There was an interesting discussion over on the Unity forums about features that are appearing only in the Chinese version of Unity. Unity China was formed as a joint venture in 2022 and as part of that formation, part of their purpose was:
In the short term, Unity China will begin building customized local versions of its core products for game developers, including a China-specific version of Unity’s flagship Unity Editor.
Creating a customize version they did. In fact they created a complete fork of Unity 2022 LTS that they have branded Taunjie. Details of Taunjie from Keen Gamer:
One year after the announcement of Unity China in August 2022, the aforesaid unveiled Tuanjie, a game engine tailor-made to enhance Unity’s scope within the region. “Tuanjie” (团结), which can be translated to “Unity” in English, is based on Unity 2022 LTS and includes support for WeChat‘s Weixan Mini Games, Alibaba’s AliOS, and OpenAtom’s OpenHarmony. After four months of closed internal testing and numerous technical iterations, Tuanjie 1.0.0 officially launched on January 1st, 2024*.
Now supporting a number of local platforms is nothing special really… but they didn’t stop there. Details of new features in Taunjie from Unity Open Day include:
Let’s start with Virtual Geometry. We are now getting demand not only from the gaming industry, but also from developers in other industries. With it, colleagues in art or other related positions can put any high-precision assets in the level without worrying about rendering performance or rendering quality. In this regard, development has been started in-house, and there are already certain results. The HDRP pipeline is currently supported, and it is hoped that an experimental version will enter the Chinese version of the engine by the end of this year, so please wait and see. In the future, we will also explore whether we can migrate some of the features of this technology to mobile as well.
So, basically a Nanite type solution. But what about Lumen you say? Well…
Real-time dynamic global illumination. We want the world to be no longer a baked light, and Lighting editors are WYSIWYG with support for both Indoor and Outdoor. The team has already started work on real-time dynamic global illumination, with the first goal of implementing these technologies in the HDRP pipeline and reaching demo status by the end of this year. Then, as with Virtual Geometry, we’ll explore options for implementing GI on mobile.
Lets also throw in some mobile (I assume this means URP) raytracing as well:
Mobile ray tracing. Many teams that make high-quality games have expressed to us that they want to find a solution for mobile ray tracing, and we also feel that this is a direction worth exploring for the engine team, so we have cooperated with MTK to implement mobile ray tracing on the Dimensity 9200. The solution is based on RayQuery, supporting shadows, AO, as well as refraction and reflection, and we expect to show this result at this year’s China Joy, so stay tuned.
Nanite, Lumen and Mobile raytracing… sign me up! So, are we going to get these features in the West? Sadly, not likely…
You can learn more about Unity China/ the Taunjie game engine and the new Nanite and Lumen like features being added to it in the video below.