The process of developing, managing and delivering content is resource-intensive and fraught with challenges that can sometimes take the fun out of creating something new. Known as a content delivery network (CDN), is the act of supplying your finished product – the beautiful piece of artistry that you have spent months and possibly years on – to those who would like to use it, and that tends to pale into comparison with the design and building process. It’s not helped by the fact that this fairly dull but necessary process can take several months itself.

Unity recognises this and has sought to ease the process by launching Cloud Content Delivery which could be used to deliver your project to an expectant public in much shorter than usual timeframe. Now, that sounds much more fun, and you can try the system through Unity with your first 50Gb of uploaded data free every month.

Cloud Content Delivery (CCD) is going to make the process of game/application delivery not only super-fast, but super easy too. When using CCD, you design your own pipeline and create as many content deployments as you need. You create binary “flags” (known as badges) so that you can assign different pathways for your content to travel down, such as straight to launch, or to other team members for other work to happen first. Each of these staging points are termed “buckets” and enable different recipients to receive the version intended for them.

But Cloud Content Delivery goes way beyond just delivering content and it becomes your main solution for both managing and hosting your content. Using Cloud Content Delivery, you can integrate your content by:

• Command-line interface: The command-line interface (CLI) is the recommended method of interacting with CCD. With this tool, you can use the command line to control every aspect of your project, from file management to organising your release pipeline.
• Unity Developer Dashboard: You can also use CCD in the Developer Dashboard to create and maintain buckets, badges and releases. NOTE: use the command-line interface (CLI) to upload, delete and synchronise files and folders before managing them in the Developer Dashboard.

In reality, you will find that most work environments will use a combination of these two features and you will use both of them to deliver your content.

How does it all work? Well, actually, quite simply. The CCD consists of two application programming interfaces (API’s) – the management API, which is used by developers during the build process to manage content, and the client API, which is used at runtime by your game client. Imagine that you are developing a new title – how would Cloud Content Delivery help you?

If your release team consists of a developer, QA, and a release manager; the developer creates the content on their local machine and then pushes the essentially finished but specially tagged product that is configured to always include the latest content onto the cloud using the CLI. From here, QA support can pick it up the modified version and be assured that any updates carried out by the developer are included. QA can then test the product as much as they need to before signing it off.

Once testing is complete the product, now configured in its final form, can be sent from its cloud storage bucket to the production bucket from where it can be sent out to the final users.

The company is so certain that this is the way to go with content delivery. To get started all you need do is sign in to Unity, connect to your Unity Developer Dashboard, go to the Cloud Content Delivery section, and follow the instructions.

The new, Content Delivery Network will revolutionise the route that Unity software will reach the end users, and demonstrates just how innovative Unity continues to be.