Unite 2022 Recap

If you were waiting for Unite 2022 – the global Unity conference/developer interaction experience – then the bad news is that you have missed it; it was 1st and 2nd November. The good news is that we have all the main highlights from the event right here.

Unite is now recognised as a worldwide meeting of everybody who is anybody in the world of Unity, and the line-up is always pretty impressive. This year there were over 19,000 participants from around the world, all eager to find out the latest in Unity, and get a handle on the up-and-coming features.

This event is a free (registration required) international conference spread over two days and allows developers, users, journalists, and those who just love Unity to get together and get the latest news and information on updates and features. The really cool thing about Unite is that, rather than having a constant stream of corporate types endlessly boasting the power of the program, Unite is hosted for the most part by developers and project managers who actually create the new features, and use the sessions to dig deep into their area of expertise, making the session far more worthwhile. Some of these features are still in development and the session in question acts as an introductory session to what will be arriving in Unity within the next year.

Take, for instance, the session delivered by Florent Bocquelet – a Senior Machine Learning Developer – on Authoring character poses with AI, which is being developed at Unity. This new feature uses machine learning (ML) to impart natural looking movements on characters created in the Unity. The new system even allows the automatic posing of AI models via imported photos; find a pose that you like in a photo, import it, and your model will assume that pose. This allows the accurate positioning and posing of characters quickly and intuitively. Awesome!

At another session, Benoit Gagnon, a senior software developer, went over the new ways to deal with large amounts of data when authoring a large, multiplayer game in Unity. Gagnon took a detailed look at a number of areas in this field, including PlayerPrefs and CloudSave features, and even had a detailed look at general Databases that can be employed for dealing with data in large quantities. 

While the conference was live-streamed, it was being co-hosted from a number of Unity’s global offices, including Austin, San Francisco, Montreal, Copenhagen, and Brighton in the UK, with each office offering some new and exciting insight from the development and technical teams. As well as giving Unity users a deeper insight into up-and-coming features in the system, it also gives the various Unity offices the opportunity to connect and share ideas.  Keynote speeches by senior Unity management are also increasingly used to show the company’s roadmap and layout where Unity will be heading over the next year and further.  The main speakers at this year’s event included John Riccitiello, President & Chief Executive Officer, Lucas Meijer, Technical Director, Timothy Vanherberghen, CEO, Triangle Factory, and Stacey Haffner, Director, Technical Product Management, and many others, each focusing on different aspects of the business and future development. Among the topics were adopting modular workflow, designing a game for player-first monetization, helping new players discover your game, and an overview of the company roadmap.

The Unite conference is fast becoming a must-attend session for anyone either involved in Unity, or who enjoys creating with it, and offers a rare insight into how the package will develop over the next twelve months. You can view the keynote here, so keep checking back here at Unity Developers for news of the 2023 Unite conference in time for you to virtually attend.