At its Unity 11 conference today, Unity Technologies unveiled version 3.5 of its popular game development environment, to be released later this year with a raft of new features.
Improvements in the new version include support for multi-threaded rendering and HDR rendering, native support for multiple graphical detail levels, and new systems for radiosity normal mapping, particle effects and occlusion culling.
The environment itself has been revamped with a new GUI, an integrated GPU profiler and built-in version control support, along with workflow and optimization improvements that make the environment run 60 percent faster, Unity said.
"Unity 3.5 is a huge deliverable in our pursuit of creating a fully-featured high-end engine that allows developers to create bigger and better top-tier games," Unity CTO Joachim Ante said in a statement. "Our goal at Unity is to always be increasing our technical capabilities to meet the highest standards in the industry."
Unity also used the event to announce its acquisition of Montreal-based animation technology startup Mecanim, which will now be known as Unity Canada. The move follows on Unity's recent expansion in South Korea and Japan as well.
"Seeing Mecanim animation technology tightly integrated in the Unity game engine is an exciting culmination of years of experience and development,” said Unity Canada's Robert Lanciault in a statement.
In addition, Unity announced that Luma Arcade would be using the company's engine for its mobile title Bladeslinger, and that yesterday's PSN release of Recoil Games' side-scrolling platformer Rochard represented the first fully Unity-powered game on consoles.
Unity currently supports projects developed for Windows, Mac OS X, Wii, Xbox 360, PS3, iOS and Android, as well as its web-based Unity Web Player.
