Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond is one of the most ambitious projects Respawn has ever undertaken. An action packed, incredibly immersive VR experience set in World War II with a deep single player campaign and full-feature multiplayer, MOHAB is testing the limits of Virtual Reality.

Players step into the boots of an agent of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in war torn Europe. The game takes you through historic events on land, air, and sea, sabotaging Nazi bases, subverting enemy plans and aiding the French Resistance.

With this ambitious campaign and a full multiplayer experience to balance, the agile team at Respawn tasked with bringing MOHAB to life had to be smart with their resources. 

Delivering the networking, matchmaking, and voice comms for top titles is what Unity Multiplayer Services does best, and so we were honored to partner with Respawn and help them focus on creating a new frontier for the beloved Medal of Honor franchise.

Our new course, 3D Art Optimization for Mobile Applications, is designed for technical artists and content creators. Upskill your mobile game dev skills with 8 hours of materials on optimizing geometry, shaders, lighting and more. Mobile games can demonstrate a range of problems. A game may exhibit low frame rates, appear jumpy, make your phone warm, and use up considerable battery life. Throttling and frame rate drops can frustrate players and take away from the game’s experience. These issues may be caused by a complex model or an unoptimized shader. But optimizing 3D assets for mobile devices can prove challenging because of the variety of mobile hardware and their differing capabilities and limitations. Artists and creators have to balance bringing their visions to life while working within the capabilities of mobile hardware. We teamed up with our partner Arm to bring Unity creators a new intermediate-level Unity Learn course, 3D Art Optimization for Mobile Applications. Arm is the intellectual property (IP) semiconductor company behind the pervasive Arm Cortex® CPUs and Arm Mali™ GPUs.

We recently shared our roadmap plans for 2021. Now, we invite you inside Unity to meet some of the teams working toward these goals. In this fourth post of our new series, we meet with the Visual Scripting team. Our Unity 2021 roadmap explains our priorities for this year. Thanks to the excellent feedback we’ve gathered since that blog post, we’re even more committed to updating production-ready features and delivering new key features. Not only that, we’re determined to improve workflows and your overall quality of life when working in the Editor. A key element of our roadmap is communicating with you, our users, about how we plan to put this into practice. By giving you behind-the-scenes looks at our processes, we hope to help you better understand how Unity is working to empower creators. Meet Development Manager Adam Blahuta and Technical Lead Theo Richart from the Visual Scripting team. They’ll help us to understand what visual scripting is and why it’s one of the top six priorities for Unity in 2021. If you’ve played Warhammer: Underworlds Online, then you’ve experienced visual scripting at work. Think of visual scripting as the workflow to create logic for games and apps without writing any code. This workflow uses visual, node-based graphs that both programmers and nonprogrammers can use to design logic or to quickly create prototypes.

In Unity 2020.2, we introduced several new features in Shader Graph that improved the workflow for artists. For example, by refining the user experience overall and introducing the Graph Inspector, Graph Editor performance has been greatly improved. As the end point of the Graph, the Master Stack is now a modular collection of feature blocks, replacing the monolithic Master Node.

The Master Stack is the end point of a Shader Graph that defines the final surface appearance of a shader. It helps users visualize the relationship between operations that take place in the vertex stage and the fragment stage. With Unity 2020.2, the Master Stack replaces the Master Node of earlier Unity versions.

Learn how to use Unity’s full suite of 2D Tools efficiently and quickly for your project with tips and tricks from our 2D technical product managers.