Technological demo of the Book of the Dead and the new features of Unity 2018

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

For many, the release of Unity 2018 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 C # Job System will write secure multi-threaded C # code.

Scriptable Render Pipeline enthusiasts have been waiting for a long time, since it is assumed that this feature is made for modern GPU models and will allow you to squeeze out of them much more than the outdated built-in Unity pipeline. Previously, developers had to go for various tricks in order to achieve good results from it. For example, one of the most popular games on Unity, Cities: Skylines , was made possible technically due to the fact that developers had access to the source code of the engine and they were able to make the necessary changes to the rendering mechanism (it was certainly not done without the involvement of experts from Unity ).
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To create a technological demo, the team resorted to photogrammetry - textures and objects were taken from the real world; Most assets were taken from the Quixel Megascans library, and their own assets were created using the Delighting Tool , an experimental tool created by Unity Labs (the tool can be picked up from Github ).



Certainly, some users of Unity may be scared away by the wide possibilities that the prospect of self-configuration of the rendering pipeline needs. Several presets will be available for them in the engine, starting with Lightweight and High-Definition - the first is designed for cross-platform development, the second is for high-end desktops and consoles. However, some can continue to use the good old built-in rendering pipeline .

Also, your own visual editor of Shader Graph shaders will appear in the engine, and if you are working with Substance Designer, then another surprise awaits you: support for importing materials will be removed from the editor, and you will need to install the Substance plugin from Asset Store (read this can be here ).



Under the C # Job System feature sauce, Unity's marketers promise programming under multi-core processors without a headache, largely due 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 have joined the Unity team to work on Unity 2018; in total, the company currently employs over 1,000 people. In more detail about Unity Demo Team, Veselin Efremova and the previous demo on Habré wrote earlier .

Some other demo creation details are available on the Unity website .

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

Update. Today, Robert Cupisz opened the veil of secrets on the technical side of the demo in his Twitter .