UNIGINE 2.19 Is Out With Major Optimizations, OpenXR & USD Support

The UNIGINE team has launched the latest update to their game engine, UNIGINE 2.19, which brings a range of enhancements, including significant optimizations, an upgraded character animation system, SpiderVision plug-in, support for OpenXR and USD export, and more.

Key changes:

• A multi-threaded renderer that significantly enhances CPU-side performance
• Engine startup loading optimization
• Major optimizations to reduce RAM usage
• Improved streaming system, including async node loading
• Support for OpenXR
• Upgraded character animation system (experimental)
• Support for USD format export
• Integration with .NET 8
• SpiderVision plugin for multi-monitor/curved screen image output
• Video streaming via WebRTC (experimental)

Regarding optimizations, the startup loading time has been significantly reduced. A multithreaded DX12 renderer has been introduced, dramatically boosting CPU performance by utilizing the power of all its cores and delivering a performance boost of up to 2x. Additionally, UNIGINE's allocator has been upgraded to optimize RAM and VRAM management for applications, leading to quicker and more efficient allocation processes.

Up to 2.18.1, all instances of geometry from Node References have shared a single common lightmap for each particular surface, limiting the use of lightmapping for instanced objects in the scene. UNIGINE 2.19 introduces the capability to bake individual lightmaps and shadow maps for geometry within separate instances of Node References, removing these limitations and fully unlocking the potential of lightmapping.

Additionally, a new Materials Quality feature offers better flexibility in balancing quality and performance. It allows for varying texture resolutions and feature sets based on global quality levels (Low, Medium, High). By adding the Material Quality Switch node to your graph and linking different options, the engine automatically generates and applies material versions for each quality level.

Also, broadcasting audio data and video frames from UNIGINE to an unlimited number of devices via WebRTC is now possible.

With this release, UNIGINE has united all major rendering output functionalities for displays, walls, and projectors, including edge blending, warping, and other features previously spread across multiple plug-ins into a single plug-in called SpiderVision. This new plug-in, replacing them all from version 2.19, simplifies usage, enhances convenience, and reduces overhead.

The Animation System continues to evolve with the following experimental improvements added so far:

• Implemented LookAt-chains for ObjectMeshSkinned
• Bone rotation constraints for ObjectMeshSkinned
• Changed morph target management for ObjectMeshSkinned
• Added several interpolation modes for bone rotation of ObjectMeshSkinned
• ObjectMeshSkinned no longer supports mesh geometry modification, as there is a special procedural mode in which a custom user mesh can be set
• Animation retargeting for ObjectMeshSkinned can now be registered using pairs (anim_path, mesh_path)

In version 2.19, developers introduced the ability to export scene content to a USD file and added .NET 8 integration with much higher performance, C#12, better Garbage Collector, improved serialization/deserialization, and a lot more.

The UNIGINE team has also added support for OpenXR, an open standard aimed at unifying the AR/VR/MR software development for broader hardware reach. This integration streamlines code compatibility across platforms and devices, and while the current implementation is a baseline for supporting VR via OpenXR API, more features are coming soon.

If you're interested in learning UNIGINE, several articles have been updated, and a series of new ultrashort quick tip videos are now available in English, Chinese, and Russian:

Learn more about UNIGINE 2.19 in the release notes here and join our 80 Level Talent platform and our Telegram channel, follow us on Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, and Reddit, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.