To find out more about the new features, changes, and improvements to this Unity version, see the 2020.2 Release Notes.
If you are upgrading existing projects from an earlier version to 2020.2, read the Upgrade Guide to 2020.2 for information about how your project may be affected.
See what’s changed in Unity 2020.2 and view the documentation for the affected areas.
Unity Hub is now in version 2.4.2 and since the 2020.1 release has received improved workflows for managing projects, downloads, Unity Editor versions, and modules.
QuickSearch 2.0 is out, with even more search tokens and the ability to provide contextual completion when typing queries. You can now also search through all the ScenesA Scene contains the environments and menus of your game. Think of each unique Scene file as a unique level. In each Scene, you place your environments, obstacles, and decorations, essentially designing and building your game in pieces. More info
See in Glossary and PrefabsAn asset type that allows you to store a GameObject complete with components and properties. The prefab acts as a template from which you can create new object instances in the scene. More info
See in Glossary of your project at once rather than being limited to just the open Scene.
Programmer tools and performance improvements
Unity Safe Mode allows you to solve script compilation errors at startup. It skips asset import and provides a minimal version of the Editor to bring your project back to a working state before importing non-script assets.
With Editor Coroutines, now out of Preview, you can start the execution of iterator methods within the Editor, similar to how Coroutines inside MonoBehaviour scriptsA piece of code that allows you to create your own Components, trigger game events, modify Component properties over time and respond to user input in any way you like. More info
See in Glossary are handled during runtime.
You can now add charts in the ProfilerA window that helps you to optimize your game. It shows how much time is spent in the various areas of your game. For example, it can report the percentage of time spent rendering, animating or in your game logic. More info
See in Glossary Window to get more performance insights and context for either existing or user-generated Profiler statistics.
URP now has new features that bring it closer to parity with the Built-In Render Pipeline. Screen Space Ambient OcclusionA method to approximate how much ambient light (light not coming from a specific direction) can hit a point on a surface.
See in Glossary (SSAO) improves the visual quality of ambient lighting in your scenes. You can lower your build data size and improve loading times and with the new Complex Lit ShaderA small script that contains the mathematical calculations and algorithms for calculating the Color of each pixel rendered, based on the lighting input and the Material configuration. More info
See in Glossary and you can use Clear Coat maps to simulate, and mimic materials such as car paint.
High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP) is now includes better tools to help you debug lighting, improvements to the decal system, Path tracing supports fog absorption and subsurface scattering for organic materials and a new depth of fieldA post-processing effect that simulates the focus properties of a camera lens. More info
See in Glossary mode for producing path-traced images with high-quality defocus blur and more.
Finally, we also made a new HDRP sample scene available, including multiple setups of physically-based light intensities and more to help you as a great starting point for creating realistic scenes with HDRP.
Shader Graph includes several new features that improve the workflow for technical artists, such as better Graph Editor performance. See the [Shader Graph Upgrade guide]((https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.shadergraph@10.0/manual/Upgrade-Guide–10–0-x.html) for further guidance.
VFX Graph updates include Output Events, allowing users to synchronize lights, sound, physical reactions, or gameplay based on spawn events via a delegate interface in C#.
The Animation RiggingThe process of building a skeleton hierarchy of joints for your mesh. Performed with an external tool, such as Blender or Autodesk Maya. More info
See in Glossary package is now verified. It enables procedural control of animated skeletons at runtime and authoring of new animation clipsAnimation data that can be used for animated characters or simple animations. It is a simple “unit” piece of motion, such as (one specific instance of) “Idle”, “Walk” or “Run”. More info
See in Glossary in the Unity Editor.
For Global IlluminationA group of techniques that model both direct and indirect lighting to provide realistic lighting results. Unity has two global illumination systems that combine direct and indirect lighting.: Baked Global Illumination, and Realtime Global Illumination (deprecated).
See in Glossary, both the GPU Lightmapper and the CPU Lightmapper now have a higher bounce limit. In addition, they now use Blue Noise Sampling for improved lightmapA pre-rendered texture that contains the effects of light sources on static objects in the scene. Lightmaps are overlaid on top of scene geometry to create the effect of lighting. More info
See in Glossary quality and have several other improvements with 2020.2.
Recorder API is now available in preview, enabling the programmatic execution of Recorder functionality and much more.
For 2D, we streamlined the 2D menu items so they are now displayed in dedicated top-level menus for object and asset creation.
2D Animation in version 5.0 comes with integrated 2D IK (previously a standalone package), which allows animators using 2D skeletal animation to save time by automatically calculating the position and rotation of a chain of bones following the parent bone in a natural way. We also improved 2D default assets providing a variety of 2D GameObjectsThe fundamental object in Unity scenes, which can represent characters, props, scenery, cameras, waypoints, and more. A GameObject’s functionality is defined by the Components attached to it. More info
See in Glossary with primitive shapes with appropriate 2D CollidersAn invisible shape that is used to handle physical collisions for an object. A collider doesn’t need to be exactly the same shape as the object’s mesh - a rough approximation is often more efficient and indistinguishable in gameplay. More info
See in Glossary etc.
In 2020.2, ARAugmented Reality (AR) uses computer graphics or video composited on top of a live video feed to augment the view and create interaction with real and virtual objects.
See in Glossary Foundation, our multi-platform framework for AR development, now includes support for meshing. AR experiences will blend much more seamlessly into the real world as virtual content can be occluded with real-world objects and realistically interact with the physical environment.
Samsung Adaptive Performance 2.0 comes with new Sample Projects to showcase different features, including Variable Refresh Rate, Scalers, and Adaptive Performance Simulator extension, to emulate Adaptive Performance on any device. Apple Silicon Support You can now also target Mac hardware’s next evolution with native support for Apple silicon for the standalone player.
You can now also target Mac hardware’s next evolution with native support for Apple Silicon for the standalone player.