Unity Engine 2018.2 beta now available, packs Texture Mipmap Streaming & Particle System improvements


Unity Engine has released a new beta version of its engine, Unity Engine 2018.2. According to the release notes, the Unity Engine 2018.2 beta features Texture Mipmap Streaming and Particle System improvements, Package Manager updates, Camera Physical properties and High DPI monitor support.

Going into more details, the improved Texture Mipmap Streaming system gives developers control over which mipmap levels are actually loaded into memory, however this will bring an additional CPU hit.

“Normally Unity will load all the mipmap levels that are stored on the disk, but with this system, you can take direct control of which mipmap levels are loaded.

Typically a system like this is used to reduce the total amount of memory required for textures by only loading the mipmaps needed to render the current camera position in a scene. It trades a small amount of CPU cost for potentially large GPU memory savings.”

UnityEngine 2018.2 beta also allows up to eight texture coordinates to be used on meshes and passed to shaders. Particle Systems will also now convert their colors into linear space, when appropriate, before uploading them to the GPU.

Unity Engine has added a real-world physical camera model that can drive a standard Unity Camera object. According to the team, this will allow developers to have a familiar interface offering cinematographers a ‘real camera’ experience. Moreover, owners of a 4K monitor can now enjoy High-DPI scaling support on both Linux and Windows in the Unity Editor.

You can download Unity Engine 2018.2 beta from here.