Unity Technology's Unite 2024 developer conference is underway in Barcelona, and the global release of Unity 6 has been announced for next month. The latest version of the company's game engine will be launch on 17 October.
And we got a taste of just how impressive Unity 6 will be with the premiere of a new Unity 6 demo called Time Ghost. The short film is quite something (see the video below).
Time Ghost is a Unity Originals real-time cinematic demo intended to showcase what can be done with Unity 6. It shows significant advances in visual quality, project complexity and the practical use of machine learning workflows. One person writing in the comments on YouTube sums it up pretty well: "While watching this, I forgot about the fact that it is Unity." That's testament to just how real it looks, and that a lot of people would happily watch this as a movie.
As expected, the light and volumetrics create an epic depth, while environment geometry has improved considerably. The rendering of grass and human hair is particularly impressive – check out that hair rub at 2.02!
Unity has announced the global release of Unity 6 for 17 October. It says the engine will offer developers customizable graphics rendering for greater control over their games’ visuals, simplified multiplayer game development and robust tools to build rich games optimized for web browsers.
The first update in the Unity 6 generation, Unity 6.1, will ship in April 2025, building on the core Unity 6 capabilities with new features like support for foldable and larger screen formats, Deferred+ rendering in GPU Resident Drawer, and new build targets and build profiles.
Matt Bromberg, CEO and President of Unity, said: “Developers have been telling us for a long time that they want more stability and more performance, which we are addressing with Unity 6. We’re bringing them the best version of Unity yet, backed by deeper, long-term support and dedicated product and engineering resources post launch.
"They will also get frequent updates with new features, performance boosts, and bug fixes, all informed by their feedback and with minimal disruption to their ongoing projects. We couldn’t be more excited to celebrate Unity developers at Unite today and tomorrow and showcase, in particular, how some of them have been using Unity 6 to create amazing games.”
You can catch the whole Unite 2024 keynote below.
Other news from Unite 2024 included the optimisation of the existing Fantasy Kingdom demo for mobile using URP. The Fantasy Kingdom project and assets will be available on the Unity Asset Store free for non-commercial use when Unity 6 launches next month.
Meanwhile, Google Cloud showcased how to build and scale live service games using Google Cloud, and the nominees for the 16th Annual Unity Awards are to be announced, with voting open until 4 October.
