Aras Pranckevičius shared some of his thoughts on the upcoming features of Unity.
Aras Pranckevičius shared some of his thoughts on the upcoming features of Unity.
Unity technologies developer Aras Pranckevičius wrote a beautiful little blog post on his official blog, detailing some of the cool new features coming to Unity. Among the most interesting points he mentioned these points:
• Package Manager.
• ProBuilder; finally Unity gets really good level blockout & building tools!
• C# Job System and Burst Compiler; see Unite Austin talk and somecool stuff that people are already doing with it.
• Scriptable Render Pipeline; see overview and upcoming HD Render Pipe.
• Shader Graph.
However, this doesn’t seem to be all. The developer belives, that the engine is getting to the point, when it will be able to make a huge jump and become a great development tool for the current generation.
But, what is perhaps even better, is that I think we’ve found a way how to do a big jump/move from “where we are today” to “where we want to be in 5 years”.
This is one of the hardest problems in evolving a fairly popular product; it’s very hard to realize how hard it is without actually trying to do it. Almost every day you’re off with something you’d want to change, but a lot of possible changes might break some existing content. A “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” type of situation, that @mcclure111 described so brilliantly:
Library design is this: You have made a mistake. It is too late to fix it. There is production code depending on the mistake working exactly the way the mistake works. You will never be able to fix it. You will never be able to fix anything. You wrote this code nine seconds ago. [source]
It’s easy to make neat tech that barely anyone uses. It’s moderately simple to make technically brilliant engine that gets two dozen customers, and then declare a ground-up 100% rewrite or a whole new engine, that This Time Will Be Even More Brilliant-er-er. Get two dozen customers, rinse & repeat again.
Doing a re-architecture of an engine (or anything, really), while hundreds of thousands of projects are in flight, and trying to disrupt them as little as possible, is a hundred times harder. And I’m not exaggerating, it’s easily a hundred times harder. When I was doing customer-facing features, improvements & fixes, this was the hardest part in doing it all.
So I’m super happy that we seem to have a good plan in how to tackle this! The Package Manager is a huge part of that. The new Entity Component System is the first big piece of this “re-architecture the whole thing”. You can opt in to use it, or you can ignore it for a bit… but we hope the benefits are too big to ignore. You can also start to use it piece by piece, transitioning your knowledge & production to it.