At first glimpse, networking is not useful in business simulations as there are no such high expectations as in games like shooters. But let’s think closely. In the case of some manufacturing process simulation, where a lot of people should collaborate and the reaction is involved, good networking experience can be very useful.

Unity has announced that version 2020 will have an open-source framework with built-in features such as Client-Side Prediction, Lag Compensation, and Interpolation. We can easily leverage the optimization techniques to implement the best simulation experience where collaboration is required.

This feature may seem as not so important. But if you think a bit more, it goes without saying that UI is the workspace where developers and designers work every day. So if they can arrange and optimize it in the most suitable way, it can increase the overall development speed. Especially for the Artists who work with Unity3D.

Additionally, Unity claims that Editor’s speed is much higher now and selecting a lot of objects at once is not laggy from now on. It is a big advantage as Level Designers would be able to build 3D worlds faster without a need for high-end hardware.

This feature will increase the prototyping speed which is a major stage of development. Game Designers would simply learn this simple scripting tool and prototype on their own. It helps them to test a lot more mechanics without misunderstandings between them and developers.

Previously a Game Designer had to describe different mechanics required for implementation within a document for developers. Then everybody should play it and decide if a particular mechanic is cool or not. With the Visual Scripting, Game Designers can simply prototype their ideas (mechanics) and choose only the best ones.

Although this feature is announced to be in Unity3D 2020 preview, it is a really cool tool, which includes Machine Learning (ML) to structure a lot of raw moting data. Therefore, the ML model can be trained by this information to produce high-quality animations reducing the number of state machines of animation controllers.

The old way was to record animations using motion capture and then build an advanced Unity Animation Controller to blend all of them. Now, ML will save tons of time so the team would be able to focus on better art as they will have more time for it.

A lot of conflicts emerged previously on the terrain assets while working on the same terrain. So it was impossible to build a big team for that purpose.

With this feature, you can build teams working in a layer-fashioned style. Hence, multiple artists can operate on different parts of the terrain simultaneously, which saves tons of time and money. Therefore, you can build bigger teams to produce more content in less time. Which is awesome as it allows us to deliver new content faster.

The release date isn’t known yet, but it’s scheduled for 2020. As Unity states, a big team is working on this feature, so they should be able to release it within the specified terms for sure.

Currently, there is Occlusion Culling, which compartmentalizes the scene by cubes. Each cube has some part of the terrain and 3D objects which then are culled if the camera view doesn’t see it. It’s a great optimization technique that considerably saves resources of the hardware.

Also, there is a great way to optimize memory by applying LODs (Levels of Detail). It reduces the object quality depending on the distance to the users’ eyes.

But Unity didn’t stop on that and implemented the Virtual Texturing that saves even more resources by displaying the best textures closer to users and the improper ones where users won’t see them. And even if they’ll see distant objects, they would think those are in good quality. Although the graphics card will say thank you to the optimization technique. Therefore, bringing less performance overhead. In its turn, it helps to build more advanced worlds with better textures that will make users experience even more immersive.