What’s got game developers excited about Unity 2018.2?

The undisputed leader of game engines over the last few years has been Unity. It brings .NET professionals and enthusiasts from across the globe under the gaming umbrella with its C# game scripting feature .

Unity also boasts of a very active community and an even busier release schedule. Unity has been following a semantic versioning. Under this scheme, version numbers and the way they change convey meaning about the underlying code and what has been modified from one version to the next. Unity have just released their 2018.2 beta version.

Here are some exciting features you can look forward to while working in Unity 2018.2.

Texture Mipmap streaming feature: If you are a game developer then saving GPU memory is probably one of your top priorities. Unity 2018.2 gives you control over which graphical map or mipmap you will load in the CPU. The previous versions used to load all the mipmaps at the same time and hence put a huge amount of load on the GPU. While this memory allocation helps in reducing GPU load, it does increase a little bit of CPU load.

Improved Package manager: Unity 2018.2 comes with an improved package manager. The improvements are in the UI font, and the status of package label. It also now has the ability to dock the window and provides easy access to both documentation and the list of changes.

Improvements in the Particle system: Unity 2018.2 beta comes with an improved particle system and new scripting APIs for baking the geometry of a Particle System into a Mesh. Unity now allows up to eight texture coordinates to be used on meshes and passed to shaders. Particle Systems will also now convert their colors into linear space, when appropriate, before uploading them to the GPU.

Camera Improvements: Unity has come up with some major improvements in their camera and and the way it functions and renders the objects in the game to portray them like real life objects.

Animation Jobs C# API: Unity 2018.2 has improved the AnimationPlayables by allowing users to write their own C# Playables that can interact directly with the animation data. This allows integration of user made IK solvers, procedural animation or even custom mixers into the current animation system.