is future, not a present available option.
Interesting. I don’t know anything about ECS yet as it is outside the scope of my current game so NFE is not an option for now. Currently using a third party library, Fish-Net. I will however swap over to the official library once the unification is done.