The increasingly popular Unity 3D development platform makes its third version today, Unity Technologies announced.
Now serving 200,000 users, according to the company, the five year-old Unity engine has benefited enormously in recent years from the explosive growth in browser, social, mobile and online game development.
As it unveils Unity 3, it's celebrating a new honor: the Wall Street Journal has awarded it its Technology Innovation Award in the software category. Unity lists Bigpoint, Cartoon Network, Coca-Cola, Disney, LEGO, Microsoft, NASA, Ubisoft and Warner Bros as major clients -- along with Electronic Arts, with which the company just signed a significant multi-year license deal.
Unity claims that "100-plus enhancements" have been added in Unity 3 -- including what it claims is an "up to" tenfold performance boost. New features include a unified editor intended to roll out changes to any supported platform project in a single editor, lightmapping from Beast, and deferred rendering available for web, consoles and stand-alone.
Unity says it's also added a new Umbra-backed PVS solution for occlusion culling, a new source-level debugger which includes variable inspection, audio filters for ambiance effects with integrated editing, and post-filters for lens effects.
"This audacious dream of building a truly unified platform for game development is coming to fruition,” says Unity CEO David Helgason. "With tens of thousands of teams of every shape and size using Unity, across every genre and all major platforms, across all parts of the game industry as well as most other industries, economies of collaboration and sharing and scale of stunning dimensions are being realized."
Unity 3 doesn't bring price increases for new seats, and Unity says it will offer discounts for users who upgrade existing licenses. The company also says its iPhone and Pro versions have seen "significant general and platform-specific improvements."
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If you want to produce for the PC only you have the UDK from EPIC, the most popular AAA engine in the Biz. So stop saying that unity costs only 1500! One engine that actually does deliver on the buy once deploy anywhere is Stonetrip Shiva3D. So yeah it's all for the love... love of Money. Nothing wrong with that!
The production times are many times faster then using just the UDK, and if you're not going for a AAA game, Unity is a way better choice than UDK.
All the world needs is game engine fanboys :rolleyes:
I really want to support Unity and would love to use it, but if I can't make a game and be able to play it on my home PC, what is the point?
Thank you for stating that. Just beginning to type the same thing.
Your help is appreciated.