Now available in Beta, Unity Hub is a new desktop application designed to streamline your workflow. It provides a centralized location where you can manage your Unity Projects and simplifies how you find, download, and manage your Unity Editor installs. In addition, it also helps you discover features that get you started faster – such as the new Templates feature. Try out the beta now (Windows or MacOS), or read on to learn more.

Our goal with the Unity Hub desktop application is to simplify your opening moments with Unity.

At first glance, it may look too similar but there’s actually a lot of new functionality. First, it’s a standalone application – separate from the editor. This is an important step in simplifying the workflow. If you use Unity on a regular basis, the folder below probably is a good representation of your starting moments:

A folder, with various versions of Unity, unmapped to your Unity project(s). Not good. Since this is an experience that so many users start with, it was the first thing we wanted to address. Here’s what Unity Hub currently does:

Consolidates Unity Editor management

Unity Hub has a dedicated area for finding and downloading versions of the Unity Editor. You can easily find and download the latest versions of Unity – including beta versions. Furthermore, you can manually add versions of the Unity Editor you already have installed on your machine. To install, just click “Download.” If you want more than one at at time, they’ll queue up and download in sequence.

Once downloaded, you can set your preferred version of Unity but also easily launch other versions from your project view.

Yes, technically, this does mean you can finally have two versions of Unity up and running at the same time. However, to prevent local conflicts and other odd scenarios, the project should only be opened by a single Unity Editor instance.

Get components, post installs

In the past, the best time to get add-on components, like specific platform support, Visual Studio, offline docs, and standard assets, was during the initial install. Getting them later was a pain. You’d have to either rerun the Download Assistant (basically, reinstall) or find/install individual components. Now, when you download a version of the editor through Unity Hub, you can easily find and add additional components.

Access to templates

With the introduction of Unity Hub, we are also launching a brand new feature called Templates. Templates are preset projects designed to jump-start the creation process for common project types. There are many default settings in Unity that require changing when you start a new project. In addition, how those settings are changed varies depending on the project “archetype” you have in mind. Templates allow us to preset batches of settings for a target game type or level of visual fidelity.

Templates ship with optimized Unity project settings as well as some prefabs and assets to get you started. One advantage of templates is that they expose users to features and settings that would otherwise be pretty hard to find. Be sure to try out templates because you might just discover something useful and new, which had really been there all the time!

This initial release comes with five template types:

Standard 2D Standard 3D (Preview) Lightweight games (mobile, low spec machines) (Preview) High Definition (high visual quality, high spec devices), (Preview) Lightweight VR

Have an idea for more? Let us know on the Unity Hub Preview Beta forum.

The Future of Unity Hub

We’re putting a lot of UX thought into your first Unity moments. Managing installs and projects is only the beginning. We want to make Unity Hub really useful to you by making it the best place to start accessing and managing your Unity experience. We don’t want to just optimize and streamline, we want to delight you too. Over time, expect the Unity Hub to do the following:

Single Sign On: Login and access all your Unity features and resources from any machine. You will be able to work offline .

. Real-time activity: Useful information about your Unity project, team, services, and news.

Consolidated access: Easily find and access Unity features like Tutorials and Asset Store.

Better first-time experience: A streamlined experience aimed specifically at users who are brand new to Unity.

Try it out!

Unity Hub ships today in beta.

Once you’ve had some time with it, we’d appreciate your thoughts on the forums.