For the past year or so I’ve been working almost exclusively in Unreal but have always had one eye on Unity and have been dying to get my hands on some of the new features to come out recently.
Entity Component System
Pure ECS is a feature that has a very special place in my heart as one of the first big systems I made back in the Flash(actionscript) days was an ECS-like system. I even went on to contribute to a popular gaming package called the Push Button Engine which championed some of those same core ideas.
Nested Prefabs
Holy crap was this a feature that could have saved me so many headaches in the past. So much so that I even bought a 3rd party solution(unfortunately I wasn’t able to get my company to actually use it) . Even though I think it took too long for these problems to be addressed, I’m happy it was done holistically with a few important updates to Prefabs in general.
I made a small Asteroids-like game to test all these new features and was surprised at how fundamental different the new systems were, it’s going to take quite a bit of effort for teams to adopt the new way of development so I’m a bit skeptical of everyone immediately jumping on board.
Last on the list is a officially-ish supported Visual Scripting system called Bolt, which deserves it’s own post.