In this blog, the creators of Skul:The Hero Slayer explain how they leveraged Unity’s full suite of 2D Tools to create sharp pixel perfect 2D artwork.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Unity 2021.1 beta kicks off this year’s Tech Stream with a continued focus on quality and productivity, plus integrated visual scripting. Read on to learn what’s available for you to try out today.

Unity 2020.1 and 2020.2 included many improvements to existing functionality that make Unity workflows even more intuitive to boost your productivity. With the 2021.1 beta, we’re building on this foundation while also introducing the first iteration of the new key features announced in our 2020 roadmap blog post.

Some of highlights in 2021.1 are ready to be tested – and we’d love to hear your feedback:

Visual scripting: Create scripting logic without coding
Graphics: Point Light Shadows on for the Universal Render Pipeline (URP) and static shadow casters for the High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP)
Editor: Performance improvements, including quick search and global variables for localization
Scripting: Faster IL2CPP, incremental C# script compilation, precision time API, and Code Coverage features
Profiler: Can now profile multiple players and servers from one machine, plus improvements to Memory Profiler 
Artist tools: ProBuilder’s point-to-point cut, Cinemachine support for physical cameras, and Timeline improvements, plus greater stability in cinematic tools and Python for Unity
2D tools: Tilemap UX features, Sprite Swap workflow
Platforms: General improvements
Package lifecycle: Changes to how we roll out and classify new features and packages

You can get the latest beta from the Unity Hub or on our download page. As of today, it includes  over 1700 fixes and more than 240 features and changes. Remember, the beta is not intended for use in production-stage projects, and you should also make sure to back up your existing projects if you plan to use them with the beta, as always. That said, we would love to know how Unity 2021.1 works for you – submit a bug report to qualify for your chance to win one of four ultrawide IPS 34” 144 Hz monitors. Also, don’t hesitate to visit and post in the beta forum, where Unity staff across teams are monitoring and considering your valuable feedback.

Finally, make sure to sign up for the webinar on February 25, where the Creator Advocacy team will demo many of the new features in Unity 2021.1 beta. You can learn more about the webinar and sweepstakes below.

 
Join the hands-on 2021.1 webinar