Unity Technologies Releases Unity 3.5
Unity Technologies, provider of the Unity multi-platform engine and development tools, is proud to announce that Unity 3.5 is now available for download. This latest update is one of the biggest additions to Unity since its inception and includes major new features and a multitude of improvements, tweaks, and optimizations. Unity 3.5 is a free update for all developers using version 3.0 or higher of the Unity development platform.
"This is one of the most spectacular additions we've ever made to Unity," said David Helgason, CEO, Unity Technologies. "Recognizing that Unity was being pushed harder and harder, we launched our initiative to upgrade Unity with high-end capabilities that larger studios are accustomed to and smaller studios usually don't have access to. We want to make Unity the best choice for everyone and Unity 3.5 is a massive demonstration of our commitment to that goal."
The Unity development platform, one of the most popular in the world with more than 800,000 registered developers globally, combines a powerful engine with an intuitive set of development tools in one complete package.
"We are incredibly proud of this release and I think it's our strongest yet," said Nicholas Francis, Chief Creative Officer, Unity Technologies. "A year ago, we took a deep dive and began working on developing features for more complex projects and larger teams. It took hard work to do this while preserving the intuitive and usable design that makes Unity so popular, but we are sure that developers using Unity will be as happy with the improvements as we are."
Throughout its history, Unity Technologies has continued to rapidly enhance Unity and the 3.5 update provides a long list of additions and improvements:
-- Effects
New in Unity 3.5, the highly optimized Shuriken particle
system provides artists and programmers with complete control over
particle-based visual effects. Shuriken is a curve and gradient-based
modular editor, with hierarchies and sequencing capabilities that
allow for many particle systems to stay synchronized.
-- Pathfinding and Obstacle Avoidance
Improvements to AI provide
accurate pathfinding along complex pathways and natural movement
through crowds. Game developers can bake navigation data in the editor
and let Unity's high-performance path-finding and crowd simulation
take over at runtime.
-- Lighting and Rendering
Developers can create jaw-dropping visuals
with linear space (gamma correct) lighting and HDR rendering, and
render them faster than before with Unity 3.5's brand new
multi-threaded renderer.
Also new to Unity 3.5, light probes add life and realism to
lightmapped scenes without the high cost of typical dynamic lights.
The addition of light probes to Unity's lighting system allows for
baked lighting on characters and other dynamic objects.
-- New Platforms
Unity 3.5 supports Native Client as a new deployment
platform. Native Client allows for near native speeds within the
Chrome browser, without the need for installing the Unity Web Player.
Unity 3.5 also ships with the preview release of the Flash deployment
add-on, which has already been used by 50,000 developers.
-- Performance Improvements
Unity 3.5 includes a completely re-written
integration of Umbra's occlusion culling system. The result is
incredibly fast and works with terrains and dynamic obstacles such as
doors. When combined with Unity's new built-in level-of-detail
support, it gives large-scale games the performance boost that they
need.
-- Better Collaboration Tools
The Asset Server license, Unity's add-on
for teams and collaboration, has been enhanced with new features that
add greater performance and flexibility. The addition of Unity's cache
server dramatically speeds up collaboration on projects of all sizes,
and a new developer API for third-party version control solutions,
such as Subversion and Perforce, allows larger teams to work more
efficiently. To reflect these changes, the product has been renamed
the "Team License," and made available as an add-on for all Unity
users.
-- Additional Improvements
The update includes other improvements such
as a new GPU profiler, a fully pluggable Social API to implement
social gaming, and low-level audio buffer access to create music
games, and directional lightmaps support to name but a few. For a
complete list of additions and improvements, please visit
http://unity3d.com/unity/whats-new
Pricing and Availability This is a free update for all Unity 3 users. Pricing otherwise remains the same. The entry-level product, Unity, is free for commercial use. The premier product, Unity Pro, remains $1500 per developer seat. For a complete list of products and pricing, please visit http://unity3d.com/shop .
To download the free and feature-packed Unity for creating games and other interactive applications, visit http://unity3d.com/download .
About Unity Technologies Unity Technologies is the creator of Unity, an intuitive and flexible development platform used to make wildly creative and intelligently interactive 3D and 2D content. The "author once, deploy everywhere" capability ensures developers can publish to all of the most popular platforms. Unity Technologies boasts a thriving community of 800,000 registered developers including large publishers, indie studios, students and hobbyists. Unity Technologies aggressively re-invests in its award-winning 3D development tools and democratization initiatives, such as the Asset Store digital content marketplace and Union game distribution service, in order to remain at the forefront of innovation. Unity Technologies is headquartered in San Francisco and has offices in Canada, Denmark, Lithuania, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Japan and Korea. For more information, visit: http://unity3d.com .
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Unity and all other product names are trademarks of Unity Technologies or its subsidiaries or affiliates. All other product names and trademarks belong to their respective holders.
