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The Unite Berlin keynote included some big announcements for engine developer Unity, including a strategic alliance with Google Cloud as it moves its infrastructure to the service. This alliance will benefit developers by giving them access to the technology to make it easier to produce connected games. This begins with multiplayer server hosting and a new open source matchmaking project co-founded by Unity and Google Cloud. This project integrates directly with Unity, giving all developers on the platform the opportunity to take advantage of powerful matchmaking tools.

"We’re proud of the many Unity developers that collectively produce more than half the world’s games," said John Riccitiello, CEO at Unity. "Multiplayer games have long been the fastest-growing type of games. Multiplayer games are also the most challenging to create and properly support. Our alliance with Google Cloud will help developers build multiplayer games more easily and operate them more cost-effectively, at a global scale."

“Migrating our infrastructure to Google Cloud was a decision made based on the company’s impressive global reach and product quality. Now, Unity developers will be able to take advantage of the unparalleled capabilities to support their cloud needs at a global scale.”

Other announcements at the keynote include nested prefabs (revealed with a shower of confetti falling on the audience’s heads), which allows a much greater degree of freedom for devs using instanced assets. There’s also a new VR and AR focused extension coming as well as a new animation system, called Kinematica. The latter will use neural nets to make animations smoothly blend together as the computer learns when and how to use the best animation at the right time.

You can watch the full keynote on YouTube for more details on all of these announcements.