Unity game engine gets Xbox One X support

Today, the tool set was updated with support for Xbox One X and a host of other features. Games like The Long Dark and ReCore use the engine on Xbox One, but Unity is also known to power experiences across phones and tablets too. It's a versatile tool which can help make a wide variety of experiences.

The makers of Unity posted the following information on their blog (thanks Michel for the tip!). The update also adds better high dynamic range (HDR) and "Dynamic Resolution". Dynamic Resolution means that a game automatically lowers the resolution if it senses a significant drop in performance.

We added support for the new Xbox One X console from Microsoft. Use Quality Settings to enable support for 4K HDR rendering, or use the extra power in other ways such as improving framerate or increasing graphical fidelity.There is now support for HDR compressed lightmaps (BC6H) on PC, Xbox One and PlayStation 4. We also made a number of GPU instancing improvements, and we're adding Dynamic Resolution as an engine feature debuting on the Xbox One platform with other platforms to follow later.As its name suggests, Dynamic Resolution refers to dynamically scaling some or all of the render targets to reduce workload on the GPU. Dynamic Resolution can be triggered automatically when performance data indicates that the game is about to drop frames due to being GPU bound. In such a case, gradually scaling down the resolution can help maintain a solid frame rate. It can also be triggered manually if the user is about to experience a particularly GPU intensive part of gameplay.

It's great to see Unity being upgraded for Xbox One X. Hopefully, Unity3D titles like The Long Dark will be updated to take advantage of the added power of the console in the future.

Keep an eye on WindowsCentral.com/Gaming for all the latest in Xbox and Windows 10 gaming, accessories, news, and reviews!

Asher Madan handles gaming news for Windows Central. Before joining Windows Central in 2017, Asher worked for a number of different gaming outlets. He has a background in medical science and is passionate about all forms of entertainment, cooking, and antiquing.

3 Comments

AWESOME. Recently started learning this engine. Now I gotta step up my game (pun sort of intended)
Ori and a few others are also built on Unity. For starter...
1. A prefab gets embed in another prefab will lost its reference. There's no OOP concept in prefabs. The feature's been requested for years but still not there. I build one for my company in 2 days, got included in the framework, it's now shared across teams. 2. State machine of MonoBehavior (Awake, OnEnable, Start, etc) is kinda disaster. Depending on the (parent, child) Activate state... hard to explain in 1 sentence, but if you work with a team, work with other designers... you'd know what it is. I use my own StateMachine, to make sure designers and programmers don't get in each others way. It also helped preventing unexpected rendering that happens in the 1st frame after obj instantiating. 3. Animator... is not suitable for UI objects. Buggy esp if you work with activating / deactivating objects...
I have my own TweenPos, TweenAlpha, TweenScale, etc (build on top of my dynamic keyframe ease equation classes) for 2d and 3d objects.
They have sequencer built in so that designers can chain Tween animations. There's more, but I'll pass.
You'd prob wanna solve those issues in the earily development. Last, feel free to use Unity the usual way if you think Unity is your lifetime partner.
If not... build your own framework around Unity is prob a good idea. Just take advantage of the cross platform compiler I'd prefer Unreal (esp building a large scaled game, memory management is important) if I'm not building mine.
This is huge. At least more than I expected.