It has been an exciting year here on the Unity blog, full of momentous announcements, powerful demos, and some amazing unity tips.

We have curated a list of some of the most well-read blogs of 2017 that we hope will spark some creativity as you ring in the new year.

News & Announcements



Update on Unity Multiplayer, Current and Future

Fewer bugs, improved docs, and a refactored transport layer are just a few of the updates made to Unity Multiplayer this year. This post takes you through the enhancements we’ve made, as well as what can be expected in the future.

TextMesh Pro Joins Unity

In March, we announced a powerful new addition to our creative tools suite: TextMesh Pro.

Build location-based games or apps with the newly launched WRLD SDK for Unity

The launch of WRLD SDK for Unity, opened the doors to creating a fully textured 3D environment using a real-world global coordinate system.

AR comes to Android with the ARCore SDK

Google’s ARCore SDK preview bacame available with Unity 2017.2b9. ARCore enables Augmented Reality development for the entire Android ecosystem, giving developers the ability to build captivating AR experiences for millions of users, without the need for specialized hardware.

Introducing: Unity Machine Learning Agents

We introduced Unity Machine Learning Agents, which allows researchers and developers to transform games and simulations created using the Unity Editor into environments where intelligent agents can be trained using Deep Reinforcement Learning, Evolutionary Strategies, or other machine learning methods through a simple to use Python API.

#UnityTips



Spotlight Team Best Practices: Optimizing the Hierarchy

The first blog in a series looking at some of the most frequent problems the Spotlight team has encountered while working with clients. It is very important that you think about the structure of your hierarchy throughout the development of your game. This blog walks through common issues with hierarchy structures and provides some guidelines for optimization.

Spotlight Team Best Practices: Collision Performance Optimization

This blog highlights some of the most common collision performance issues and provides readers with the best practices to avoid these hiccups in the future.

Spotlight Team Best Practices: Project Setup

Taking a moment to set up your project correctly from the beginning will save you a ton of time down the road. Grab some tips and tricks for efficient job set up.

Unity AI – Reinforcement Learning with Q-Learning

The connection between machine learning and games is something very close to our hearts here at Unity. This is the second blog in a series exploring emerging developments for ML and AI in the gaming realm.

Making cool stuff with ScriptableObjects

What are ScriptableObjects and why are you missing out if you are not already using them? Our online evangelist, Matt Schell, shares example of how they can improve your workflow and architecture.

Mind-blowing Demos



Neon

Showcased at Unite Austin in October, Neon is a small environment project created by our Demo team’s creative director, Veselin Efremov, in just a couple of days using Unity 2017.1 and models from the Asset Store. In this blog post he shares some thoughts around the project and how it came about.

ADAM – Step by Step

When we showed the ADAM demo for the first time, everyone was blown away by the look and quality achieved with Unity. But soon, on everyone’s lips, was the question: “How did they do it?”. This is a complete walk-through of how to recreate one entire scene of ADAM from an empty scene.

ADAM – VFX in the real-time short film

This behind-the-scenes blog gives a glimpse into how the visual effects in the ADAM demo were created. This includes particle effects, dynamic simulations, and CaronteFX.

ADAM: The evolution of Alembic support in Unity

This is an in-depth, behind-the-scenes blog post focusing on the use of Alembic support in the ADAM film series.

They are what they wear: Clothing simulation in ADAM

Discover how Oats Studios created such high-fidelity costumes in real time for ADAM: The Mirror and ADAM: Episode 3.

Timeline: Keeping the ADAM films on track

See how Timeline was used in the second and third episodes of ADAM to meet many different real-time film production requirements.

Lighting tips & tricks in the ADAM films

Unity supports a large number of platforms, which also means there is a wide choice of lighting workflows. Learn how Oats Studios’ lighting artists were able to achieve some very impressive effects in real time.

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We look forward to bringing you more interesting and valuable content in the year to come! Let us know in the comments what you would like to see more of on the blog. Happy New Year!