Building-up from humble beginnings, the Unity game-engine has since brought us titles such as Family Guy Online, MechWarrior Tactics, Battlestar Galactica Online and Wasteland 2.
Though certainly popular for browser-based gaming, Unity actually supports Windows, Mac, the Xbox 360, Windows RT, Windows Phone, iOS, Android, the Wii and PlayStation 3, with support for Linux, Windows 8 and the Wii U in the works.
Unity's latest 4.0 release, however, sees support for DirectX 11, offering developers access to tessellation and compute shaders to pull-off some interesting new tricks.
Other improvements consist of the following:
- Mecanim - A comprehensive new motion tool
- Real-time mobile shadows, skinned mesh instancing and normal maps with lightmap baking
- Flash player add-on
- Linux publishing preview
- Shuriken particle system supports external forces, bent normals and automatic culling
- 3D texture support
- Navigation: dynamic obstacles and avoidance priority
- Major optimizations in UnityGUI performance and memory usage
- Dynamic fonts on all platforms with HTML-like markup
- Remote Unity Web Player debugging
- New Project Window workflows
- Iterative lightmap baking
- Refined component-based workflows
- Extensible inspectors for custom classes
- Improved Cubemap import pipeline
- Geometry data improvements for huge memory and performance savings
- Meshes can be constructed from non-triangle geometry—render points & lines efficiently
- Search, live preview and buy Asset Store assets from the Project Window
A Unity Professional licence can be obtained from just over £1,000, with additional platform licences ranging from £300 to £1,000 each, not quite the six figures one might have to pay for a full Unreal licence.
For a full list of improvements and changes, visit Unity's What's New Page.
