Today (19th September) we shared our latest Unity Roadmap at Unite. Our agenda covered the Unity 6 generation and what’s coming after that, i.e. the next generation of Unity. Our team has created a number of dedicated threads to help engage in discussions about everything we shared today:
This is some extremely exciting stuff. Can’t even decide what of these I’m most excited for, these are all such great improvements to some of the engine’s current pain points Great work to all the teams at Unity pushing this tech forward!
Thanks for exciting updates about Unity Next/7,
I do wish we get updates for Ui Toolkit during Unite, but so far there is no new stuff except some samples
It would be nice to know what “Next Release Generation” means. Clearly, the things shown here are intended for the next major release, judging by that terminology. But will there be other minor versions between Unity 6.1 and Unity 7? Will additional minor versions be just for improvements to existing systems?
It is nice to know that these things are close enough to being able to be tested that they’re categorizing them as “Next Release Generation”. See a lot of talk about “dangling carrots” but this actually feels like stuff that’s getting relatively close to an actual release, as opposed to some prior announcements that felt like they were made before major headway had even been made into the systems.
Honestly since Unity decided to go back from a yearly version naming to apparently simple number versioning I cant wrap my head around it, the main reason for that is the weird way they communicate how this “new” versioning behaves in the future.
Is the 6.0 that comes in October the LTS variant? When 6.1 comes out next year, will that 6.1 also be an LTS variant?
I feel this stuff confuses me way more then it should lol
On the subject of Unified Rendering… will that essentially mean a brand new pipeline that will eventually replace URP and HDRP?
I’m 100% in support of merging pipelines, but I worry the addition of a new pipeline will result in the XKCD meme about standards. Can we be assured that won’t happen?
From the wording, and behavior of the last couple years (coexistence) it might just be a seamless integration of URP and HDRP. And hopefully that would mean transitioning won’t be as hard.
ATM you can have URP and HDRP in the same project but it’s not seamless. Maybe “Unified” isn’t new just “Both”
They are not seamless because the implementations are very different under the hood. They use entirely different shader/hlsl code and a different set of render passes, with different methods for both. It’s very difficult to see how unification can occur without requiring a major breaking api change in one or more likely both pipelines.
For URP users, we have only just finished adding support and fixes from the rendergraph changes. I fear this goal means more instability and changes in the long run, and continued user pain. Would very much appreciate some details from the graphics team about the plan here.
I’d bet that HDRP will soon get RenderGraph as default, too, with exactly same API (as it already uses RenderGraph anyway). Biggest issue I guess are shadows, which are very differently done on both pipelines, hardcoded Screen Space effects like SSS on HDRP side, and maybe complex shaders like StackLit, Eye, Fabric, Hair etc; but I guess those shaders would also work in URP, at least the Hair shader was proven to be easily transferable to URP.
I hope they are creating a new Render-Pipeline- if you ever tried to write a shader in URP - it is way more complex than Built-In and a lot of the things don’t work as documented.
Great work to all the teams at Unity pushing this tech forward!