At Unite Europe 2015, we unveiled our public roadmap. We realize that our users have been wanting more information for some time. To address this, we carefully considered the best format for presenting this information, then assembled it in a way we hope is most useful to all of you.

Background

For the past 10 years, Unity developed in a more organic fashion with an eye for feature work usually trumping schedules or deadlines. Without having some sense of regularity, a roadmap becomes some distant reality that is hard to subscribe to. Since shipping 5.0 and now 5.1, we are comfortable committing to a more regular rhythm of quarterly releases. In this commitment, a roadmap schedule now becomes a useful tool for everyone involved.

Goals

The roadmap is a tool for Unity users to be able to reasonably predict what feature set they could work with/commit to when starting a project in the near term. With that in mind, our goal is to lay out the anticipated and probable work arriving in the next 9 months.

We aware our community has interests in what important things are currently being worked on, and sometimes those timelines are beyond 9 months. Additionally, we are still a finite number of often specialized engineers and prioritization does take place. Also, taking any feature and multiplying it by 22 platforms and the complexities of making it easy to use for a broad span of users simply take time.

In any case, we’ve organized the roadmap into five groups. First, we will display the next three upcoming releases with specified dates. For the very next release, we’ll also color code to show the confidence of the work item making the final cut and shipping. After trying something out in alpha and early beta, there is always a chance that the feature just really isn’t ready for prime-time. In that case, it could be delayed a version, or even kicked back to the drawing board. Everything of course is case-by-case.

The “Development” work are in-progress with a clear plan and dedicated engineering effort to move it towards release. However, the time at which the work may complete may exceed the 9 months of listed releases or other externalities may prevent us from specifying a particular release. For example of these externalities, we list WebGL 2.0 in “Development” since the technology in the industry is still evolving and we depend on the browser technology to be available in the general public.

Finally, we are left with “Research” which contains all the prototypes, design phase, and other items which are getting actual time, however they are not in any condition to be called earnest development where there is a solid plan being worked against.

We will aim for a weekly update to the roadmap contents, and will look to further refine the presentation.

If you would like to up-vote any listed feature or add a feature for consideration, please head over to feedback.unity3d.com.

Let us know what you think!