Unity has spent the last six months building new key functionality that addresses the three key pillars of quality, productivity, and performance in the 2021.2 Tech Stream release, which is available now for download. A beta of these features was released in July.
A primary focus for this release has been extensive work on the Universal Render Pipeline (URP). The company has taken a big step towards ensuring that URP is at feature parity to the Built-In Render Pipeline, so users can rely on key features and functionality while also capitalizing on the greater benefits URP offers.
Another aspect of Unity’s quality work is to ensure that users have the latest standards supported for writing code, so it has upgraded its Mono and C# support to give users access to today’s coding standards.
One of Unity’s most exciting additions in this release is feature sets. These give users the ability to quickly install and configure a set of packages designed for a particular outcome – all with one click. Feature sets make adding a new feature to a project incredibly efficient, while also eliminating the possibility of missing a critical package that you need. In addition, the company is providing a collection of samples and preset templates for URP- based projects to help users get started more quickly.
In addition, the company has increased performance on multiple fronts, with smoother workflows, faster testing, and higher frame rates while creating your projects.
The deferred rendering URP support on some mobile platforms has been improved to give users greater performance flexibility to suit project needs. An enhancement to the UI Toolkit allows users to author runtime UI, and now the Visual Effect Graph supports rendering lit particles in URP on Android, iOS, and ARCore and ARKit compatible devices. An upgrade to Unity WebGL powers faster build times and smaller WebAssembly outputs, enabling quicker loading and play times for users.