Unite 2023: Deepening our commitment to game development

We’re excited to get together with the community at Unite 2023, our first large-scale in-person conference in four years. Unite is all about meeting up with Unity developers from around the world to make connections, share inspiration and expertise, and dig deep into the present and future of the Unity platform.

Today’s Keynote is packed with developers sharing their stories and games, new Unity demos, and updates about what’s coming and what’s here now to support all of you as you design, build, deploy, and run video games.

In the Keynote, we’re kicking things off with a preview of the next major, supported version of Unity – with a new name. Say “hello” to Unity 6, our next Long Term Support (LTS) release, heading your way in 2024. Unity 6 will come with major performance enhancements and accelerated multiplayer game creation, as well as early access WebGPU support and deeper XR device support.

We’re previewing some of these capabilities in Fantasy Kingdom in Unity 6, a stylized environment demo built around assets from Synty Studios that showcases upcoming enhancements for rendering, lighting, and scaling richer worlds with significant performance improvements. A major part of the demo is Adaptive Probe Volumes, which deliver more immersive, natural lighting scenarios. GPU Resident Drawer, GPU Occlusion Culling, and Spatial-Temporal Post-Processing (STP) unlock hardware-based optimizations and additional performance boosts.

Unity 6 will also bring support for a brand-new WebGPU graphics backend. Starting from Unity 6, you will be able to run your Unity games anywhere on the web, including in a web view inside native apps or inside a browser. The new capabilities unlock support for new and exciting rendering features and enable next-level of graphics fidelity.

You can check out our Roadmap session, available on demand soon, for more details on Unity 6.

While we can’t wait to bring you this new version, we’re also highlighting some key features from our latest Long Term Support release, Unity 2022 LTS, including its full DOTS support and Universal Render Pipeline (URP) graphics features in a 3D sample that shows you how to develop, scale, and configure graphics for multiplatform projects. Download 2022 LTS and the URP 3D Sample Project today to get started.

Building on the multiplayer capabilities unlocked with LTS 2022, StickyLock Studios is joining us to describe why they turned to Unity when developing their multiplayer competitive shooter game Histera.

We’re offering a sneak peek of the upcoming Megacity Metro demo and sample game, created to highlight the end-to-end capabilities you need to deliver awesome multiplayer games. Megacity Metro refreshes our Megacity sample from 2018 with a new aesthetic and greater focus on cross-platform play. This game sample will show you how you can create and scale multiplayer experiences with support for over 100 players through the use of Netcode for Entities and Multiplay Hosting.

We’re also showing you Safe Voice and Moderation, tools for managing toxicity in your multiplayer games that you can access in open beta today to provide a safer community for your players.

At Unite, we are also unveiling the new Unity Cloud, with tools to connect and streamline workflows. Unity Cloud includes Unity Asset Manager, Unity DevOps, centralized Team Administration, Editor integrations, and an improved Dashboard UI to bring order to the game development lifecycle.

Unity Cloud is in early access today for every version and subscription tier of Unity, including Personal Edition.

As part of the Unite announcements, we are also unveiling the latest evolution of both Unity Muse and Unity Sentis. Unity Muse helps you iterate more quickly using AI capabilities like Chat, Sprite, and Texture to refine your vision.

With Chat, you can use natural language prompts to find exactly what you’re looking for. In seconds, you’ll have well-structured answers and instructions – and even project-ready code. Using the Sprite capability, you can produce and modify 2D art directly in the Editor, generating production-quality textures for 2D and 3D projects, in any style, all inside your project.

We’re also offering a glimpse of the next set of Muse capabilities, currently in prerelease and fully supported later in 2024: Behavior, Animate, and Sketch. Behavior enables you to instantly set up character interactions. Simply describe the desired actions, and Muse will create behavior trees in the Editor. For both aspiring and skilled animators, Animate lets you bring humanoid characters to life with just a few text prompts. With Sketch, you can get started mocking up collaboratively on the web before importing your sample scene into the Editor.

Muse produces game art that can be tweaked and modified for production use, so you can drop the asset directly into a Unity project. To learn more about how we trained our models and the techniques applied for quality-controlled outputs, check out our blog post on responsible AI and enhanced model training at Unity. Since it’s powered by our custom-built, responsibly trained model, you don’t have to worry about accidentally generating someone else’s copyrighted materials. We’re committed to ensuring that Muse provides safe and original assets for all paid subscribers. After this early access period, if anyone claims that your Muse-generated assets infringe copyright, we’ll defend you ourselves.

Muse is available now in early access, and subscriptions are $30 a month. While Muse is still in early access, you can experiment as much as you want, without limits. During this period, as we learn with you, all features have unlimited usage. At the conclusion of early access, which we expect to be in the spring of 2024, we’ll update the Muse terms and conditions and allow you to purchase overages if needed, and we’ll give you plenty of notice before we make any changes. Follow the latest on Muse in Discussions, and be sure to check out the FAQ that will be updated as development progresses.

With Unity Sentis, you can embed AI models in the Unity Runtime in your game or application, enabling enhanced gameplay and other functionality on end-user devices. You can take models from places like Tensorflow, Pytorch, Meta, and OpenAI, or marketplaces like Keras or HuggingFace. Sentis uses the open ONNX file standard to import and optimize them for the Unity Runtime.

Because Sentis allows trained AI models to run locally on all Unity-supported devices, you can imagine and deliver experiences like smart interactive NPCs with open-ended quests, object recognition, and more – without worrying about cloud compute costs or latency. 

Sentis continues in open beta and is free for all Unity users at this time, with a full release to follow with Unity 6 next year. Follow the latest on Sentis in Discussions, and be sure to share the amazing things you build with the community.

At Unite, we’re announcing a new partnership with Meta to bring Unity titles to Instant Games across Facebook and Messenger. This will be available in beta late next year.

We’re adding more ways to build mixed reality games and experiences for Meta Quest 3 by officially launching AR Foundation for the Quest platform. This lets you bring the real world into your mixed reality games – and use our templates to start building for it right now.

Earlier this year, Unity’s platform support for Apple Vision Pro was announced at WWDC, and the world was introduced to Unity PolySpatial, which allows you to build unique spatial experiences that can run alongside other applications in Apple Vision Pro’s Shared Space. Thousands of you, from 145 countries, registered interest to participate in our beta program for visionOS – and during the Keynote, we’re announcing that Unity visionOS Beta is open to all Unity Pro, Enterprise, and Industry customers as of today.

Finally, we’re concluding the Keynote with a look at your amazing creations and by announcing the community-nominated and elected winners of the 15th Unity Awards. Congratulations to all the winners!

Unite 2023 is happening now with technical sessions, roadmap deep dives, and more. Select content from the event will also be made available on YouTube over the coming weeks. Watch the full Keynote address below.