Mac-based high-end game development tool
Unity is the only Mac-based high-end game development tool sporting a stylish pro-app GUI, no-friction workflow and top-of-the-line technical features such as extensible graphics, great particle effects, highly optimized scripting, the Ageia physX Engine, skinned character animation and ragdolls, and making standalone games for Mac and Windows (and Dashboard Widgets and web-plugins).
Unity is a 3D game editor which happens to contain one of the most advanced game engines out there. Packed with power it is built to meet the demands of next-generation game developers.
Create dazzling, different, captivating games with state of the art technology such as the Ageia physX™ Physics Engine, the most modern graphical effects, and highly optimized JavaScript.
Automatic asset importing, prefabs, and ultra fast edit-play-modify turnaround while you assemble and test your game helps maintain the creative flow. Asset production was never this fast before. The editor ties together all the powerful features of the engine in an intuitive way.
Features:
Integrated Editor
- Keyframe animation system with an easy to use interface that allows you to animate almost all game object parameters.
- Drag'n'drop to set values and hook up everythign from game logic to graphical effects.
- Play button for instantly trying out your work, and pause and step-frame to try out the game as you go.
- High performance automated asset pipeline. Never think about importing your assets again. Save your .psd file in Photoshop and see it update live in Unity without clicking a single button.
- Customizable pane layout system. Allowing you to customize your work environment as you see fit.
- All settings are editable in an easy to use property editor.
One-Click Deployment
- Mac OS X web plugin.
- Mac OS X standalone player.
- Dashboard Widget.
- Windows web player (coming soon).
- Windows standalone [Unity Pro feature] (coming soon).
- Protected deployment [Unity Pro feature].
Scripting
- Game logic and AI most easily implementable in scripting.
- All aspects of a game are scriptable with an easy to understandbut powerful interface. Scripts can be assigned to objects via drag & drop.
- Edit script properties in the editor, and drag'n'drop to assign values.
- Supported languages are JavaScript, C# and the Python-like language Boo.
Graphics
- High performance mesh rendering engine. Mesh skinning with multiple bones. Realtime animation mixing for believable characters.
- Very fast and flexible particle system which supports collisions as well as color and texture animation.
- Animated textures.
- Normal map generation from meshes.
- Superb multiple camera support.
- Skyboxes.
Flexible Shader Engine
- Extendible render-to-texture effects, including glow [Unity Pro feature].
- Spotlights, omni-lights and directional ligths, as well as projected textures, halos and volumetric light cones.
- Support for latest graphics card features such as bumpmapping, reflection mapping, refraction, cubemaps, trilinear filtering and mipmapping.
- Unity comes with an extensive library of 32 shaders including Vertex Lit, Diffuse, Glossy, Bumped, Bumped Specular, Reflective, Self-illuminating and 9 different particle shaders.
Novodex Physics Engine
- Flat out world's best physics engine by Ageia.
- Fast and realistic simulation allowing for physics based gameplay with large interactive environments.
- Ragdolls, box stacks, cars, helicopters. Whatever you want to simulate.
- Flexible dynamics system featuring hinges, ball-sockets and suspensions.
- Tune friction, slipping, and restitution.
- Support for mesh-mesh as well as mesh-primitive collisions.
Audio
- 3D positional audio with distance attenuation.
- Support for all common file formats.
Game Structure
- Component based modelling of game entities. Components can be added and removed while the game is running.
- Powerful (and fast) query and messaging system for communication between components.
- Support for switching between scenes, data that survives across scenes, and saving game settings and status.
Import File Formats
- Import models, animations and animated characters from all major 3D applications such as Maya, Cinema 4D, Lightwave and MotionBuilder. Supported file formats are: fbx, maya mb files, 3DS and blender. With the 3DS format virtually every 3D modelling application can be used with Unity.
- Imports all major image and movie formats using QuickTime. Save your Photoshop files complete with layers and let Unity automatically compress your images with Unity's high quality S3TC texture compressor. All automatic without even pressing a button.
- Automatic heightmap to normalmap conversion.
- Different mipmap generation methods (detail fade, Kaiser filters, gamma corrected, and others).
Requirements:
- Mac OS X 10.3 or later
- Radeon or Geforce MX GFX card with at least 32 MB VRAM.
- 500MHz recommended.
- Games run on Rage 128 GFX cards depending on the scene complexity.
- Works with most 3D modelling apps, and imports almost any media file-format.
What's New:
New Graphics Features:
* Anti-aliasing now just works with Image Effects (requires updating Pro Standard Assets).
* Added floating point render texture support (4 channel 16 bit floating point).
* Built-in method to generate Depth or Depth&Normals textures: camera.depthTextureMode.
* Camera.layerCullDistances lets you specify culling distances per layer.
* Anti-aliasing setting can be changed at runtime using QualitySettings.currentLevel. Editor also picks up anti-aliasing changes immediately.
* Added an Is Readable setting to texture importer, so textures don't have to use up main memory if the pixels are not accessed from code.
* Ability to limit supported aspect ratios in Player Settings. E.g. your game can say "I only support 4:3 and 16:10", and only matching resolutions will be shown in the resolution dialog.
* Animation culling, so animations outside of the visible screen area don't have to be updated.
* Image Effects work better with multiple layered cameras.
Graphics Optimizations:
* Terrain & Vegetation rendering is much faster and does less memory allocations.
* Compression capability for meshes and animations to improve build sizes.
* Shadow rendering is faster (much less CPU overhead).
* Pixel-lit lights are faster (less CPU overhead).
* Applying matrix parameters to shaders is faster.
* Movie playback is faster.
* Improved shader loading times.
Editor Improvements:
* Brush preview is shown in Terrain editing tools
* Icon for standalone players can be automatically set by Unity (set it in Player Settings).
* Generic List<T> objects can be serialized and shown in Inspector.
* Scene view Gizmos are not displayed for hidden layers.
* There are now Development and Release web players available. The Development one includes Profiler support and is installed with the Editor as well as being available for download seperately. Auto-update and user installations use the Release webplayer.
* You can now build Development and Release Standalone players. In the Build Options you can now select a Development build which will generate a player with Profiler support and debug symbols.
* Terrain Editing got a bunch of hotkeys added:
o Shift-Q through Shift-Y selects the tool.
o Comma and Dot cycles through brushes.
o Shift-comma & Shift-dot cycles through the selected detail.
o All of these can be remapped in the Preferences.
* Animation Editor:
o New window to edit animation clips. Besides transforms, animation curves can also be created for component properties and material properties.
o Animated objects instantly reflect curve edits and auto-recording automatically adds curves and keys as objects are moved or their properties changed.
o Curve tangents can be auto smooth, free smooth, or each tangent can be free, linear, or constant.
o Support for adding and editing animation events with automatic listing of available methods in attached script components.
* Animation States in the Animation component can now be viewed in Inspector Debug mode to inspect current values.
* Animation component shows animation state array in Debug inspector mode
* Improved performance & responsiveness of the editor
* Editor Console now automatically scrolls to end of log when scrollbar is at the end
* Slightly better color preferences dialog
* Generic Property inspector can now be invoked from OnInspectorGUI or is invoked by default if no OnInspectorGUI is defined.
* Inspector title says "Debug" when debug mode is enabled.
* Shader Inspector indicates when the shader has errors or is not supported by the GPU.
* Ray Snapping improved: If pivot mode is set to center, the object gets placed so the bounding volume is resting on the snapped position. Great for companion cube placement!
* Selected objects can be snapped to grid from Snap Settings dialog
* Debug.Log is now thread safe when used outside of the main thread in the Editor.
Asset Pipeline Improvements:
* External Version Control Systems support. This is alternative way of saving metadata in Unity Pro and can be enabled per project. When enabled, the Assets folder can now be checked into version a control systems, such as Subversion, Perforce or Bazaar, without losing import settings or references between assets.
* 16 bit/channel Photoshop (.psd) files can be imported now.
* Support for direct importing of Cinema 4D files on Windows.
* FBX importing supports Step animation curves.
* AIFC audio file import support.
* Updated FBX libraries to 2010.2.1, fixes some importing issues.
* Support for building Asset Bundles using deterministic ID generation. This lets you create shared asset bundles that can be swapped out with different versions without requiring a full rebuild of all assets. Also lets you create two asset bundles containing assets imported differently; for example one bundle with low resolution textures and one with high resolution textures. See BuildAssetBundleOptions.DeterministicAssetBundle.
New Scripting Features:
* Added a threadPriority property to the WWW class, to control decompression performance when downloading in the background.
* Texture2D.GetPixels now supported on compressed textures.
* Mesh.CombineMeshes() method for more efficient mesh combining.
* ParticleEmitter.Simulate() method to forward-skip a particle system to some point in time.
* ParticleEmitter.enabled property to pause a particle system.
* Renderer.isVisible property to check if a renderer is currently on screen or not.
* EditorUtility.CompressTexture() method to compress editor-generated textures.
* Input.GetJoystickNames() method to get name strings of connected joystick devices.
* QualitySettings.anisotropicFiltering and QualitySettings.masterTextureLimit global texture quality settings.
* Generic versions of GetComponent, AddComponent etc. added for C#.
* Unity version #define exposed for conditional compilation of C# scripts.
* Vector3.Lerp, Color.Lerp and Vector4.Lerp are faster
* Added HSV<->RGB color conversion functions to EditorGUIUtility
* Gathered more common Editor GUI styles into EditorStyles
* Added EditorGUI.PropertyField and SerializedProperty
* Added SystemInfo.graphicsShaderLevel
* Exposed a bunch SystemInfo variables (OS, CPU, RAM etc.) to scripting.
Documentation:
* Improved Scripting Reference.
New Audio Backend:
* Better overall performance and mixing quality. Lower CPU and memory usage.
* 100% cross-platform and software mixing (no surprises with platform specific implementations and sound hardware/drivers).
* Fixed sound crackling and pops< when CPU is stressed (ie. during garbage collection) or/and changing volume and pitch rapidly.
* Unity can now position and playback all files in 3D (not only mono files).
* Audio devices are now changed instantly when a new device is plugged in, removed or changed in the system settings.
* AudioClip.samples: returns the length of the clip in PCM samples.
* AudioClip.frequency: returns the sampling frequency of the clip.
* AudioClip.channels: returns the channel count of the clip.
* AudioSource.timeSamples: get or set the position of the source in PCM samples.
* AudioSource.time: more precise for compressed, streamed and movie audio.
* Loop button in Inspector Audio previews.
* Audio paused properly when player or editor loses focus (and Run In Background is off).
Windows Specific Improvements:
* Windows Web Player can now be installed by non-administrator users! We think this is really really cool :)
* No more artifacts on close or intersecting surfaces on Windows (we automagically emulate all fixed function vertex processing with vertex shaders to make this work).
* Even with all new 2.6 features, Windows Web Player got 100 kilobytes smaller!
* Support for direct importing of Cinema 4D files on Windows.
* Detached Editor windows are always on top of the main window (on Windows). Fixes a ton of usability issues and behaves like all other Windows apps.
* Windows standalone players got batch mode support. Use -batchmode command line argument just like on OS X players.
* Windows standalone games do not produce a log file (Data/output_log.txt) when -nolog is passed on the command line.
* Windows standalone accept -single-instance argument on the command line. Then if a game is already running, launching it again will focus the running one.
* Improved workflow when building standalone Windows players. Now the file dialog asks for location/name of the .exe file. The data folder is created next to it, with the same name as .exe file, plus "_Data" suffix.
Note: BuildPipeline.BuildPlayer now takes path + filename of executable when building Windows players!
* -nographics option on Windows Editor allows you to use editor batch mode on a truly headless servers without any graphics card support.
Online Features:
* Compression capability for meshes and animations to improve build sizes.
* Threaded background loading - load new scenes and AssetBundles smoothly while playing.
* Added a threadPriority property to the WWW class, to control decompression performance when downloading in the background.
* Decompression of unity WWW streams uses less memory.
Asset Server Improvements:
* New History window. Merged Project Revert, Recover Deleted, Browse old versions and Old history windows into one
* Asset Server windows refresh automatically when something in the project changes
* Improved Asset Server performance
* Deleting items in Asset Server no longer show in updates with their full history
* Ability to delete users and projects from within editor
* Added a dialog to warn user about committing unsaved open scene
* Asset Server Inspector. Shows asset's state directly in Inspector. Allows to discard changes and show history for asset in Inspector.
* Most long-running Asset Server operations can be canceled.
* Added support for faster commits and updates of large changesets when used with AssetServer v2.0 (to be released along with Unity 2.6)
* Calculating to total download size when updating from the server is now done in the background so it does not delay starting the actual download. This speeds up downloading large projects from the Asset Server significantly, especially if the project consists of a lot of small assets.
Additional Improvements:
* Visual Studio and MonoDevelop integration for C# script editing.
* Optimized memory allocation patterns for better overall performance.
* Added Profiler logging to a file, for use in Standalone Player and Web Player.
* Added a dialog asking user to reload currently open scene when its file changes on disk.
* Added an option to disable generation of tangents or normals in the model importer - this allows some space savings in model data.
* Standalone game Icons can now be supplied in different sizes.
* Added helper functions Graphics.Blit and Graphics.BlitMultiTap, to simplify Image Effects code. Refactored Image Effect scripts in Pro Standard Assets to use them.
* Ability to set raycasts to not hit triggers (under Physics settings)
* Support for setting the wrap mode on the clip in the inspector instead of setting it in the animation component or from code in the animation state API. If the wrap mode in the animation component is set to default, it will not be shown anymore, but you can still edit it in debug mode.
* Improved Texture2D.PackTextures packing when source textures do not fit into maximum atlas size.
Changes:
* Unity no longer ships with a 30-day demo period but has to be activated immediately to work. The activation page now has the ability to automatically generate and activate 30-day trial licenses for each machine.
* EditorUtility.SmartResetToPrefabState and EditorUtility.SmartResetGameObjectToPrefabState have been renamed to EditorUtility.ResetToPrefabState and EditorUtility.ResetGameObjectToPrefabState respectively.
* Removed one superflous parameter from the overload of Undo.RegisterUndo() that takes multiple objects.
* Removed warning: Couldn't load the script because its file name doesn't match the class name.
* When rotating objects in the scene view, rotation euler angles can increase or decrease indefinitely without being clamped in a specific range. Note that this is only supported in the editor when not in play mode.
* Constant interpolation in animation curves now always assume the value of the left hand side key.
* Don't send EventType.mouseMove events in game mode.
* Removed option to not compress textures when building a player. Removed BuildOptions.CompressTextures as well.
* Handle cap drawing functions have been renamed in the Handles class to better reflect what they do
* Deprecated GUIStyle.clipOffset Use BeginGroup instead
Fixes
Graphics Fixes:
* Fixed Skybox drawing when camera's near clipping plane is very large (e.g. half of far plane).
* Graphics.DrawMeshNow was not drawing a mesh if there was no current camera at the time.
* Fixed rendering order issues when shadows and different opaque Render Queues are used (hi TigerWoods Online!).
* Projectors now support Queue tag in their shader to control their render order. If Queue tag is not specified, then Projectors are rendered after all opaque geometry.
* Soft Vegetation setting is taken into account when rendering Terrain tree billboards.
* Non-billboarded Grass in the Terrain waves in the wind again!
* Shader.Find can properly find shaders that were not supported by the editor that built the game. Fixes missing shaders when building games from batch mode editor (-batchmode -nographics on Windows).
* Shaders that fail compilation have proper names in shader popup (instead of "Default").
* Fixed Directional Occlusion of Terrain trees being biased towards one side (a strong light from one side would result in brighter trees than the same light from another side). Reimport your tree models!
* ParticleEmitter.Emit now updates particle system bounds correctly
Windows Specific Fixes:
* Fixed shader compilation failing on Windows for long Cg shaders that were using Windows style line endings.
* Fixed Windows Web Player auto-updater occasionally not exiting.
* Fixed keys occasionally getting "eternally pressed" in Windows standalone / web players, when clicking to another application and clicking back with another button.
* Fix dragging things creating multiple Undo steps on Windows Editor.
* Fixed rare crash when closing Unity Editor on Windows.
* Fixed double click in Terrain Inspector throwing exceptions and/or opening unrelated terrain dialogs.
* Windows Vista does not "ghost" Editor windows on long editor operations.
* Fixed Windows Web Player update problem on Windows Vista, where it was possible to ignore UAC popup dialog, leading to a crash later.
* Swapped Play and Quit buttons in Windows Standalone screen selector dialog to better reflect Windows' conventions.
* Fixed setting of project folder file attributes problem on some Windows configurations.
* Windows Web Player installer first completely uninstalls existing Web Player if present.
* Fixed icon drawing in long (multi column) asset popup menus on Windows XP
* Fixed some Mono configuration being wrong in Windows Editor (e.g. CodeDomProvider.CreateProvider would fail).
* Ctrl now zooms Scene View on Windows when view tool is selected (used to be Windows key - d'oh)
* Windows Web Player ActiveX control can be embedded into non-browser applications (previously it failed to download the data file)
Mac OS X Specific Fixes:
* Fixed problem with installing Unity Editor on OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.
* Opening a script on a different Space than Unity Editor no longer hangs compilation.
* When using an external editor, whose bundle does not provide a CFBundleDisplayName, use a less cryptic fallback name in the Editor Preferences dialog.
* Fixed file permission verification on OS X. Unity now only requires files in the Assets directory to be readable by the current user, directories must by readable, writable and executable and files outside the Assets directory should be readable and writable by the current user. When fixing permissions, Unity will not prompt for administrator access unless required.
* Fixed issues with projects located on FAT32 filesystems on Mac OS X.
* Report correct mouse button IDs in events of Mac OS X web player.
* Screen Selector on OS X Standalone players is centered properly
* Mac OS X web player should now properly catch crashes without crashing the browser.
* MouseMove GUI events are sent to windows under the mouse in OS X Editor (previously were sent to focused window)
* Installing the Example project no longer trashes the /Users/Shared/Unity folder but only, if present, the project folder itself.
* Fixed problems in launching component help when Unity was installed in a path containing whitespace (OS X).
Asset Server Fixes:
* Asset Server on OS X no longer allows committing files with names that are invalid on Windows.
* Made Asset Server connection cache less aggressive. This makes it easier to delete projects on the server without getting errors that there are other clients connected to the project.
* Fixed problems with communicating with the Asset Server that could result after a server restart.
* Fixed problems with deleting users from the Asset Server.
* Asset server download progress is properly shown for larger than 2GB downloads
* Fixed Asset Server sometimes needing to update twice
Editor Fixes:
* Fix crash where serializable class Foo has a field of type Foo[].
* Fixed broken Vector2Field.
* The currently selected brush and brush settings in the terrain inspector no longer get reset when saving the current scene.
* New Game Objects are now centered correctly after switching layouts.
* Changes done to managers (Physics, Tags etc.) made in play mode no longer persists.
* Fixed Projectors present in the scene sometimes affecting Inspector material previews.
* Fixed color picker in VertexLit materials sometimes not working.
* Fixed crashbug when serializing Animation Curve inside of Serializable class array.
* Editor Undo performance is better when undoing actions with lots of objects.
* Improved handling of fatal errors when Editor is launched in batch mode.
* Fixed Game View Statistics vertex count for meshes with multiple materials.
* Fixed F to focus when using Terrain tree placement tool.
* EditorUtility.CreateGameObjectWithHideFlags now always adds a Transform, just like GameObject constructor.
* GUI.Window now works in editor windows. See EditorWindow.BeginWindows for docs.
* Color picker window now saves its position
* Project/Hierarchy windows handle Home/End/PageUp/PageDown keys properly
Other Fixes:
* Fixed several bugs in animation curve sampling functions, especially when using stepped curves and PingPong wrap mode.
* Improved GetComponent warning messages.
* Better error message for looking up GUIStyles by string outside OnGUI. And it no longer crashes.
* Better consistency checking of project data when launching Unity. Unity will now ask to rebuild the project if the project library data are corrupt beyond repair.
* Failing to close all GUILayout groups degrades more gracefully.
* GUILayout.ScrollView inside GUILayout.BeginHorizontal works correctly.
* Shift+Click now selects text in text fields.
* The Network Manager now respects Application.CancelQuit and doesn't reset itself on quit event (affected standalone player only).
* Fixed Configurable Joint not always being deterministic.
* Clicking on toggles now takes away focus from text fields and alike.
* Event.KeyboardEvent now correctly handles Space key
* Terrain disallows heightmaps larger than 4096x4096.
* Fixed some FBX importing issues
* Fixed Color.Equals
