Unity 2.5.0

High-end Mac-based pro-app game development GUI to make games for Windows and Mac.
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, captivating, different 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.

Main features of Unity:

Fully Integrated Editor

The Unity game engine is happily married to the Unity development environment. This tight integration allows the Editor to do everything a published game can do. The simple, visual, and intuitive nature of the Editor makes building games fun again.

· Play, Pause, and Step
Click the Play button to instantly run your game. Pause and Step forward to analyze complex behavior in detail. While the game is running (or paused), you can alter values, assets, or even scripts! This means you can do more experimentation and more testing for a better final game.

· Keyframe Animation Creator
Every part of every GameObject (positions, rotations, scales, colors, etc.) can be animated with an integrated keyframe animation interface. This is in addition to the fully-featured character animation system.

· Easy Editor Customization
Streamline your workflow using simple, Editor-specific scripts. Extend the development environment with wizards, menubar options, context menus, and object visualization.

· Drag 'n Drop Everything
Visually drag assets and objects in the editor to assign Textures, Audio, Behaviors, and script variables. Create logical GameObject hierarchies to manage and maximize your game's functionality.

· Prefabs
To streamline the repeated use of complex GameObjects, you can turn one or more of them into a Prefab. This Prefab can then be easily placed throughout the game or instantiated at runtime. Any changes to the original prefab are propagated to all dependents, so both major and minor adjustments can be made very quickly to a large number of GameObjects.

· Customizable Editor Layout
Choose from one of many built-in application arrangements, or create and save your own. Different tasks might benefit from different arrangements, so use easy hotkeys to switch arrangements as needed.

One-Click Deployment

Unity supports a wide range of publishing platforms, all available at the push of a single button.

· Standalone Mac & Windows
Publish standalone builds for Mac OS X (Universal Binary, or specific, smaller Intel/PPC-only builds) and Windows 2000/XP/Vista.

· Support for Old Hardware and Drivers
Many potential players are using outdated graphics hardware and drivers. Even many common computer configurations are much less than ideal for games. Unity has built-in fallbacks and workarounds for compatibility problems. Unity has rock-solid support for almost all hardware/software combinations, in both DirectX and OpenGL.

Unity has undergone extensive compatibility testing, which means you don't need to put an ounce of effort into making sure your customers can run your games. Instead, you can expect everything to work well the first time. This helps you reduce your QA and customer support needs, and allows you to focus on making the game great instead of making the game work.

· Web Deployment
Unity-made games can be played inside a web browser thanks to the Unity Web Player Plug-in. The plug-in download is small (about 3 MB), auto-installs without a browser restart, and already has a 6-digit distribution. It works on all modern browsers including Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and most Mozilla-based browsers.
You can publish a web game that is identical to a standalone in visual fidelity from the same Project.

· Mac OS X Dashboard Widgets
Still using the same Project as your standalone, you can create a 3D Dashboard Widget. Using a Dashboard Widget is a great way to advertise your content, give a pick-up-and-play preview, or extend your game's functionality.

Asset Importing

· Instantaneous, Automatic Importing
When any asset file is saved, it is seamlessly imported without exception. Each asset's Import Settings are remembered, so you can set them once and never worry again.

· Incredible 3D Package Support
Unity can import 3D models, bones, and animations from almost all 3D applications.

· Just Hit Save
Hit Save in Maya, Cinema 4D, Cheetah3D or Blender, and Unity will pick up all changes across your entire project. It's that simple. See the bottom of this page for a full list of supported formats.

· TrueType Font Support
Unity handles pixel-perfect rendering of TrueType fonts. Drop in any TTF font and start making great-looking text. When localization time rolls around, be relieved as Unicode fonts are supported, as are Unicode strings.

· Texture Handling
Save your multi-layer Photoshop files normally and let Unity automatically compress your images with high quality DXT texture compression. It's all automatic without a single required click.

· Height-map to Normal-map Conversion
Any texture can be converted into a Normal-map. This process is automatic and instantaneous, even when you later change your image files.

· High-Quality Mipmap Generation
Unity supports several different mipmap generation methods: Detail Fade, Kaiser Filters, Gamma Correction, and more.

· Audio Support
Unity can import any audio format that is supported by QuickTime. Audio can be internally converted and distributed as Ogg Vorbis, for keeping down your game's published file size.


Requirements of Unity:

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.


Limitations of Unity:

30 days unlimited trial period.

What's New in This Release:

Graphics & Shaders:

Multithreaded mesh skinning. Multicore processors, here we come!

Runtime DXT compression. See WWW.LoadImageIntoTexture and Texture2D.Compress.

Shader Level of Detail support. See Shader.maximumLOD, Shader.globalMaximumLOD.

RenderQueue can be set per-material from script, see Material.renderQueue.

Optimized rendering internals.

Shader compilation is about 3x faster now!

Added #pragma exclude_renderers and #pragma only_renderers directives to shader compiler, to be able to write D3D-only and OpenGL-only shader paths.

Optimized UnityGUI rendering, now it generates less vertices when it can.

NVPerfHUD is supported in Windows standalone games.

Web Player:

Google Chrome browser support (had input problems and crashes on early versions of Chrome).

Internet Explorer 8 support (had input problems when running on Vista).

Windows Web Players have much more stable frame rate.

Editor:

Asset Server client interface completely rewritten. Change-set based interface, log history, and so on!

Scene view can visualize overdraw & optimal texture resolutions (added to RGB/Alpha mode popup).

FBX importing libraries updated to latest version. Fixes lots of issues with FBX, Collada, OBJ, DXF file importing.

FBX user properties are exposed to asset post-processing scripts, see AssetPostprocessor.OnPostprocessGameObjectWithUserProperties.

Added Global transformation tools mode.

Game view Stats window displays frame time and frames per second.

Arrays of enums are properly shown in Inspector.

Added "Show Project Wizard when launching" option to Preferences.

Custom Script/Image editing applications are remembered in Preferences.

Added Terrain wind tint color to terrain settings. Previously it was a hardcoded value.

Added gizmo for Spring Joint and improved gizmos of other joints.

Make default setting for "Recalculate Normals" be off in mesh importer.

Added progress bars for import/export package operations.

Other Improvements:

Application.targetFrameRate. If you want to cap the maximum frame rate to save the planet - now you can!

AnimationClipCurveData has target variable now.

Improved UnityGUI text fields. Now they scroll with cursor if content is too large to fit; selection and cursor display were improved.

Unity on Windows is "large address aware" - so on 64 bit Windows it can use up to 4GB of memory.

Licensing changes: Unity Indie can build standalone games for any platform (they will show splash screen). Unity Indie builds web players with a watermark that goes away after a short period of time.

Editor Fixes:

Fixed Character Kerning inspector for custom fonts.

Fix error message when importing Font from a FAT32 filesystem on OS X

Fixed Rotate tool handle location changing with complex hierarchies when it's in Center mode.

Fixed Joints that are connected to themselves.

Fixed Mac vs. PC byte orders in terrain .raw files being swapped.

Mass Place Trees is properly undoable.

Switch texture format to one that has alpha channel when Generate Alpha from Grayscale is enabled.

priority parameter for MenuItem attribute actually works now.

Fixed crash when importing some TrueType fonts.

Error Pause in the console works for script exceptions.

In Cubemap inspector you can create cubemap from skybox images without having to mirror them.

Gizmos.color and Gizmos.matrix are reset before calling any gizmo functions.

Fixed importing progress bar for movies without audio.

Fixed terrain lightmap shaders not working in editor on some old cards (e.g. GeForce 2).

Mesh importer was putting random values into normals and tangents of unused vertices.

Web Player Fixes:

OS X web player correctly clips the game area if it does not fit on screen.

Work around a bug in Vista + Internet Explorer 8 (RC1) where going fullscreen hangs up the browser. Now fullscreen is disabled there :(

Work around Firefox 3.0.x scripting interface bug on OS X that made some games not work.

Fixed non-focused web players able to read keyboard input.

Fixed OS X web player flicker while scrolling in Firefox.

Graphics Fixes:

Fixed Camera.RenderWithShader in some cases messing up image effects if called from inside of OnPreRender.

Fixed Water becoming blocky on some Intel cards when game is running for many hours. Update Standard Assets and Pro Standard Assets to get the fix!

GUI.DrawTexture fixes: can handle non power of two render textures; fixed 50% opacity when there's no other UnityGUI used; correctly takes GUI.BeginGroup clipping rectangles into account.

Rendering Stats window gathers any rendering done during Update and other functions. Rendering through GL class is captured now as well.

Reported VRAM size should be more robust now on OS X (previously was reporting 256MB for some 512MB cards).

Fixed Texture2D.ReadPixels being upside down when reading from render textures on Windows.

Fixed TexGen ObjectLinear not producing correct texture Z coordinate.

Fixed Movie Textures leaking some memory.

Fixed occasional movie playback crash when movie is more tall than wide and is not power of two in size.

Fixed Camera.SetReplacementShader not taking the tag value into account.

Fixed particle rendering in orthographic scene view.

Fixed large GUI areas clipping off last pixel row/column on Radeon HD graphics cards.

Fixed crash in Graphics.DrawMeshNow if there is no current camera.

Fixed setting mesh.triangles corrupting data when mesh has multiple submeshes and you set a smaller triangle array.

Documentation Fixes:

Much better documentation for Editor scripting API.

Attributes are on a separate page in scripting reference.

Fixed scripting reference search not finding some words (e.g. Mathf.Sign)

Fixed broken links in printable documentation (printable.html)

Unicode love:

Various Unicode character input fixes for Unity GUI.

Standalone Windows games can launch from Unicode paths or when Project Name contains Unicode characters.

Fixed Paste with some Unicode strings not working.

Fixed Font.HasCharacter() for some characters.

Seeking in compressed audio (with .time) now works and with a much better precision.

Animation fixes:

Fixed Animation.Sample() not working if animation was not playing before.

Fixed Animation.CrossFade and Stop not clearing out queued animations.

Fixed Animation.IsPlaying for queued animations.

Fixed Application.loadedLevel being initially -1 in players.

Fixed Mesh.tangents producing null reference exception if mesh had no normals nor tangents.

Fixed EventType.ScrollWheel delta values being about 100x too large on Windows compared to OS X (now they match OS X).

Fixed copying text into clipboard producing extra ASCII zero character at the end on OS X.

Fix unrecognized keys (like volume up/down on some keyboards) triggeting unrelated input axes on Windows.

Fixed Mathf.Ceil and Mathf.CeilToInt returning next integer number if the argument was integer already. D'oh!

Fixed audio playback from streamed Ogg files.

Fixed crash when streamed video download is cancelled.

Fixed terrain tree colliders for terrains that aren't placed at zero.

Fixed MovieTexture playback issue.