Alex Thiessen from KinematicSoup Technologies talked about Scene Fusion – a new collaboration tool for Unity 5 developers.
Alex Thiessen from KinematicSoup Technologies talked about Scene Fusion – a new collaboration tool for Unity 5 developers. It’s a new instrument, that allows game developers to build big complex worlds together in one environment. Great stuff for large-scale game production.
Scene Fusion
Scene Fusion allows multiple users to edit a Unity scene together in real-time. The tool allows people to join a ‘scene session’ that lets them all edit the scene at once. Users can see objects that other users are manipulating in real-time while using the tool. In the current Unity workflow without Scene Fusion, it is far more difficult for developers to work together, as Unity does not natively support multiple users in a scene. Instead, teams have to use technology like scene merging to deal with scene collaboration. These processes are not conducive to collaborating with your team and can have a lot of problems associated with them.
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Collaboration
Scene Fusion lets one user open a scene and host a session. Other users on their team can then join this session and edit the scene together. The Scene Fusion system is a cloud based platform that syncs metadata about the project such as commands and transforms. The nice thing about this is that assets from projects are never passed through our cloud servers, meaning the intellectual property of the developer is always protected. Scene Fusion can be used at any stage of development where it is beneficial for multiple people to be able to work together on a Unity scene, whether they are in the same office, or across the world.
Another thing to note about Scene Fusion is that it does not replace current source control – there is no transfer of assets during a session, meaning that teams don’t have to migrate away from their current source control tools or workflow.
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Reduction in Production Time
Because teams are able to work collaboratively on scenes and do not have to deal with processes like scene merging, scenes get built a lot faster. This reduction in scene building time translates to a large reduction in overall game production time. We had Taunia Sabanski, the CEO of Amnia Interactive tell us that “she would expect Scene Fusion to cut down development time by up to 36%, based on previous experience with custom in-house solutions that had the same capabilities”.
Scene Fusion is currently in free open beta. We do not have a complete pricing model decided upon yet, but it is likely that the tool will be licensed to users for a monthly fee based on a tiered system.
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Make sure to check out official website for more information on the tool.